Posted on 01/09/2018 11:18:14 PM PST by iowamark
Please pardon the vanity. I just saw Darkest Hour. It was really excellent and moving. Both history and drama. Some lines and scenes are obviously fictionalized. The scene with Churchill riding the subway is silly, but I understand the need for dramatic license.
It is about the last three weeks of May 1940. Churchill becomes Prime Minister, even though Chamberlain, Halifax, and King George dislike him. Hitler invades France, which becomes a rout. Halifax insists on peace negotiations with Hitler. Churchill wavers, but decides to fight on. It is impossible to say what might have happened if Britain had made a deal with Hitler.
I strongly encourage all to see Darkest Hour. The cast is all excellent.
Gary Oldman as Churchill, Kristin Scott Thomas as his wife, Ben Mendelsohn as George VI, Lily James as his secretary, Ronald Pickup as Neville Chamberlain, Stephen Dillane Lord Halifax.
Sounds much like “The Man in the High Castle” on Netflix
Yes...his works are magnificent, to those of us who view WWII as a pivot that history turned on, his books provide an amazing and well written insight from someone who was on the stage, not just in the front row.
I think Halifax knew hard decisions would need to be made and he didn’t want to do it but was willing to bide his time and step in later.
The hard decisions that Churchill makes is amazing and may not have been made by a lesser man. Sacrificing the men at Calais so that the rescue at Dunkirk could happen....Sobering.
Loving it...
I had a wonderful friendship with two elderly gentlemen that was kicked off by one of Churchill’s volumes.
One of them was in for an appointment and left the volume by accident. He was from out of state (halfway across the country) so I had to find his address and mail it to him.
Next time he came in, he gave me a new copy...and we became good friends.
So, besides being EXCELLENT books, they have made a difference in my life in other ways...:)
I disagree to a degree, simply because I didn’t think it was ridiculous in EVERY way.
I thought in at least one respect it captured quite well the fear and desperation of men who were trapped in a shrinking perimeter with no way out...well symbolized (to me) by the scene where the men were packed in on the pier, and were bombed and strafed by the German pilots.
That scene was a microcosm of the whole thing...there was nowhere to go...nowhere to run...nowhere to hide. All they could do was close their eyes and make themselves as small as they could...and hope. And the desperation to get out, to not be one of the last people left there when the last boat left (before all the small boats began showing up). I could get that.
Where the movie lost me was the jumping back and forth. I understood what they were trying to do, but it became difficult to keep time and place.
I watched it with my brother and my wife and we actually did laugh about the Spitfire sequences...where he almost seemed to be going backwards, never gaining, but actually losing ground with each scene...”Well...he still hasn’t caught up yet, and we are 3/4 of the way through the movie...”
Additionally, they didn’t provide enough clues to the viewer where they were at any given time...some of the characters looked quite similar, and it was hard to tell if you were flashing back, or seeing something new. That made it disappointing to me.
I am a huge Churchill fan, admire the man, and to me, his flaws make him even more attractive, remarkable and interesting to me. I think he was the greatest man of the 20th Century. He was the pivot upon which history turned at that point.
I’m telling was Ray Bradbury said it was about. School teachers insist he was wrong.
...up for debate then?
If Bradbury said that, then we have to honor his intentions, no?
I saw it last weekend and agree that it is very well acted. Not very strong on accuracy though.
Hitler and the other top Nazis didn't trust "Jewish physics," and evidently the Wehrmacht came to Heisenberg and the other physicists in 1941 and asked if they could guarantee an operational weapon in two years. They admitted that they could not (even the US missed that timetable by two years), and the Wehrmacht said, "okay, thanks," and withdrew their support. From then on, it was managed as just another research project.
Nobody knew that on our side until after the war, of course. The OSS actually sent an agent into Switzerland to listen to a talk by Heisenberg and assassinate him if the German program was making significant progress. The assassin concluded that it was not, and let Heisenberg go.
Because Halifax knew that only a coalition with Labour could direct the country through the war and he knew that Churchill would be a better leader of such a coalition than he would.
I read all 6 volumes a year or so ago. Absolutely worth every word and page and the time it took. Enjoy the experience.
You might appreciate this:
Gen. Smuts live on stage- (with Churchill offering ‘hear hears from the dias.)
I’ll have to wait for the DVD.
Looking forward to it.
Thanks.
http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted
AMY E. BOYLE JOHNSTON | MAY 30, 2007
...Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.
Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.
This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.
“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He’s now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled “Bradbury on censorship/television.”
As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’ .?.?. This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”
HE SAYS THE CULPRIT in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as “walls” and its actors as “family,” a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends....
I won’t see it. What’s the hell is the point? Today’s Britain is unworthy of Churchill. He fought off the Nazis — only to see his successors IMPORT Muslim Nazis en masse into Britain just 25 years later. Not onto the beaches, but right into the cities, by the hundreds of thousands. Not a single German soldier managed to invade Britain. But now a new Nazi army far worse than the Nazis will destroy the UK. It is all but inevitable.
Yep. Good soundtrack too.
I knew the subway scene was coming from Mark Steyn’s review, they set it up in the first moments of the movie, so I went to the loo then.
“HE SAYS THE CULPRIT in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people.”
What a curious statement. It begs the questions: why then was the govt. directing the burning of books, and why then did they pursue Montag?
Perhaps Bradbury was “turned” - and has now become a statist.
Anxiously awaiting Season 3 of “The Man in the High Castle”. However, it’s actually on Amazon Prime, not Netflix.
***When the movie leaves the theaters it will be on Blu-Ray 3 weeks later.**
I remember when films like this would have been at major theaters for six months. Then they would start making the rounds of the “second run” theaters. Then on for a couple of years more at independent theaters. Then a major re-release to theaters eight years later, then two years later on TV.
Now the average time between major theater release and DVD is about two months.
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