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On 4/13/2020 at 7:02 PM, saskimo said:

MV5BOTA0NTAwMTc1MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODk2

I was one of the producers of their first movie. (They were well established from their tv show by then.  Fun to hang with.)

18 minutes ago, ghost of miles said:

This came out when I was a kid, never saw it but it popped into my mind recently as something that might prove interesting to watch... any other board members who’ve seen it?

 

I was much older than a kid when I saw this.  Like the book upon which it's based it's quite entertaining.  Nicholas Meyer's big breakthrough. 

Edited by medjuck
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1 hour ago, Matthew said:

Lately I've become addicted to watching Asian cooking videos on YouTube, cabin fever causes strange things...

 

Hey Matthew, how about Asian eating videos?

 

 

Edited by Aggie87
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35 minutes ago, Soulstation1 said:

Ali V Frazier I on ESPN+
March 8, 1971

Madison Square Garden

New York City

Did you ever see when Ali and Frazier wrested on the floor when Cosell was interviewing them. Classic. 

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On 3/30/2020 at 7:28 PM, Dmitry said:

ZEROZEROZERO miniseries on Prime. Nice, well-made international drug smuggling thriller. USA-Western Africa-Calabria-Mexico. Recommend it. No "beautiful people".  Cinematography is very good. 

It impressed m so much, that I'm now watching GOMORRAH on Netflix. I'm on the Episode 2, so it's way to early to tell how the show turns for me, but so far it's feeling like like the Italian version of the Sopranos, with a lot more grit and bang.

 

A cousin on my mother's side in an executive producer of both series. I just started watching the amazon one.

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Having just finished a rereading of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, and having spent a fair amount of time the past couple of days revisiting my longstanding interest in Kent State (today was the 50th anniversary), I decided to finally plunge into Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary. Watched all of episode 1 tonight and its accompanying extras and was greatly impressed with how the Burns team handled the century-long historical prelude to America’s involvement, as well as their presentation of the Vietnamese/North Vietnamese perspective. The only odd element was the way in which they kept dropping teaser-like remembrances of American soldiers from the mid to late 1960s into the middle of early-20th-century Vietnamese history—completely out of place and jarring, as if they didn’t quite trust an American television audience to sit through an opening 90-minute introduction to the series without occasionally interrupting it with coming-soon, the-Americans clips. I wish they’d left those out, because the story of what happened from the late 1850s to the late 1950s is so important and vital to understanding what happened in the 15 years that followed, and the brief out-of-nowhere American interludes kept throwing off the narrative rhythm they were otherwise establishing. Other than that, a strong opening episode... I’m going to try to watch one every night after work for the next few days.  (Also started reading the first volume of the Library of America’s Reporting Vietnam set.)

EDIT: just did a search and came across a review of the first episode on the Process history blog that cites the same issue that I found problematic:

>>In many ways, The Vietnam War is two documentaries interwoven. One is a densely detailed and heavily narrated chronological history and the other is a series of oral histories about personal experiences of the war. Sometimes the two strands are intimately connected and enlarge our understanding of key moments; elsewhere, the personal accounts have little relationship to the historical issues under review.

Nowhere are these two approaches more disjointed than in Episode 1. Every few minutes we jump from black-and-white archival images and accounts of French rule or the creation of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem in the mid-1950s to color footage of the U.S. war in the late 1960s and recent interviews with American veterans. Given the episode title of “Déjà vu,” we might have expected the interviewees to specify the ways U.S. intervention recapitulated the failures of the French or to recount how many Vietnamese came to view Americans as little different from the French (neocolonialists rather than old-fashioned colonialists). Instead, the American veterans speak about their own wartime experiences and the loss of comrades. It’s as if the filmmakers worried that viewers might get bored with the earlier history so they repeatedly previewed the main attraction.<<

Edited by ghost of miles
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29 minutes ago, ghost of miles said:

Having just finished a rereading of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, and having spent a fair amount of time the past couple of days revisiting my longstanding interest in Kent State (today was the 50th anniversary), I decided to finally plunge into Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary. Watched all of episode 1 tonight and its accompanying extras and was greatly impressed with how the Burns team handled the century-long historical prelude to America’s involvement, as well as their presentation of the Vietnamese/North Vietnamese perspective. The only odd element was the way in which they kept dropping teaser-like remembrances of American soldiers from the mid to late 1960s into the middle of early-20th-century Vietnamese history—completely out of place and jarring, as if they didn’t quite trust an American television audience to sit through an opening 90-minute introduction to the series without occasionally interrupting it with coming-soon, the-Americans clips. I wish they’d left those out, because the story of what happened from the late 1850s to the late 1950s is so important and vital to understanding what happened in the 15 years that followed, and the brief out-of-nowhere American interludes kept throwing off the narrative rhythm they were otherwise establishing. Other than that, a strong opening episode... I’m going to try to watch one every night after work for the next few days.  (Also started reading the first volume of the Library of America’s Reporting Vietnam set.)

EDIT: just did a search and came across a review of the first episode on the Process history blog that cites the same issue that I found problematic:

>>In many ways, The Vietnam War is two documentaries interwoven. One is a densely detailed and heavily narrated chronological history and the other is a series of oral histories about personal experiences of the war. Sometimes the two strands are intimately connected and enlarge our understanding of key moments; elsewhere, the personal accounts have little relationship to the historical issues under review.

Nowhere are these two approaches more disjointed than in Episode 1. Every few minutes we jump from black-and-white archival images and accounts of French rule or the creation of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem in the mid-1950s to color footage of the U.S. war in the late 1960s and recent interviews with American veterans. Given the episode title of “Déjà vu,” we might have expected the interviewees to specify the ways U.S. intervention recapitulated the failures of the French or to recount how many Vietnamese came to view Americans as little different from the French (neocolonialists rather than old-fashioned colonialists). Instead, the American veterans speak about their own wartime experiences and the loss of comrades. It’s as if the filmmakers worried that viewers might get bored with the earlier history so they repeatedly previewed the main attraction.<<

I watched it when it first came out and my recollection of the first episode was that it lacked enough Vietnamese history. Although the series made an attempt to use Vietnamese participants, it was an American-centric series as are most books you read about Nam. From the US perspective, the books I’d recommend are Tim O’Brien’s books. From the Vietnamese side, I’d recommend Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer; his account of Apocalypse Now is damning. The Times ran a great series three years ago, Vietnam 67.  It’s worth the time. It ran for about 15 months. I was sorry when it ended.  I was in high school and then college in the late 60s (did my share of demonstrations and was gassed once or twice) and the one good thing about the series — or bad thing, depending on your perspective — is that it brings you back; I felt I was reliving it again. Wasn’t a great feeling.  Can only imagine how the combatants felt. 

Edited by Brad
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