A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The Post (2017) Written by: Liz Hannah and Josh Singer Directed by: Steven Spielberg Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Poulson, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford, Bruce Greenwood, Matthew Rhys   Robert McNamara: If you publish, you'll get the very worst of him, the Colsons and the Ehrlichmans and he'll crush you. Kay Graham: I know, he's just awful, but I... Robert McNamara: [Interrupting and getting extremely angry] He's a... Nixon's a son of a bitch! He hates you, he hates Ben, he's wanted to ruin the paper for years and you will not get a second chance, Kay. The Richard Nixon I know will muster the full power of the presidency and if there's a way to destroy your paper, by God, he'll find it. Director Steven Spielberg’s The Post is a timely political how-they-done-it about how The Washington Post (following the lead of its much larger and more prominent rival, The New York Times ) helped unco

On Tuesday, April 17, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released Steven Spielberg's 2017 political/historical thriller The Post on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K UHD Blu-ray. Starring Academy Award-winning actors Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and the newspaper's dogged editor Ben Bradlee, The Post dramatizes the duo's 1971 decision to publish "the Pentagon Papers" in defiance of the secretive - and vindictive - Nixon Administration. (C) 2018 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment OSCAR ® winners Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, and Tom Hanks team up for the first time in this thrilling film based on a true story. Determined to uphold the nation’s civil liberties, Katharine Graham (Streep), publisher of The Washington Post, and hard-nosed editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks) join forces to expose a decades-long cover-up. But the two must risk their careers –– and their freedom –– to bring truth to light in this powerful film wit

Pros: Excellent scripts, great acting, and superb production values makes this WWII true-life drama worth owning. Cons: It's expensive...and lacks English subtitles for the hearing impaired. I couldn’t watch Band of Brothers when it aired on HBO in 2001, so I bought the late Stephen E. Ambrose's book of the same name. It was the tie-in edition with the cover art taken from the miniseries; promotional materials and a new foreword by the author describing the genesis of the miniseries and his praise for executive producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. Ambrose stated that their personal interest and attention to detail were impressive, for they wanted to make sure they got everything right. I did ask one of my best friends if he could tape it for me; he has HBO and a whole batch of premium channels and he does record programs he can't watch while he's at work, but even though I had logged on to HBO.com and gotten the airing schedule for Band of Brot

“There’s a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn’t a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.” — Barbara Kingsolver If 1993's Schindler's List was director Steven Spielberg's soul-searching and ultimately redemptive examination of why we fought the war, then 1998's Saving Private Ryan is the emotional bookend that depicts the sacrifices made by citizen-soldiers who put their lives on hold -- and often lost them -- to save the world from becoming a charnel-house ruled by Adolf Hitler and his Axis partners. It is  a powerful and graphic film that has, in retrospect, reawakened our nation's interest in World War II and made us realize, however belatedly, how m

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 was about to work on a book about the war in the

(C) 2015 Dreamworks LLC Steven Spielberg’s 2015 Cold War film “Bridge of Spies” is an intriguing (if somewhat flawed) take on how a Brooklyn insurance attorney named James Donovan (Tom Hanks) helped negotiate the 1961 exchange of convicted Soviet intelligence agent Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and an American college student (Will Rogers) accused of espionage by Communist-ruled East Germany. Spielberg’s latest historical drama earned five Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, and Best Supporting Actor. “Bridge of Spies” only won one: Mark Rylance walked away with the 2015 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor – a well-deserved recognition for his nuanced performance as accused spy Abel. “Bridge of Spies” begins with Rudolf Abel’s arrest by FBI counterintelligence in 1957. It is an age of atomic anxiety: The U.S. and the Soviet Union are building nuclear ar