Reviewing Movies

Guy Ritchie's the Covenant

A flavour of the week type movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal who has grown up to be an action movie mogul. There's plenty of conflict with Taliban Guerrillas and a picaresque odyssey across forbidding Afghani terrain but the message here highlights America's abandonment of the local interpreters it promised to repatriate to America in return for their service to the "tender" mercies of the Taliban when they pulled up stakes.

Beware Yanks bringing gifts.

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal it's a flavour of the week type movie highlighting America's abandonment of Afghan Interpreters to their fate with the Taliban when the US pulled out. It is spiced with loads of action sequences vs Taliban Guerrillas and a picaresque odyssey across forbidding Afghan terrain.

The Valour and the Horror (1992)

Brian and Terrence McKenna

Savage Christmas: Hong Kong 1941

Death by Moonlight: Bomber Command

In Desperate Battle: Normandy 1944

A mini series each 1hr 44 min

An account of the Canadian experience of WW#2. Reviled by the Royal Canadian Legion. Given written accounts I've read recently I find this version rather temperate in its portrayal. For much of the filming the background music is taken from Faure's Requiem with a snatch of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

In typical fashion generals and air marshals treat the man on the ground or in the plane in similar fashion as the chess player treats the pawns on his checker board; they are expendable. Indeed British generals had disdain for colonial troops.

And the incompetence of those in command of troops in the battle for Normandy gets highlighted here. Child soldiers on the German side pitted against a Black Watch Regiment committed to never retreating.