Episode 28: There's Some Good in This World

We come up with a name for a rock band and talk about the Patriarch's history as a Parrot Head. Also, we discuss The Two Towers, the Enlightenment, dehumanizing language, Islamic terrorism, WWI and cultural disintegration, what The Lord of the Rings has to say about foreign policy, multiculturalism, and the true nature of patriotism.

Henry V (1989) - Movie Review

When Henry V debuted in 1989, 28-year-old director and star Kenneth Branagh was hailed as the new Olivier. It was something of a premature announcement, but not unwarranted. Twenty-five years later, it’s still Branagh’s best movie, even if he did improve in subsequent films. For instance, Henry V’s beginning is weighed down by dull politics and difficult language (though Derek Jacobi’s opening monologue is inspired,) and Much Ado About Nothing, by contrast, improves in clarity. But Branagh proved to suffer from Peter Jackson Syndrome: his judgment clouded by fame and large budgets.

As a Shakespeare fan, I’m nowhere near expert. Henry V is my favorite movie adaptation of The Bard, and my inexperience may partly be the reason—for it is both accessible in its raw, visceral emotion and complex in its treatment of the subject material. Still, I'd definitely recommend this one to those who have read the play, for it often opts for emotion over simplicity.

A plot summary really ought to be superfluous, but Henry V isn’t actually as familiar on a cultural level as Julius Caesar or Romeo and Juliet. In brief, it’s the tale of a young medieval king who led his country to war against France, narrated by a snazzily-dressed Derek Jacobi, and featuring the best pre-battle pep talk of all time.

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” That one.

Saving Private Ryan - Movie Review

Steven Spielberg has always had a penchant for the grandiose. It is very much on display in Saving Private Ryan, both in the enormous scope of the project and the scale of violence. At the time of its release, this film was hailed as markedly graphic. Watching it today, after the last decade of Tarantino and the desensitization that accompanies that, it's hard to comment, but it is still shocking and unlike films like Braveheart, it imbues every death with importance, even those of faceless soldiers on the beaches of Normandy. 

Certainly unlike Braveheart, it has enough respect for the enemy to not draw them as one-dimensional Disney villains. They are Nazis, but they are human beings. (It was clear, to me at least, that the one cruel decision made by a Nazi was impersonal and almost accidental, once again driving home the point that in wartime, there is no time to stop and think, to pause and pick out one man in the mayhem.)