Black '47 is scathing, seething diatribe against the very concept of empire
When I think of Irish history and the travails of the Irish people, I can’t help but want to repurpose what Porfirio Díaz allegedly said about Mexico: “So far from God, so close to Britain.”
The history of English, and later British, rule in that green isle is suffused with cruelty. Ireland has been described as Britain’s “laboratory of empire”. Ben Kiernan, author of Blood and Soil: a Global…
Amos Gitai porrays righteous victims on both sides of the Arab-Israeli War in Kedma
The historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fraught at the best of times: a decades-long slog between two different peoples, each with ties to a small strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Benny Morris, an Israeli historian and a rather controversial one, titled his history of the conflict Righteous Victims (1999). Despite some polarizing remarks, I think…
Exodus tells the epic story of the founding of modern Israel
They don’t make movies like Otto Preminger’s Exodus anymore. It’s one of those epic historical dramas with bombastic soundtracks that make me regret being born in a time when only Star Wars has such scores. (Listen here.)
It runs in the ballpark of three and a half hours, so it’s by no means an easy watch. Making it even less easy is the controversial subject matter: the founding of the modern…
Predictable villains. Action scenes that go on for too long. A Cold War setting that is underused. Wonder Woman 1984 disappoints
I was looking forward to Wonder Woman 1984. The last movie was amazing. Gal Gadot is perfect for the role. And this one would be set in the 1980s!
Sadly, it disappoints on all fronts.
Unlike 2017’s Wonder Woman, the plot of this movie is discombobulated. The main villain, played by Pedro Pascal of The Mandalorian fame, is a cartoonish version of Donald Trump. His sidekick, played by Kristen…
If I had to describe ’71 in a single sentence, I’d say “Black Hawk Down in Northern Ireland”. It has the same inciting incident: a soldier is cut off from his unit in a foreign land and has to survive surrounded by enemies. But that is where the similarities end.
For one, it is made clear to our protagonist (Jack O’Connell), after he goes through boot camp, that he is not leaving the…
Old war movies are frequently smeared as jingoistic and morally simplistic. There is also the reckoning with François Truffaut, who argued no movie can ever truly be antiwar.
But the history enthusiast in me always finds something to enjoy in these movies, where heroic Americans, Britons and Allies (almost always from the Anglosphere) in awe-inspiring tanks and sleek propeller planes fight…
steampunkd