Word: preachment
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the full extent of the Holocaust became generally known after the end of World War II, the thought that its horror was too monstrous to write about in the conventional fictional forms slipped into the conversations of literary intellectuals. Fiction implies maneuver - heroic activity, moral preachment, even softening sentiment, all of which gestures seem trivial and inappropriate in the context of unprecedented, and in some sense inexplicable, evil. Putting the point simply, it is impossible to think of a novel, play or film that conveys the full effect of the Nazi genocide. The works that abide - Anne Frank...
...flash-bang grenades, this movie seeks to banish some of that darkness. It offers a paradigm of what war in the 21st century is going to be--modernism run amuck as it defends itself against primitivism, innocence savagely fragmented in incomprehensible combat. Black Hawk Down makes that point without preachment, in precise and pitiless imagery. And for that reason alone it takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs...