Quotulatiousness

August 12, 2017

In reaction to the movie Dunkirk, Hollywood reloads with daring new concepts!

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kurt Schlichter goes behind the scenes in Hollywood to let us know what movies we’ll be watching soon:

People say the movie industry has lost its way and alienated its audience, but I’m super-excited about the future of movies, especially in light of Tinseltown’s current trend towards goose-stepping leftist conformity! How can that go wrong?

[…]

Xe-Day: After the racist, sexist, and homophobic nightmare that was Dunkirk left audiences literally shaking, moviegoers are begging to see a war movie that doesn’t just focus on the people who were actually there or things that really happened. Well, your wish is Hollywood’s command! You thought you knew the whole story of the Normandy operation, but what you really knew was the phallo people of pallor version that minimized and invisibled the contributions of trans soldiers of heft! Xe-Day is the stirring story of the she-roes who didn’t let their birth genders or carbohydrate addictions get in the way of defeating the Nazis! With the cry of “Come on you she-males, you want to live forever!” these pudgy paratroopers aren’t about to allow the Third Reich to mansplain away their girl power! It’s no longer just Band of Brothers anymore! It’s band of brothers, sisters, and others! Opening this Winter Solstice!

1984 II: This exciting reboot turns expectations on their heads as courageous social justice warriors root out bad thinking thought criminals like Winston Smith! You’ll thrill as angry college students confront people with ideas they don’t like, and punish and kill them for daring to be different – all in the name of diversity! When this smash hit is over, you too will love Big Mother!

Dirty Harriet: Take that, cro-magnon Clint Eastwood clichés! This modern cop movie teaches us that every life matters, except blue ones! Female-identifying (but curious!) Detective Harriet Callahan gets all the dirty jobs, like running diversity classes for those knuckle dragging patrolman who refuse to abandon their wrong thinking. Pairing up with a differently-abled Muslim dwarf of color, she busts the real villains…the people trying to keep order on the streets! And she does it with hugs! Go ahead, make her day – by admitting your privilege!

Son of an Inconvenient Truth: It’s his third try, and this time it’s personal! Al Gore takes time away from his busy schedule of eating, dining, having dinner, and pestering innocent masseuses, to explain in detail why his previous predictions of total climate Armageddon that were supposed to come true a couple years ago haven’t. Spoiler Alert – it’s all Trump’s fault!

July 27, 2017

Andrew Roberts on Dunkirk

Filed under: History, Humour, Media, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It comes with the Niall Ferguson seal of approval:

The retreat from the Continent was a perilous time for Britain. The Germans were willing to throw everything into making it as dangerous and costly as possible for the island people. Britain’s French allies were full of suspicion about what they were depicting for propaganda purposes as a treacherous retreat. The British government was in disarray, with senior government ministers even proposing negotiating with the enemy in order to minimize the terrible ultimate cost that they now saw as inevitable. Everyone was crying out for leadership.

But enough about Brexit. What about Christopher Nolan’s new movie about Dunkirk?

July 24, 2017

Great Blunders of WWII: The German Blunder At Dunkirk 1

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 4 Nov 2016

From the History Channel DVD series “Great Blunders of WWII”

July 22, 2017

Dunkirk Myth vs. Reality – Operation Dynamo

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 7 Jul 2017

The evacuation of British, Belgian, and French troops at Dunkirk – Operation Dynamo – was a crucial event in the early stages of the Second World War. Although the Allies were ultimately severely beaten in the Battle of France, the events at Dunkirk were mostly portrayed and perceived as a victory for the British. Quite naturally various myths surround this event.

» SOURCES «

Palmer, Alice: Dunkirk: The Defeat That Inspired a Nation
http://repository.wellesley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=library_awards

Alexander, Martin S.: French grand strategy and defence preparations. In: Cambridge History of the Second World War, Volume I
Frieser, Karl-Heinz: The war in the West, 1939-1940: an unplanned Blitzkrieg. In: Cambridge History of the Second World War, Volume I
Amazon.com link (affiliate): http://amzn.to/2tuFtuM

Gardner, W.J.R. Gardner: The Evacuation from Dunkirk: ‘Operation Dynamo’, 26 May-June 1940 (Naval Staff Histories)
Amazon.com link (affiliate): http://amzn.to/2uoqMFV

History of The Association of Dunkirk Little Ships
http://www.adls.org.uk/t1/content/history-association-dunkirk-little-ships

Mrs. Miniver
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Miniver

July 21, 2017

Dunkirk

Filed under: History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Megan McArdle was very impressed with the new Christopher Nolan movie on the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940:

I was perhaps unreasonably excited to see Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s new movie about the evacuation of British forces from a French beach during World War II. The historical event on which it is based is astonishing: unable to get enough warships close to the beach to load their fleeing troops, the British government mobilized a flotilla of small private craft, which ultimately helped evacuate more than 330,000 soldiers ahead of the German army. I was eager to see what one of my favorite directors would do with the story.

He did not disappoint. This nearly flawless film put me on the edge of my seat for two hours. It is the best thing I’ve seen about war since the stunning opening of Saving Private Ryan — and Nolan, bless him, is not prey to Steven Spielberg’s compulsion to mar his creations by slopping them over with speechy goo.

As with all of Nolan’s films, it’s emotionally distant from its characters. Cillian Murphy plays an officer credited only as “Shivering Soldier,” and none of the characters have much in the way of backstory or goals, other than survival. Matt Zoller Seitz calls it an “Ant Farm Picture,” a portrait of society in which individuals are almost incidental. That’s rather the point.

A lesser director would have given in to the temptation to make this a story about the righteous crusade against the Germans, men fighting other men, but Nolan shows us a world in which the enemy is a plane, a torpedo, the water and the flying bullets, and men are reduced to little more than their rage to live.

The result is less a war film than a disaster movie. An exquisite disaster movie. I didn’t expect such a vivid and visceral illustration of how quickly a ship can sink, or just how difficult it is to hit a target in the sky. I left the theater almost too overwhelmed to talk.

Having recovered, I began to wonder why we can’t have more pictures like Dunkirk. The easy answer is, of course, that there is only one Christopher Nolan, and only so many people willing to give him $150 million to spend putting thousands of extras and some World War II-era ordnance onto a French beach. But the easy answer is incomplete.

I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve been impressed with the reviews I’ve seen so far (except the ludicrous “it doesn’t have any women or POC characters in lead roles” criticism from historical illiterates).

July 12, 2017

World of Warships – Dunkirk

Filed under: Britain, Gaming, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Published on 11 Jul 2017

It’s all well and good for Churchill to promise to “Fight them on the beaches…”, but first he had to get them off the beaches of France to ensure he had anyone to fight them on the beaches of England with…

May 19, 2010

Remembering Dunkirk, 70 years on

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:53

This is the 70th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation, where 338,000 British and French troops were carried out of the German encirclement by just about everything that could float.

“Without Dunkirk, Britain wouldn’t have had an Army and it’s extremely questionable whether Britain could have fought the war,” he explains.

Mr Hewitt gives the credit to the Royal Navy and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, who led the operation, but also to all the civilians who helped.

“They thought they would bring back 30-40,000. In the end they rescued 338,000 British and French troops. It’s an extraordinary achievement.”

And this pulling together of civilians and the military meant an event that could have been seen as a failure became, in fact, a key turning point in World War II.

“Dunkirk was a military defeat, but it was a symbolic victory,” he adds.

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