Pearl Harbor Lighthouse

The movie Pearl Harbor has two scenes which show the lighthouse: 1)Evelyn reading a love letter outside the lantern room with the fresnel lens rotating and 2)a scene outside the hospital with the lighthouse next door.

I take it the hostpital one features Olivia Newton-John.

That was filmed at Cape Vicente. Our guide there told us about the 3-4 days of shooting and how gracious Olivia Newton-John was.

The old fog-signal building (now a small museum) was converted into the 'hospital'.

This leads to an error in the film. The flags that fly on the pole next to the lighthouse. The American flag has 50 stars and the Coast Guard flag is of a newer style than ones in 1941.

I don't know about Olivia Newton-John. I didn't notice the flag. The lighthouse does look like Pt. Vicente but I can't be sure.

The movie was much better than I anticipated and, again, the critics must have been watching something else. I think it was excellent and if you go see it, remember to breathe! There are scenes that are so active and intense that I realized I was holding my breath.

Joanne

Olivia Newton-John? - John
She was not in the movie.
I agree Joan. I enjoyed the movie and it was packed all weekend. It's not going to break any box office records the opening weekend though because it is 3 hours long therefore can not be viewed as many times per day as a 2 hour. By the way, I didn't look at my watch and the 3 hours flew by. War scenes were intense but not as bad as Private Ryan. I really felt stressed out after that film. Maybe it conditioned me for this one?

I also saw Knight's Tale yesterday. It was very clever in making a Gladiator type movie into a comedy with rock music. The opening scene made me ask myself 3 times was this really happening? No lighthouse in this one!

Last night MSNBC aired the 2 hour program "Pearl Harbor, Attack on America" narrated by Norman Schwarzkopf. It featured real scenes and interviews with real survivors, as well as some Japanese airmen. No transplanted lighthouses, just the story of the tragic loss of 2400 U.S. servicemen. Excellent show that we happened upon by chance. This was not printed in our what's on T.V. booklet, although a number of other Pearl Harbor programs appear to be scheduled this week. This final airing of this show is today at 1pm.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/537370.asp#BODY

It's not a record but....

I pulled this from a CBS entertainment news report from yesterday. That sure isn't chump change!
SaintWackoPaul'
Keep the Flame

Here's another plug for the movie. The lighthouse scenes may be brief, but I thought the movie was excellent. Superb computer graphics of aerial combat, interesting romance story, and a decent re-telling of the Pearl Harbor and Doolittle Tokyo bombing stories. It sure flamed my patriotism!

I haven't seen the movie, but I have seen at least one of the specials concerning it. One thing that caught my eye, was that while they had access to all that great graphics capability, they paid so little attention to the laws of physics! It appears that at least in the scenes I saw the planes were flying almost twice as fast as "real time", and the bomb onto the Arizona fell like a arrow! Those old iron bombs wobbled and bobbled in "flight", and they follow a parabola, traveling almost as far FORWARD as the plane that drops them before they hit the target. Then, the bomb punches through two or three armored decks, and shows no deformation? To me, those are as big clunkers as showing a fifty-star flag!

That's OK, Dave. From just catching glances of the ads for the movie, it would appear that the ships being bombed are modern day Aegis cruisers. It's the thought that counts.

Dave

Just wanted to put my belated "2 cents" in and say I enjoyed the movie. Mistakes and all this was still better than the critics said.

Rusty

Yes, there were quite a few mistakes. Another that hasn't been mentioned is the fact that they had the Queen Mary as she is now in Long Beach, as opposed to as she should've been: in wartime gray in a slip in New York City (which is where she was suposed to have been). Also, why would you floodlight a country's greatest asset? During the bombing of Battleship Row, I got chills down my spine constantly. Despite the mistakes, I enjoyed the movie and thought it was pretty good.