I only saw the first episode of the new series, I'll have to make an effort to catch up.
NOW WATCHING
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SixesAlltheway
Ancient Mariner
@LooseCannon , @Maturin , @Shadow , @Severian I remember your discussion about Philip K. Dick novels in the Now Reading thread. Don't forget that the new Amazon exclusive series based on The Man in The High Castle has begun....
Trailer:
First Episode up now:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RSI5EHQ/ref=dv_dp_ep1
Trailer:
First Episode up now:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RSI5EHQ/ref=dv_dp_ep1
SixesAlltheway
Ancient Mariner
It seems that it is already well received - and looks incredibly well done. I have high hopes for the series.
SixesAlltheway
Ancient Mariner
A month from now on November 20th is when the full season goes up. I think they might upload Episode 2 before that though...
Gave up on the book few chapters in, few years ago. Didn't watch the available episodes either, waiting for the full season. Love alternate history stuff.
EDIT: And fyi, episode 2 is online out there already
EDIT: And fyi, episode 2 is online out there already
bearfan
Ancient Mariner
Gave up on the book few chapters in, few years ago. Didn't watch the available episodes either, waiting for the full season. Love alternate history stuff.
EDIT: And fyi, episode 2 is online out there already
Cool, I'll probably wait for the whole series to get uploaded and watch it at once
Edit: I'll probably watch the pilot again, not sure if they did it here, but for the Amazon series Bosch (which was quite good), the first episode was changed from the original pilot .. a casting change and a few minor plot changes. Not sure if that is the case here or not.
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
I didn't read the book, but a collegue told me how different (and better) the book was. Very MacGyverish. I liked the film a lot, but also noticed how much less creepy this film was compared to most Ridley Scott films. There was a positive vibe in it, with a little amount of scary moments.
I also understood from that collegue that he read that 80% of people in social media said that they thought that the mission really happened.
Maybe these viral videos contributed to this?Thanks for the link, hadn't seen these!
SixesAlltheway
Ancient Mariner
Think I'm gonna watch Rosemary's Baby later. Only one of the best movies ever made.
Don't click if you haven't seen the movie. Spoils the ending!
Hail Satan!
Don't click if you haven't seen the movie. Spoils the ending!
Hail Satan!
This might interest you too:I didn't read the book, but a collegue told me how different (and better) the book was. Very MacGyverish. I liked the film a lot, but also noticed how much less creepy this film was compared to most Ridley Scott films. There was a positive vibe in it, with a little amount of scary moments.
I also understood from that collegue that he read that 80% of people in social media said that they thought that the mission really happened.
Thanks for the link, hadn't seen these!
The Martian - Ridley Scott Confirms Extended Cut
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
Produced by William Castle.Think I'm gonna watch Rosemary's Baby later. Only one of the best movies ever made.
Don't click if you haven't seen the movie. Spoils the ending!
Hail Satan!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Castle#Rosemary.27s_Baby
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Castle#Legacy
Severian
Have a good time, all the time!
I Would recommend Hitler, ein film aus Deutschland.
It's very experimental/Surreal but it has the same themes.
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
I didn't see anything of it, nor read any Dutch review about it.
@Perun have you seen this? Did you like it? I remember we discussed this a while back (perhaps before it came out?)
Criticism posted on wiki:
Reception in Germany
The series was awarded the Deutscher Fernsehpreis 2013 (German Television Award) for the best multi-part television film of 2013.[27]
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that the film would give the remaining survivors of the World War II generation an opportunity to discuss it with their families. The film had introduced a new phase in historical films on the Nazi era.[6][28][29]
The historian Norbert Frei praised the film for showing, for the first time on German television, an unvarnished portrait of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, including the participation of the Wehrmacht in murdering Jews, the shooting of hostages as reprisals against partisan resistance, and the looting of homes vacated by Jews. He wrote that the film did not present idealised one-dimensional figures, but people of broken character who become aware of their shared guilt.[30]
Several German historians criticised the film. The historian Ulrich Herbert wrote that the film showed Nazis as "others", different from "Our Mothers and Fathers". It showed all Germans as victims. The film showed nothing of the love and trust that Hitler inspired in German youth, or of the widespread belief that Germany deserved to rule Europe. In reality, he wrote, these "mothers and fathers" were a highly ideological and politicised generation, who wanted Nazi Germany to win victory, because that would be right.[31]
The historian Habbo Knoch said that the film failed to show how the Nazi system functioned. The film showed 20-year-old characters who became victims of war, but missing were the 30- to 40-year-old Germans who built the Nazi system and supported it out of a mixture of conviction and self-interest. The film should have shown those who profited from the Nazi system.[30]
A critic in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger called the film kitschy, devoid of deeper meaning, and morally worst, full of pathetic self-pity. The film's message was "We perpetrators (of war crimes) didn't have an easy time."[32]
In the German Jewish weekly Jüdische Allgemeine (de), Jennifer Nathalie Pyka wrote that the achievement of the producers of Generation War lay in producing a film about World War II in which the troublesome question of how six million Jews were killed had been simply blanked out and omitted. The film provided an epiphany for those who had always known that not only Jews were Hitler's victims, but more important – all Germans were Hitler's victims.[4]
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that the film would give the remaining survivors of the World War II generation an opportunity to discuss it with their families. The film had introduced a new phase in historical films on the Nazi era.[6][28][29]
The historian Norbert Frei praised the film for showing, for the first time on German television, an unvarnished portrait of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, including the participation of the Wehrmacht in murdering Jews, the shooting of hostages as reprisals against partisan resistance, and the looting of homes vacated by Jews. He wrote that the film did not present idealised one-dimensional figures, but people of broken character who become aware of their shared guilt.[30]
Several German historians criticised the film. The historian Ulrich Herbert wrote that the film showed Nazis as "others", different from "Our Mothers and Fathers". It showed all Germans as victims. The film showed nothing of the love and trust that Hitler inspired in German youth, or of the widespread belief that Germany deserved to rule Europe. In reality, he wrote, these "mothers and fathers" were a highly ideological and politicised generation, who wanted Nazi Germany to win victory, because that would be right.[31]
The historian Habbo Knoch said that the film failed to show how the Nazi system functioned. The film showed 20-year-old characters who became victims of war, but missing were the 30- to 40-year-old Germans who built the Nazi system and supported it out of a mixture of conviction and self-interest. The film should have shown those who profited from the Nazi system.[30]
A critic in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger called the film kitschy, devoid of deeper meaning, and morally worst, full of pathetic self-pity. The film's message was "We perpetrators (of war crimes) didn't have an easy time."[32]
In the German Jewish weekly Jüdische Allgemeine (de), Jennifer Nathalie Pyka wrote that the achievement of the producers of Generation War lay in producing a film about World War II in which the troublesome question of how six million Jews were killed had been simply blanked out and omitted. The film provided an epiphany for those who had always known that not only Jews were Hitler's victims, but more important – all Germans were Hitler's victims.[4]
Reception in Poland
Many Polish viewers were outraged at the depiction of Poles as the greatest anti-semites shown in the film. Tygodnik Powszechny described the film as "falsification of history" in depicting all Poles as fanatical anti-semites, even more so than the Germans who are shown as "basically good people" misled by the Nazis.[7] Critics stated that the screenwriters sought to slander the Polish anti-Nazi resistance underground army Armia Krajowa which is shown in the film as rabidly anti-semitic. In fact, the Armia Krajowa had a branch called Żegota devoted to the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust in Poland carried out by the Germans.[6][33][34] The Polish ambassador in Austria, Jerzy Marganski, and the Polish embassy in Germany sent a letter of complaint to the German broadcaster ZDF pointing out that the Armia Krajowa had Jewish members, and that Poles constituted one-quarter of the Righteous Among the Nations honored at Yad Vashem.[35][35][36] The broadcaster issued a statement that it was regrettable that the role of Polish characters had been interpreted as unfair and hurtful: "The deeds and responsibility of the Germans should in no way be relativized."[5][6][37]
Poland's largest daily Gazeta Wyborcza published a review under the title "Who can explain to the Germans that the Armia Krajowa was not the SS?" The critic said the movie was the newest of a genre of German poor-quality historical films seeking sympathy for Nazi Germany. Their recipe, he wrote, "tastes like a western movie, but in the background waves a flag with a swastika."[38]
The Polish ambassador to the USA, Ryszard Schnepf, sent a written complaint to Music Box, who had bought the US rights to the series.[39] He was supported by the director of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, Łukasz Kamiński, who feared that in America where people are unfamiliar with European history, the film may convince people that Armia Krajowa members were all anti-semites.[40] Plans to broadcast the series in the UK led to a demonstration by Polish activists in London.[41]
Poland's largest daily Gazeta Wyborcza published a review under the title "Who can explain to the Germans that the Armia Krajowa was not the SS?" The critic said the movie was the newest of a genre of German poor-quality historical films seeking sympathy for Nazi Germany. Their recipe, he wrote, "tastes like a western movie, but in the background waves a flag with a swastika."[38]
The Polish ambassador to the USA, Ryszard Schnepf, sent a written complaint to Music Box, who had bought the US rights to the series.[39] He was supported by the director of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, Łukasz Kamiński, who feared that in America where people are unfamiliar with European history, the film may convince people that Armia Krajowa members were all anti-semites.[40] Plans to broadcast the series in the UK led to a demonstration by Polish activists in London.[41]
Comments in the UK and USA
Commenting its success in Germany, The Economist wrote that some German critics suggested that, "putting five sympathetic young protagonists into a harrowing story just offers the war generation a fresh bunch of excuses."[1] The Daily Telegraph wrote that Generation War, "has been hailed by critics as a 'turning point' in German television for examining the crimes of the Third Reich at an individual level," and that it, "explores the seductive aspect of Nazism."[42]
Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, commented that the series "does not filter the Nazi atrocities nor the reality of war. Instead, it tries to portray how the millions of people who followed Hitler into the catastrophe he created were attracted to the vision he offered, only to then be confronted with trying to survive it."[43] The Hollywood Reporter noted that the sales company in Cannes billed the series as "a German equivalent to HBO's Band of Brothers."[44]
When the three-part TV film saw a limited theatrical release in the United States as a four-and-a-half-hour two-part film on January 15, 2014, The New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott stated that by not showing the Nazi death camps, Generation War perpetuates "the notion that ordinary Germans were duped by the Nazis and ignorant of the extent of their crimes." The review ends with the comment that of the five protagonists, "the artist, the intellectual and the Jew are all punished, for wantonness, weakness and naïveté, and pushed into extreme states of moral compromise, [while] the chaste, self-sacrificing Aryans, the lieutenant and the nurse, though they are not without guilt, are the heroes of the story, just as they would have been in a German film made in 1943."[45]
According to the NPR review by Ella Taylor, the film depicts how totalitarianism corrupts almost everything in its path, including individual responsibility.[46]
The New Yorker reviewer David Denby wrote that "Generation War has the strengths and the weaknesses of middlebrow art: it may be clunky, but it's never dull, and, once you start watching, you can't stop," and "the old accepted notion that the barbarians were confined to the S.S. and the Gestapo has been cast aside. The series acknowledges what scholars have established in recent years: that the Wehrmacht played a major role in committing atrocities in the occupied countries." But "while destroying one myth, the filmmakers have built up another. The movie says that young men and women were seduced and then savagely betrayed—brutalized by what the Nazis and the war itself put them through. Their complicity, in this account, is forced, never chosen. Aimed at today's Germans, who would like, perhaps, to come to a final reckoning with the war period, Generation War is an appeal for forgiveness. But the movie sells dubious innocence in the hope of eliciting reconciliation."[47]
The Tablet reviewer Laurence Zuckerman said that Generation War's presentation of World War II Germans as tolerant and free of anti-Semitism was "wildly out of sync" with what scholars have learned from letters, diaries and other primary sources. In reality, "most ordinary Germans at the time held attitudes of casual racism at the very least, and a strong sense of imperial entitlement over Jews, Slavs and other races deemed racially and culturally inferior. The series tries to draw a distinction between Nazis and everyday Germans that simply did not exist in any broad way. The tagline on the movie's poster – 'What happens when the country you love betrays everything you believe?' – is demonstrably false. Most Germans believed in the Nazi agenda."[48]
Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, commented that the series "does not filter the Nazi atrocities nor the reality of war. Instead, it tries to portray how the millions of people who followed Hitler into the catastrophe he created were attracted to the vision he offered, only to then be confronted with trying to survive it."[43] The Hollywood Reporter noted that the sales company in Cannes billed the series as "a German equivalent to HBO's Band of Brothers."[44]
When the three-part TV film saw a limited theatrical release in the United States as a four-and-a-half-hour two-part film on January 15, 2014, The New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott stated that by not showing the Nazi death camps, Generation War perpetuates "the notion that ordinary Germans were duped by the Nazis and ignorant of the extent of their crimes." The review ends with the comment that of the five protagonists, "the artist, the intellectual and the Jew are all punished, for wantonness, weakness and naïveté, and pushed into extreme states of moral compromise, [while] the chaste, self-sacrificing Aryans, the lieutenant and the nurse, though they are not without guilt, are the heroes of the story, just as they would have been in a German film made in 1943."[45]
According to the NPR review by Ella Taylor, the film depicts how totalitarianism corrupts almost everything in its path, including individual responsibility.[46]
The New Yorker reviewer David Denby wrote that "Generation War has the strengths and the weaknesses of middlebrow art: it may be clunky, but it's never dull, and, once you start watching, you can't stop," and "the old accepted notion that the barbarians were confined to the S.S. and the Gestapo has been cast aside. The series acknowledges what scholars have established in recent years: that the Wehrmacht played a major role in committing atrocities in the occupied countries." But "while destroying one myth, the filmmakers have built up another. The movie says that young men and women were seduced and then savagely betrayed—brutalized by what the Nazis and the war itself put them through. Their complicity, in this account, is forced, never chosen. Aimed at today's Germans, who would like, perhaps, to come to a final reckoning with the war period, Generation War is an appeal for forgiveness. But the movie sells dubious innocence in the hope of eliciting reconciliation."[47]
The Tablet reviewer Laurence Zuckerman said that Generation War's presentation of World War II Germans as tolerant and free of anti-Semitism was "wildly out of sync" with what scholars have learned from letters, diaries and other primary sources. In reality, "most ordinary Germans at the time held attitudes of casual racism at the very least, and a strong sense of imperial entitlement over Jews, Slavs and other races deemed racially and culturally inferior. The series tries to draw a distinction between Nazis and everyday Germans that simply did not exist in any broad way. The tagline on the movie's poster – 'What happens when the country you love betrays everything you believe?' – is demonstrably false. Most Germans believed in the Nazi agenda."[48]
Israeli reviews
Uri Avnery's review of "Their Mothers, Their Fathers" appeared 28 February 2014 on International Policy Digest.[49] Avnery himself fled from Germany to Mandatory Palestine in 1933. Concerning the film's not showing Nazi death camps, Avnery writes "The Holocaust is not the center of events, but it is there all the time, not as a separate event but woven into the fabric of reality." He describes the progression of two of the protagonists: "Death is all around them, they see horrible war crimes, they are commanded to shoot prisoners, they see Jewish children butchered. In the beginning they still dare to protest feebly, then they keep their doubts to themselves, then they take part in the crimes as a matter of course." He propounds a theory of the individual in totalitarian circumstances: "It is this element of the situation that is difficult for many people to grasp. A citizen under a criminal totalitarian regime becomes a child. Propaganda becomes for him reality, the only reality he knows. It is more effective than even the terror." He sees the Jews of Israel and the Germans as two still traumatized peoples. "That's why the film is so important, not only for the Germans, but for every people, including our own."
Uri Klein's review of Generation War appeared 2 September 2014 in Haaretz. Concerning the miniseries not showing Nazi death camps, Klein writes, "... no extermination camps are shown in the series, whose measure of brutality and blatant anti-Semitism is meted out by the Polish partisans ... and by the Russian army." This is due to the portrayal of the five main characters in a sympathetic light of "heroism and sacrifice, loyalty and betrayal, love and its price" which is detached from actual historical events. Instead of history, Klein likens the production to a typical Hollywood product of action, special effects, and a romanticized story of essentially noble individuals caught up in a war not of their choice. "The difficulties that they experience, like their personality crises, stem from the fact that, as we have learned from the movies dozens of times, war – any war – is hell." In other words, the production is slick, melodramatic, and, from an historical point of view, useless fiction. [50]
Uri Klein's review of Generation War appeared 2 September 2014 in Haaretz. Concerning the miniseries not showing Nazi death camps, Klein writes, "... no extermination camps are shown in the series, whose measure of brutality and blatant anti-Semitism is meted out by the Polish partisans ... and by the Russian army." This is due to the portrayal of the five main characters in a sympathetic light of "heroism and sacrifice, loyalty and betrayal, love and its price" which is detached from actual historical events. Instead of history, Klein likens the production to a typical Hollywood product of action, special effects, and a romanticized story of essentially noble individuals caught up in a war not of their choice. "The difficulties that they experience, like their personality crises, stem from the fact that, as we have learned from the movies dozens of times, war – any war – is hell." In other words, the production is slick, melodramatic, and, from an historical point of view, useless fiction. [50]
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SixesAlltheway
Ancient Mariner
Only 7 hours long...It better be pretty good then
Speaking of WWII stuff, everyone should of course watch the mini series/documentary World At War, from the 70s.
On a different note...This is coming next year..Jane Austen's classic tale of the tangled relationships between lovers from different social classes in 19th century England is faced with a new challenge -- an army of undead zombies.
Must watch
Looks surprisingly entertaining.
SixesAlltheway
Ancient Mariner
It's based on this book from 2009 if you're interested
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies
I'm sure it will be fun - I'm afraid the movie adaptation missed the whole Zombie hype by several years though - but hopefully it will do alright.