#histfic

A Reclusive Cowboy, Widow, and "Retired" Gunslinger Expose HUGE Murder Conspiracy (You Won't Believe What Happens Next!)

Mini haul from Oxfam today - I wouldn’t normally bother with the book on the right. Not necessarily because it’s from Lettice’s point of view but mainly because it’s very outdated/downright inaccurate and the writing doesn’t make up for it, but I could not RESIST that cover

- overall had the vibe of an okay tv movie. an expensively produced tv movie! a tv movie which can afford lots of actors you’ve seen in things! but still.

- omar bradley had a 6 second cameo and someone in my row gasped and whispered “omar…” when he came on screen

- damian lewis having a lot of fun as montgomery doing his damian lewis tight-mouthed grandiose freak thing, his agent clearly having a lot of fun getting him callback roles, glad everybody in the lewis camp is happy,

- interestingly damian lewis is doing a monty impression which pairs somewhat strangely with brendan fraser not even doing a little bit of an ike impression at ALL not even a LITTLE BIT. they could have taken a guy off the street and put him in a bald cap and pleated pants and it would have been ikier. bold choice! lots of shots of brendan fraser stanced up like bigfoot looming over a room, doing something either hilarious or odd with notions of military masculinity depending on the scene. despite this a performance with absolutely no gravitas. really a master class in cinematic vacuum

- intersperses colorized archival footage which is a choice i liked as a person who likes archival footage but also i am suspicious of this choice and can’t really articulate why

- also reenacts d day, like private ryan but worse. who is this for. anybody who is watching this movie has seen other, bloodier, higher budget depictions of utah beach and i think it would have been a stronger choice just to straight up not show us d day. this movie isn’t actually about beachhead combat. it is not about the front-line experience actually.

- however, because every wwii movie has to be about Our Brave Boys……Who Have Mothers And Wives…. they keep cutting away from weather bureaucracy and high command infighting to shots of extras in uniform clowning around to remind the audience that it’s about the boys…the individual boy-lives…..the central conflict the movie sets up is whether concerns for the boy-lives (empathetic, correct, represented by ike loudly fondling photos of individual boy-corpses, no i’m dead serious) will outweigh the strategic demands of the invasion (abstract, detached, somehow effeminate because monty is the wrong kind of british person). of course we all know that the notion of the us army operating in a mode that considers the soldier as individual was invented in the 90s by Big Brokaw to sell more gulf war. and to get sag affiliation for 70 new gi-faced young actors per year