While the second season of His Dark Materials had some wibbles and pacing issues, this third season looks promising. The eight-episode final season has a double-episode premiere on December 5th, with two episodes airing each week until the December 26th finale.
Final Real War
The Russian military finally secured control over Mariupol in mid-May, when the last Ukrainian forces surrendered after a valiant resistance. Weeks of indiscriminate Russian shelling and bombing have left Mariupol, a predominately Russian-speaking city where almost half of population was ethnic Russian, absolutely devastated.
From the first days of the Civil War, slaves had acted to secure their own liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed their insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom. It added moral force to the Union cause and strengthened the Union both militarily and politically. As a milestone along the road to slavery's final destruction, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom.
SON: Mama, I'm in Ukraine. There is a real war raging here. I'm afraid. We are bombing all of the cities together, even targeting civilians. We were told that they would welcome us, and they are falling under our armored vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels, and not allowing us to pass. They call us fascists. Mama, this is so hard.
"I think it's outside the realm of possibility right now that there's going to be a nuclear war or World War III that really spills over that far beyond Ukraine's borders," Samuel Ramani, a geopolitical analyst and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told CNBC.
"Russia will cut off gas to more countries, it will increase its ruble demands, because it wants to ensure the ruble convertibility remains open, and the West needs to be preparing for this with a full war mentality, making the Western populations understand that this is going to have real economic costs and real impacts on the cost of goods, the cost of living and inflation over the coming years."
In a recent article, the New York Times essentially called on the US government to be realistic and recognize that Ukraine cannot defeat Russia. The appeal to be realistic drew my attention because, to a large extent, this entire war is being fought for the kind of reality we will live in and what we believe to be true.
I am writing this piece in Kyiv, where I have been since the beginning of the war, and where I still have to run to the basement several times a day because of air-raid sirens. There is a special sense of the reality of war here, and I want to tell three truths about it.
Putin has repeatedly said that the West had left him no choice. This tells us that this war, and its end, is not about Russia-Ukraine relations. Victory in Ukraine is not Putin's final goal, and if he achieves it, he will simply move on to the next target. But to defeat him in Ukraine is to prevent him from doing that.
After finishing the script, Robinson and Sherman continued searching for a studio. They landed a deal with New Line Cinema in 2007, but not long after, New Line was sold to Warner Bros. and the project was canceled and was again without a backer. Robinson and Sherman spent the next decade finding funding, and production finally began in 2017.[8]
I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war--and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.
First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable--that mankind is doomed--that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.
Second: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims--such as the allegation that "American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars . . . that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union . . . [and that] the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries . . . [and] to achieve world domination . . . by means of aggressive wars."
Truly, as it was written long ago: "The wicked flee when no man pursueth." Yet it is sad to read these Soviet statements--to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning--a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.
So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
Meanwhile, we seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system--a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating conditions under which arms can finally be abolished.
.css-rj2jmfheight:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;I thought the film showed accurately how tough life could be in a tank, but the final scene where the crew hold out against a battalion of Waffen SS troops was too far fetched. The Germans seemed to be used as canon fodder. In reality they would have been battle-hardened and fanatical troops who would have easily taken out an immobile Sherman tank using Panzerfausts (an anti-tank bazooka). They also seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of ammunition and fuel. A Sherman tank only does five miles to the gallon so I think they would have run out long before the final showdown.
In late July 1998, Steven Spielberg landed on the American public with his World War II film Saving Private Ryan, which won the war of critics, veterans, scholars, historians, and the general moviegoing public. All that is left is the cleanup at the box office and the final awarding of medals such as the Oscar for Best Picture. The bottom line of the positive critical evaluations is this: Saving Private Ryan is a new and different World War II combat film because it finally refutes the dishonesty of previous Hollywood movies of the genre.
The truth is not that simple, and Saving Private Ryan represents another case in the ongoing struggle for film historians, who must constantly deal with modern critics who judge artistic events by the standards of their own times. For the combat movie, this means if there's no blood and guts, there's no glory. Although there is no question that Spielberg made a fine film or that Tom Hanks and the rest of the cast have done an excellent job, there are issues of film history to be addressed in evaluation. No one is going to argue with the WWII veterans who have stated that Saving Private Ryan is the most realistic presentation of combat they've seen. There is also no question but that Spielberg has achieved integrity in his images. He closely consulted with historian Stephen E. Ambrose (author of Citizen Soldiers) and Dale Dye, a retired Marine Corps captain who acted as his chief military adviser. The issue to be discussed is not combat accuracy (or the quality of the movie) but rather accuracy about the history of the World War II combat genre and Saving Private Ryan's place in that history.
Taking an overview based on actual screenings, where does Saving Private Ryan fit? It has been defined by modern critics as groundbreaking and anti-generic, "the desire to bury the cornball, recruiting poster legend of John Wayne: to get it right this time."1 The primary differences that have been cited are (1) its realistic combat violence, (2) its unusual story format in which soldiers question leadership and the point of their mission, and (3) its new and different purpose.
Even without specific guidelines for war, the original combat films naturally conformed to the censorship standards of their own time. This meant finding ways to clarify horrible events for viewers without directly representing them on screen. (This ploy was similar to the ways they hinted at sex: fireplace flames, crashing waves, fireworks, and judicious editing.) An example of the original WWII combat film is the seminal Bataan (1943), directed by Tay Garnett and written by Robert D. Andrews. Bataan was not the first movie about WWII combat, but it can be accepted as the first that pulled together all the elements that would become traditional to the genre. How realistic was Bataan's combat? Critics of the day almost unanimously gave the movie raves, praising its "gritty realism." Bataan, of course, was shot entirely inside a studio on sets, using matte shots, rear projections, and artificial fog machines. What is realistic (and gritty) about it is the genuine anger it contains. Its propagandistic passion was fueled by the recent fall of Bataan and America's overall failure in the early days of the Pacific war.
Does this mean "unrealistic"? Physically, yes. Psychologically and emotionally, perhaps not. And did the absence of blood mean that audiences believed that soldiers died without losing arms and legs or even blood? The tendency to assign an audience of the past the role of idiot, and an audience of today the role of genius is often a problem in critical studies. Filmmakers of the 1940s knew how to create powerful effects for the audiences of their time. They also knew that the 1940s audience was not detached from the horror of war. They were losing friends and family every day, and welcoming home the maimed and wounded. Even though they could not fully grasp what being in combat was like (and still can't), they could understand its results, which they were experiencing. Critics of the day also reminded everyone about the differences between the movies and reality. James Agee reviewed Guadalcanal Diary (1943) favorably, but said, "It would be a shame and worse if those who make or will see it got the idea that it's a remotely adequate image of the first months on that island."3 2ff7e9595c
Comments