Word: d-day
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...have greatest-hits albums and fiction writers have collections, so it's not unreasonable that historians might want to have similar access to the reading public. The Victors, Ambrose's latest work, is a cobbling together of three of his previous books, with many of the pieces lifted from D-Day and Citizen Soldiers. Replete with tales of heroism and harrowing sadness, those two books offer a stirring account of the G.I.'s role in beating the Nazis. The big news from The Victors: Ambrose says he's giving up military history. Say it ain't so, sir. Your fans...
...alone that is finding increasingly intrusive ways to get its ads into the faces of an already ad-weary public. But in the past few years, it seems, the endgame, the D-day, the final storming of the last untrademarked beaches has begun. The opening shot was fired in the nation's sports stadiums...
...summer. Spielberg's war has both won over the critics (Joel Siegel gushes that he "can't wait to see it for the third time") and the American public, with whom the movie has clearly hit a nerve. Three months after its opening, people keep turning out to see D-Day in all its bloody glory on the big screen...
What, ultimately, can be gleaned from Spielberg's depiction of D-Day (which takes up the first half hour of the film) except the terror and remorse that we already know are inherently a part of war? The problem is that Private Ryan is an anti-war movie only by virtue of the bloodiness of its battles, rather than by any ideas it presents. Stunning but obvious, it relies on automatic audience empathy without bringing anything new to the table. This wouldn't be such a problem if Spielberg weren't the man behind the camera. But because he sets...
...comes the chaos that challenges patriotic fervor as well as the mind's capacity to comprehend horror--the D-day landing on Omaha: seasick soldiers slaughtered the minute the ramps on their landing boats are lowered; other men clambering over the sides trying to avoid the fire, only to drown under the weight of their packs; the surf turning red with the blood of the slaughtered; some who make it to the narrow beach huddling immobilized yet pathetically vulnerable behind what little cover they can find. A few inch forward, hoping perhaps that being a moving target is safer than...