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The United States celebrates its Memorial Day in honor of fallen servicemen and women on Monday.  In remembrance for all fallen soldiers in countries around the world, we at Playtime have devised their favorites from war and anti-war cinema, all capturing the spirit of human struggle.

Matthew Kessen

Apocalypse Now (d. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) - Apocalypse Now is, to many, a definitive war movie. The book on which it is based, however - Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness - actually has nothing to do with war. The novella’s Kurtz instead goes …

As Playtime guest contributor Adam W. workshopped his article “A Clash of History and Fiction in Titanic” in the Playtime contributor forums, his early draft touched off a heady exchange concerning the role of historical accuracy in James Cameron’s Titanic in particular and in fiction in general.
The Titanic and Historical Accuracy
Daniel Swensen: It seems a trifle odd to me to pick on Cameron for “capitalizing on a disaster still easy to recall for its survivors” when movies like The Longest Day were reliving the battles …

There was never a ship like the Titanic a bold and glorious ocean liner which shuttled the rich across the Atlantic Ocean as if they were angels riding in an unsinkable clam. Then we have the film, Titanic, directed by James Cameron. It, too, was bold and glorious with a firm yet supple grip, capable of satisfying the director’s Quixotic ego. Unfortunately, these are both myths: a socialist iceberg struck the Titanic in the mid-Atlantic on April 15, 1912 and 1,517 people died in the vast emptiness of the ocean. …

They appear to us as if emerged from the void. They have no context, no back-story, and no prior life. We discover them at the same time as they discover themselves: they are newborn men and women, plucked from an infernal factory where human beings are built and placed in a makeshift territory of uninhabitable houses. Lacking a past, lacking anything to remember, they shuffle about their dystopic wasteland with no goal in mind, having never had a past in which to choose a goal. They have no anecdotes to …

March of 2010 saw the release of Hardware: The Man in the Machine, a trade paperback collecting the first eight issues of the comic book Hardware; but it was in April of 1993 when Hardware #1 first hit the shelves. Written by Dwayne McDuffie with art by Denys Cowan, Hardware was the first title in a new line, or imprint, of DC Comics titles, called Milestone Media. The milestone referred to was easy enough to figure out. Though the Milestone imprint, on a basic level, published comics about the usual …

If you have had regular access to the internet these past six months, you have no doubt been exposed to the extensive marketing campaign that preceded the release of KICK-ASS. Not a week went by without new trailers, vignettes, movie stills or one of the approximately 150 posters, making this easily the most-hyped release of the first half of 2010. Kick-Ass is based on the comic-book by Mark Millar (Wanted) and John Romita Jr. and adapted for the screen by director/writer Matthew Vaughn (Stardust, Layer Cake) and Jane Goldman. Now that it’s finally arrived, critics can be roughly divided into two types:
–Those that applaud Kick-Ass for being a clever satire/smart deconstruction/subversion of the superhero genre, and
–Those that condemn it for being morally bankrupt for its sadistic violence and foul language.

For reasons explained before, I don’t believe the hype, either positive or negative. And after witnessing Kick-Ass with my own two eyes, I am forced to admit that both groups of critics are wrong.

Steve P nears the end of his journey through Kill Bill with the Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei and Elle and I.

How To Train Your Dragon was a pleasant surprise and a lot more fun than I had expected from the trailer.  I would go so far as to call it the best Dreamworks Animation to date.
Yes, the story is at first glance an all-too familiar one. A Young boy, a misfit in his community, befriends an ancient enemy and defies a centuries-old tradition. From that information alone, you can probably deduct where and how the story will proceed, but sometimes the joy is not …