A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

 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 disappointed me

Nos·tal·gia : Pronunciation: nä-'stal-j&, n&- also no -, nO-; n&-'stäl- Function: noun Etymology: New Latin, from Greek nostos return home New Latin -algia; akin to Greek neisthai to return, Old English genesan to survive, Sanskrit nasate he approaches 1 : the state of being homesick : HOMESICKNESS 2 : a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia - nos·tal·gic /-jik/ adjective or noun - nos·tal·gi·cal·ly /-ji-k(&-)le/ adverb Nostalgia. For most of us, the past sometimes seems more attractive than our present or somehow less frightening than the undiscovered country of the future. It's an illusion, really, but memory has a way of dulling all but the sharpest pains, the saddest memories, and the rest of all our yesterdays becomes a series of sepia-colored memories in which we take refuge from our 21st Century red state-blue state, conservative vs. l

Spring, 1945. After the failure of his Ardennes Counteroffensive - the famous "Battle of the Bulge" - three months earlier, Adolf Hitler huddles in his bunker beneath Berlin, trying desperately to stave off certain defeat as his "Thousand Year Reich" falls back on all fronts. In the East, the Red Army has overrun most of Poland and East Prussia. Russian armies, several million soldiers strong, are now less than 100 miles away from the Nazi capital.  Only the floodwaters of the Oder and Neisse Rivers, as well as the tattered remnants of the once mighty German forces which invaded Russia in 1941, block their advance. In the West, the American, British, Canadian and French forces have liberated most of France, all of Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of Holland.   And though the surprise German attack in December caught Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Anglo-American subordinates by surprise, its failure has eliminated one of the Allies' worst strategic scenarios f

It's Sunday,. December 16, 2012.  It's nice outside - sunny, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and not humid - and I really want to go for a walk or simply go to the "little pool" on 97th Place and read a book out in the fresh air.  Problem is, I can't do any of that because on weekends my mom's Nursing South Corporation aide is only here to perform what is called "personal hygiene duties" and can't stay longer than one hour. In fact, she's not even here yet and it's almost 1:30 PM.  So because my mom is confined to bed and practically helpless, I am here in what used to be our dining room trying to write anything...a review, Facebook posts, emails or a blog entry.  I need to exercise my mind somehow, since I can't watch TV or listen to music during Mom's waking hours in case she calls for me from her room. I love my mom dearly and I try to carry out my duties as a caregiver with as best an outlook as I can muster, but some days, like toda

Although I like to read different types of books about the Second World War, I don’t usually read memoirs written by the participants because (a) most of them are written by generals or politicians, (b) they can be tedious to read and/or (c) the authors have axes to grind or are trying to twist history in order to enhance their reputation at the expense of the truth.  (In other words, they can often be self-serving and even misleading.)  There are other reasons why memoirs don’t attract my attention as a reader in the same fashion as books like Cornelius Ryan’s  A Bridge Too Far  or Stephen E. Ambrose’s  Band of Brothers  do; as historian Ronald H. Spector ( Eagle Against the Sun )  puts it, “Memoirs of wars and politics usually become less interesting with the passage of time.”  Readers who were born a generation after V-E or V-J Day find such works as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe  (1948) or Winston Churchill’s six-volume opus  The Second World War  (1948-1953) outdate

In the summer of 1987, Universal Studios released  Dragnet,  the third feature film based on the long-running radio and TV police procedural series created in 1949 by actor-director-producer Jack Webb.  The show, which ran on-and-off from ’49 to 2003 on various media platforms on two networks and in syndication, is famous for its musical theme (“Dum - - - de - DUM - DUM"), its cinema verite approach to storytelling, and Webb’s deadpan delivery of his dialogue.  Five years after Jack Webb’s death (which came just as a new version of  Dragnet  was in pre-production), writer-director Tom Mankiewicz teamed up with actors Dan Ackroyd and Tom Hanks to create a comedy which was part parody and part loving tribute to Webb’s very straight-faced drama.  Here, Ackroyd, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mankiewicz and Alan Zweibel, stars as Joe Friday, nephew and namesake to Webb’s famous Los Angeles Police Department plainclothes sergeant.  The younger Friday is a bit taller and stockie

Dear readers, Even though I am not feeling all that well as of late (I seem to have picked up a nasty chest cold or something), I will be working on a few reviews this week for Epinions' $10-for-10 December promotion. I'm not sure in what order I'll do them,  and given the circumstances I don't know if I'll even be able to get them all done by December 31, but these are the products I plan to write about: Prometheus, the Alien semi-prequel directed by Ridley Scott The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan's final film of his Batman trilogy Seven of the Harry Potter movies (I've already reviewed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ) Charles B. MacDonald's Company Commander Regarding Henry , a film by director Mike Nichols.   I bought it for my mom's Christmas present so I haven't watched it yet, so if I do review it, it will probably be one of the last reviews I'll write this year. If I can "suggest a product" (SA

You have to have a heart of stone - or be a Dursley - to  not  like  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.   I say this not from the perspective of a child, nor the parent of a child, nor even a voracious reader of the J.K. Rowling novels about the boy with glasses and that lightning-shaped star. Indeed, I only have the first of the five books and that, dear readers, only because my former neighbor and computer troubleshooter gave it to me before he moved to South Carolina. My taste in movies rarely goes into the realm of "family fare," even though some of my favorite films ( E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind , the  Star Wars  series, among others) are geared for young and old alike.  I must also admit that I only started reading Harry Potter when I had just about gone through most of my Tom Clancy novels, Star Wars tomes, and history books. I was not sure if I would like it as much as I do, say, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings . However, I was pleasantly surp