Belated Civil War Observance
I realize it's a month too late, but, after reading The Longest Night and finishing midterms and my own grad classes, I finally got around to paying homage to the Civil War last night with a movie, Gods and Generals.
Even considering the wooden performances (and I appreciated how the script tried to research historical accents and cadences), the tedious monologues ...(read more)and background information, it's always refreshing to watch an historical movie made with love and respect for its subject. The Fredericksburg scenes are amazing, though. The omissions are unfortunate.
Overall, though, I think the author of the book erred by trying too broad of a sweep. Killer Angels succeeded by sticking to the Battle of Gettysburg; his son's book and this tribute script is just too broad and edits too much to boot. It's the worst of all worlds!
Stephen Lang's performance as Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was superb! That should have been the entire movie.
It's unfortunate there will be no screen version of The Last Full Measure. Yet, cinematically, it's more like the reality: the Civil War never ends!
As Shelby Foote argued, the Civil War defines America. And, as the continuing Democratic primary season has shown, the issues from that era have not lost their relevance politically. To understand this film's subject is to understand what is unique about America, and just how disappointing that quality can be.
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