The Top of the Bleeping Obstacle: MoFo Top 100 War Movies Prelims!

Watched this about a month ago because of the praise it has gotten here. My review, "over rated".

I gave it and said this in my review"Come and See...is a heavy handed Soviet propaganda film about as subtle as a bottle of Smirnoff served in a dirty glass."

People complain that Saving Private Ryan is American flag waving propaganda but the heaviest handed propaganda films I've seen came out of the Soviet Union and Come and See might be the biggest state sponsored propaganda film of them all.

Russian war movies are the worst.

I think some were well made like The Cranes Are Flying (1957) & Ballad of a Soldier (1959) and those are way more honest and more artistically filmed than Come and See. Yet Come and See will finish high on the countdown and to that I say Нет.

Looking forward to the list.

While I respect your view, it is actually incorrect in labeling this as “propaganda”. For whom, exactly? Certainly not for Russia. They levied the same charge against it in their argento to censor it. Too “realistic” was the claim. The fact is, the massacre we see was based an actual accounts. Are the Germans reduced to caricatures? Not if those actions were indeed what actually occurred. And we all know the Germans were capable of such atrocities. There is no exaggeration in this film.

If we are going to levy that charge against Come and See (the depiction of the Germans) we have to also levy that charge At Schindler’s List, and I love that movie as well!

As for the lack of a sympathetic German? There were none at that town

I've had this conversation before. So to be clear, I'm not saying the actions of killing civilians is a caricature. I believe the actions of the German soldiers in Come and See (killing everyone in a town and even burning them alive, is accurate). What I am complaining about is the heavy handed way the German soldiers are portrayed in that film (like disorderly jumping around acting ridiculous), which is akin to having Japanese soldiers looking and acting like caricatures in some 1940s movie so the audience sees them as idiots.

In other words it's not the actions they take, it's their body language and vocal reactions to the burning of civilians by the actors playing Germans that I'm calling heavy handed propaganda. Maybe I didn't explain it well in my review.

I feel like that’s a slight exaggeration of the film. However, let’s not forget that there are first hand accounts of German soldiers who absolutely behaved in that manner. And again, the actions you described were depicted even more so in Schindlers List

I honestly don't remember the German soldiers or SS acting so silly in Schindler's List, they were cruel that's for sure. Maybe the cruelest and to my mind the most believable portrayal of SS was in the movie The Grey Zone.

The portrayal of the Nazis in Come and See isn't realistic (in regards to the over-the-top behavior of them during the village massacre), but the film isn't going for realism. It's going for surrealism. Given the real-life savagery of the Dirlewanger brigade (which wasn't a disciplined army unit and was mainly made up of army rejects, murderers, rapists, etc.), in addition to how we're watching the film from the POV of a child, it's normal for the film to feel strange and bent out of shape. The opening scene of Florya's friend mocking the village elder's voice sets you up for the tone of the rest of the film.

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Okay, I'm just seeing this now, and I'm sure it's already been litigated, and obviously several people have already submitted, but what the hell is this? War and Peace is a single movie. Not only is it absurd to count it as 4 different movies when no one conceives of it that way, but it also hurts its chances in the ranking to force people to spend 4 whole slots on a single movie or just choose one of the parts and hope other people choose the same one. I just don't get it. Like, I am someone who is willing to spend all four slots on it because it's one of the greatest movies ever made, but how many people will do the same? Even on wikipedia, they repeatedly call it a single film.



Anyway, much love!

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I've already been over the plethora of points made by this website and contradicted them with others. I'm not including one 1965 movie that was half released in 1967. It's not fair to those who don't have the time, and as I predicted, there were plenty of people who didn't have time for all the long movies. I don't care if they're all featured on the same DVD release, they didn't have DVD released when the last two parts were released in 1967, and I'm not going through all the discussions as to "what constitutes a movie in comparison to a series." The ballots have been tallied, and you shouldn't be asking people to make time for both Shoah and War and Peace and count the latter as one movie. If someone can only watch one or two parts, then please don't behave like a purist about it.

WWII - 13 films
Napoleonic Wars - 4 films
WWI - 2
Vietnam - 2
The Third Crusade - 1
First War of Scottish Independence - 1
French and Indian War - 1
Unnamed African Civil War - 1
The Cold War - 1
Boer War - 1


This was the war breakdown for me I think some of my picks are pretty obvious

I voted for it for the 60's countdown and would have had it top 10 here. There's no way I could have voted for it in parts as I watched it as just 1 film. Hopefully some or all of it still makes it.

I also have a question about the genre rules. It has to have "war" listed as a genre at one of those websites, right? There are a couple movies I've looked up that had war listed as a theme on letterboxd, but not as a genre. I'm assuming those wouldn't count? Thanks!

No, they don't count. As I found to my cost.

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