
As some of you know, I have started watching DVD of complete television series. As I don't watch regular television per se, this has been a soft of couch potato godsend. This all started a while ago with FireFly and Farscape. I don't have the time right now to tell you but I love both of these series, Farscape in particular. What I have been moved to right about today is Band of Brothers. This Spielberg/Hanks production is based on Ambrose Pierce's novel about the Easy Company of the 101 Airborne. The story follows the group of core soldiers from D-Day throughout the Eurpoean Theater. The story is incredible. The acting is incredible. The attention to detail in this just makes all those WWII movies I watched as a kid seem like backyard productions.
The whole series follows the format of the other Speilberg/Hank miniseries From the Earth to the Moon (one of my all time favorites as well). A prologue to each episode is given in the form of actual interviews with the surviving membors of Easy Company, then each episode tends to focus on a single important event or one particular aspect of war, bordom, losing friends, etc.
This is really an outstanding piece of work and I'm not surprised it is being used in some schools for teaching about what happned in '44 and '45. One interesting not is the cameos and central casting for this. There's one scene where Jimmy Fallon of SNL shows up and I thought after the scene was over.."hey was that Jimmy Fallon? Man he was good!" Some actors show up and then are gone but offer great, solid performances. This enterprise taps into the emotions for me on several layers: first are the stories themselves, and second is the realization that these, although "dramatized" by being recreated are nothing but pale imitations of what really happened. It's this second part that's gotten to me the most. On a side note my grand father was a tanker in Patton's Third Army. History records that it was Patton's men that rescued the 101st although the full 101st deny that they needed any resuing during the Battle of the Bulge. It's gotten me thinking about my grandpa and what his world must have been like. I wish he was still around to ask.