A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2017 Game-Labs Hi, there! I know I haven't posted much here, but between writing posts for A Certain Point of View, Too , working on a screenplay, and gaming every so often, I find it difficult to carve time to post here regularly. If it weren't that I've had this blog for so many years already, I'd probably call it a day and just focus on my WordPress blog. But, since I have already invested a lot of time and work into A Certain Point of View , I will just submit posts here when I can.  © 2017 Game-Labs Speaking of gaming, I have been playing two Civil War-based computer games published by a Romanian company called Game-Labs. One is Ultimate General: Gettysburg  (2014) , and the other is its more ambitious sequel, Ultimate General: Civil War (2014) .  I am not a die-hard Civil War buff, but I know enough about the bloodiest war in American history to at least try out a few wargames set in that conflict. I currently own four such games; in addition to the Ultimate G...

Battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. Credit: Wikipedia Why can't the Civil War be called the "War of Northern Aggression" or a war about states' rights? Because those descriptions of the Civil War are deceitful and odious revisionism of history, that’s why. First of all, the Federal government tried to avoid bloodshed from the time of South Carolina’s secession (December 20, 1860) till Lincoln’s Inauguration (March 4, 1861) and on until the morning of April 12, 1861. Lincoln even addressed the issue of slavery in the South in his Inaugural Address, saying that the government was not going to abolish slavery in the states where it was already legal. Second,  who  fired the first shots of the Civil War? It was not the United States Army (or Navy, for that matter) who did so; it was the Confederate Army that let loose the first cannon shot against Ft. Sumter in Charleston (SC) harbor. So if the Civil War were to be renamed “the War of X Aggression,”...

Pros:  Fine (if sometimes inaccurate) script, great narrator, and always-interesting presentation "We have felt the incommunicable experience of war. We felt - we still feel - the passion of life to its top. In our youths our hearts were touched with fire."   - Oliver Wendell Holmes. On September 23, 1990, just as units of the XVIII Airborne Corps were taking up defensive positions in the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield in the wake of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the Public Broadcasting Service aired "The Cause," the first of nine episodes of director Ken Burns’  The Civil War . It was an odd juxtaposition - as an almost unbelieving nation was sending the vanguard of what eventually became a 350,000-troop force to war against Saddam Hussein, millions of television viewers were watching what was to become the defining documentary about America’s bloodiest conflict. Although Burns wasn’t an unknown filmmaker...

 I'm not a Civil War movie fan. I'm rather a more, shall we say, generalist war movie one. Still, I have watched several feature films about the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history because, like the late Shelby Foote, I believe that we must understand that mid-19th Century tragedy in order to comprehend the modern character of the American people. As a general history buff, I prefer Ken Burns' 1990 documentary miniseries  The Civil War  as a source of such a deep comprehension.   Sure, the writers (Burns, his brother Ric and Geoffrey C. Ward) allowed a few factual errors to creep in, but overall the most-watched PBS program in history has depth and a powerful narrative that many "for entertainment" films about the Civil War sorely lack. Of the three Hollywood-made Civil War epics that I've seen over the past 21 years (including Edward Zwick's  Glory ), writer-director Ronald F. Maxwell's  Gods and Generals  is the only one which disap...

The most important programming public television offers, even with the existence of The History Channel, is a diverse range of historical documentaries that are never aired on the other broadcast networks. In the age of American Idol and The Fear Factor, it's not very easy to find well-written non-fiction television fare such as PBS' 1990 epic, The Civil War. With its then-innovative mix of photos and paintings,a wonderful script by Ken and Ric Burns, voiceovers by famous actors like Morgan Freeman, Sam Waterston and George Plimpton, a haunting musical score (which featured Fiddle Fever's now-famous "Ashokan Farewell") and a very effective narration by writer/historian David McCullough (author of The Path Between the Seas).  Not only did PBS release the series on home video, but Knopf published a "companion volume" or book tie-in.  The Civil War, written by Ken Burns, Ric Burns and historian Geoffrey C. Ward, is the companion volume to the outstand...