A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

War, despite being one of humanity's worst innovations, nevertheless exerts a strange fascination for most people, hence its enduring appeal as a subject in both the printed page and movies. Great drama, or so we were told in high school English class, is based on some type of conflict (man vs. nature, man vs. fate, man vs. himself, and man vs. man), and war is, after all, the ultimate expression of conflict. No other human endeavor exhibits so many contrasting extremes; on the one hand, the bonding and comradeship born out of the shared dangers and miseries is unrivaled by anything in civilian life, and this is one of the themes many of the best war movies explore in varying degrees. Men and women often exhibit their finest traits under the strains of war: courage, loyalty, determination, inventiveness, and self-sacrifice. At the other extreme, war brings out the worst in people: cowardice, selfishness, cruelty, amorality, treachery, and avarice.  There is also no awe-inspiring ...

I first saw Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Western”  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  when it was broadcast by the ABC television network as a Sunday Night Movie feature back in the day when the home video revolution was still a decade away and the Big Three TV networks devoted some of their prime time schedule to air not-quite-new-but-not-quite-old theatrical movies.   Because I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time and wasn’t educated about movies or the film industry, I was not aware that  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  was the third chapter of Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” (which also included A Fistful of Dollars  and  For a Few Dollars More ) or that it was originally an Italian-made flick (shot on locations in Spain and southern Italy) titled  Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo  (literally, “The good, the ugly, the bad").  Of course, because I was so young I didn’t quite understand all the nuances – visual and thematic – of L...

In 2003, two years after the successful first run of HBO's  Band of Brothers,  a World War II-set miniseries based on the late Stephen E. Ambrose's non-fiction book about a company of paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division that saw action in Normandy, Holland, the Battle of the Bulge and captured Hitler's Eagle Nest in southern Germany, its executive producers, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, began working on a similar project which focused on the "other war" America fought on the far side of the world against Japan. Before his untimely death in 2002, Ambrose had begun to outline a book about the Navy sailors and Marines who had participated in every offensive action against the Japanese Empire, starting from the 1942 landings at Guadalcanal and ending in the bloody 1945 struggle for Okinawa, the gateway to the Japanese home islands. However, Ambrose - weakened by his losing battle with cancer - found that the war in the Pacific was far more comple...

When I was a 25-year-old college sophomore and majoring in Journalism/Mass Communications, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take part in an overseas-study program co-sponsored by Miami-Dade Community College’s Foreign Language Department and the College Consortium for International Studies. At the time, I had just about taken most of the required courses for my Associate in Arts degree except math (my bete noir) and three credits’ worth of the foreign language pre-requisite. I had also, or so I thought, done everything I had set out to do as a reporter/editor at the campus student newspaper, so I was feeling a bit unmoored and restless without a plan for what I figured would be my final year on the staff. Looking back on it now, I’m not sure what, exactly, prompted me to sign up for the Semester in Spain program. Part of it, I’m sure, was a sense that this would be my best chance to go to Europe for a significant amount of time. Maybe it was my journalist’s instinctive...

In Spain, soccer is a wild, no-holds barred contest January 26, 1989 Alex Diaz-Granados Columnist SEVILLE, Spain (CCIS Program) When one is in Spain, one must do as the Spaniards do, or so we've been told by the College Consortium for International Studies Center staff when we ask about how to enjoy our free time here. This applies to everything -- from eating lunch at 2 p.m. and dinner between 9 and 10 p.m. to drinking tall glasses of "cerveza Cruzcampo" (the Spanish Budweiser) with tapas at one of the billions of bars in the city. And for those of us with a desire to be athletic (even if it's once during a 12-week term), it applies to playing sports. Because soccer is the national sport here, it was only natural that we, too, would want to catch a little "futbol fever." Most of the time we watched soccer games on Spanish television, although quite a few of us went to see the Spain-Argentina exhibition game or the Spain-Ireland game,...

Study abroad is more than educational: it’s an experience Alex Diaz-Granados Columnist (Originally published in the December 1, 1988 issue of Catalyst ) SEVILLE, Spain (CCIS Program) Over the past six weeks of my stay here in Seville as a participant in the College Consortium for International Studies’ Semester in Spain program, I have come to understand how challenging studying abroad really is. Several other students from this campus are also taking part in this program. In many respects, studying abroad is no different from studying at our home college or university. We have our schedule set up much like we do in the U.S. with lectures and reading assignments. We have midterms and finals, of course, although in some classes final exams are given at the director’s discretion. Unlike studying in the U.S., we’re learning about a different country’s history, culture, government and economic system, not by reading about these in a textbook, but by living in it. “It’s be...

It is late spring, 1940.  It's been nine months since Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland plunged Europe into general war. France and Great Britain, which had hoped to appease Hitler the year before at Munich -- and practically gave away Czechoslovakia to Germany in order to stave off war -- have been forced to fight. After a period of uneasy waiting called "the phony war" by the American press, Hitler's armies have quickly overrun Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg and thrown the Anglo-French forces back into France in less than six weeks. British forces are forced to leave their heavy equipment on the beaches and evacuate from the port city of Dunkirk. Only the English Channel, units of the Royal Navy and less than 1,000 fighters stand between Hitler's conquering legions and the British Isles. As the new Prime Minister says in a speech before the House of Commons, "What General Weygand calls the Battle of France is over, the Battle of Britain is about ...