Reviews

The promo and the word "Miracle" in the title hinted at something a little more dramatic. The opening shot of the promo of the baby in a hospital ward hinted that there may be some medical issue that would come up requiring a literal miracle. Instead this was a formulaic movie of a person in a strange town stranded because of a combination of a snowstorm and car problems as Christmas approaches.

The gimmick here is that it's the city of Bethlehem, Northampton county, Pennsylvania (which is not far from where I used to have a vacation home decades ago, and not quite the small town with one hotel as the film implies). The stranded stranger is a divorced woman named Mary Ann who has adopted a newborn girl in Bethlehem whom she named Natalie and is about to drive home when the storm hits and closes all the roads. The one Inn in town has just reached maximum occupancy, and in this desperate situation for a mother with a newborn, the Innkeeper suggests that her brother, predictably named Joe and a mechanic and tow truck driver, put Mary Ann and Natalie in the guestroom at his home.

After that point, it's the same Hallmark Christmas movie we've seen many times. Mary Ann bonds with Joe and his family as they follow their family holiday traditions in the storm. Predictable ending. An average Hallmark movie for this particular plot, nothing that stands out.

I get that all TV series require long lead times from the completion of an episode until it is aired. But the History Channel really blew it with this one. Or at the very least they fell victim to it.

The episode chronicled the vicious rivalry between the Miller Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis, Missouri, with particular focus on the rivalry, starting with the 1970s and what became a personal rivalry between John A. Murphy, an executive from R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, the parent company of Miller Brewing who took over the brewery upon the sudden deaths in a plane crash of the last members of the original Miller family on the brewery's board of directors, and August Anheuser "Augie"Busch III who took over as the CEO of the family company by leveraging own father, August Anheuser "Gussie" Busch Jr., into an early retirement. Both Murphy and Augie Busch saw the futures of their respective breweries as being dependent on changing with the times and the trends of the consumers.

The episode covered Murphy's shift of emphasis in advertising of their initial sole product, Miller High Life, from "The Champagne of Beers" to that of the everyman's beer, which allowed Miller to skyrocket in sales and close the gap in sales with Anheuser-Busch's flagship beer, Budweiser, followed by Augie Busch's advertising campaigns to keep Miller from surpassing Budweiser.

Still changing with the times, Murphy shifted focus on the trend toward healthier lifestyles which included lower calorie food and drink. He discovered a "diet beer" from one of the bankrupt breweries that Miller had bought up, but which was a failure in and of itself because of its taste or rather its lack thereof. Murphy saw the opportunity and embraced the concept, directing Miller's brewmasters and chemists to create a low calorie beer as close in taste to MIller High Life as possible. After they did so over the course of nearly a year, Murphy targeted his advertising, initially labeled Lite Beer from Miller, at the largest single demographic of beer drinkers: sports fans.

The rise of Lite Beer from Miller was so meteoric that it blindsided Augie Busch as it approached the sales of Budweiser; he quickly instructed Anheuser Busch's brewmasters to come up with a light beer of their own. Their first attempt was called Natural Light, and it was slow to catch on; Augie didn't want to attach the Budweiser name to the new product lest it taint the brand name and the entire brewery. Determined to beat Miller Brewing and John Murphy, he directed his brewmasters to work on an improved light beer, the goal being "A light beer good enough to be called Budweiser."

Anheuser-Busch's product did not arrive in time to keep Lite Beer from MIller from taking the top sales spot. During this time, Murphy had used almost the entrer full power of the advertising funds of parent company R. J. Reynolds. From that point forward, it was a full-blown advertising war between the two breweries, with Miller sponsoring all major league sports broadcasts and Anheuser Busch purchasing majority shares of virtually all major league sports teams themselves, then gaining a monopoly of advertising on the newly formed ESPN cable sports network, naming their improved offering Bud Light. The episode concludes by pointing out that the combined sales of Bud Light, Miller Lite and the light versions of many other mainstream brands far eclipsed those of older traditional beer types, but that Bud Light prompty surpassed the sales of Miller Lite which never regained its lead after that, and almost grudgingly acknowledged that while Anheuser-Busch continued to be by far the top selling brewery worldwide, John Murphy's forward thinking and the creation of Miller Lite had triggered the competition that brought the change in the world's beer market landscape.

Here's the caveat and the elephant in the room: that may have been true as recently as several months ago when this episode was filmed, but by then both John Murphy and Augie Busch had both been retired for well over a decade, Murphy having risen to CEO of Miller's parent company R. J. Reynolds and Augie Busch having handed the reins of Anheuser-Busch to his son August A. Busch IV who within a few years would sell the company off to a multinational corporation and out of the family's control after 160 years of existence, so neither man had any responsibility. But just a few months before this episode aired, a general unorganized grassroots boycott of Bud Light, in a backlash over the direction the advertising campaign and selection of a spokesperson had taken, had sent Bud Light's sales and Anheuser-Busch's stock prices crashing down and well out of first place. I won't elaborate on the specifics of the ad campaign; they're out there on the internet for anyone who hasn't heard about it to get caught up. Did the History Channel deliberately try to bury the lead story, or was it just coincidental bad timing? In any case, Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light were no longer Number One when the episode aired! Live by the Ad Campaign, die by the Ad Campaign!

Back in the 1980s, Coca Cola decided to go head-to-head against their biggest competitor Pepsi and introduced "New Coke", which was sweeter than original Coke and tasted much closer to Pepsi. What made it worse was that they were completely discontinuing the original. All it took for me was one sip of New Coke to make me stockpile several six packs of original Coke. Coca Cola almost destroyed themselves as New Coke fell flat on its face, and within a few months they brought back what was now called "Coke Classic" and quietly took New Coke off the shelves.

I used the analogy of New Coke vs Pepsi in my review of the 1987-90 Vietnam War series TOUR OF DUTY which was the first series set in that war which ran on CBS. It was a simple and realistic portrayal of a platoon of ordinary US Army infantrymen fighting the war, and could have been titled COMBAT!: THE NEXT GENERATION after the 1962-67 World War II series. At the end of the first season, ABC premiered CHINA BEACH which focused on nurses at a US Army Evacuation Hospital in Vietnam, and some idiots at CBS and the TOUR OF DUTY production crew decided they had to compete with CHINA BEACH and pulled the platoon out of the Vietnam bush and moved them closer to Saigon while introducing a bunch of female characters. That's when TOUR OF DUTY jumped the shark, and I said in my review that they, like Coca Cola the first cola company, tried to imitate their biggest competitor and destroyed themselves in the process. It was too late for them to bring back a "TOUR OF DUTY CLASSIC".

Ever since I started following NAKED AND AFRAID, I never watched another full episode of SURVIVOR again. I'm a retired military officer and went through SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training early in my career, and had always thought that the competitions in SURVIVOR were silly, childish and convoluted and made a mockery of the title of their series, while N&A was the real deal. N&A: LAST ONE STANDING's introduction of convoluted competitions and elimination is their Jump the Shark moment, their Coke imitating SURVIVOR'S Pepsi or TOUR OF DUTY imitating CHINA BEACH moment.

If the producers of the NAKED AND AFRAID franchise know what's good for them, they'll fire the idiots on their crew who came up with this harebrained idea (they can always find work on SURVIVOR!) and never do this again!

Just having Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson in this movie elevated it one or two stars above your average cookie-cutter Hallmark Christmas Movie. A time-travel Hallmark Christmas Movie puts it one more star above the other cookie-cutters. Erika Slezak in one of only four IMDb-listed roles other than Victoria Lord since ONE LIFE TO LIVE wrapped eight years ago adds one more. (The only one I've seen of Erika's other three was an excellent and moving episode on BLUE BLOODS. Glad she's finding work!)

Other reviewers note a lack of chemistry in the central characters, particularly the love triangle. I agree, and they articulated what I felt was lacking and made the overall movie a little flat, but no worse than the average non-time-travel cookie cutters.

I wasn't expecting the BACK TO THE FUTURE franchise but I wasn't expecting a Hallmark cookie cutter either. I wasn't disappointed.

My headline is not meant as a compliment. If you have the time, go to my user profile and read my review of GREYHOUND ATTACK. I started out my military career as an Air Force F-4 Phantom Weapons Systems Officer (backseater) and then as the F-4 was being replaced by single seat F-15s and F-16s, defected to the Army National Guard and spent the rest of my career as an Armor/Cavalry officer in the Guard and Reserve. I actually formed a ceremonial horse team within my Guard unit, out of my own pocket at no expense to the taxpayer. When asked to drive one of our tanks in a parade in the local area, we did them one better by having the team ride in front of the tank. As I liked to point out, "We ain't reenacting anything. We ARE the Cavalry!"

Reenactor units can be a mixed bag; some Guardsmen including some of my friends also belonged to reenactor units, and some of the other reenactors are very professional living historians, but you also find some of the worst military wannabes; I hold a special contempt for this one clown who, on a network TV newsmagazine, went through his first Civil War battle reenactment and then proudly boasted before the cameras, with all seriousness and not being in-character, "I've seen the elephant!"

I have to preface everything else by saying that IMHO, the greatest movie ever made-- not just the greatest war movie ever made but the greatest of any movie of any genre-- was GETTYSBURG (1993), and that it could not have been made without the over three hundred Civil War reenactment units that acted out the battle scenes for no direct pay, only donations by the production company to battlefield preservation funds. The film was great because it was arguably the most accurate reenactment of an actual historical battle ever filmed, and that was the largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere in all of history. It was a faithful adaptation of Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize winning historical novel THE KILLER ANGELS, and on top of the historical accuracy depicting the battle itself, there was underlying drama ripe with Greek or Shakespearean Tragedy which Shaara found in the real-life historical figures who were his main characters.

KILL CAVALRY has none of that. It was a movie set during the Civil War with the principal characters being real-life historical figures, and made with the use of reenactor units, but that's all it has in common with GETTYSBURG. It's amazing that my all-time favorite movie and the movie now tied with GREYHOUND ATTACK for my absolute worst movie ever released had even that much in common. The main "plot": Union General Judson "Kill Cavalry" Kilpatrick and Confederate General Joe Wheeler were best buds at West Point before the war, and now they hate each other's guts. The End.

The acting was as bad or worse than that in GREYHOUND ATTACK, where one actor playing a British MI6 agent couldn't make up his mind whether he was a proper upperclass Englishman or a good ole boy from Alabama.

Even the so-called battle reenactments were incoherent and numbingly repetitive. It's pretty obvious that the production crew just took a bunch of already existing film of various battle reenactments along the South Carolina-Georgia border and spliced them together hodge-podge. The reenactors' firearms were obviously pointed upward over what would be the heads of their opponents 90% of the time. About the only thing close to Shakespearean in this film is that it was full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

When I buy a video from the $5 bin at WalMart as I did for this, I usually shrug it off and tell myself, "You get what you pay for!" This is one of the few times I didn't even get my money's worth. In my review of GREYHOUND ATTACK, I at least gave kudos to the producers for having the chutzpah to release that film. I can't even say that about KILL CAVALRY; it looks like a shameless and unabashed ego trip for a bunch of reenactors with not even mediocre reenactment footage.

In order to illustrate how bad this movie is, let me tell you a story about my younger days.

If you read some of my other reviews here on IMDb, you'll see me mention that I flew F-4 Phantom fighters in the Air Force back in the late '70s to early '80s. If you read my review of the movie RED TAILS, you'll see my rant about how George Lucas was absolutely the worst person possible to have produced that movie, and how nobody in Hollywood has any clue about what a real dogfight looks like, and how Lucas is the worst offender, having bamboozled America's moviegoing public into believing that his depictions are an accurate depiction when they're the farthest thing for it.

Back when I was in college and Air Force ROTC, I was part of a small clique with my two best friends, Ray and BJ. Ray was in my class and BJ was a year behind us. All three of us were aspiring fighter pilots, and were allotted to attend flight school upon graduation and commissioning. Until BJ flunked out during Ray's and my senior year, his junior year. BJ decided to go in the Air Force as an enlisted man when Ray and I graduated and went to flight school. In the meantime, he decided to transfer his credits and enroll in a Community College and finish his Associate's Degree before enlisting. One of the courses he took was in Cinematography, with the final course requirement being a short subject film on Super 8mm film with no sound.

With BJ's family's home (and the Community College campus) being not far from our college campus, he recruited Ray and me to help him with his short subject. He decided to do a film depicting a dogfight between F-4 Phantoms and Russian-built MiG-21s. We used a large 1/32 scale model of a Phantom that I had, and smaller 1/72 scale models of another F-4 and two MiG-21s, one of which BJ built just to sacrifice by setting fire to it to depict it going down in flames. We built a Phantom cockpit mockup out of spray-painted corrugated cardboard boxes, and BJ doctored up his old high school football helmet and other athletic equipment into a flight helmet and oxygen mask (using duct tape to fasten the mask to the helmet instead of the metal "bayonet" clips that real mask/helmet combinations used. I caveat this by saying that while Ray and I had spent time at F-4 bases for ROTC summer training, neither of us would see or actually participate in real dogfight training for more than another year, after completing undergraduate flight training. At the time, we didn't know any better, and BJ storyboarded his short subject film based on the dogfights depicted in George Lucas's original 1977 STAR WARS movie and an old 1958 Korean War movie, THE HUNTERS with Robert Mitchum and Robert Wagner. (That film, we later learned from experience, which was made with USAF cooperation with real F-86 Sabres and with F-84F Thunderstreaks painted up as MiG-15s, still left a lot to be desired in depicting the intricacies of dogfighting and made Mitchum's character look like a one-trick pony!)

Cinematographically, BJ's old short-subject Super 8mm silent film was ten times better than GREYHOUND ATTACK. I'm absolutely serious and objective. That includes the helmets and oxygen masks and the cockpit mockups.

By the way, the average US Army Air Force pilot in World War II was 23, the average enlisted bomber gunner was 19, the average squadron commander was 24 to 26, and the average group commander was under 30. And they had height and weight standards to get into flight school. I don't think any of the actors playing aircrews was under 40 or would have met military height-weight standards even adjusted for age. And what was with the supposed British MI-6 intelligence analyst who couldn't make up his mind if he was a proper upper class Englishman or a good ole boy from Alabama?!?

The positive things I can say are that the writer/producer/director's heart was in the right place. And I congratulate him for having the chutzpah to actually release this turkey!

I just finished rewatching this on YouTube after having seen it on its original run in 1976, then on late night reruns at least 20 years ago. Don't let the title fool you, it's got nothing to do with the Dick Wolf franchise except also being about the NYPD. It actually more resembles another later, long-running series, BLUE BLOODS, about a multigenerational family of NYPD cops of Irish descent.

Darren McGavin (best remembered as Kolchak the Night Stalker and the dad in A CHRISTMAS STORY) plays Deputy Chief Brian O'Malley Jr., a second-generation cop, and Whitney Blake (best remembered as Dorothy on the sitcom HAZEL and for being Meredith Baxter's mom) plays his wife. Art Hindle plays their son Patrick, a recently discharged Army veteran and now a rookie patrolman. Robert Reed of THE BRADY BUNCH is one of a number of 1970s all-stars who make up the rest of the cast.

It doesn't just remind me of BLUE BLOODS. It actually wouldn't take much rewriting other than changing the surname of O'Malley to Reagan, with Deputy Chief Brian O'Malley Jr. becoming Henry Reagan and Officer Patrick O'Malley becoming Francis Reagan, for this to be a PREQUEL to BLUE BLOODS, a generation earlier. The only major change to the backstory would be that Mary Ellen O'Malley, Brian Jr.'s wife and Patrick's mother, is the daughter of a rich NYC political boss, while recently revealed BLUE BLOODS series canon has Betty Reagan, Henry's wife and Frank's mother, as an Irish-born immigrant from a huge, poor family. Otherwise it's an almost perfect fit. Brian Jr. isn't squeaky clean, especially early in his career, like Henry Reagan often alludes to in BLUE BLOODS.

The one serious problem I have that keeps me from giving this miniseries 10 stars is that of 50something and 40something actors playing the same characters in flashbacks as teenagers and 20somethings. There are flashbacks to when McGavin's and Blake's characters first meet when he's supposed to be a rookie cop in mid 20s and she's supposed to be 17; McGavin was 53 or 54 and Blake was 49 or 50 when they filmed it. Who were they trying to kid??? Blake's daughter Meredith Baxter was 28 or 29 at the time and SHE would've been to old to play the character at that age! Robert Reed, Alan Arbus, James Olson and several other characters playing Brian Jr.'s contemporaries also play the same characters in the flashbacks. Scott Brady, who appears in those flashbacks as Brian O'Malley SENIOR was 2 years younger than McGavin. Other than haircuts and Arbus having a mustache as an older man, only the uniforms and rank insignia, the vehicles driven, and the clothing of the civilian characters offered any indication of what was a flashback and when it occurred, and it was troublesome; the attempt to make the characters appear younger in the flashbacks was an epic fail.

But as a story, it was gritty, compelling and rang true. Other reviewers may wonder if this was a pilot for a series and speculate that it would have been successful. Perhaps in a sense it was, 34 years later as BLUE BLOODS even though there was no evident intent.

The title Human Resource Manager of this movie has a task thrust upon him, completely unforeseen and probably not in his or any other HR Manager's job description. A female employee of his company, the largest bread bakery in Jerusalem, is killed in a terrorist attack, under circumstances which bring an embarrassing public relations nightmare to the company. The deceased woman was a recent immigrant from Romania (the actors who play her relatives speak Romanian, but the country is never actually named, only identified as a former communist country in Eastern Europe), and the owner of the bakery sends the HR Manager to escort the body to her homeland. Tagging along on the journey is the same muckraking photojournalist (known to the audience as "The Weasel") who brought the bad PR upon the bakery in the first place.

This movie could have taken any of a number of different tracks without any change in the plot line, in which the HRM encounters several bureaucratic or emotional obstacles upon arriving in Romania and meeting with local officials, the Israeli consul, and the teenage son and ex-husband of the deceased, all the while hoping to make this a short trip to get home in time to chaperone a school trip for his own neglected teenage daughter, and clashing with "The Weasel".

Had this been an American movie, I have could easily pictured it done as a "road/buddy" comedy, a rather slippery slope down which this movie could have descended to a bonehead movie a la A WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S.

At the other end of the spectrum, I did in fact see this movie as part of the Film Movement foreign film subscription series shown at a public library. I'm rather new to that series, and this movie was the third I'd seen. The first two were totally depressing: ILLEGAL, which showed the suffering of a Russian woman illegally in Belgium and undergoing deportation and separation from her teenage son, and THE COLOR OF THE MOUNTAIN, showing the takeover of a small Colombian village by narco-terrorists, and its impact on the children, their families and their school. This movie had the potential of going down that gloomy path as well.

Instead, this was the first one in the series where I actually felt good at the end. The poignancy and pathos of the HRM dealing with the deceased's relatives is well offset by the adventurous challenges he faces getting the deceased to her final resting place, and by the comedic sparring between him and the journalist.

This movie was very nicely balanced. For my own personal tastes, I might have liked it a little better if there had been a touch more comedy, one or two more laugh out loud moments, but if the production crew were wary of the slippery slope to A WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S, I have no quarrel with that call. It's not quite a perfect movie for me, but nearly so.

I'm a former US Air Force F-4 Phantom Weapons Systems Officer (backseater).

You know this movie is crap when you start with a supposed fighter squadron commander who doesn't know the difference between a SQUAD (thirteen infantrymen) and a SQUADRON (48 fighter pilots).

To paraphrase General George S. Patton, George Lucas doesn't know anything more about real aerial warfare than he does about f --- ing! (And George C. Scott may have said "fornicating" in the movie PATTON, but the real Patton used the real F-word!)

Lucas was absolutely the worst person in the movie industry to do this movie. This movie is only the latest of many giant steps down the primrose path which Lucas started the world's movie-viewing public with the first STAR WARS movie in 1977; I distinctly remember the documentary on the making of that movie, in which Lucas patted himself on the back for patterning his battle scenes after what he claimed to be the most realistic dogfight scenes ever filmed, and at the same time in the documentary intercutting his scenes with those from A YANK IN THE RAF which were absolutely THE phoniest looking flying scenes ever filmed! And he hasn't bothered to learn jack about aerial warfare in the last 35 years; he's just conned most of the whole world into thinking his cartoonish creations are reality when they're the farthest thing from it.

The technical fallacies are far too numerous to list. Lucas doesn't know the first thing about physics or aerodynamics, let alone the complexities of basic fighter maneuvering required to put bullets into another airplane and to prevent another airplane from doing that to one's own. He just makes his CGI airplanes do anything he wants them to do to fit his fantasies and fiction. Lucas is welcome to create his own sci-fi universe where he makes the rules. But for an "historical" movie like this claims to be, Chuck Jones could have made cartoon Mustangs imitating the Road Runner and cartoon Messerschmitts imitating Wile E. Coyote and his Acme gadgets, and they wouldn't have been any more technically inaccurate.

But that's just about the technical fallacies and impossibilities. One of the biggest issues I have is that this movie was incapable of making the 332nd Fighter Group look good without taking cheap, lying shots at the other US Army Air Force fighter groups who fought in Europe in World War II. And it once again demonstrates George Lucas's total ignorance of aerial warfare in World War II, if not his blatant disregard for the truth.

Fighters assigned to escort bombers did not fly in and among the bomber formations, and they certainly didn't stay there when enemy fighters attacked. Escorting fighters flew above and to the sides of the bomber formations, weaving in zigzag patterns to maintain their airspeed while staying even with the much slower bombers. To "stay with the bombers" meant disengaging from the enemy fighters and returning to the flanks of the bomber formation AFTER successfully driving off the enemy if not shooting them down within sight of the bomber formations, rather than pursuing the enemy back to their home bases. It was somewhat of an issue in 1943 when the P-51 Mustang had not yet been deployed to the front lines. The older shorter-ranged P-38 Lightning and P-47 Thunderbolt fighters did not have the capability to stay with the bombers all the way to targets deep in Germany, and the bombers suffered horrendous losses to German fighters past the range limits of the P-38s and P-47s. As more 8th Air Force fighter groups replaced their P-47s and P-38s with P-51s, tasks were rotated among the fighter groups between bomber escort and fighter sweep, the latter meaning that the fighters flew out ahead of the bomber route to intercept the German interceptors before they got within sight of the bombers, and/or destroy them on the ground on their own airfields.

Total abandonment of the bombers was NEVER condoned. The 8th Air Force was primarily a bomber force, and by the Fall of 1943 the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator heavy bombers were endangered species. Jimmy Doolittle, the commanding general of the 8th, was no dummy; his doctrine of employing fighters in both bomber escort and fighter sweeps reduced the bomber losses to 20-25% of what they had been before the arrival of the P-51. The Italian-based 15th Air Force quickly followed suit with that doctrine. The promise in RED TAILS fictionally given by Colonel Bullard (actually a thinly disguised version of the real-life Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Jr.) to reduce bomber losses by 70-80% was in real life fulfilled by all American fighter pilots in the European Theater. They not only reduced the bomber losses to a fourth of what they had been, but effectively eliminated the German Luftwaffe over their own home turf wherever they found them, and not just near the bomber formations.

RED TAILS insinuates throughout the length of the movie that the 332nd was the only fighter group that stayed with the bombers and that the other fighter groups violated operational orders and standing doctrine by abandoning the bombers in pursuit of German fighters for their own personal glory.

The Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd had a more than honorable combat record and a story to be proud of, a story which could be told without trying to make other US Army Air Force fighter units look bad by telling falsehoods about them. The Tuskegee Airmen deserve better than that.

Just saw this movie. When I first saw the trailers, I thought it looked like a remake of INDEPENDENCE DAY. I was going to give it a pass until my best friend, also a retired military reserve combat arms officer like myself, told me how much better it was.

This is one of the best war movies I've seen, regardless of the fact that the enemy are a bunch of space aliens! This is INDEPENDENCE DAY meets BLACKHAWK DOWN, or more specifically, INDEPENDENCE DAY done with the intensity and seriousness of BLACKHAWK DOWN.

Actually, another good way to compare this to INDEPENDENCE DAY is to reference two novels from the 1980s: THE THIRD WORLD WAR by General Sir John Hackett, a British Army commander who wrote out a scenario for an all-out but conventional war across Central Europe between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, mostly from higher headquarters' eye view; and TEAM YANKEE by Major Harold Coyle, a US Army armor officer who took General Hackett's scenario and showed it from the point of view of an American company-level tank/mechanized infantry team commander.

BATTLE: LOS ANGELES can almost be analogized as being to INDEPENDENCE DAY what TEAM YANKEE was to THE THIRD WORLD WAR. Except that INDEPENDENCE DAY had too much of a lighthearted touch to it, with a lot of comic relief, none of which BATTLE: LOS ANGELES has. After the first 20 minutes of introduction of the characters, the alien invasion starts and we immediately go nonstop for the remaining 1 hour and 40 minutes with the kind of intense combat that that I can only compare to BLACKHAWK DOWN, or the first half hour of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, or the Little Round Top segment of GETTYSBURG. Not even WE WERE SOLDIERS had that nonstop intensity for that long, because they threw in an interlude showing the wives of the soldiers back in Fort Benning as they got their casualty notifications.

I couldn't give this movie 10 stars (on the IMDb system). The stars I knocked off were mostly for the jerky-cam, one of my pet peeves.

I had to check my brains at the door and suspend a lot of disbelief for INDEPENDENCE DAY. Not with BATTLE: LOS ANGELES.

Okay, I get that this is a watered down kid's show, but every character, especially the one adult and so-called pilot, is an idiot. That's no fun to watch, right off the bat. Don't tell me this guy was the only chaperone for a school trip PLUS having his hands full flying the plane. Maybe if they'd had a few more adult chaperones who happened to get killed in the crash, that would make it more realistic and believable, but I guess that would be reason to lose a G-rating for NBC's Discovery Kids lineup.

I'm watching a rerun of the pilot episode as I write this, and AIRLINERS DON'T FLOAT! That's why they're required to have flotation devices for all passengers, so WHERE ARE THEY? Oh, and the word for the letter W in the international phonetic alphabet is WHISKEY, not "William". Isn't that taking watering things down for the G-rating a little too far?

I thought that the purpose of the Discovery Kids lineup was to inform and educate by entertaining. The only way for this to have any educational value would be for all the characters to die off, the way they would if it would be a real-life situation, to show the audience how NOT to survive.

Like I said, every character in this show is an idiot. Maybe it's autobiographical for the writers!

I couldn't write a critique the so-called remake of this show without paying homage to the original.

I'm a pushing-50 baby boomer who watched the original Kolchak movies on ABC's Movie of the Week when I was in high school and watched the one season of *Kolchak: The Night Stalker* when I was in college.

Kolchak was an irreverent, sarcastic and wisecracking rogue who could get knocked down but never out, who always got back up laughing, still irreverent and sarcastic and ready to keep swinging. And his verbal sparring with Tony Vincenzo almost made the whole show in and of itself. Darren McGavin as Kolchak, with the seersucker suit, straw homburg hat and tennis shoes, was an irreplaceable icon. And Simon Oakland was the perfect foil. Yes, I know Mr. McGavin is in his 80s and ailing, and Mr. Oakland is no longer with us, but that doesn't mean the chemistry of their characterizations is not replicable.

I'll even point out that I grew up watching reruns of George Reeves in *The Adventures of Superman*, and never had a problem accepting Jeff East, Christoper Reeve, Dean Cain and now Tom Welling taking over the role of Clark Kent/Superman in his various subsequent incarnations. I wish I could say the same for Stuart Townsend's incarnation of Carl Kolchak, but I can't. Humor and irreverence were the lifeblood of the original Cark Kolchak, and it's been sucked out of the new 2005 incarnation of Kolchak as thoroughly as if done so by Janos Skorzeny, Dracula, Nosferatu, Lestat or any other vampire who appeared on the big or small screen.

Anyone who has ever seen this original series or the two Kolchak movies that preceded it knows what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you don't know what you've missed!

Okay. I understand that Chris Carter and his *The X-Files* crew were inspired by the original *Kolchak: The Night Stalker* TV movies and series. I understand that Frank Spotnitz, the head writer for the 2005 *Night Stalker*, was a member of Carter's X-Files crew. I also understand that Darren McGavin is in his 80s and ailing, and even if he were in perfect health he'd be too old to reprise the role of Carl Kolchak.

I'm a pushing-50 baby boomer who watched the original Kolchak movies on ABC's Movie of the Week when I was in high school and watched the one season of *Kolchak: The Night Stalker* when I was in college. I'll even point out that I grew up watching reruns of George Reeves in *The Adventures of Superman*, and never had a problem accepting Jeff East, Christopher Reeve, Dean Cain and now Tom Welling taking over the role of Clark Kent/Superman in his various subsequent incarnations. I wish I could say the same for Stuart Townsend's incarnation of Carl Kolchak, but I can't.

Inspiration and imitation do NOT equal replication. Kolchak may have inspired *The X-Files*, even to the point that Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz may have created a guest character for Darren McGavin in that show in tribute, but Spotnitz missed the mark completely on what Carl Kolchak was about. Kolchak was an irreverent, sarcastic and wisecracking rogue who could get knocked down but never out, who always got back up laughing, still irreverent and sarcastic and ready to keep swinging. Humor and irreverence were the lifeblood of the original Carl Kolchak, and Spotnitz sucked it out of this incarnation of Kolchak as thoroughly as Janos Skorzeny, Dracula, Nosferatu, Lestat or any other vampire who appeared on the big or small screen.

Many are touting *Night Stalker* as "the new X-Files," and I can't disagree with that; Stuart Townsend's Kolchak doesn't resemble Darren McGavin's original Kolchak so much as he does Fox Mulder-- if Mulder were taken off Prozac. It's obvious that the Generation Xers (pun definitely intended) like their TV shows about the supernatural dark, depressed and humorless; this show may be the new X-Files, but don't try to pass it off as the new *Kolchak: The Night Stalker*!

Somebody stake this vampire before it hurts anyone!

Let me preface this by saying that GETTYSBURG is my all-time favorite movie, IMHO the greatest film ever made and, overaged and obese Rebels and polyurethane beards notwithstanding, the most historically accurate fact-based nondocumentary movie ever made. (Yes, the relatively bloodless combat scenes are sanitized compared to the later in-your-face gore of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, but this is not necessarily a flaw, and this is further offset by the fictionalized, contrived and corrupted premise of SPR.) It is also one of the most faithful adaptations of a novel (Michael Shaara's Pulitzer-winning THE KILLER ANGELS) to film ever made. It is because of this that my first reaction to GODS AND GENERALS is "OUCH!"

This is even with my lowered expectations going in. Like THE KILLER ANGELS/GETTYSBURG, I'd read the book long before the release of the movie, and I realized with GODS AND GENERALS that Jeff Shaara isn't his father. I recognized that this was his first attempt at following in his late father's Pulitzer-winning footsteps; as someone who ended up in the same field as my own father, I'm very sympathetic to that situation, and he's shown some growth, albeit inconsistent, in his subsequent historical novels. But the book version of GODS AND GENERALS, for all the younger Shaara's attempts to emulate his father's style in the stream-of-consciousness narrative of the characters, ended up flat, dry and colorless; little depth of, or reader sympathy for, the characters is developed, even for those characters who were the central figures and whom we had already come to know in THE KILLER ANGELS/GETTYSBURG.

It should be pointed out here, for those unaware, that it was screenwriter/director Ron Maxwell who encouraged Jeff Shaara to write GODS AND GENERALS, with the understanding that Maxwell would adapt it to film as he had THE KILLER ANGELS. Unfortunately, the foundation he had upon which to build the movie version of GODS AND GENERALS was not nearly as solid as that which he had for GETTYSBURG. (My first impression of THE KILLER ANGELS was, "As long as they don't use any further dramatic license than they already have, this will make a damned good movie!" As it was, Maxwell actually reduced the dramatic license and made it even better, which gave me reason for hope with GODS AND GENERALS.)

The one big plus in GODS AND GENERALS is that Stephen Lang did succeed in making fans of GETTYSBURG ignore the fact that he had played a different but nearly equally prominent character (both dramatically and historically) in the earlier film. Unfortunately, for all his increased screen time, Lang's Stonewall Jackson came across as a nearly one-dimensional Bible-thumper to the point of overkill (albeit with a few "chick-flick" vulnerabilities coming through). Aside from his not flinching when wounded, we get almost no feel for the real-life Jackson's tactical brilliance, dynamism and charisma as a combat leader. (Keep in mind that one of the most popular descriptions of George S. Patton was that he was the greatest American general SINCE Stonewall Jackson!) This begs the question: since Jackson is dead and George Pickett is no longer a major character in THE LAST FULL MEASURE, the third installment of the Shaara Trilogy, who will Maxwell have Lang play in the film version? My money's on U.S. Grant, who does not appear in the first two of the trilogy but becomes one of the central figures.

It's also just as well that Maxwell gave Lang a role change, because one of the big flaws is that, for all the repeat players who reprise their roles from GETTYSBURG, they waited too long at over 9 years to do what is actually a prequel. This is particularly telling for Jeff Daniels and C. Thomas Howell (the Chamberlain brothers) and for Brian Mallon (Winfield Hancock). On the other hand, Kevin Conway (Buster Kilrain) Morgan Sheppard (Isaac Trimble) and Royce Applegate (James Kemper)-- who tragically passed away shortly after the film wrapped-- somehow managed to actually look younger than they did in GETTYSBURG; too bad the makeup wasn't consistent!

The biggest question in my mind is: what happened to Ron Maxwell's sense of vision? As an officer with a quarter-century in various active and reserve components of the military, I consider myself a semi-professional military historian, and I've visited and studied all the major Civil War battlefields in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. One of the biggest strengths of GETTYSBURG is the way Maxwell was able to give the viewer a sense of tactical situational awareness, the ability to grasp the "Big Picture". He lost that somewhere along the way to doing GODS AND GENERALS. The closest he came to it was in depicting the battle of Fredericksburg, but he was nowhere close in the depictions of First Bull Run and Chancellorsville; the latter was particularly lacking in that it was arguably Jackson's most brilliant moment; the film did capture the surprise and shock effect of the final assault on the Union flank, but completely missed depicting the long, circuitous but desperately rapid forced march that Jackson's corps made to get there. The battle sequences in GETTYSBURG always built up to a climax; even the prolonged firefight at Little Round Top was paced to give you the sense of exhaustion and desperation the soldiers went through; the battle scenes in GODS AND GENERALS were largely monotonous and repetitive so that they exhausted the viewer without conveying that sense among the characters.

GODS AND GENERALS fits the pattern of most movie trilogies, in that the second movie is almost always the weakest and least popular, as evidenced by THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, and BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II. Just as often, the last movie of a trilogy is nearly as good as the first if not even better. For that reason, I'm still holding out hope for THE LAST FULL MEASURE.

Actually, as a fictional war movie, BATTLE OF THE BULGE is not bad for its time in terms of plot, character development and action. It's just not the definitive movie about the Battle of the Bulge.

Ever notice how so many movies named after big historical events usually become so full of themselves in the flash and spectacle and hype, and end up bearing no resemblance to the real events they are purported to depict? And how the definitive movies that do accurately capture those very same events have a more subtle title, usually with meaning only to those serious students of the events? Evidence TITANIC (1997) versus A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (1958); PEARL HARBOR (2001) versus TORA! TORA! TORA! (1970); D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE (1956) versus THE LONGEST DAY (1962). [GETTYSBURG (1993) appears to be the exception to this rule, but then again it was filmed under the working title THE KILLER ANGELS, the same as the Pulitzer-winning book from which it was adapted.]

BATTLE OF THE BULGE falls into the same trap, although the definitive Battle of the Bulge movie, BATTLEGROUND (1949) was also a fictional work rather than a docudrama like A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, TORA! TORA! TORA! or THE LONGEST DAY. Ironically, the closing credits of BATTLE OF THE BULGE claimed, as the intent of the moviemakers, to capture the essence of the battle, but they failed to do so while BATTLEGROUND had already succeeded 16 years earlier. (Actually, if you want a good, historically accurate docudrama of the Battle of the Bulge, the last 45 minutes or so of PATTON will suffice. Then there are also the Battle of the Bulge episodes of the miniseries BAND OF BROTHERS.)

Much has been said about the desert-like setting of BATTLE OF THE BULGE which bears no resemblance to the Ardennes forest of Belgium. I've often wondered about that and the fact that so many of the cast and crew of BATTLE OF THE BULGE were also involved in CUSTER OF THE WEST (actors Robert Shaw, Ty Hardin and Robert Ryan; writers Bernard Gordon and Philip Yordan to name a few). CUSTER OF THE WEST has the 7th Cavalry getting slaughtered in a football field-sized meadow enclosed by trees, while the sprawling barren plains of the final tank battle in BATTLE OF THE BULGE bear an awfully strange resemblance to the Little Bighorn battlefield. Is it possible that the location managers and the rest of the production crew got the last few pages of the two screenplays mixed up? ;-)

Although this is strictly a fictional work, I consider BATTLEGROUND to be THE definitive theatrical movie about the Battle of the Bulge.

Ever notice how so many movies named after big historical events usually become so full of themselves in the flash and spectacle and hype, and end up bearing no resemblance to the real events they are purported to depict? And how the definitive movies that do accurately capture those very same events have a more subtle title, usually with meaning only to those serious students of the events? Evidence TITANIC (1997) versus A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (1958); PEARL HARBOR (2001) versus TORA! TORA! TORA! (1970); D-DAY, THE SIXTH OF JUNE (1956) versus THE LONGEST DAY (1962). [GETTYSBURG (1993) appears to be the exception to this rule, but then again it was filmed under the working title THE KILLER ANGELS, the same as the Pulitzer-winning book from which it was adapted.]

BATTLE OF THE BULGE (1965) and BATTLEGROUND fit the same pattern. BATTLE OF THE BULGE falls into the same trap of overblown spectacle; BATTLEGROUND was also a fictional work, rather than a docudrama like A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, TORA! TORA! TORA! or THE LONGEST DAY, but it rang true. It still captured the cold, snow, isolation and desperation faced, not just by the 101st Airborne Division, but by most of the Allied participants of the battle. Ironically, the closing credits of BATTLE OF THE BULGE claimed, as the intent of the moviemakers, to capture the essence of the battle, but they failed to do so while BATTLEGROUND had already succeeded 16 years earlier.

[Actually, if you want a good, historically accurate fact-based docudrama of the Battle of the Bulge, the last 45 minutes or so of PATTON will suffice. Then there are also the Battle of the Bulge episodes of the miniseries BAND OF BROTHERS. But as an artistic depiction of an historical event, BATTLEGROUND should not be overlooked.]

This series could have been titled COMBAT! THE NEXT GENERATION, and lived up to that status. Zeke Anderson was a next-generation Chip Saunders and Myron Goldman a next-generation Gil Hanley. In fact, I'm surprised and disappointed that the producers didn't have Rick Jason do a guest appearance as COLONEL Gil Hanley (and it's too bad Vic Morrow was no longer alive to show up as Sergeant Major Chip Saunders)!

I think one of the reasons this series wasn't as popular on its original run as it is in syndication today is precisely because it was essentially COMBAT! with M-16s and Hueys: a lot of people in the 1980s were still of the mindset that those who fought in Vietnam were all baby killers; they couldn't accept the simple fact that the Myron Goldmans, Zeke Andersons, Alberto Ruizes, Danny Percells, Marcus Taylors, Scott Bakers and Marvin Johnsons of Vietnam, 1967 were the same ordinary American boys as the Gil Hanleys, Chip Saunderses, Cajes, Littlejohns, Braddocks and Kirbys of France, 1944, doing their best in an ugly situation that was not of their making.

TOUR OF DUTY was one of my all-time favorite series, right along with another contemporary New World Television production also set 20 years in the past, THE WONDER YEARS; . I've always seen these two series as two sides of the same coin, i.e. the battlefront and home front of the Vietnam War. It's fitting that in the TOD episode "Soldiers" (where three of the cast regulars go to Hawaii for R&R), Olivia d'Abo of THE WONDER YEARS had a guest appearance essentially playing the same character.

[For the record, I did not go to Vietnam; I was still an ROTC cadet when the war ended. That does mean, however, that I got my share of the "baby killer" epithets and spitting upon my uniform during that era! ]

Having said all that, the series was not without flaws. The first flaw was the entire 2nd season with the introduction of the female love interests for Anderson and Goldman, coincident with the start of the competing ABC series CHINA BEACH. This is a classic example of the original trying to imitate the imitator and nearly ruining itself in the process. (Anyone remember Coke vs Pepsi, New Coke and the return to Coke Classic?) My second major criticism is that although this was still one of my all-time favorite series, there's no denying that elements of just about every Vietnam War theatrical movie of that era found their way into episodes of TOUR OF DUTY; the finale of the first season was essentially a condensed, cleaned up for network TV version of HAMBURGER HILL. There were so many cases of this that, at times, I felt the series should have been titled APOCALYPSE OF THE FULL METAL HAMBURGER PLATOON AT FIREBASE GLORIA! ;-)

For those who sneer at RED DAWN as being a ridiculously impossible right wing fantasy, it needs to be pointed out that events quite similar to those depicted in RED DAWN did happen in United States history, at least twice.

The first instance took place in Missouri during the Civil War; although they didn't form the unit, two teenage brothers did join a Confederate guerrilla unit, and then took over when the original leaders were killed or captured. Much like Jed and Matt Eckert do to the invading Soviets in this movie, these two teenage brothers led their guerrilla force (which included a number of other teenagers) in wreaking havoc on the Union Army, and became legendary among the local population. Unfortunately, Frank and Jesse James are remembered less for being teenage guerrilla leaders than for the fact that after their side lost the war, their guerrilla force became the most notorious bank-and-train-robbing outlaw gang of the post-Civil War era.

The second instance took place more recently on a much larger scale, when 116,000 square miles of sovereign United States territory was attacked without warning, occupied, and its 17 million people subjugated by an invading totalitarian foreign army. While I'm not aware of any teenagers commanding guerrilla forces in this instance, there were many teenagers among the thousands from the local civilian population who took up arms, and joined guerrilla units which were formed around the nucleus of survivors from the regular US armed forces which had been decimated in the initial attack. These guerrillas wreaked havoc on the occupying invaders for 3 years and kept them tied up, preventing the enemy from further conquest of other US territory, and paving the way for an eventual counterinvasion and liberation by the main US forces.

I was born in what had once been that invaded US territory, where these guerrillas are still remembered and revered as great heroes; a few of my relatives were among these guerrillas. John Wayne and Tyrone Power each made movies about this period of guerrilla warfare, where they played leaders from the regular US military survivors. Apart from a pitiful general deficiency in historical knowledge among the American public, the main reason today's American public doesn't remember this invasion of its territory is that on July 4, 1946, less than a year after the Japanese invaders were defeated, that territory and its 17 million people became the independent Republic of the Philippines.

Some may see RED DAWN as a right-wing fantasy. I see it as, right along with BACK TO BATAAN and AMERICAN GUERRILLA IN THE PHILIPPINES, a depiction of my former homeland's and my family's history.