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AndyK's Replies
Look, I'll keep the recommendation in mind, & I agree re the horror & folly of the war, but there was no single battle in which one million men were killed. If the documentary holds this, they're mistaken.
But only as long as they're called "Tommy" or "Mack" or "Steve" or "Vic" .... lol!
Thanks for the reference. I'll check it out.
I do find this topic fascinating, because I've always wondered if my own reflexes would betray me (or my loved ones) in such an event. Given the example in the Loneliest Planet, the man's action was pure reflex, no more his fault than having one's leg jump after being tapped with a rubber hammer. But the image, however brief, of him standing behind his girlfriend is powerful. Understandable that it might wreck their relationship.
In Force Majeure actions were more thought out, there was more time to react. I don't doubt most people would do the right thing.
Then there's the Aurora Theater shooting. Remember that one? Jamie Rohrs is there with his fiance & two children. When the shooting starts, he jumps off the balcony, makes his way outside, with no regard for fiance or kids, actually gets into his car & drives off, not returning until a call from the fiance (made on the phone of Jamal Brooks, the young man who saved her & Rohrs's kids, getting shot himself in the process) asks him where the hell he is.
Then, on TV the next morning, with her still in the hospital from her own gunshot wounds, he asks her to marry him. There in front of the camera, she has little choice but to say yes.
Now that's cowardice to the nth degree.
I'm waiting for that movie....
Stick to the facts?
LOL!
It barely touched on Nagumo's dilemma when they key scout plane failed to report on the NE leg. Then, it does report US ships, but fails to mention whether or not any carriers are present, forcing Nagumo to keep changing his tactics, & leading to the rearming of the strike group. Very little about the degree of sacrifice the torpedo bombers made in drawing the Japanese CAP low & leaving them vulnerable to the dive bombers. The losses of the TBD squadrons was on level with those of kamikazes later in the war.
On the US side, one would think Spruance was in overall command of the task force, when actually Fletcher was. Of course it was Spruance's decisions that led to the victory. Fletcher really played no significant role. But the the end, did anyone wonder why Halsey's was lionized, fifth star & all, but no fifth star for Spruance (also won another key victory at the battle of the Philippine Sea)? Perhaps because the key to Spruance's victories, as shown in Midway, was restraint. Congress limited the US Navy to four fleet admirals only. King, Leahy & Nimitz were obvious choices. The fourth was between Spruance & Halsey. & Halsey had better press (not to mention more support in Congress).
The title of this thread is ironic, inasmuch as sailors were said to love serving under Halsey, while Navy officers preferred Spruance....
I don't agree with those of my compatriots who claim "we saved your asses!" to Brits. Really, it was the other way around. Britain saved our asses by staying in the fight & acting as a key linchpin for a combined strategy that eventually defeated the Axis. No doubt.
But I also reject utterly the, mostly British, criticism of US conduct prior to Dec '41. "We came in too late!" Yes, Americans were mistaken to believe we should stay out of the war, but it was a case of being wrong for all the right reasons. After all, we had finally intervened in the first war, to what effect? Although our losses were far smaller than those of the primary combatants, they still led to what? Another war? Doubtless you're aware of Churchill's alleged statement in '36 that the US should have stayed out of the Great War because by the end of '16 the powers had begun to realize that a military victory was impossible & that some face-saving peace was the only way out. Imagine had that taken place: no Nazism, likely no Bolshevik revolution. A stable Europe.
The rest: profiteering? How else are the tools of war & supplies to sustain the population provided? Great Britain ceased payments on war loans in the mid-thirties. Congress, recognizing that the preservation of war debt to the Allies was one of the principle reasons the US entered the Great War (an Allied collapse would have bankrupted the US), put strict limits on how far the President could support a foreign power. It was supposed to be all cash & carry. Which left FDR to find creative ways to support Britain, such as Lend Lease & the destroyer transfer. It might have seemed cold-blooded when Britain was fighting for her existence, but it was the law, enacted for understandable reasons.
Finally, of course US corporations did business with Nazi Germany prior to the war. Why not? Are you certain no British company did as well? People had mixed feelings about the Nazis, given how Germany had suffered economically before Hitler.
I don't know. Maybe. The studio system began its decline shortly after wwii, when studios could not longer own movie theaters because of anti-trust laws & TV competed for audience share. Of course the decline was gradual. But I'm still questioning why '69? I would understand if it referred to an end to the hippie/summer-of-love/peacenik era. But studios & LA continued to dominate US filmmaking (& to an extent perhaps still do) for many years after.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if the key isn't in Dicaprio's declaration that he can no longer live in "Hollywood" (okay, Beverly Hills) & because of financial considerations has to move to the Valley. Had traditional Hollywood, studio-union filmmaking reached a tipping point in cost, compelling newcomers to look elsewhere? I recall De Laurentiis moved to North Carolina a few years later, heralding a trend to film not just on location or out of LA, but in permanent locations all over. Today, of course, travel & technology permit the making of feature-quality films pretty much everywhere.
Given that Tarantino is an advocate of films being made in LA, I wonder if that was his intent citing '69 thus.
Would that have been Linda Kasabian?
As I recall, she cooperated with the police & became the prosecution's star witness at trial.
Not at all. I loved it. I've enjoyed most of Tarantino's films—particularly as he's been to LA what Scorsese is to NYC film making. OUATIH is a wonderful snapshot of LA & Hollywood c. the late sixties. Event though I'm not crazy about Inglorious Basterds & its alternative history, I really did like the way it was rendered here. When Sebring introduces himself to Dicaprio's character & asks what happened ... just wonderful.
No doubt, Hitler was absolutely mesmerizing before a crowd. He would practice speaking & motions with his hands & arms before mirrors endlessly. But correspondents & diplomats who met with him personally consistently claimed he was awkward & not the least bit spontaneous one-on-one.
No. I enjoyed it, by & large, & look forward to the finale. But I was deeply troubled by the way Jon & Daenerys blithely accept Cersei's statement that she "hopes it will be remembered" that she joined the anti-white walker alliance near the end of the season finale.
That is just not Cersei. Not Lannister. & one need not be intimate with her to know that. She did blow up the Red Keep, after all. Her father, Tywin, destroyed a key component of Westeros culture when he rendered the custom of bread & salt utterly invalid at the Red Wedding ... Lannisters care only for Lannisters. Westeros could happily burn, or become an outpost to the living dead, if it suited Cersei in some way.
& there's no way Jon & Daenerys don't realize that. That they appear to have taken her at her word seems like clumsy writing for the sake of rhetorical convenience. Very troubling, imho.
Well, you know, there's no such thing as giants, right?
Oh I agree, not sharing the reason for Jerry's debt/embezzlement was part of what makes the film great. &, sure it might just as easily been a get-rich-quick scam. Jerry, most than anything, wants to get out from his FIL's oppressive shadow, so falling for such a scheme might have been what happened.
I just can't help but be intrigued by schemes that go wrong, wondering how they might otherwise have worked. Would Romeo & Juliet have lived happily ever after away from their home & families? How would he support her?
What about Moss in No Country For Old Men? Just keeping the money was a lot more complicated than just not screwing up & going back with water for the injured carteleno. Gangsters would have flooded the nearest towns, asking who hunts out there in the desert? Who has just packed up & left town, & where did they go? I really believe if he had sat there longer & thought things through, he would skimmed a hundred grand or so off the top & left the rest be, hoping it wasn't enough to set them looking, or that they'd believe one of the dead men skimmed it out prior to the shootout.
Like that....:)
LOL!
Exactly, precisely correct:)
This would be The Last Sunset co-starring Rock Hudson & Carol Lynley? I distinctly remember Douglas's character in the end, breaking open his Derringer to check loads before walking out to meet Hudson, only later to see it was unloaded.
"Generous peace offerings of Germany"?
What do you mean, "of Germany?"
You mean, from Hitler?
Given how fair he played the Czechs, maybe you're right, maybe the Brits should have listened.
Of course the film is an oversimplification of history—personally I think a better hinge might have been Churchill's order to fire on the French fleet at Oran. Very controversial, even to this day, but it showed the US in particular that, a) Churchill was firmly in charge, & b) the British were willing to do whatever it took to pursue the war, because, as you know, opposition to Lend Lease stemmed largely from the belief that the equipment sent to Britain would fall into German hands soon enough.
Of course, as well, if you are some kind of revisionist Nazi symph, facts of any sort are irrelevant. That story about Churchill and the false alarm ... if true, so what? What people of significance don't have embarrassing stories in their biographies?
Oh yes, no doubt. I was 18 when Star Wars appeared in theaters. I did think the juxtaposition of Ben Kanobe's comment about the blast hits being "too accurate" for Sand People, then later watching the intrepid heroes shoot down storm troopers without themselves taking a single hit odd, but not insurmountable.
Now, forty years later, I kind of wish it had a evolved a little. Not to utter naturalism—e.g. outer space battles in complete silence. But really, why do they wear that armor?
Yes, I do. So why not be a cop, or a spy, or TSA ... or something that reflects more education & career advancement. How can he even earn enough to pay for his home as a security guard?
Good point, which I hadn't considered.
I wasn't terribly troubled by the idea of white supremacists using Black bodies in that manner, but rather it was the practical issue of changing identities—shouldn't you pick someone as similar ethnically, in height, weight & other overall physical characteristics in order to be less obvious?
Coming in a year later—you probably won't see this & I actually haven't seen the movie, lol—but I know that part of LA very well. In the 80s & early 90s Downtown east of Spring Street had got to be quite a massive skid row (& south of Little Tokyo). Comparing it with the South Bronx as a zone of urban despair is really pretty apt. There developed huge homeless encampments along Sixth Street, Wall, Boyd, back to the River & under & along some of the bridges.
One time I was in the LA River just past the 6th Street Viaduct shooting pictures at night. As I headed back to my car, a long line of homeless people with shopping carts filed past, entering the river under the same tunnel I had used to drive through. It was a long, silent & eerie procession, to where, I never learned.
Left LA in '94. Been back a few times since. Most recently in 2012, & I couldn't believe how changed Downtown has become. One example, the P&E Building, along 6th & Main, once pretty much in the core of skid row, now boasts a high end food boutique, and apartments marketed to upper middle class renters. All of that area has changed, gentrified, but also become much safer. But because the Midnight & LA Missions are still there, they're still the center for adult homeless in Los Angeles (Hollywood is where the youth go, by & large).
So they have actually "cleaned up the area" to a degree I never would have thought possible in my lifetime.
Now I live in NYC (Brooklyn, not the Bronx), but The Bronx is also much nicer than it was 20 - 30 years ago.
Well, nearly one year later, still worth commenting on after seeing the film again.
The Believer isn't particularly well known. It was released in '01, shortly before the WTC attack, & didn't stay long in the theaters. Its protagonist has a degree of ambivalence audiences don't generally respond to.
Also, as a Jew myself I'm not especially fond of apostasy, so were they real people I'd probably be more sympathetic to Ed Norton's skinhead than Ryan Gosling's turncoat.
Still, it is incredible that in a motion picture a character actually knew the difference between "kidish" & "Kadish".
I've heard many reasons for Norton's career not really taking off the way his talent suggests, but playing a goyishe skinhead is sure a new one.
Ps: chicken in included in g'di forbidden to combine with milk as a rabbinic prohibition to prevent accidental mixing of dairy with meat thought to be fowl, but actually not.