A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

History is written by the winners. This axiom is so old and has been attributed to so many persons over the centuries - Pliny the Elder said something like this, and so have such historical figures as Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill - that it seems as though it's become ingrained in history buffs' DNA. Whether you accept the idea that history, indeed, is often written in such a way that it favors the viewpoint of the winning side of a conflict at the expense of the losers' or not, if you carefully watch war movies about World War II - especially those made before the late 1960s - there's no doubt that films made by the former Allied powers (China, France, Great Britain, the Union of Soviet Social Republics, the United States and their allies) tend to prove that the axiom is more or less true. For instance, if you are an average American movie watcher (not necessarily a war film buff), chances are tha...

Finding Balance: How to Juggle Academic Responsibilities with a Healthy Social Life in College For millions of American high school juniors and seniors, going to an institution of higher learning is the first big step forward in their post-graduation future.  After all, not only is a college degree necessary to start a career in many professions, but going to a college or university – often an out-of-state one – is a cultural and emotional transition from the dependency of adolescence to independent adulthood. If you are a high school upperclassman this year and plan to attend a post-secondary academic institution, perhaps you are looking forward to the freedom (and challenges) of living away from home for the first time.  Perhaps you are anticipating the new opportunities to make new friends and enjoy the college party scene.  Some of you may also be worried about how tough your professors may be or how to juggle your class schedule with off-campus responsibilitie...

In the late 1970s, prompted by the success of Douglas Adams' original sci-fi/comedy radio series  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,  the British Broadcasting Corporation's television department commissioned him and John Lloyd to adapt it into a six-episode miniseries. Adams, who had also worked for a while on the venerable  Dr. Who  TV series, had already adapted part of the radio series into a couple of novels ( The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy  and  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe ) was notorious for being a procrastinator, so the project took a while in getting started. At first, the TV version of  Hitchiker's Guide  was going to be an animated series, but this idea was nixed in favor of giving viewers a live-action version featuring some of the original radio series' actors, particularly Simon Jones (Arthur Dent), Mark Wing-Davey (Zaphod Beeblebrox), Stephen Moore (Marvin the Paranoid Android) and Peter...

Francis Ford Coppola’s original 1979 version of Apocalypse Now is a dark, sardonic, surrealistic yet mesmerizing reworking of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Starring Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Fredric Forrest, Larry Fishbourne, and Dennis Hopper, Apocalypse Now trades Conrad’s African setting for the then-still largely unexplored (by Hollywood, anyway) jungles of Vietnam. The film’s premise is deceptively simple. A hard-bitten, combat-weary Capt. Benjamin Willard (Sheen) is given a difficult (and highly classified) assignment: he is to travel up a long Vietnamese river on a Navy PBR (river patrol boat) to find the jungle outpost of Col. Walter Kurtz (Brando), a highly decorated and intelligent Special Forces officer who has gone "rogue" and utilizing what one senior officer describes as "unsound methods" to fight the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Willard is to locate Kurtz and "terminate (him) with extreme prejudice....

(C) 1992 Simon & Schuster The trouble with history, particularly modern history, is that events can be interpreted and presented in different ways. Consider, for instance, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Some books, such as Jim Bishop's The Day Kennedy Was Shot and Gerald Posner's Case Closed , point the finger at Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman. Others, such as David Lifton's Best Evidence , claim there was a vast conspiracy to shoot Kennedy in Dallas, Texas and to cover this violent coup d'etat up so Lyndon Johnson could be President and escalate the Vietnam War. I don't believe the conspiracy theorists and they'll never get a dime from me, but nevertheless there are plenty of people who do believe Lifton and his other "there was a second gunman in the grassy knoll" compadres. By taking a fact here, adding a supposition there, and by presenting information selectively to make it fit an author's particular ...

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World War II, for good or ill, has been the backdrop for hundreds – if not thousands – of movies produced by all the nations which participated in it even as it was being waged. Of course, though “combat” films along the lines of A Walk in the Sun, Battleground, The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan often come to mind when the term World War II movie is mentioned, the genre actually straddles quite a few other film styles that aren’t restricted to movies about battles, campaigns or the hardware of the war.  Many love stories, dramas, comedies and even science fiction films have been set or partially set during World War II. Naturally, the sheer scope of World War II – fought on three continents and involving millions of combatants – and its more or less unambiguous “good versus evil” nature resulted in the near-mythologizing of certain events by Hollywood and writers of fiction. One of the most popular subgenres of World War II films is the “sabotage and comman...