A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’s first C.O., First Lieutenant (later Captain) Herbert M. Sobel, was ...

The Pacific  is what I like to call a “cinematic bookend” to the Emmy Award-winning 2001 HBO miniseries  Band of Brothers.  It’s not a sequel because it doesn’t follow Army soldiers in the European Theater of Operations. It’s more of a “companion series” because it’s about three Marines (John Basilone, Robert Leckie, and Eugene Sledge) and their experiences in the war against Japan. Because Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman teamed up with most of the writers, producers, and directors of  Band of Brothers,  the 2010 miniseries was not made to compete with the earlier show. It was made in part to address Pacific War veterans’ concerns that Hanks and Spielberg focused on the ETO  twice  in less than three years ( Saving Private Ryan  was released in 1998) and that  their  story wasn’t being told. (This, too, was a complaint that the late Stephen Ambrose received after he wrote a series of books about the war in Europe. He ...

For the most part, the various battles depicted in  Band of Brothers  (the Normandy campaign, Operation Market-Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, and the patrol near Hagenau) are depicted as accurately as possible in a made-for-television miniseries. Sure, the miniseries  does  get a few things  wrong,  such as its claim that Private Albert Blithe died in 1948 as a result of a wound he received at the battle for Carentan (Part Three: Carentan). This particular error has vexed the Blithe family since 2001; the real Private Blithe not only recovered from his wound, but stayed in the Army until his death (from health issues not caused by his World War II injuries) in 1967 at a U.S. Army base in West Germany. He was a Master Sergeant at the time of his death. This  faux pas  did not originate in Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1993 book; it originated with the episode’s writers, probably as a result of interviews with other veterans who  thought  Bl...

(C) 2007, Alfred A. Knopf On September 23, 2007, PBS aired A Necessary War,  Episode One of Ken Burns' seven-part series The War. Co-written by Burns and historian Geoffrey C. Ward, The War is a 14-hour look at World War II and how it affected the U.S. through the experiences of four geographically-distributed towns in America - Luverne, Minnesota; Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; and Sacramento, California. 12 days earlier, Alfred A. Knopf had published a companion book, The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945. The 408-page hardcover was co-written by Ward ( Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882-1905 ) and filmmaker Burns. (Ward and Burns have co-written five books and collaborated on many documentaries since 1990's The Civil War, including Baseball, Jazz, Prohibition, and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. ) The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who...

24: The Complete Series           Reviewer’s Note: This Epinion focuses solely on the  24: The Complete Series  box set (DVD format) and its particular features.  It doesn’t contain any season-specific content. It doesn't discuss plot or characters, either. However, links to the author’s reviews of the seven seasons found in the Epinions database have been provided in the   Content  section of this review:  On November 6, 2001, the Fox television network aired the first episode of  24,  a hybrid of the action/espionage/political thriller and nighttime soap opera genres. Created by Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran ( La Femme Nikita ) and starring Kiefer Sutherland as Federal counterterrorist agent Jack Bauer,  24  portrays the events of a single day in “real time.”  The series ran for nine years and eight seasons – the seventh being delayed by almost a year due to the Writer’s Guild strike of 2007-2008; ...

Before the November 2009 release of  Star Wars - The Clone Wars: The Complete Season One  Blu-ray and DVD sets, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm released two four-episode "volumes" of episodes of the Cartoon Network's animated anthology series set between  Attack of the Clones  and  Revenge of the Sith. The first volume,  A Galaxy Divided,  is a no-frills presentation of the series' first four episodes ( Ambush, Rising Malevolence, Shadow of Malevolence  and  Destroy Malevolence ); the first of these is a Yoda versus Asajj Ventress battle of wits, while the others make up a complete story arc in which Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin's Padawan Ahsoka Tano are on a seek-and-destroy mission against a Separatist superbattleship commanded by General Grievous. Because  Star Wars: The Clone Wars  (like Lucasfilm's  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles ) doesn't have a well-defined chronology, Volume Tw...