Roxio CinemaNow - Miracle at St. Anna

Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee's effort to set the record straight on the contribution of black and Latino servicemen to the combat against Germany in World War II, winds up being shot down itself by many critics. Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News writes that the stories Lee tells in the movie "are too often stuck in a swamp of stereotypes and clich?s." Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal describes the film as "diffuse, dispirited, emotionally distanced and dramatically inert." Claudia Puig in USA Today calls it "unfocused, sprawling and badly in need of editing." To Anne Hornaday in the Washington Post, it's "Overwrought, overproduced, overbusy and overlong." But A.O. Scott in the New York Times, while agreeing that the movie "sometimes stumbles under its heavy, self-imposed burden of historical significance," suggests that this war movie, except for darker faces, is not all that different from war movies of the past. He writes: "Mr. Lee sticks to the sturdy conventions of the infantry movie, adapting old-fashioned techniques to an unfamiliar, neglected story. And the cinematic traditionalism of "Miracle at St. Anna" is perhaps its most satisfying trait. At its best, this is a platoon picture, and if it's not exactly like the ones Hollywood made in the late '50s and early '60s, that's part of Mr. Lee's argument: it's the movie someone should have had the guts or the vision to make back then. Better late than never." And Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, while also expressing criticism about some of Lee's scenes, concludes: "The scenes I object to are not evidence of any special perception I have. They're the kind of scenes many studio chiefs from the dawn of film might have singled out, in the interest of making the film shorter and faster. But they're important to Lee, who must have defended them. And it's important to me that he did. When you see one of his films, you're seeing one of his films. And "Miracle at St. Anna" contains richness, anger, history, sentiment, fantasy, reality, violence and life. Maybe too much. Better than too little."