Watched it but don't recommend. Bad acting and annoying.

wrt generation kill agree completely and it's really sad cuz it was an absolute masterpiece and the book it was based on was fantastic as well can't recommend it highly enough.

as for band of brothers it was very strange why the randomly decided to stray from real story with regards to such a minor character as blithe was but overall it was way way better than 99% of historical shows when it comes to accuracy.

I watch BoB at least once a year and never enjoy it any less just ridic amazing.

absolutely. I have become addicted to audiobooks (libby is a great free resource for audiobooks to complement audible) and ambrose has a few books about WWII that are great listens.

oh yeah bob is still an all time great in my opinion, i don't remember all the details of what they changed but I agreed with most of it because it indeed told a better story, iirc winters was also never in a situation where he went over a trench and there in front of him were hundreds of germans eating breakfast - but that was a powerful scene, not because it's "omg winters is so badass" but rather he's finally close enough to see who he is killing enough to realize it's just a young boy having breakfast and then that image is later repeated to show how what he's done never leaves him and this is how soldiers get haunted with ptsd etc, etc, even in their most triumphant moments they are still doing terrible things that will linger

ie blithe, the narrative they were telling was "there's no need to be afraid we're all already dead"

so then if he is able to shed that fear and become a competent soldier, it closes that narrative loop if then by doing so it ends his life - he accepted his fate, became a good soldier, and like all good soldiers died

from my understanding, his family was rather upset at the portrayal, if you read the wiki link he went on to have an extremely distinguished career fighting in Korea

ya the ironic thing is that if you read the actual memoirs from various men of easy co (I've only read 3 along with ambrose's book) there is absolutely no need to embellish anything, what they did in reality was more than enough to make a super compelling and badass series but when Spielberg is an exec producer guess it's inevitable that it's gonna get some added melodrama.

generation kill on the other hand literally had nothing at all embellished or manufactured simon was meticulous about having everything be hyper realistic and he even had a couple of the real soldiers in it including fruity rudy playing himself and it's one of my fav things ever made.

an interesting comparison in terms of how each story was adapted with much different approaches but the result being outstanding in both cases.

If Spiers didn’t run through the entire German army keep your trap shut about it.

Sounds like the new Night Court. I'm not a big fan of sitcoms in general, but I did check out the first episode of the new Night Court show for nostalgia sake. I'd say the judge is probably better than in the original, but other than that it's kinda like a bad 80s sitcom they decided to release in 2023.

On a side note, reviewing the cast of the original Night Court I couldn't believe how many of the actors had passed away. And somehow Bull is the one still alive at the age of 80.

Yea, the new Night Court is pretty weak compared to the original, I will stick around for a bit.

I have high hopes for the new Frasier coming to Paramount+ soon, they are filming now I believe. I think Frasier is the only original character that will be on it.

lol big +1 one of my fav scenes/characters.

been ages but from what I recall he was super special but the guy in charge was not the bumbling idiotic coward he was portrayed to be

spiers did do most of that stuff, including that run, but it wasn't in order to bail out his incompetent commander

again, the story arc in general for that episode was about the problems with having incompetent senior officers and they sort of combined all of them into one guy who by all accounts was not incompetent, he actually got several medals and went on to get promoted - what really happened was he got wounded in that battle - which incapacitated him and required spiers to take over

and also, the us soldiers were under orders not to take any prisoners on d-day, so spiers executing those men wasn't the sadistic thing but rather what any commanding officer would be forced to do if his soldiers ignored those orders and took prisoners back to base anyway

I'm going to have to check out Band of Brothers as I've heard great things although I'm generally not as into the wartime movies and shows as other genre. I mean I respect movies like "Saving Private Ryan" and I think it was a good movie but I've never watched it a second time. The only war time movie that I've ever watched more than once is "Apocalypse Now".

It’s the best thing ever put on television.

wolf hall is elite... but also kinda boring... i mean it's slow. and it's def for an older audience. but jfc, the acting is amazing... mark rylance is one of the best actors to ever live. and damien lewis is great... i saw it a while ago and forget who else is in it

but if you like that kind of stuff, and you like the story of henry and anne.. it's incredibly well done.

In the Band of Brothers book:

Hiding it seems silly, but sadly that number actually sounds small to me.

omaha beach - 50k soldiers landed, 2k casualties (of which 500 died)

two waves in total

it was a very soft spot carefully chosen, in order to protect from naval bombardment, most bunkers were over a kilometer inland and did not directly face the beach, spread over lengthy gaps due to inability to cover entire coast otherwise and manned by low quality troops

in between the bunkers were a sea wall, a clif, and extensive ravines, leaving ample cover to slowly proceed under extreme caution

the main german defensive strategy was to just have enough defense to slow down the landings and then rapidly move in tank divisions for support - those tank divisions were never deployed because we'd successfully tricked the germans into believing this was a feint and the real attack was coming at another location, by the time they realized this was the real attack, it was too late

first wave landed at 6:30 am, the last of the fighting ended around 9pm - it was a very slow and methodical step by step process of hanging under cover and slowly making headway

furthermore, the scenes of saving private ryan of machine lines zeroing in on landing craft and firing as they opened the doors never happened - again because the bunkers weren't facing the water and instead were angled to fire across the beach rather than over to cover more ground

this is the actual view the bunkers had, distant & angled across the beach to cover more ground and avoid naval bombardment




this is how saving private ryan showed it




I can't emphasize enough, how terrible it would have been to be landing on d-day, I don't by any means try to downplay the noble sacrifice of those soldiers nor their bravery. But people tend to believe survival rates of that were about 50/50 because of the bs ways in which it's shown on film

i know that saving private ryan did trigger a lot of ptsd among veterans, I think it's because the only way to truly capture such horrific events on film is to exaggerate them, when someone is shooting at you from a kilometer away it's still incredibly terrifying but it doesn't come off that way on film - so i get the choices they made and am fine with it

but we have terrible exaggerated notions of how high casualties are in war, any death is one too many, but we still tend to believe far more died


also, forgot to mention one thing that really bothered me about bob is tha liebowitz was not a jew in real life, the writers just saw one of the people had a plausibly jewish name so they ran with it and gave this solider this entire arc about him signing up to defend judaism from nazis, his family, devout roman catholics, were not amused - hbo was actually very worried about getting sued because of the production with all the altering of the stories of real people but eventually went along with - they did seek out permission from a few such as spiers though who had no objections to whatever they wanted to do

you guys are being kind to the Night Court reboot on NBC.

Watched the first two episodes, and it was absolutely awful.

I agree, but The Pacific came really close to the greatness of BoB imo. The first half fell short, but episodes 6-10 are top tier.

This. Always enjoyed the original. This version is just terrible.

I enjoyed The Recruit. I'd say the first ep, maybe the second, feels a little silly, but it gets better if you stick with it.

+1

For all the BoB/Pacific fans, Masters of the Air is coming out this year.

only vaguely familiar with the original from the occasional rerun, it definitely felt over the top but i felt like it worked

seeing the promos for the reboot, no, just no, i couldn't

oh man so stoked.

Finished The English last night. Good story told an odd way. But I enjoyed. Feels like 6 episodes is the right length for these shows (with the exception of Peaky where I could just take a billionty episodes every season)

Thanks, that was a really interesting read and I had no idea about the actual conditions they faced.