ken burns ww2 on now / are we watching this?
I haven't been. Any good? I'm sort of a sucker for Military history, but I'm all WWII'd out.
I saw the John Stewart interview. Burns had six years to dig through archives --> lots of never seen footage. Lots of it in color.
watched part of one. the color footage is the most alluring aspect. the burns style is the least. not because its so bad, just predictable at this point, flattening everything to treacle.
his approach is rote boarding on hackneyed.
To give him credit, he invented the approach, but it was at its best in the Civil War, which did a good job of balancing and simultaneously illuminating the big picture (what they used to call “History”) with personal experience and intimate detail. But the style fit the subject, and race was at the crux of it. When he took the same tack with Jazz and Baseball the big idea overpowered the details of what are at bottom entertainments and sucked the basic fun out of them. This time he’s gone too far the other way with the local biographies and doesn’t really provide a proper History of the war (War?) There’s valuable material, but the average episode of Battlefront! on the Military Channel is more gripping.
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- bill 9-25-2007 4:13 am
I haven't been. Any good? I'm sort of a sucker for Military history, but I'm all WWII'd out.
- jim 9-27-2007 11:52 pm [add a comment]
I saw the John Stewart interview. Burns had six years to dig through archives --> lots of never seen footage. Lots of it in color.
- mark 9-29-2007 1:24 am [add a comment]
watched part of one. the color footage is the most alluring aspect. the burns style is the least. not because its so bad, just predictable at this point, flattening everything to treacle.
- dave 9-29-2007 2:23 am [add a comment]
his approach is rote boarding on hackneyed.
- bill 9-29-2007 3:20 am [add a comment]
To give him credit, he invented the approach, but it was at its best in the Civil War, which did a good job of balancing and simultaneously illuminating the big picture (what they used to call “History”) with personal experience and intimate detail. But the style fit the subject, and race was at the crux of it. When he took the same tack with Jazz and Baseball the big idea overpowered the details of what are at bottom entertainments and sucked the basic fun out of them. This time he’s gone too far the other way with the local biographies and doesn’t really provide a proper History of the war (War?) There’s valuable material, but the average episode of Battlefront! on the Military Channel is more gripping.
- alex 9-29-2007 4:45 am [add a comment]