Band of Brothers rewind, episode 10: "Points"

And so we've come to the end of our trip back through "Band of Brothers," so all bets are off in terms of talking about what happened to these characters after the war ended. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I shoot a bazooka at a rockpile...

"I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked me the other day, when he said, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' Grandpa said, 'No, but I served in a company of heroes.'" -Mike Ranney

Because the war more or less ended for Easy Company with the Battle of the Bulge, give or take some minor skirmishes like the one depicted in "The Last Patrol," there was a danger that these last two episodes of the series could have felt terribly anti-climactic. But "Why We Fight" found power by dealing with the liberation of the concentration camp outside Landsberg (which only merits a few paragraphs in Stephen Ambrose's book). "Points," meanwhile, turns the lack of action into its primary theme, showing both the advantages of life in an occupying army (more free time, gorgeous scenery, grand moments) and the drawbacks (the men all want to go home, and they keep dying or being wounded for stupid reasons). Anchored by Damian Lewis' narration and some of Michael Kamen's most beautiful music of the series, it feels like a fitting epilogue to all that came before.

Though "Points" isn't precisely Dick Winters' story in the way that "Crossroads" was, the miniseries as a whole has been his story, and so it feels right that he be allowed to narrate its concluding chapter, and to tie together all the small vignettes of Easy's time in Germany and Austria in the war's final days. His courtesy interview for a transfer to the Pacific turns into a kind of Dick Winters' Greatest Hits montage, and throughout the episode we get small callbacks to previous events. Winters' closing narration tells us that he eventually bought the farm he dreamed about at the end of "Day of Days." When Easy Company captures the Eagle's Nest, we hear the men yell "Hi-yo, Silver!," which was Sobel's pathetic battle cry, and Sobel himself pops up again so Winters can humiliate him one last time by demanding a salute. (How you feel about that moment depends, I suppose, on where you stood in our discussion about "Curahee" and whether Sobel is depicted fairly.) We hear again about Welsh's reserve chute, Shifty's marksmanship and many other running character points from earlier episodes.

What I love about "Points" is the larger-than-life quality that writers Erik Jendresen and Erik Bork and director Mikael Salomon give it -- drawing heavily, as always, on real events. The Alps look so beautiful in the background of the baseball game, as does the view from the Eagle's Nest balcony. Winters' gift to his buddy Nixon is staggering when viewed from a 21st century perspective -- how do you give an alcoholic the keys to Hermann Goering's wine cellar? -- and yet in the context of the time, and this particular friendship, it makes perfect sense, and is oddly touching. Winters doesn't judge Nixon, doesn't try to fix him, and thinks this is the nicest thing he can possibly do for him. And after all they've been through, who can say they didn't all need some fine German liquor?

Oddly, in a few cases, the stories told in "Points" are actually toned down from the real-life versions described by Ambrose. For instance, the story of Sgt. Grant being shot in the head, and Captain Speirs going to extraordinary lengths to save his life and then punish his shooter, actually took some stranger turns. After Speirs pistol-whipped the guy for failing to call him "sir," a buddy of Grant's not only pointed a gun at the man, but pulled the trigger as he was being held back, only his pistol misfired. Later, Speirs would claim that Col. Sink "said I should have shot the son of a bitch."

Like the rest of the miniseries, "Points" can't possibly hope to cover everyone's story to the fullest, and there are occasional awkward moments where minor players are shoved into the spotlight as the clock is running down. Alton Moore suddenly becomes relevant because he stole Hitler's photo album, and the scene where Floyd Talbert resigns as 1st Sergeant doesn't really work because Talbert -- described by Dick Winters as the best soldier in the company, and the one he'd most want by his side in a battle -- hasn't had much to do in previous episodes.

(In his book, "Beyond Band of Brothers," Winters writes that Talbert actually resigned his position because he and Speirs didn't get along, and both Winters and Ambrose write at length about how Talbert, more than any other man in the company, never quite recovered emotionally from the things he did and saw during the war. At the time the miniseries originally aired, Bruce McKenna, who wrote several episodes of this series -- and is a producer on "The Pacific" -- apparently said on the HBO.com boards, paraphrasing Shifty Powers, "we could completely redo the entire miniseries and focus on completely different men and not repeat one single scene." I imagine this parallel universe version of "Band of Brothers" would have a whole lot more of Talbert.)

There's also the odd sequence with Webster and Liebgott arguing about what to do with the alleged concentration camp commandant, which seems to fly in the face of Webster's behavior with the German baker in "Why We Fight." Much as Ambrose wrote more about Webster than was probably warranted given his role in the company, the miniseries leans on him pretty heavily in these last few episodes, inserting him into events where he wasn't present or wasn't a factor, and changing his characterization based on the needs of a particular scene. In real life, Don Moone was the soldier objecting to the mission (which was ordered by Captain Speirs, on dubious authority).

As for Liebgott, he's involved in the episode's centerpiece, and a fitting capstone to the series, as he translates the German officer's speech to his defeated troops. The German is, of course, saying the same sorts of things to his men that Winters no doubt thinks about his, but Winter isn't the kind of man who would ever say such things, especially not in victory. So the script cleverly puts the words in the mouth of an opponent trying to put a good face on defeat for the benefit of his men. And, don't forget how "Why We Fight" opened with the real men of Easy Company talking about how much they realized they had in common with the German soldiers -- Ross McCall does a wonderfully subtle job of showing how, as the speech goes along, German-hating Liebgott begins to recognize the shared experience.

Rather than begin the episode, as all the others did, with interviews with unidentified Easy survivors (their names withheld, no doubt, to preserve suspense about who lived and died), "Points" closes with them, and finally puts names to some faces. We get confirmation that the thin, confident gentleman with the glasses is Dick Winters, realize that the man who broke down crying in the "Breaking Point" interview was Donald Malarkey, and see just what perfect casting Frank John Hughes was as Bill Guarnere. And (after Carwood Lipton gives us the St. Crispin's Day speech from "Henry V") Winters gets to repeat the closing anecdote from the book, quoted above.

There isn't time to identify all the men interviewed in previous episodes -- just as the baseball scene, by design, doesn't allow Winters to tell us what happened to men who survived the war but weren't with the company at the time, like Guarnere, Malarkey and Joe Toye -- but for that, I highly recommend the bonus disc in the DVD set, which includes the outstanding documentary "We Stand Alone Together," featuring lots of interview material that otherwise would have been left on the cutting room floor.

Speaking of the baseball game, what really strikes me about Winters telling the story of everyone's post-war life is how absolutely normal most of them are. Lipton and Johnny Martin made a lot of money, and Buck Compton achieved some fame as an LA prosecutor, but for the most part these men who jumped through flak on D-Day, who survived freezing cold and exploding trees in Bastogne, who were both very lucky and very good to survive everything the Germans threw at them, went home to be postmen, and handymen, and cab drivers, and to live completely average lives. In "Beyond Band of Brothers," Winters writes about George Luz's funeral, and how even his own family members were stunned to see the medals he had won during the war; it had never occurred to Luz that this was something his nearest loved ones ought to hear about.

And yet, that's the story you could tell about so many veterans who survived World War II, in either the European theater or the Pacific. They saved the world, and then they came back home to live like the rest of us. And in that way, as much as any other, "Band of Brothers" symbolizes the story of all of our troops over there.

Some other thoughts on "Points":

• It amuses me that even the normally squeaky-clean Winters isn't above a little looting, if for no reason than that he knows Speirs will take the silverware if he doesn't.

• Along similar lines, I love the smirk on Nixon's face after Winters makes Sobel salute, like he's happy to see that his perfect friend is capable of being ruled by emotion from time to time.

• Shifty Powers was the Easy veteran whose recent death I alluded to a few episodes back. The story of Shifty's bad luck lottery win was even more frustrating in real life. After he won the ticket home, an officer offered him a large sum of money buy the ticket from him. Shifty declined, wound up injured (as mentioned here), and then all of his backpay and valuables were stolen while he was convalescing in the hospital.

• The officer interviewing Winters about the transfer is played by David Andrews, who was a key figure in "From the Earth to the Moon" as astronaut Frank Borman.

• If you're interested in more detail, I highly recommend reading Ambrose's book, and then "Beyond Band of Brothers," and to do it in that order, as Winters treats his book as a companion to Ambrose's, and deliberately omits details about things he felt Ambrose covered sufficiently. In particular, it's worth it for the section where Winters reprints excerpts from letters he received from men who were storming Utah Beach at the time Winters, Compton and the others took out the guns at Brecourt Manor (or from their children and grandchildren), and who talk about how much easier it was to get across the beach after the guns were silenced. Good luck getting through that chapter without some tissues handy.

Finally, now that we've come to the end, I guess it's time to rank the episodes. A few years after the miniseries first aired, I remember ranking them on a Usenet newsgroup, but that post seems lost to history. Regardless, the order is different now than it would have been at the time. As I said back when I reviewed "Curahee," rewatching the miniseries was a far more rewarding experience than watching it the first time, and some episodes like "Replacements" held up much better once I didn't have to keep asking, "Wait, who's that guy again?"

Maybe the order changes again if I take another look at the series five or ten years from now, but at the moment, I'd rank them as follows:

1) "Bastogne"
2) "Why We Fight"
3) "The Breaking Point"
4) "Day of Days"
5) "Points"
6) "Replacements"
7) "The Last Patrol"
8) "Currahee"
9) "Crossroads"
10) "Carentan"

Feel free to offer up your own rankings, or any unanswered questions you have about the series and the lives of the men depicted within it, or anything you want at this point. We're all done, so everything's game.

Also, for those of you who are Star-Ledger print readers, it looks like we're going to be running slightly edited versions of these reviews in the paper as a summer series, most likely starting Saturday, July 18.

For the last time on this great, great series, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 9: "Why We Fight"

We're in our final week of looking back on "Band of Brothers," with spoilers for the penultimate episode, "Why We Fight," coming up just as soon as I borrow your lighter...

There are essentially two halves to "Why We Fight" -- one of the finest episodes of this damn fine miniseries -- that seem unrelated at first by anything but chronology, but which turn out to be inextricably linked in the final moments.

The first half focuses on Captain Nixon quest for Vat 69. To this point in the series, Nixon's role has been primarily to offer exposition (as a battalion strategist, he knows more about the big picture than Dick Winters does), and to function as a kind of Greek chorus (suggesting that Sobel is a better training officer than the men want to admit, reminding Winters of how much good he did at Brecourt Manor). We've learned that he's a drunk, but also that he's brave (he declines the 30-day pass home in "The Breaking Point") and that Winters obviously thinks the world of him, but because he hasn't been a member of Easy Company since before they left America, this is his first real spotlight.

And the Nixon of "Why We Fight" is burnt out. Like all the men, he's been at war too long, has started to forget why it is this all started, and with the lack of action post-Hagenau, he has a lot of time to do nothing but think, and stew, and drink. And because he's not just an alcoholic, but a discriminating alcoholic, he's running out of the one thing he's willing to drink. And when he's one of the few survivors of the doomed jump, he gets to stew some more about what all those boys in the plane died over.

There's this amazing weariness to Ron Livingston's performance. Like Scott Grimes in "The Last Patrol," he's so much older and frailer than he was at the start of the series (when I praised Livingston for this at an awards event, he gave all the credit to the makeup department for making him look so jaundiced). And while he's always going to look and sound like Peter from "Office Space," he has a gravity and haunted quality here that works perfectly in a scene like the one where Nixon gets the Dear Lewis letter from his wife. And that, in turn, leads into the marvelous scene where the entire convoy sings "Blood on the Risers," the unofficial paratrooper anthem, and Nixon reluctantly joins in, then starts singing louder than everyone else because he's so sick of it all.

The episode's first half also offers vignettes of other characters suffering a similar level of bitterness towards their time in the Army. Perconte rants to replacement O'Keefe about how long it's been since he saw America. Webster flips out at a passing convoy of surrendered Germans: "You have horses! What were you thinking?" Replacement Janovec tells Luz that he's reading an article about how "the Germans are bad," and Luz reacts like this is the most hilarious thing he's ever heard. With few exceptions -- like Captain Speirs, who seems delighted to be able to loot everything in sight now that they're in Germany -- the Toccoa veterans are all desperate to get home, and wondering why they wound up here in the first place.

Then we come to the second half, in which the episode's title goes from being ironic to explanatory. Whether the men of Easy Company knew it or not, stopping the kind of people responsible for the concentration camp they find outside of Landsberg is exactly why they fight -- why they've given up years of their lives and risked those lives repeatedly. As the real Dick Winters (who had fewer problems with his resolve to begin with) said to himself after getting a look at that nightmarish place, "Now I know why I am here!"

As good a job as the makeup department did on Livingston, their masterpiece is their work on the camp survivors. (Amazingly, they lost the Emmy to the TNT fantasy miniseries "The Mists of Avalon.") I don't know exactly how they made some of those extras look the way they did, but the sight of them never fails to hit me in the gut, to fill me with horror and despair that this kind of thing can happen -- and I say this as the son of a teacher who specializes in Holocaust education and who frequently brought her work home with her(*).

(*) And who has asked me to put in a plug for her college's Holocaust education center.

The visceral impact of the camp sequence is just amazing. All the little beats are devastating, from the man carrying his emaciated, possibly dead friend to the prisoner who starts showering his terrified rescuer with desperate kisses.

But the most brutal part of all involves Liebgott. The earlier scene with Webster in the truck is there primarily to remind us that Liebgott is the lone Jew in Easy Company. Because he's also the German translator, he winds up in the position to be the first to discover what this camp really is, and that smacks him -- and us -- extra hard. And then an even tougher blow comes when he's asked to order the prisoners back into the camp even temporarily, for their own good. Ross McCall isn't mentioned often among the best performances of this series, but he owns those two moments.

So here's what I'm most curious about, in terms of your reaction: how do you read the faces of the German townspeople in the sequence where they're being forced to dispose of the bodies? Specifically, how do you read the German officer's widow whom Nixon had met earlier when he broke into her house looking for booze? She's furious and disgusted and mortified, but is it at the Americans for forcing her to perform this horrific task, or at her own country's leadership for creating this place (and making her husband die for this)? Or is it a bit of both?

Some other thoughts:

• I'm again going to break the who lives/who dies rule here, as we're so close to the end that it's more or less pointless, but skip ahead to the next bullet if need be. The level of Speirs' looting -- and the other soldiers' awareness of it -- becomes one of the better running gags of these final two episodes, but the miniseries doesn't have room for the big real-life punchline: Speirs was sending all the looted merchandise not back to America, but to a "war widow" he had married during his time in England, and with whom he fathered a son. One problem: the woman's first husband turned out not to be dead, but a POW, and she chose him over Speirs -- and kept every bit of loot Speirs had sent her.

• Webster's command of German in the scene with the baker seems far shakier than it was in "The Last Patrol," and his bloodlust in that scene is in marked contrast to how he'll behave in a similar moment in the series finale. (Let's save discussion on that till we get to "Points," but I wanted to bring it up now so we have it in mind in a few day's time.)

• Don't Luz and Perconte in the opening scenes feel like they could be either supporting characters in a '40s war comedy, or maybe the leads on a '50s or early '60s Army sitcom?

• In case you haven't seen it by now, HBO has released a trailer for "The Pacific," the long-awaited follow-up to "Band of Brothers" that focuses on the Pacific theater of WWII in the same way "BoB" focused on the European theater. A couple of readers expressed concern that the trailer makes it look like "The Pacific" is going to be filled with the kind of war movie cliches that "BoB" avoided, but to that I would point out that some of the promos for "BoB" featured the scene from this episode where Winters tells Nixon what to write to the families of the boys who died on the jump. In context, "You tell them they died as heroes" is about the messiness of war and the necessity of telling noble lies about it. Out of context, in a trailer, it just sounds corny, even with Damian Lewis saying it.

Coming up on Thursday: We come to the end of the line with "Points," in which the war in Europe comes to an end, and yet the men of Easy Company can't get home.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 8: "The Last Patrol"

Getting very close to the end of our trip back through "Band of Brothers" -- close enough, in fact, that I'm going to break my rule about who lives and who dies to discuss the fate of the episode's central character -- so know that there are bigger-than-usual spoilers for "The Last Patrol" coming up just as soon as (and I mean that) I divvy up the PX supplies...

We're close enough to the end of the series -- and Easy Company is close enough to the end of the war, with "The Last Patrol" offering up the last significant combat action we'll see -- that I'm going to violate the "who dies" rule. There are still some casualties to come, but I don't think I can properly discuss "The Last Patrol" without saying that David Kenyon Webster did, in fact, survive the war, but died decades before Ambrose's book was written.

Webster was a would-be author himself, and while he never found a publisher for his combat diaries while he was alive (though he did put out a book about sharks), Ambrose was so enamored with his writing that he helped get them published in the early '90s, under the title "Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich." And before that, Ambrose liberally quoted from Webster's unpublished manuscripts in "Band of Brothers" (several passages of which are turned into voiceover narration here), and talks quite a bit about Webster beyond that -- arguably moreso than any other Easy Company soldier who wasn't with the company for either Normandy or Bastogne.

I say all of this because it's obvious Ambrose had some affection for the Webster he met in those unpublished pages, no doubt finding a kinship with the Harvard-educated English major, and I have this feeling that he looks on Webster more fondly than the men who actually served with him. Ambrose doesn't judge Webster for his refusal to be promoted above Private First Class, or to volunteer for any kind of hazardous duty, or to bolt out of the hospital early to get back to the men -- as we've seen Popeye Wynn, Joe Toye and others do in previous episodes. (Toye lost a leg as a result.) And Ambrose's account of the Hagenau patrol doesn't in any way mention the hostility that Liebgott and others show for Webster upon his return. (Nor does it deal with the switcheroo in who got to lead the patrol, which was actually led by Ken Mercier, who's not a character in the miniseries.)

The way I see it, there are two possibilities: 1)Erik Bork and Bruce McKenna needed an easy way to illustrate how much Bastogne changed the men who were there -- and how much they resented those who weren't there -- and Webster was an easy choice, given the timing of his return from the hospital; or 2)The survivors didn't much like Webster, and when they were talking to the producers, they gave them more dirt than either Ambrose knew or wanted to get into.

Now, I suspect little to none of this matters to your appreciation of "The Last Patrol." But given that Webster will be fairly prominent in these final three episodes, and is one of the more unusual characters of both book and miniseries, I'm curious about which portrayal is the more accurate one.

Either way, "The Last Patrol" works as a sequel of sorts to "Replacements," only instead of showing how the newcomers were in awe of the tested and heroic Normandy veterans, we see how an actual veteran could become so disconnected from the company because he wasn't in Bastogne. And, through Webster's eyes, we see just how devastated the company was in those months while he was away.

Compare the welcome Webster gets when he returns (surprised, begrudging, irritated) to the enthusiastic one given to Perconte, who was not only present for the Battle of the Bulge, but has busted out of the hospital to rejoin the company only a few weeks after getting shot at Foy. Or compare the way Webster still reacts to exploding mortar rounds to the way the Bastogne veterans just shrug them off, because they heard and felt worse out in the forest. Or compare the Malarkey from even as recent an episode as "Crossroads" (where he's giddy to show off his gambling winnings to Skip Muck) to the shell of a man he is after losing so many friends in the Ardennes.

(Though this is primarily Webster's episode, Malarkey is the one who has to symbolize the sorry state of Easy after the Bulge, and Scott Grimes and the hair and makeup team do a terrific job of capturing that. He looks so much older, and emptier -- particularly in the shower scene -- and all the red color has vanished from his hair. He's seen too much, and lost too much, to resemble the enthusiastic, foolhardy kid he was in the early episodes.)

In addition to the depression of the men, what "The Last Patrol" shows is that, despite Speirs' appointment as the new company commander, not all is right with Easy's leadership. Speirs is in charge, but with Lipton sidelined by pneumonia and Harry Welsh not returning until episode's end, they're still so short on experienced officers to lead the platoons (since Colonel Sink kept promoting the best ones to batallion or regimental staff) that newbie Lt. Jones gets sent on the patrol to secure prisoners -- and even Jones has the perspective, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, to realize he's not qualified to do anything but observe.

As the real-life Easy veterans talk about in the introductory piece, they were now close enough to the end of the war that everyone was particularly self-conscious about not being in a position where they could get killed. (Or, in the case of Jones or the soldier from the PX who asked to be put on the patrol, concerned about seeing some action before the war stops.) So "The Last Patrol" focuses more on combat fatigue, and on paranoia, and on the careful preparation each man puts into so minor an action as the combat patrol.

Again, this is the last major action set piece of the series, and it's a good one, suitably chaotic and intense, with the ante upped by Pvt. Jackson's screams as he dies slowly from his own grenade.

And in the end, we find out that Dick Winters continues to look out for Easy Company even though he's no longer their direct commander, as he disobeys Col. Sink's order for a second patrol because he knows it would be as dangerous as it would be pointless. In real life, Winters' promotion to major didn't come for another couple of weeks, but it feels appropriate to see him getting those oak leaf clusters immediately after one of his braver bits of leadership in the war.

Some other thoughts:

• The miniseries isn't exactly consistent on how well Webster speaks German. He can make basic conversation and shout out commands here and in "Replacements," while his command of the language seems far less (if not non-existent) in "Why We Fight" and "Points." And Wikipedia (I know, I know) suggests he didn't speak it at all.

• As with the Jimmy Fallon cameo in "Crossroads," I find Colin Hanks' presence as Lt. Jones much less distracting this time than I did in 2001 -- though in this case, it's because I've seen Hanks do enough good dramatic work elsewhere (most recently on "Mad Men") that I can accept that, while nepotism undoubtedly got him the part, he fits it well.

• Ambrose writes that Webster and another private tried and failed repeatedly to use grenades to kill the wounded German on the opposite bank, before Cobb (who, again, gets the short end of the stick in this episode and is depicted as a cowardly bully) got sick of the wheezing and killed the German with a more accurate throw.

• Rick Gomez has some fine comic moments throughout the series as George Luz, but none may be better than the scene where he's dealing with the chocolate bars and the order to blow up a house across the river.

Coming up next (probably on Monday): "Why We Fight," in which Nixon runs low on his preferred brand of booze, while Perconte makes a horrifying discovery.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 7: "The Breaking Point"

In the home stretch now on "Band of Brothers." Spoilers for the seventh episode, "The Breaking Point," coming up just as soon as I link up with I Company...

"Alright, I want mortars and grenade launchers on that building till it's gone. When it's gone I want 1st to go straight in. Forget going around. Everybody else, follow me." -Lt. Speirs

Because I just never get tired of that moment, do I?

As I said when I reviewed "Bastogne," "The Breaking Point" seems to be the consensus favorite episode of the series, and I can certainly understand why. It combines the point-of-view storytelling, which makes the second half of the series so much more intense than the first, with the amazing spectacle that we so often got in the first half of the series. It features both one of the lowest points of the series (Buck losing it as he stares at Toye and Guarnere's broken bodies), and one of the highest (Speirs running to Easy's rescue during the attack on Foy). And it has a superb central performance by Donnie Wahlberg as 1st Sgt. Lipton, the man holding the company together while the officers are flaking out.

But I had two fundamental issues with the episode back in '01, and I still have them now, that keep me from ranking it quite as highly as most of you do. (Still, I'd probably put it at least third, after "Bastogne" and maybe "Why We Fight.") I want to get those out of the way so we can talk about all the brilliance.

My first issue is with the narration. It's probably necessary to help fill in the gaps of an episode where so much is happening, and to help underline certain points, like how the men didn't hold Buck's departure against him. But while Wahlberg is a terrifically expressive actor who says so much with a simple look, he (like his brother) has a fairly flat, thin speaking voice that doesn't hold up under such prolonged scrutiny. The first time I watched this episode, on an HBO review screener (it was a videotape, I believe, which is how long ago this was), I thought for several minutes that it was a temp track recorded quickly and without emotion by a production assistant. But it was Wahlberg, and compared to Damian Lewis in "Points," or even Eion Bailey in "The Last Patrol," something always feels lacking in the voiceover to me.

There are also moments where the voiceover feels unnecessary, as if writer Graham Yost didn't trust the audience to grasp certain things (say, Lipton's mistrust of Lt. Dike) without spelling it out for them. That was also a problem I had with "Boomtown," the show Yost created directly after this, co-starring Wahlberg and Neal McDonough. "Boomtown" (at least, the first season) had its ardent supporters, but I often found it guilty of telling rather than showing, and thought that most of its appeal came from the actors and the production values.

All of which brings me to my second issue with "The Breaking Point," which is the closing scene with Speirs and Lipton at the church, where again Yost has to put into words an idea -- the amazing job Lipton did holding Easy together during its lowest point of the war -- that any viewer who's been watching the preceding hour-plus should understand by now. I could almost live with Speirs' speech about the one man Easy could count on at Bastogne if the scene ended with Speirs realizing that Lipton is so selfless he doesn't understand whom Speirs is describing. But having Speirs say, "Hell, it was you, 1st Sergeant!" is just too much, a really false, forced moment that drives me crazy every time I watch it. There isn't a similarly jarring note for me in, say, "Bastogne."

But beyond those two points... holy cow. What an amazing 69 minutes of storytelling by Yost, director David Frankel, and everyone else involved.

Where "Bastogne" was following Doc Roe, and therefore cut away from the battle whenever he was focusing on saving a wounded soldier, "The Breaking Point" offers no respite from combat. We're there as the trees explode, as some men are killed for stupid reasons (Hoobler shooting himself with the Luger) and others are horribly wounded for noble ones (Guarnere gets out of his foxhole to drag his buddy Toye to safety), and as some die simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (Muck and Penkala had the deepest foxhole in the company and were killed by a direct hit). There's no let-up as morale goes from bad to worse under Lt. Dike, as Compton and Malarkey suffer differing levels of combat fatigue (Malarkey can stay with the men, while Buck... can't, and can you blame him?) and the attack on Foy begins to go awry because Dike freezes up.

But amid all the spectacle and horror and dread is a pretty inspiring story of leadership, and of the different kinds of it that served Easy over the years.

Dick Winters led by example -- by being the best at everything, and filling the men with such confidence in him that they would follow him into Hell if need be.

Lipton is also a fine soldier, but his approach is as much about understanding the individual needs of the men as inspiring them as a whole. He knows, for instance, that Malarkey needs some time away from the line, and that maybe he can make some good out of Hoobler's death by giving Malarkey the Luger. He knows that Luz's Dike impression is just going to increase the panic level, but he makes sure to compliment George on the quality of it before asking him to stop. And he knows that Winters really isn't in a position to remove Dike until something more egregious happens, but he knows that his old CO will at least listen.

Dike, of course, is an utter failure as a leader. He doesn't make decisions, doesn't make himself available when needed, and even his attempts to connect with the men are half-hearted, as we see when he disappears as Lipton is in the middle of telling him his life story.

Ronald Speirs, on the other hand, is a killer. Whatever the truth is about the German POWs and the cigarettes, or about the man he killed in his own platoon(*), he does not suffer from indecision. His mind and body work as one as he marks a course of action -- just watch the way Matthew Settle moves without a trace of hesitation when Winters sends Speirs into Foy, or how the words fly out of his mouth as he's telling Lipton what to do to take out the sniper -- and while he may lack for warmth or conscience, his decisiveness is an asset Easy desperately needs at this moment in the war.

(*) This episode is as close as we're ever going to get in the miniseries to answering the question about either incident, as we find out that Speirs is too pleased with the power those stories give him to confirm or deny them. The book "Beyond Band of Brothers" gives a more concrete explanation for the one about shooting his own man, and says that Speirs did it because the man was refusing to take orders in the middle of combat -- which is as justifiable a reason for execution as any in the military.

Again, I think "The Breaking Point" has some flaws, but for the most part it works brilliantly, and features one jaw-dropping moment after another. Even though I disagree that it's the best episode of the series, I'm not going to argue the point very strongly with those of you who do, because so much of it is so great.

Some other thoughts on "The Breaking Point":

• This is Wahlberg's episode, but it's not hard to see why Yost also wanted to hire McDonough for "Boomtown." His portrayal of Compton's breaking point, and the empty shell he is after it, is superb.

• For that matter, Rick Gomez is mostly comic relief as Luz, but he's wonderful in the sequence where Muck and Penkala are calling for Luz to join them, only for the shell to hit their foxhole before he could get there. How do you keep going on after something like that? I know I'd pull a Buck Compton if I was in that position.

• This will, not surprisingly, be the last we'll see in the miniseries of Kirk Acevedo as Toye and Frank John Hughes as Guarnere. Their presence (both the soldiers and the actors playing them) will be missed in the upcoming chapters. Though both lost their legs, Toye would live until 1995, and Guarnere is still with us. (His grandson maintains WildBillGuarnere.com, a good message board to talk about "Band of Brothers." One word of warning, for the spoiler-phobic: a key member of Easy Company died last week, and there's a post near the top of that site about it.)

• I also love that Guarnere is able to crack a joke about getting back home ahead of Toye. Though he doesn't get his own spotlight episode, he still makes one of the biggest impressions of any character in the series.

• Jamie Bamber, aka Apollo from "Battlestar Galactica," makes his first appearance of the series as Lt. Foley, whose most notable moment here is yelling at Dike to make a decision as they're stuck behind the haystack. If you're watching for the first time, don't expect to see much more of Bamber in upcoming episodes, as Foley is a fairly minor character in the scheme of the miniseries.

• Shifty Powers is only slightly more prominent than Foley, though "The Breaking Point" gets to show off the man's amazing marksmanship when he takes out the sniper at Foy. As Popeye Wynn said of his friend, "It just doesn't pay to be shootin' at Shifty when he's got a rifle."

• I haven't talked much about the opening sequences with the surviving members of Easy Company, in part because I'm trying to stick by the who lives/who dies no-spoiler rule. (Though I should warn you that I'm going to break it very early in my review of "The Last Patrol.") So if you're somehow not to the end of the miniseries yet, I won't say who the man is who breaks down at the thought of seeing his buddies all torn up, but it's an incredibly affecting moment -- especially since you can tell these are the type of men who rarely opened up like that in the half-century since the war.

• This is TV, so a few moments get exaggerated for dramatic purposes, but not by much. In real life, Winters stopped himself from running across the field at Foy, rather than needing Colonel Sink to stop him. And some of the surviving members of Easy said that Speirs' dash to hook up with I Company wasn't quite as superheroic as Frankel makes it look. But as Lipton puts it when describing the moment, "Damn that's impressive."

Coming up next (probably on Thursday): "The Last Patrol," in which Private Webster returns from the hospital to find Easy Company much changed after its time in Bastogne.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 6: "Bastogne"

We're now into the second half of our trip through "Band of Brothers," and if you don't have the DVDs, or missed HBO's On Demand window, History Channel is doing another marathon this weekend, with the first five episodes Saturday afternoon (1:37-8), and the next five on Sunday (12:16-7, and don't ask me about the weird start times).

Spoilers for "Bastogne" coming up just as soon as I go in a dell...

If you polled fans of the series for their favorite installment, I imagine the next episode, "The Breaking Point," would win in a landslide. And while I certainly have a lot of affection for that one, "Bastogne" was and remains the hour that sticks in my head the most. It's the episode that, on first viewing, was the point where I began to feel confident distinguishing all the characters (ironically, in a show that spotlighted a character who had barely any previous screentime), and it remains the episode that does the best job of making me feel like I understood, even on a superficial level, what the men of Easy Company went through.

The Battle of the Bulge, and, specifically, the siege at Bastogne, is where the legend of the 101st Airborne was made, and I've seen some complaints that the series miscalculated by choosing this moment in the war to show through the eyes of the company medic, Eugene "Doc" Roe (Shane Taylor). These people aren't objecting to the idea of a Roe episode so much as its timing.

For me, though, the "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" approach(*) to the Battle of the Bulge works beautifully. There's still plenty of time for exploding trees and other combat in and around the Ardennes in "The Breaking Point," but in terms of the emotional experience of the siege, I think "Bastogne" absolutely nails it. Even more than "Crossroads," "Bastogne" marks the point when the series shifts to a more overt point-of-view narrative style, and these episodes feel more personal -- and much more involving -- for it.

(*) For those of you not up on your literary devices, this is re-telling a famous story from the perspective of a minor character, and only seeing the major events and players as he sees them. There are a couple of breaks from Roe's POV, notably the combat patrol where Babe Heffron has to watch Pvt. Julian bleed to death, but for the most part, we only find out things if Roe is there to eavesdrop.

The story of Bastogne is that the 101st was terribly short on bodies, and even shorter on supplies, and yet somehow they were able to hold off everything the Germans (who had more men and more materiel) threw at them. And therefore, it feels absolutely right that we should see it as Doc Roe's story. It's more of an abstraction, I think, to talk about how many rounds of ammo each man had than it is to show Roe down to his last Syrette of morphine, or being happy Captain Winters captured a German prisoner because the guy had a spare bandage on him.

More importantly, though, "Bastogne" -- through Bruce McKenna's script, David Leland's direction, and Shane Taylor's performance -- made me look at the position of Army medic, a staple of these sort of movies and TV shows, in an entirely new way. On the surface, the medic seems to have it (relatively) easier than the grunts: he doesn't have to kill, he's far less likely to get shot at, etc. But what we see, over and over in "Bastogne," is the psychic cost of the job. In the heat of combat -- particularly combat as intense as at Bastogne -- when a comrade gets shot, the other soldiers can't focus on it all that much, because they're too busy shooting back and trying to save their own skins. But the man bleeding to death is all that the medic gets to focus on. He can't use his rifle as a distraction, because he has to stick his hands into the wound and try to make the bleeding stop, at least long enough to get him back to the aid station. And whether the men live or die, you see the toll each of them take on Roe, and you begin to understand why he seems to hold himself apart from the men -- why he eats apart from them, and why avoids using their nicknames. It's only after his friend Renee the nurse(**) dies in a shelling of the town that Eugene seems to recognize this approach is futile -- that it hurts just as much whether he gets close to people or he doesn't -- and he lets himself call Heffron "Babe."

(**) The scenes with Renee seem to be the other source of complaint about "Bastogne." As Roe is such a minor character in Ambrose's book -- and as Roe died years before the miniseries was made -- I have no idea if there really was a Renee, or if that was just an invention of McKenna's. But I don't have much of a problem with the character, as she allows Roe to open up about his feelings in a way he simply wouldn't with the other guys in Easy, even the other medic. If she's a dramatic device, she's not a bad one.

Some other thoughts on "Bastogne":

• Leland and the production team do an amazing job of conveying just how bloody cold it was in Bastogne, and how much the men suffered for not having proper winter gear. We open with a shot of endless white, then see Roe's purple fingers shivering from the cold, and from there it's one bit of frozen-over Hell after another.

• As I so often make fun of the Louisiana accents on "True Blood" (if only because they all sound different from one another), I have to ask any locals who are reading: how do you think Shane Taylor (one of many Brits in the "Band of Brothers" cast) tackles Roe's Cajun accent? Authentic, or overcooked?

• We're still trying to be vague about who lives and who dies, but as Smokey Gordon doesn't appear again, I can say that Roe and the surgeons not only saved his life, but helped him recover a fair amount of his mobility. (So much, in fact, that, per the epilogue in Ambrose's book, the Army briefly tried to get out of giving him full disability, until Gordon's father threatened to have his son strip naked on the floor of Congress to show off all his wounds.)

• While the other men (Wild Bill Guarnere, in particular) are growing beards while out there in the woods, I like that Winters is still making an effort to shave every day, even if it's with freezing cold water.

• General McAuliffe's response to the German offer of surrender -- "Nuts!" (short for "Nuts to you!") -- would, 60+ years later, be appropriated by Skeet Ulrich on "Jericho," and in turn become the centerpiece of one of the more (temporarily) successful Save Our Show campaigns ever.

• This episode also has one of my favorite end title sequences of the series, though the question of whether Easy needed to be "rescued" by Patton seems more a matter of semantics than pride.

• We get more signs that "Foxhole" Norman Dike isn't up to commanding the company, particularly at this point in time. And between Harry Welsh's Christmas injury ("in a dell") and Buck Compton's increasing PTSD symptoms (check out how panicked he got by the singing), Easy is going to have a major leadership vacuum, which is the subject of "The Breaking Point." But we can talk about that sometime next week, likely on Monday.

Keeping in mind the who lives/dies thing, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 5: "Crossroads"

We're up to episode five of our look back at "Band of Brothers." Spoilers for the fifth episode, "Crossroads," coming up just as soon as I do my John Wayne impression...

"Band of Brothers," like "From the Earth to the Moon" before it, was a labor of love for Tom Hanks, and I imagine he could have had his pick of directing assignments for both series. In each case, though, he took one for the team, selecting a transitional episode that may have been necessary to the larger story, but that almost certainly wouldn't be remembered as one of the series' high points. With "FtEttM," it was the opener, "Can We Do This?," which gave all the backstory on NASA in the pre-Apollo days. Here, it's "Crossroads," which spans the period from the end of Easy's time in Holland -- and, more importantly, the end of Dick Winters' tenure as Easy's commander -- through Easy being deployed, undermanned and undersupplied, to the town of Bastogne for what will be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Now, that isn't to say these episodes lack memorable moments. "Can We Do This?" has a couple of great Mercury and Gemini recreations (I'm always fond of the Alan Shepard mission in particular), and "Crossroads" is bookended by two terrific sequences: Winters leading the charge on what would turn out to be his final combat mission with Easy, and the men of Easy trying to stock up on ammo from the shell-shocked troops retreating from the Ardennes.

But the middle section of the episode, while important, feels a little flat. Some of that may be by design -- trying to depict how bored and out-of-sorts Winters was once he got that promotion he didn't want -- but it means that "Crossroads" is lacking a vitality that's present throughout all the other episodes of the series, even the relatively low-key finale, "Points."

Still, that battle at the crossroads is pretty amazing, and illustrated just what an amazing leader -- not just a master tactician, but a guy willing to lead a charge rather than following one -- Easy lost after it. The image of Winters charging alone across the field, and then the men of Easy following in the thickening red smoke, is one of the series' most hauntingly beautiful.

After that, we deal with Winters' struggle to accept that he's now part of the Army bureaucracy, forced to do paperwork while Moose Heyliger gets to lead Easy on Operation Pegasus, then unable to do anything after Heyliger is wounded by friendly fire and replaced by "Foxhole" Norman Dike, who seems woefully unprepared for the challenges ahead.

The interlude in Paris, where Winters is more or less forced to go on a brief leave, is, I suppose, trying to depict Winters' difficulty in being even further removed from a combat context, and in trying to put away memories of killing when placed in a peaceful setting. But it goes on too long. Of all the actors/characters in the miniseries I'd have the least problem spending idle time with, it would be Damian Lewis as Winters, but watching him take a bath, ride the subway, etc., I couldn't help wishing we were instead seeing what was going on back at Mourmelon.

But after meandering for a while, we get the chilling closing scenes on the march to Bastogne, as Guarnere and the other men start to realize the kind of hell they're headed for. Michael Kamen's score has rarely been used as well as it is over that closing shot of the rolling convoy.

And if "Crossroads" is largely about set-up, at least it's setting up some amazing episodes.

Some other thoughts on "Crossroads":

• This episode gives us our first indication of the severity of Nixon's drinking problem -- and of Winters' refusal to indulge the side effects of it, even as he didn't object to the drinking itself. Winters really did dump a pitcher of Nixon's own urine on him to wake him up, though it's not clear in either real or TV case if he knew what was in the pitcher.

• The real Liebgott apparently had a reputation for being rough with prisoners -- as the only Jew in the company, I imagine he had a chip on his shoulder about the Germans, even if he didn't yet know the full extent of the Final Solution -- which is why Winters takes all but one of his bullets. (Oddly, that's how Andy Griffith always treated Barney Fife, but there he was never afraid of ol' Barney shooting the prisoners, just himself.)

• Pvt. Webster, who got wounded at the crossroads and will now disappear for several episodes, was an aspiring writer whose journal of his time in combat is one of the go-to sources for Ambrose's book. So it makes sense, and is amusing if you understand this detail, that he'd be annoyed with himself for uttering a cliche like "They got me!" after being shot.

• While Webster is gone, Buck Compton returns from the four-hole buttocks wound he got in "Replacements," but it's clear he's a changed, haunted man from his time in the hospital, and Neal McDonough does a hell of a job depicting the transformation from the cocky, outgoing Buck of the earlier episodes.

• I had completely forgotten the bit about Guarnere returning from a jeep accident. Feels like one of those situations where they had to cut the scene where he actually gets sidelined, but needed to keep in the return scene because of the other exposition in it.

• The movie the men are watching when they're ordered to Bastogne is "Seven Sinners," with John Wayne, and with Marlene Dietrich doing her usual butch cabaret thing.

• Thoughts on the Jimmy Fallon cameo? Maybe it's because I've recently warmed to his talk show, but I don't mind it that much. Yes, it's a little jarring to see a relatively recognizable, incongruous face in the middle of these men we've now started to believe as their characters, but it's a small part, and the overall troop transport scene is so well done that it's a relief to have anyone bringing these guys some ammo, even if it's the mumbly guy from "SNL."

Coming up next (probably Thursday): "Bastogne," maybe my favorite episode of the series, as we get a medic's-eye-view of the Battle of the Bulge.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 4: "Replacements"

Okay, we're up to episode four of "Band of Brothers." Spoilers for "Replacements" coming up just as soon as I remember to stop throwing left-handed...

In the initial run of "Band of Brothers," "Replacements" came in the middle of a trio of episodes I wasn't especially fond of. But where "Carentan" and, to a lesser extent, "Crossroads" suffer from problems I still see all these years later, my issue with "Replacements" turns out to have been largely about unfamiliarity with the characters. My recollection was that it might have been stronger had it been told primarily from the point of view of either a Toccoa veteran (presumably Bull Randleman) dealing with the replacements, or of a replacement (maybe Hashey?) in awe of these men who jumped into Normandy. But when I watched it this time, having a much stronger idea of who everybody was, I could just appreciate it as a strong ensemble episode that managed to tell both sides of that story while also giving a snapshot of Easy's role in the mess that was Operation Market Garden, the first time in the war that the 101st got its rear end kicked.

"Replacements" is another episode filled with spectacle, from the gorgeous daytime jump into Holland through the impromptu parade through the tank battle between the Brits and Germans. (And the battle alone has a bunch of amazing technical beats, notably Bull trying to crawl away from the fiery tank, in a scene evoking Harrison Ford's getaway in "The Fugitive," but constructed by director David Nutter more like a Spielberg set piece, in the way it seems to be taking forever for the damn thing to slide down the hill.)

But some of the best things about it are the small moments, like Guarnere baiting the replacements into mocking Bull so he can scold them for it, or Bull showing Garcia how to carry his gun on the jump, and looking very much like a father showing his son how to tie a necktie. For the biggest guy in the cast, playing a character known as Bull, Michael Cudlitz delivers a very economical performance in his biggest spotlight of the series. And even the moments that seem like they have to have been invented, like Nixon surviving the headshot because of his helmet, or Bull having the bayonet fight with the German in the barn, turn up right there in the pages of the Ambrose book. (Though Ambrose makes no mention of Bull hiding out with a Dutch farmer and his attractive but frightened daughter.)

The tension between the Toccoa men and the replacements will be an issue for the rest of the series, and I liked the way it was handled here. Some replacements are absorbed quickly into the orbit of the veterans, like Babe Heffron (who shares a Philly background with Guarnere); some will slowly assimilate themselves, like Hashey; and some won't survive long enough to fit in, like Miller. For those of you watching the series for the first time, get used to the influx of new faces, particularly once we approach the Battle of the Bulge episodes.

Some other thoughts:

• Who do you think has the most inverse ratio of "Band of Brothers" screen time to current fame: Simon Pegg (blink and you'll miss him in the first couple of episodes as Easy's original 1st Sergeant), or James McAvoy, who has a scene or two at the start of this one as Private Miller, before dying of a grenade during the firefight?

• Two notes about Buck Compton in this episode. The first is that, despite Winters' admonishment against gambling with the men back in "Currahee," Buck opens the episode hustling (with the help of the ever-hilarious George Luz) poor Heffron at darts. The second is that the bit with Malarkey and the others dragging Buck away from the attack on a door because he was too heavy to carry is undercut, just a little, by the fact that Neal McDonough doesn't look nearly like the biggest man in Easy Company, which the real Buck (who played on the UCLA baseball team with Jackie Robinson) was. McDonough is so wonderful in every other aspect of the role that I don't want to ding him much for this, but the gag works much better if the actor were built more like Michael Cudlitz, who's taller and broader than McDonough.

• "Replacements" also features the first appearance of Eion Bailey as Harvard-educated PFC David Webster (for you newbies, he's the guy who gives the chocolate to the little boy). The first time through the series, Webster's role confused me -- here, he's new and seems like he could be a replacement, while a later episode will make a big deal out of Webster having been at Camp Toccoa -- and I wished they could have found a way to include Bailey somewhere in "Currahee." But in re-reading Ambrose's book, it turned out that while Webster was at Toccoa, it was with another company, and he didn't technically transfer into Easy until after they were pulled off the line and sent back to England (the period depicted at the tail end of "Carentan" and the start of this episode). Given the number of other characters who had to be introduced, I'm not sure what could have been done differently.

• Cobb, the soldier who gives Miller a hard time for wearing the Normandy pin, gets a bit of a raw deal in the miniseries based on my reading of the book. Both here and in "The Last Patrol," he's depicted as a bit of a bully, and a cowardly one at that. While Ambrose does write about Cobb's moment of fear depicted here, it was after the firefight, not during it, and Cobb was a veteran Army man whom Webster described as "invariably good-natured."

• If you want a better sense of the scope of Market Garden, and the many ways in which it became FUBAR, try to track down a copy of the DVD of "A Bridge Too Far," Richard Attenborough's 1977 movie about the mission. It's not a great movie, but it has one of the most absurdly star-studded casts ever, particularly given where all these men were in the careers at the time: Michael Caine, Sean Connery, James Caan, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Maximillian Schell, etc.

Coming up next (probably on Monday): The Tom Hanks-directed "Crossroads," another Dick Winters spotlight.

Keeping in mind once again that, for the sake of the newbies, we're trying to be as vague as possible (which isn't always possible) about who lives and who dies, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 3: "Carentan"

The On Demand run of "Band of Brothers ended over the weekend, so hopefully everybody either watched it or has the DVDs as we continue to revisit this great series. Spoilers for the third episode, "Carentan," coming up just as soon as I get another Purple Heart...

"Carentan" was my least favorite episode when I initially watched the series eight years ago, and although this viewing offered up some redeeming features, it remains the low point, in my mind.

I've said before, and will talk more about this when we get to "Bastogne," that the miniseries took a significant leap forward when it started doing more POV-centric storytelling. Well, "Carentan" is largely told from Albert Blithe's point of view, but in this case, it doesn't work for two reasons: 1)Because it isn't told from his point of view enough, and 2)Because he's a very poorly-drawn, and played, character.

Let's take the second point first. I've liked Marc Warren in other projects that have crossed the pond ("Hustle," his episode of "Doctor Who"), but he's terrible here. He struggles mightily with the American accent and, like a number of other Brit-as-American performances of recent vintage (see Michelle Ryan in "Bionic Woman"), he's so distracted by the issue that he fails to give much of a performance beyond that. He's whispering half the time, as if that might better hide his inflections, and he significantly overplays Blithe's moments of terror during the battle scenes. It feels like he was cast largely because of his piercing blue eyes, which always tend to look haunted, rather than anything he brought to the role.

And, unfortunately, the role itself is really undercooked. It feels like the "Band of Brothers" producers (and, specifically, writer E. Max Frye) wanted to do an episode about the way fear can paralyze men in combat, and they chose to center it on Blithe, who receives only two mentions in Stephen Ambrose's book: first when Winters cures him of the hysterical blindness, second when he suffers the wound that would eventually take his life. And because Blithe died so young(*), and was apparently not close to the Easy men who survived the war and the decades after, there's not much other color to him, and the script fails to add any. He's not a person so much as he is an archetype, and a fairly thin one at that. To bring it back to the inevitable "Saving Private Ryan" comparison, "Carentan" is an entire hour of Corporal Upham cowering outside the room where Melish is fighting for his life, only without the characterization that Upham had gotten to that point.

(*) Or not; check the comments for evidence of what appears to be the largest screw-up in the book and miniseries.

And yet, I still think it might have worked if the entire episode had done nothing but follow Blithe. Doc Roe, the main character of "Bastogne," is just as minor a character in both the book and the miniseries, but Shane Taylor is given a bit more meat to play as Roe, and simply showing the battlefield through his eyes (with one or two exceptions) makes a big difference in terms of the intensity of the experience. Here, sometimes we're with Blithe, and sometimes we're just in the middle of the chaos in and around Carentan following other soldiers. And after Blithe is wounded and sent to the hospital, the episode goes on for another 10 minutes or so, just to set up things for the next episode with the arrival of the replacements. The final scene with Malarkey picking up the laundry for all the men of Easy who fell since D-Day is an affecting, unusual way to tell that particular emotional beat, but even with Blithe's clothes in with the pile, it doesn't really feel like it's of a piece with the rest of the episode.

All that being said, watching "Carentan" now with a better understanding of who everybody is, there are a number of scenes that stood out far better than they did in '01. The two major combat scenes aren't always easy to follow in terms of who's where, but the sheer spectacle of them, and small moments within them, are amazing. I love the bit in the first battle (inside the city) where Liebgott pauses to tenderly comfort the soldier who was so badly wounded by the grenade, and the fight scene in the hedgerows has that wonderful sequence where the normally-reserved Winters has to use his force of will to urge one man after another (including Blithe) to get the hell out of his foxhole and start shooting back.

But "Carentan" remains the one episode I'm likely to skip if I ever choose to re-watch the series again (with no blogging obligation) down the line.

A few other thoughts:

• I did like the one scene Blithe (the man overpowered by his fear) shares with Speirs (the man seemingly without fear), which features one of my favorite quotes from the miniseries: "The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse."

• This episode introduces a nice running thread about Harry Welsh's attempt to hold onto his reserve chute so his wife can use it to make a wedding dress. It also offers up a rare tough side to the usually genial Welsh, who seems to suspect Blithe's cowardice more than the others, and treats him suspiciously as a result.

• Ambrose's book says that the words to "The Night of the Bayonet" were lost to history, so either Frye came up with a new poem on his own, or one of the men somehow remembered them after the book came out.

• I haven't yet mentioned Michael Kamen's score, and since it's one of the best things in an episode I otherwise don't like very much, now seems as good a time as any. What I love about the "Band of Brothers" music -- both the theme song and the score used throughout -- is how counter-intuitive it is. Instead of going with bombast because of the scope of the story and all the pyrotechnics within, Kamen instead keeps things spare, sticking mainly with strings, and the theme song itself might as well be a waltz. Chokes me up damn near every time.

Keeping in mind, once again, that we're trying to be vague about who lives and who dies for the benefit of the people watching for the first time, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 2: "Day of Days"

Trying to move as quickly as possible through this project, it's time to look back at episode two of "Band of Brothers." Spoilers coming up just as soon as I offer you some cigarettes...

Just as "From the Earth to the Moon" (which I'll get around to blogging one of these years; I know the damn thing by heart now) was an attempt to expand the historical world shown in "Apollo 13," "Band of Brothers" was designed to go deeper into World War II than the largely fictional "Saving Private Ryan" could. Never is the stylistic debt of gratitude more obvious than in "Day of Days," which opens with the paratrooper's-eye-view take of D-Day, and climaxes with the raid on the guns at Brecourt Manor, shot in the same grainy, kinetic, you-are-there style of all the "Private Ryan" combat set pieces. The technical achievements of "Band of Brothers" are amazing throughout, but I still get particularly big chills watching the CGI-enhanced tracking shot of Winters jumping out of his plane as the flak flies all around him, floating serenely (as only Damian Lewis-as-Dick Winters can) through all the flak and explosions and carnage around him and landing on the fields of Normandy.

Yet for all the amazing effects and photography and sound design, "Day of Days" wouldn't work as well as it does if it didn't continue to stick with Winters once he hits the ground. There are a few scenes he's not present for (the destruction of Lt. Meehan's plane, the business with Malarkey and the German prisoner and Speirs), but he's at the center of most of the action, and puts a human face on all the mayhem -- even if it's an amazingly calm face.

My three favorite characters from this miniseries are Winters (so perfect, and yet never dull for being perfect), Guarnere (Frank John Hughes' performance feels closest to an actual '40s war movie character without ever lapsing into caricature) and Speirs (terrifying and cool and larger-than-life), and so an episode that features the first two at odds while giving the third such a memorable introduction was always going to occupy a special place in my heart.

The tension between Guarnere (who just lost his brother, and is reluctant to trust officers besides) and Winters (who doesn't want to be in charge of Easy Company under these circumstances) gives the scenes an added crackle, yet it doesn't feel like some kind of pat Hollywood moment to have them nod approval at each other at the end. Having been through that assault on the guns together, how could they not have greater respect for each other?

This episode establishes a couple of trends for Easy Company. First is that the men who got non-fatal wounds tended to be shot in the ass, as happens to Popeye Wynn during the assault at Brecourt Manor. Second is that, no matter how FUBAR the mission plan may turn out to be -- for example, when everyone loses their leg bag, Easy Company loses its commander, and they have to perform the assault with only a dozen or so men instead of the full company -- these guys somehow managed to get it done.

As for Speirs, the cigarette incident is going to be debated over and over throughout the miniseries without ever giving a clear explanation of what happened -- because, of course, Speirs didn't want anybody to know. (We'll talk more about this down the line, obviously.) I had forgotten how ambiguously the episode staged the scene; my memory was that Malarkey was a lot closer and actually saw something, as opposed to turning at the sound of the shots but being too far to be an actual witness. It works wonderfully, particularly the expression on Scott Grimes' face, and then after we're introduced to Speirs as this potential war criminal, he comes in to almost single-handedly (and, yes, recklessly) kick ass on the final gun at Brecourt.

"Day of Days" isn't a perfect episode. Damian Lewis randomly starts narrating the final scenes to provide some exposition that I guess they couldn't include any other way (maybe a scene got cut for time?), and even all these years later with a pretty good handle on who the prominent people in Easy are, I still get lost for chunks of the assault at Brecourt, particularly on the roles of Lorraine (Col. Sink's driver, who would be one of three men on the assault -- along with Guarnere and Buck Compton -- to get the Silver Star) versus Hall (the guy from A Company whose chute landed next to Winters' during the night drop, and who was the only casualty under Winters' command).

But the parts of it that work... wow. After all these years, still wow.

A few other thoughts:

• As I mentioned in my "Currahee" review, it gets confusing that Malarkey is established as being obsessed with bringing home a Luger (and even risking getting shot by the Germans to do it) one episode after they set up Hoobler with the same identifying trait, but I imagine plenty of soldiers were intent on getting that souvenir, and it pays off in "The Breaking Point."

• There are a couple of great Truth Is Cooler Than Fiction moments during the Brecourt assault: the soldier getting shot because he got lost on the way to headquarters (Wikipedia ID's him as Warrant Officer Andrew Hill) and Joe Toye twice surviving point blank grenade explosions without a scratch.

Coming up next (at a date/time TBD): "Carentan," easily my least favorite episode then and now, albeit one that has more redeeming elements on second view.

Keeping in mind again that we're trying to be vague about future developments (specifically about who lives and dies) for the sake of those watching for the first time, what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Band of Brothers rewind, episode 1: "Currahee"

As discussed last week, we're going to revisit, in relatively short order, all 10 episodes of HBO's landmark World War II miniseries, "Band of Brothers." I know some of you have seen it a million times, and some of you are watching it for the first time, so I'm going to do my best to be vague about what's coming (specifically about who's going to live and who's going to die), and I'd ask you to do the same, but there are some things we may not be able to avoid. (Hint: the Allies won the war.) Spoilers for the first episode coming up just as soon as I enjoy a nice spaghetti lunch...

As much as I enjoyed "Band of Brothers" back in 2001, it's a much better project to re-watch than it is to watch the first time, I think. The cast is so huge, so made up with similar looking skinny white guys with dark hair -- most of whom, at the time, were unknowns -- wearing identical uniforms, grime on their faces and helmets on their heads, that it was a real bear to keep track of who was who, particularly in an early episode like "Currahee."

Other than Captain Sobel (David Schwimmer), who's the villain of the episode and played by the most famous actor in the cast, and Lt. Winters (Damian Lewis), who's the hero, most of the characters who stand out in the early going do so either because they've been assigned an obvious character trait -- Lewis Nixon (Ron Livingston) is Winters' best friend, Bill Guarnere (Frank John Hughes) is cocky and loud, Joe Toye (Kirk Acevedo) fights dirty, George Luz (Rick Gomez) does impressions, Joe Liebgott (Ross McCall) is Jewish -- or because they're a physical outlier -- Buck Compton (Neal McDonough) has that so-blonde-it's-white hair, Bull Randleman (Michael Cudlitz) is a giant, Frank Perconte (James Madio) a shrimp. (Winters, as both the main character and a tall guy with red hair, has the best of both worlds.)

But now, having seen the miniseries a few times -- and having started this particular re-watch out of order -- it's not nearly as hard to tell who's who. When Hoobler (Peter McCabe) mentions an interest in bringing back a Luger, I remembered him as the Luger guy. (Though even that gets confusing, since the next episode features another character also obsessed with bringing one back.) A later episode will talk about the close friendship between Malarkey (Scott Grimes) and Skip Muck (Richard Speight Jr.), and here I could see them hanging out together.

And with that confusion out of the way, it becomes easier to pay attention to the details of the story that Tom Hanks and company are telling, adapted from Stephen Ambrose's book about the real-life Easy Company, following them all the way from training through the end of the war in Europe. (Easy makes an ideal stand-in for all of the many outstanding companies in the European theater, simply because they were on the line for so many significant battles, and enough key men made it from the beginning of the war to the end.)

In "Currahee," for instance, I wasn't wasting time trying to decipher the sequence where Guarnere finds himself accidentally wearing a coat belonging to Johnny Martin (Dexter Fletcher) that contains the letter about Guarnere's brother; I understood who both of them were in relationship to each other, and could just watch Guarnere's family tragedy unfold.

Even back in 2001, "Currahee" was probably the easiest to follow of all the early episodes(*), with the clear conflict between the men of Easy and their original commanding officer, Herbert Sobel.

(*) The miniseries shifted to more of a point-of-view structure in its second half, and I think those episodes were the stronger for it. But we'll deal with that when we get to "Bastogne."

I've always felt that "Band of Brothers" piles on Sobel a little too much. I understand that the story is told from the perspective of the men of Easy, and those men didn't like Sobel. And it's entirely possible that they were right to dislike him, and even to distrust him as a combat leader. But there's also no denying that Easy turned out to be one of the finest companies in the 506th, and, as even Colonel Sink (Dale Dye, who doubled as the technical advisor for the miniseries) puts it -- right before reliving Sobel of command and re-assigning him to the jump school -- a lot of the company's success has to owe to Sobel. Now, some of that may have been the men working harder just to spite Sobel, and the Charlie O. Finley approach may not have been Sobel's intention -- as played by Schwimmer, he seems bewildered and even frustrated when the men start to sing as they climb Currahee, rather than listen to more of his taunts -- but an elite unit was created at Toccoa, and Sobel played some kind of role in that. And while I think Schwimmer is great in the role, I can't help but feel like casting him is just more stacking the deck: Of course this guy's a jackass who has no business in command! He's played by Ross from "Friends"! I'm not saying Sobel was a misunderstood genius, a humanitarian who took in stray cats and was fun at parties -- just that the book(**) and miniseries seem to go out of their way to demonize a guy who seems to have made a legitimate contribution to Easy Company's success.

(**) The miniseries still goes easier on Sobel than Stephen Ambrose did. Here, for instance, is Ambrose's physical description of Sobel: "The C.O. was fairly tall, slim in build, with a full head of black hair. His eyes were slits, his nose large and hooked. His face was long and his chin receded. He had been a clothing salesman and knew nothing out of the out-of-doors. He was ungainly, uncoordinated, in no way an athlete. Every man in the company was in better physical condition. His mannerisms were 'funny,' he 'talked different.' He exuded arrogance."

All that said, the scenes of the men slowly coming together, even if just to get back at the martinet giving them orders, are wonderful, as is Damian Lewis' performance as Winters. The brilliance of Lewis in this is that he finds a way to make the ordinary aspects of Dick Winters seem extraordinary, rather than trying to play him as an overtly extraordinary man. He's not a superhero, he doesn't give rah-rah speeches or lose his temper or in other ways act larger-than-life; he's just a regular guy who turned out to be ideally suited to irregular circumstances, and Lewis embraces that aspect of the character. Just watch how quietly and simply Lewis plays the scene where Sobel tries to get Winters to accept his assigned punishment rather than face a court-martial. There's never any doubt that Winters is going to take this all the way if he has to, and yet there aren't any theatrics about it; he's just sure of the rightness of his position, and of his ability to prevail over Sobel, and he's going to see this thing through.

I especially love the way Lewis plays the scene at the end where Winters helps each of his men to their feet as they get ready to board the plane for their mission over Normandy. This idea that the men were so weighed down by their gear that they had to lie on the tarmac, one on top of the other, and be pulled up -- like a kid being helped off the grass by his father -- is one of the series' many "truth is more interesting/moving than fiction" moments, and the serene, paternal look on Lewis' face is just beautiful. Sobel's contribution to the success of Easy Company is clearly in question, while Winters' was not, and a moment like that, and the way the men look back at Winters, makes it clear as to why.

Some other thoughts on "Currahee":

• God, everybody looks so young -- not only compared to eight years later in the real world, but compared to how the survivors will look by the end of the miniseries. There's a scene in the final episode where two of the survivors study a photo of themselves back at Toccoa, and it's startling how youthful and innocent they seem in the picture. Way back in the day, I asked one of the two actors from that scene (hint: he's the one with the dark hair) about the physical transformation he underwent, and he extolled the virtues of the makeup department for a while. I think it also speaks to the uniform quality of the performances, though, that everyone could seem so convincingly boyish here, and not at all down the line.

• Lewis obviously went on to other things (notably "Life"), as did a lot of the other significant castmembers (McDonough and Donnie Wahlberg segued immediately from this to "Boomtown," created by "Band of Brothers" writer Graham Yost), but it's also fun to see people I had either forgotten were in the miniseries, or wouldn't have recognized at the time. That's Jason O'Mara, for instance, as Sobel's replacement, Lt. Meehan, and Simon Pegg pops up as the guy giving Winters the court-martial from Sobel.

• Speaking of Pegg, and Lewis, because the miniseries was filmed in England, a decent amount of the cast is made up of British actors trying, with various degrees of success, to master an American accent. Lewis is obviously the best at this, and Marc Warren (as Pvt. Blithe, who's in the background of a few scenes here and will play a larger role in episode three) is the worst, but the others are all along the continuum. Dexter Fletcher's accent, for instance, tends to come and go.

• Schwimmer has fun with the scene where Sobel revokes each man's weekend pass, one by one, but no scene like that can compare to Gunnery Sgt. Hartman's intro in "Full Metal Jacket." (Language is NSFW.)

Coming up next (at a date and time TBD): "Day of Days," in which the invasion doesn't go exactly according to plan for Easy Company.

Again, keeping in mind that we're going to try to avoid discussing who lives and who dies (and when), what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The plan for 'Band of Brothers'

"Alright, I want mortars and grenade launchers on that building till it's gone. When it's gone I want 1st to go straight in. Forget going around. Everybody else, follow me."

If you know the context of that quote from "Band of Brothers," then you should be psyched when I start reviewing the miniseries next week. And if not, then you have much to discover and enjoy. A quick explanation of how it's going to work coming up just as soon as I find some Vat 69...

After everybody pledged to read and comment, I sat down and thought about how I was going to do this, given several factors: 1)For the people without the DVDs, the episodes are only up On Demand until June 8, 2)I've been watching the episodes while exercising and therefore haven't taken notes, 3)I have all my thoughts on the episodes rattling around in my head now and want to get to discussing it already, and 4)Even though it's summer, my schedule is already pretty swamped as it is with summer shows, plus "The Wire" and "Sports Night," plus the usual Star-Ledger obligations.

So here's the deal: on Monday, I'm going to post some thoughts on "Curahee," and then I'm going to keep doing these write-ups as quickly as I can over the next few weeks, whenever I have some free time in my day to do so. These won't be remotely as long or as detail-oriented as the "Wire" reviews, nor will I be recapping the plots like I did with "Freaks and Geeks." Just whatever thoughts I happen to have on each episode, followed by an opportunity for you to discuss it. (And if you don't hold up your end, you'll get the Sobel treatment.) In an ideal world where I had unlimited free time, I'd do this more in-depth for posterity's sake, but this is what I can do now.

Also, while I do these separate newbie/veteran versions of the "Wire" reviews, in the interest of keeping things simple here, it's gonna be one version per episode. I'll be as vague as I can about what's coming, but I can't not discuss anything that's to come, and I imagine you guys -- most of whom seem to have seen the miniseries already -- will have a difficult time as well. We'll do our best to not include major spoilers, like that time Guarnere kidnapped Ava Braun... ooops. Shouldn't have said that. But if I say something like, "This episode sets up Hubler's interest in finding a Luger, which will be a running element," or "this guy now doesn't appear for a few episodes," I think that's fair game, under the circumstances.

So, see you on Monday for this one. Click here to read the full post

We may now interrupt your regularly scheduled summer programming

So while I've been busy getting all excited about season 2 of "The Wire" and starting with "Sports Night," I've been taking advantage of the post-season lull to dive back into "Band of Brothers." History Channel did a Memorial Day marathon, and HBO has been featuring the episodes On Demand, plus I have the DVDs, so it's been easy (and a good motivational tool for when I need to ride the exer-cycle). I started out watching them for fun, but as I go through the episodes, I keep thinking to myself, "Boy, I wish I had a blog back when this aired." And I'm kinda thinking I want to add it to the summer rotation

But the episodes are only up On Demand until June 8, and since the DVDs are both less available and more expensive than the ones for "The Wire" or "Sports Night," we kind of have a week and a half to do this where the episodes are available to as wide a group as possible. And I don't have time to do 10 episodes in 10 days or so, even if I'm being briefer than I'd be on "The Wire." (And I would be briefer. Like I said, I'm riding the bike while watching these, so no notes are being taken, and I'd only do this for fun.)

So here's my question: how many people either have the DVDs available, or remember the miniseries well enough, or would be willing/able to watch 'em On Demand now and wait for the reviews when they come to discuss them, to make it worth whatever time I'd be spending on it?

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Okay, response has been overwhelming enough that I'm gonna do it. Not sure of the schedule, or format, but look for something early next week. Click here to read the full post