What I’m Watching:
BAND OF BROTHERS- They call this BAND OF BROTHERS, and there ain’t no Brothers in the movie? WTF? 🙂
I’m only half joking though.
Film kinda ignores the heavy colored presence, to include such decorated veterans as Walter Morris, of the nationality: American, of the ethnicity: Black, of the occupation: Bad Ass, who was a paratrooper and spearheaded the 555th during the same 1944 period this series covers.
Don’t get me wrong BAND OF BROTHERS is not a bad show from the bit I watched of it, it just seems a bit… opaque. I mean even if your central story is of this certain company… fine, that’s fine, but then I look at the major massings, the troop movements with the group transports when they get on the boats, there’s like two Black faces in a crowd, that if you blink you missed it.
It just seems the filmmakers went out of their way to portray an entire war fought sans persons of color, and that if I might say, in my best British accent, is… bollocks!
Ahhh feel better now. But my feeling better aside, that… shortsightedness, that tendency to ignore, is increasingly the cinema of 21st century America, a cinema of turning back the clock.
It’s pretty much a big eff you to the people of color who lost their lives in yet another War for liberty, a liberty that, at V days end, again failed to extend to them and their families. Yet fight they did. So to paint an entire war as absent of that perspective, even that awareness, (hell RED TAILS had white people in it :)) well that just strikes me from every angle as whitewashed bs.
Because if you can’t acknowledge that inexplicable fact of every American War, from the revolution down,,, that people denied equality fought for it, fought for the dream that lives behind the lie, the promise of America… then you make a lie of the sacrifice, not just of those of color who fought and bled and gave their last best measure, but a lie of all who fought, of all who served, of all who gave, of all who lost.
Because the war, was about the very rights of man… and to forget that, to not acknowledge that, with every generation, with every nation, with every breath… is to savior the axis philosophy… rather than to slay it.
Ohhh… deep.
So to be less deep… Goddamn producer Tom Hanks! Even damn racist John Wayne put a couple people of color in his films. WTF? And to think I liked you in FOREST GUMP! :).
Yeah I can’t watch anymore of this BAND OF WHITE BROTHERS :). Grade: I’ll pass. Nicely acted, from what I can see, just have no interest in finishing it. Damn I ain’t saying make Billy D. Williams the star, but would it have killed you to acknowledge the war was fought by more than CW stars?! :).
‘CW stars’, that’s a good one. I slay me. 🙂
Heroic Times 