If you can’t see the video for one reason or another, I’ll leave the following abridged transcript and screenshots.

Chinny: “You know what I always say? You know what I always say? Follow your dream, follow your dream.”

Chinny: “So the other day, by Boy comes over. And you know what I say to him? You know what I say? I say, are you just going to stand there picking your nose all day? And do you know what he says? He says-”

Chinny Jr: “Yeah dad, I’m just going to stand here picking my nose all day…”

How would you react if you were Chinny? What career tips do you have for Generations X, Y and Z?

Well, Professor Chinny McGringo knew exactly what he wanted to say, and if you watch this video, Professor McGringo may be able to help you too.

John Lawson claims to have the funniest clowns in Britain, and that may be true. Rather than relying on old stock jokes and cheap shots, Kakehole and Popol are masters of comedic timing, storytelling, and involving the audience in the situation.

The only downside of the circus is that it’s so small.

If you’re looking for men running on broken glass or other deadly freak shows, look elsewhere.

Apart from a short knife-throwing skit, there’s no danger for danger’s sake. Instead, the acrobats rely on their strength, skill, and tightly scripted acts to entertain.

The average audience member is probably not as strong as Angelo, a 20-year-old, sixth-generation circus performer who can do all kinds of tricks on the ropes that would make the average Olympian blush.
They probably can’t do all the flips on the trampoline that they see Gabriella or her Deltai troupe perform.

Yet one never gets the feeling that anyone in John Lawson’s circus is showing off.  The cast are there to entertain, and they do it well. Whether in character or when being themselves, each performer plays to the delight of the audience.  (And they seem to enjoy it as much as we do.)

Standard snacks like cotton candy are for sale alongside circus equipment, and you can even get your face painted by Kakehole the clown.

One word of warning, don’t go dressed in your Sunday Best. The clowns get messy in the ring, and seats in a small circus tent are always close to the action.

Audience participation is all part of the fun at John Lawson’s circus.  So be prepared to get wet and have a great time.

So, what happened since June?

It’s true that the men beheaded were involved in an insurrection.  They were labeled “men of violent and intractable character.”* However, Napoleon was coming from the land of revolution, his stated aim was bring the revolution, to bring liberty, equality, and fraternity to Egypt. 

On the 30th day of June, 1798, Napoleon landed just outside of Alexandria to bring civilisation back to its cradle.  In a few years, Monsieur Bonaparte would be remembered as the man who brought tyranny of the Mamelukes to Spain.

Why did Napoleon Bonaparte change?  Did Egypt give him a taste of reality, or a thirst for power?  Or, was the world changing around Napoleon? 

And what really happened in Cairo?

An interesting and entertaining account is given in Paul Strathern’s Napoleon in Egypt.  Does Strathern have the answer?

[to be continued.]

* the English translation of Napoleon’s words here are taken from Stratham’s book.

However, if you’re as cynical as I am about government and modern society, you’ll laugh out loud no matter how many kids you’ve got.

Woody Allen is more neurotic than usual in this time traveling epic.  Some of the details of his comments on modern society may be lost on those who have forgotten recent history, but it still holds true today.

Woody Allen has awoken two hundred years into the future, when has discovered that cholesterol is good for you, that you can get immense pleasure from holding yoga balls, and when the incompetent government tries to know everything about everybody.

Woody Allen’s character clearly doesn’t understand his own time, and yet people look up to him as some kind of sage, just because he lived in the past.

Yet when he finally does gain an insight into how the world works, he has trouble getting other people to listen.

Sleeper succeeds where movies like Idiocracy have failed.  It pokes fun at our increasing dependence on government, technology, and leadership, and the widespread ignorance that this dependence appears to produce.   At the same time, it doesn’t insult its audience by pretending to be smarter than the people watching it.

Just don’t laugh too loud, or the kids might come back in the room.

Sleeper [DVD]

“The word Palestinian conjures up images of a brutal armed gunman or a terrorist with no morality or regard for human life.”

So says Nida Shoughry in “Dehumanizing the enemy in war covereage: Palestinians through the Israeli lens.”

Though the events at Jenin are less than a decade old, the research presented in Shoughry’s book shows the affects of digital indexing on historical research.

The book, about as long as an average masters thesis (or even a long undergraduate dissertation), analyzes six news articles from one Israeli newspaper to claim that the press in Israel dehumanizes Palestinians.

With such a limited scope, it is easy to dismiss Shoughry’s essay as a piece of propaganda.

Historical references are scarce.

Shoughry mentions the fact that news was censored under the British mandate, or the time between World War I and when Israel was granted independence in 1947.  Shoughry claims that this this censorship has now been applied by the Israeli military to its press.  However, Shoughry mentions that self censorship is probably stronger than any state censorship, as the average Israeli journalist feels a patriotic bias as the result of an ongoing state of war.

Shoughry establishes the age of Haaretz, the newspaper that is the subject of this study.

Shoughry also mentions that the German propaganda of the second world war dehumanized Jews, as well as mentioning dehumanization of “American Indians” (her quotes).

Shoughry mentions other books in her literature review, implying that the historically relevant background of other dehumanizing cases are sufficiently covered in the books in her bibliography.

Shoughry’s references also supply the criteria she uses for dehumanizing.  These include turning people into statistics and stereotypes instead of individuals with names, using jargon and metaphorical language, and using an otherwise biased form of language in reporting people, places and events.

The six articles Shoughry does examine do give evidence of meeting the cited criteria for “dehumanizing the enemy.”  Palestinians (apart from “wanteds”, or terrorists) are not given personal names, while Israeli soldiers are.  The work of the newspaper is indeed ethnocentric, and the terminology used is indeed the kind of jargon you’d expect from an enemy’s perspective on the battlefield.

Other evidence Shoughry presents as dehumanizing include relative article size and number of different points of view, variations in font size, photographs (or lack of them), the lack of any interviewed Palestinian sources, and the non-standard use of photo captions.  Palestinian casualties are reduced to faceless numbers, and all destruction in the articles is blamed on Palestinians.

Historical Comparison: Shoughry’s work in context

Reading historical sources from the age of Revolution and the Napoleonic war, I’ve found some of the same kind of distortions elsewhere, but not all of these are intentional.

The names of casualties of other nationalities can not always be known, and so can not alway be given.

The reason this information was not historically known was not normally from any intentional effort to dehumanize the enemy.  The fact is, the adversary did not readily supply his name in a fight.

When a ship was captured, for instance, a captain usually destroyed the ship’s records.  Sailors, civilians and soldiers would often refuse to give their names or status in order to prevent extortionate ransom demands.

Captains would be recognized, and their names would probably be recorded, but ordinary sailors and soldiers would not be easily identifiable by anyone other than their own countrymen.

As time goes on, the available records for the Napoleonic period become more complete.  Books in English covered more details about French soldiers as time went on, and books in French about English soldiers.  Italian and Egyption points of view have also been translated and scholars from all participating nationalities have expanded our outlook.

The same could be said for any conflict.  Though the time lapse was far greater then, we still have an easier time finding the point of view of people who are like us than people unlike us.

Other considerations for future essays

It would have been interesting if the author considered the fact that, due to circumstances, it was probably easier for the journalists to gather information from Israeli sources than from Palestinian ones.

Though Palestinians on the scene could easily be asked “what is your name” (assuming no linguistic barriers existed between journalist and subject), official records probably allowed the Haaretz journalists to double check personal information with Israeli sources more quickly than with the Palestinians.

This book is also filled with spelling and grammatical mistakes that were strikingly obvious.  There were incomplete sentences, and some of the author’s thoughts were also incomplete.  It appears that this master’s thesis had not been marked yet at the time of publication.

Six articles (and the photographs around them) from one news source could hardly be said to be representative, but Shoughry does make the case that Haaretz did not meet the ideal standards of good journalism when it covered Jenin in 2002.  She also cited sources that made the case that Haaretz was a good paper to analyse.

However, considering the detail Shoughry went into, there wasn’t room for much more than six articles in that short essay.  She would have to expand it.

I hope Shoughry will make a follow up book that examines the same biases, or lack of them, in the contemporary Arab media towards Israelis, or in the historical British media towards both Jewish and Arab inhabitants during the Palestine mandate.

Shoughry could also examine whether current and historical French, American, Turkish, South African or British media portrays Palestinians in a different way, and if so how.

Shoughry could examine the whole newspaper, including lifestyle sections, and not just limit herself to “war coverage.”  For instance, this story on the US aid website is not about the conflict, and it portrays Salam Fayad in a positive light.  Similar stories may be available through the Israeli press.

Conclusion

Shoughry misses a lot by limiting her research to articles that came up in a search engine for one search term.

One of the benefits of reading this essay is that it shows that there are limitations to how a computer can aid in research.

Limiting study to a limited number of articles can speed things up, but the result is that context is lost.  Complete pictures can not be covered through key word searches.  Just as the author shows how images like photographs frame a situation, and how this framing leaves things out, Internet searches and limited word counts also “frame” our perception.

However, Shoughry’s aim is stated clearly in her title.  Shoughry isn’t the jury who considers all opinions to see who is right, but she is more like the plaintiff who is making the opening arguments in a case.  It is up to other academics to confirm or disprove what Shoughry says here, to do further research that supports or refutes her hypothesis.

Shoughry’s research may be limited, and she acknowledges in her conclusion that her background makes it difficult to be completely objective, but her attention to detail and her passion make for an interesting read.

Dehumanizing the Enemy in War Coverage: Palestinians through the Israeli Lens

Notes:

(As far as blame goes, things aren’t always clear cut.  In 18th and 19th century warfare, combattants could err on the side of exagerration in the damage that they did to others.  The adversary, rather than being blamed for attacking his own people, is often not even credited for the attacks he did make.  Even today, many people would rather hide details on their own country’s war deaths, alleging that this kind of information leads to lowered morale and encourages public opposition to wars.)

(I have consciously chosen the word adversary above instead of enemy.  Adversaries could quickly be turned into allies, and leaders like Napoleon made a conscience effort to ensure that their troops respected conquered people as equals.  This may not have always worked, but it was more effective a propaganda weapon than dehumanization.)

Reginald C. Stuart may present Thomas Jefferson as an idealistic dreamer who is out of touch with human nature, an “Anglophobe” and even a “fatherly” despot, but one gets the feeling that Stuart likes Jefferson despite everything.

Thomas Jefferson

This book, and the bias therein, reveals why the Tea Party is particularly irksome to Canadians.  America’s founding Deist belonged to a party that wanted to “attack Canada” before the country to the North existed.

That “Jefferson hated the English” has become a kind of truism in British writing.  While the rest of the world was joining with either Napoleonic France or Georgian Britain, Americans wanted to stay out of war.  It was thousands miles away, and both sides were engaged in senseless slaughter.

Stuart, recognises this, but still accused Jefferson of being anti-English.  He appears to be convinced that it was Napoleon who introduced total war to the world, and broke the conventions of limited warfare.  Stranger still, Stuart seems to blame Napoleon for somehow forcing the British to take the same position and somehow forcing Britain to attack neutrals half way across the world.

Nelson’s massacre of civilians in his bombardment of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was not caused by Napoleon.  Sure, many of those massacred had sympathized with revolutionary ideals, but their deaths were an unnecessary slaughter.

The impressment of American sailors was also unnecessary.  A modern day equivalent would be like kidnapping Filipino or Panamanian citizens off of fishing vessels and forcing them to fight in Iraq.  Britain impressment’s policy was inexcusable.

Stuart does, in his final pages, acknowledge some British high handedness in the affair.

Yet Stuart blames most of Jefferson’s legitimate anger at the British military on American Indians.  In both with the Henry Hamilton affair and with the continuation of the War of 1812 after the discontinuation of official impressment, Stuart mentions Indians and puts no blame on English combattants.

Despite its Canadian bias, the book does try to be even handed.  Almost everything that Jefferson does which doesn’t attack Canada or its interests is seen as a good thing.

Regarding a treaty that would have been beneficial to Britain, Stuart seems to think that the President does not have the authority to reject treaties.

Well, the executive makes treaties.  If the president appoints someone, that individual is part of the President’s executive branch, and indeed a representative of the President.  If what that representative does is not part of the President’s policy, it will be rejected before going to congress.  Congress has the power to ratify treaties, and thus to reject them, but the President does not have to agree to treaties that he feels are harmful.

The treaty that Jefferson rejected, of course, is one that would have been beneficial to the British empire.

One suspects that these errors are made because Stuart is looking through Canadian eyes.  The Canadian constitutional monarchy is different than America’s constitutional presidency, which Stuart no doubt realizes.  He doesn’t seem to fully appreciate though that Presidential appointees are not like cabinet members in a parliamentary system, and that the American president is not a prime minister.

Another flaw includes the 1801-1805 war of the Barbary pirates.  Although Stuart has studied Jefferson’s reasoning for the war in detail, and rightly points to Jefferson’s related policy against Algiers in the preceding decade, he doesn’t seem to understand why the war finished when and how it did.

Stuart credits the bombardment of Tripoli with the outcome of the war, but that would be incorrect.  Both Sweden and Denmark bombarded Tripoli, but both continued to pay tribute afterwards.

America’s success was largely due to Decatur’s daring destruction of the Philadelphia, and the ransom paid was largely due to an error made during the blockade that made that destruction necessary.  Another part of the success is often attributed to William Eaton’s attempted invasion with Libyan and Egyptian allies, including the “rightful pasha” of Tripoli.  Additional naval operations, also contributed.

The joint European bombardments of later years were very different affairs.

It’s possible to see, as the war in Tripoli did not concern Canada, that Stuart may not be interested in the details.  Still, one is tempted to think that examining this aspect of Jefferson’s presidency might have shed further light on Jefferson’s changing attitude to war.

Wars that were not covered here are sufficiently covered in other books.  Many other authors, however, lack Stuart’s patience.  The other books don’t actually sift through Jefferson’s writings as Stuart does; instead they rely on old party prejudice, as passed down through secondary sources.

However, Stuart is able to show Jefferson’s general policy, despite ignoring the details of the war in Tripoli (and despite neglecting the crisis in what would become Haiti.)  He quotes Jefferson extensively, and he examines Jefferson’s attitude to European wars that America did not enter, including South American independence struggles.  Jefferson’s attitude to the Monroe doctrine is briefly examined, and Jefferson’s philosophies are compared to those of his contemporaries.

Also covered is Thomas Jefferson’s alleged partisanship.  Jefferson did not like the Jay Treaty, which was put forward by Federalists. Nor did he like the Quasi War, which Adams, a Federalist, brought on.

What should be noted, however, is that both of these policies were favorable to the British empire and Canada.

By concentrating his efforts against the French enemy, President John Adams allowed Canadian trade with the US and the Indies to flourish.  Jay’s treaty recognised Canada’s claims and freed Britain to concentrate their fighting against the French.

Another policy of Jefferson’s which could be seem to be that of an “Anglophobe” was his desire to invade “Canada.”  Jefferson envisioned a day where North Americans expelled “the English” from their continent.  Stuart fails to mention that by “the English” Jefferson meant the English system of government, or in other words, Jefferson proposed to liberate Canada from a monarchical government.  Canadians, as history soon showed, didn’t want this.  In this respect, Jefferson was an interventionist.

However, as Stuart points out, Jefferson’s interventionism was limited to practical applications.  Once the threat from Britain had gone, Jefferson no longer wished to “invade” Canada.  Stuart attributes Jefferson’s apparently shifting attitudes partially to the temper created by the moods of war.  He sees Jefferson as a great thinker who gets angry when under pressure.

Stuart is right that Jefferson was human and thus had some limitations of understanding.  With hindsight, it’s hard to see why Jefferson thought that the Embargo Act experiment would work.

Was Jefferson a hopeless pacifist?  Did Jefferson over-estimate the importance of American trade with Britain? Or as Stuart suggested, did he misunderstand the whole British economic system?  Or, might have the Embargo succeeded had Madison continued with the policy in the ways that Jefferson suggested?

Whatever the case, it is easy enough to look back at the failed policy and pretend that Jefferson lacked insight into economics.

Stuart claims that “those elements [in Britain] which suffered most [from the Embargo Act] were politically impotent.”  In other words, the embargo act did affect some British subjects, but it didn’t work because those people had no power.  Stuart also supplies letters that Jefferson wrote to others about his economic ideas, and suggests that the recipients of these letters must have been shocked that the “sage” could be so ignorant when it came to money.

The fact that Jefferson himself was in debt is not neglected, nor is the fact that America suffered economically from the Embargo Act.

Stuart seems to understand Jefferson’s economic policies better than many American activists who like to quote Jefferson.  Stuart points out that Jefferson preferred spending money on the general welfare of the people (through acts such as the Louisiana purchase) than through the ravages of war.  In any case, Jefferson saw spending money as a kind of investment.  However, there are times when Jefferson may not have made the right investments, as was the case with his personal finances.

Armed with this information, Stuart makes a convincing argument that Jefferson’s economic policies were flawed.  The flaw appears to have been this: while Jefferson knew how to save money, he didn’t know how to create wealth.  (The book does not analyse the economic benefits of the Louisiana purchase.  Instead, Stuart uses Jefferson’s own words on the purchase’s value, and then supposes that it was a baseless exaggeration.)

What’s not so easy is to understand Stuart’s rationale that Jefferson is Anglophobic.  One suspects that Stuart has inherited an institutional bias from years of British and Canadian scholarship on the Napoleonic wars.

“Europe was engaged in total war where self-interest was ambition, and power, not reason, was the telling argument.” Stuart says. Thomas Jefferson, Stuart argued, was daydreaming when he thought that rational discussion would achieve anything in the age of Napoleon.

Stuart repeatedly argued that human beings are not rational, and that Jefferson was stuck in 18th century thought when he clung to outdated virtues of limited warfare.

The book is worth reading because, while flawed, it is meticulously researched and it is clearly written.  The flaws are natural, as they are based on the bias inherent in a Canadian view of history.

At just sixty five pages (before the footnotes), “The Halfway Pacifist” is a simple and brief analysis of a complex man, and it serves as a great introduction to the foreign policy of Thomas Jefferson.

Half-way Pacifist: Thomas Jefferson’s View of War

If you’ve been following show business, you know that China has been accused of banning American films.

When Steven Speilburg pulled out of being advisor to the Beijing Olympics, a handful of angry Chinese called for Kung Fu Panda to be banned. They complained that it insulted the Panda, supposedly China’s national symbol.

You didn’t know that Speilburg directed or produced Kung Fu Panda? No, I didn’t see his name anywhere in the credits either. But he is associated with Dreamworks, its parent company. It seems the protesters were right about something.

It turns out, the protesters may have been film students. More people were annoyed that they had to wait so long to see the film than anything else. They looked forward to seeing the family friendly cartoon with a Chinese Panda for a hero. The first Kung Fu Panda was an uncensored hit, and Po the panda was adored by people throughout the world.

Well, when Kung Fu Panda II came out, the Chinese response to the first movie came with it. A few activists had a reply, and they made Legend of a Rabbit. In Legend of a Rabbit, there’s a good little Bunny who fights an evil Panda that resembles Po. However, this film, which seemed like a protest against the Dreamworks franchise, didn’t seem to do anywhere near as well in China as Kung Fu Panda 2.

About the same time Kung Fu Panda II was released in rural Wales, China was said to be banning American films. Transformers III was said to be banned. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the movie brought in “a record breaking” 597 million Yuan. Not bad for a banned film!

But when I saw the movie, I’d just heard about Transformers being banned, and I didn’t have time to discover it was merely a rumor, or at most a delay in getting an exhibition permit. So, my viewing of the film was flawed.

Twitch film claims that the real censorship in China is against bad science. Transformers III, with its fictional history of the space race, is apparently thought by some bureaucrats to be revisionist. (People might think its a documentary.) Chinese films with time travel science fiction storylines are being discouraged, but foreign films apparently aren’t. Again, all this may be another rumor, but it’s interesting.

So, here I am, watching Kung Fu Panda, half wondering why this film is being banned in China while some Chinese people were probably watching it at the same time.

In this state of disinformation, the evil peacock came to symbolize Mao, leader of the communist party during the Chinese civil war. Not satisfied with his town, he tries to take over all of China.

The attempt of Po to achieve inner peace had a spiritual dimension, and communists are meant to hate religion, right? Was he defending Tibet, perhaps a personification of the Dalai Llama? Or did Po represent China’s pre-communist past, a time when capitalist – or even feudalist – tradition dominated the Middle Kingdom?

Even with this preoccupation, I still enjoyed the film thoroughly. I felt for Po as confronted his father that he knew that he was adopted. I earnestly followed his quest to find his real parents, and the way it hurt his adopted father was touching too. I felt for the Panda, torn between wanting to find the truth and the loyalty he owed the man who raised him. The resolution to these problems, and others, is touching and funny at the same time.

As in the original Kung Fu Panda, the magnanimous Panda even gives the bad guy one last chance.  Po represents the dying tradition of the selfless super hero, who doesn’t want to hurt the bad guy, but only fights because justice must be served.

No vindictiveness is in Po’s soul.  He’s the “good Joe” of the old Hollywood tradition, the character that the typical American man wants to relate to and the everyday American boy wants to be when he grows up.

It has been said that the good Joe is a hero only Americans understand, but he obviously does well in China too.

Kung Fu Panda 1 and 2 [DVD]

Kung Fu Panda 1 and 2 [Blu-ray][Region Free]

Famous Confederate commanders..., Sherman Publishing Company, 1884

Watching Gods and Generals feels more like a reading a history book than watching a movie.  I don’t mean because the film is so long (the version I saw was three and a half hours. *), nor is it because there are so many words thrown across the screen.

Sure, the locations changes often, and so you might read a lot of titles to figure out where you are geographically (there aren’t a lot of maps in the film. You’d be totally forgiven for missing a few of the titles, they briefly accompany the fleeting but beautiful establishing shots.)

Additionally, with the authenticity of the accents, a few viewers may be tempted to turn on the subtitles (although the actors do enunciate pretty well.) A lot of the story is passed through dialogue, so that could mean a lot of reading.

But no, that’s not why Gods and Generals is like a book. In fact, it’s a wonderfully visual movie, much like a series of photographs, and the painstaking attention to detail is what makes this film worthwhile.

This attention to detail also kills any chance of having a central storyline. Just like a good textbook, God’s and Generals tries to be subjective. And so, we not only have the point of view of the man who seems to be the main character – Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson – but we are also burdened with the stories of his cook, a soldier who is shot for desertion, other generals, and Stonewall’s adversaries.

No, we are not satisfied with just one Yankee general to balance things out, but we have meet that general’s brother, and his wife, and learn a bit about both of them and their changing attitudes toward the war.

Now, all these points of view aren’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s interesting to pause on a household slave, and wonder if she’s considering escape, or whether she’s considering taking her master’s place. Little bits of dialogue really help us think about every person who the history of these early battles touch.

The Irish Civil War

One of the most touching sequences, for instance, involves Irish men shooting other Irish men. “Go to Hell and Damnation” one man says as he fires at his former countrymen. His face portrays a complex mix of emotions of a man who would normally be lost in the battlefields.

The Dixie Irishmen ask each other “Don’t they understand that we are fighting for our freedom.” It’s a great little piece that shows the director can really pull on the heart strings, though it strays completely from the plot.

Yes, Stonewall Jackson is the main character, but we could hardly call him the protagonist. The story ends with his death, but it starts before his enlistment. In many ways, he’s just another pawn in the big terrible war around him. And that’s what makes this film so special.

Not your typical biopic, not an epic either.

Most films about big men make them look giant, unsurmountable, like gods. This film shows the Generals that are revered as Gods, but brings them down to the status of human. We understand the horrors of war, as we do in Gallipoli or All Quiet on the Western Front, but here we see how these horrors also affect those at the top. Even the greatest General is just a soldier, with a heart that can break in tragedy, and a conscience that can be torn by the hypocrisies of the cause he serves.

While the split character, seeing all the wives and families, completely destroys a fiction film like Heat, this isn’t a narrative in the Aristotelean structure. This isn’t a tragedy about how Stonewall Jackson died, or how a great war started that tore up the nation. This is a history.

Most Americans have ancestors who were around then, we know people who look like those who fought in that war. This isn’t the story of the downfall of people greater than us, or the success of people we can identify with, or the comedy were we laugh at our inferiors. This is the story of our own past, it’s like watching a recreated photograph of our five times great grandparents wedding, or rather, burial.

Just as Lee says to his troops that the land is where they fell in love, where they played, where their history is, so every bit of that story means something to us, as Americans, whether our ancestors fought for the Union or the Confederacy.

So, if you’re interested in the Civil War, in knowing why the Confederates fought against the Union, in knowing why hundreds of thousands lived and died for both sides, you’ll learn a little more by watching this film.

While it strives to be accurate, however, there are a few inaccuracies that show it as a fiction, or at least a psychological perception rather than reality. One, is the Zouave uniform. Why do the Yankees have red Zouave uniforms that stand out in such great numbers? Why are the Zouave wearers so particularly joyful in their destruction?

And why do those Zouaves disappear from the Union army about the time the Emancipation Proclamation is declared? Is that a coincidence?

“Ceasar, those who are about to die salute you,” quotes the academic from Maine as he leads his troops to battle. He verbally expresses his doubt in the validity of this war to a greater degree than any Confederate general does.

This film is about how the unionists from the North were seen by the secessionists in the South. I’d say it’s not a true “Civil War” movie, but more a “War of Northern Aggression” film, or at least a “War Between the States” picture.

Sure, it goes out of its way to show the Union point of view, and to show a couple of Southerners go North to Pennsylvania. They seem to be wise old men who see the secessionist cause as wrong, while many younger men rashly think their cause is right.

(One could be forgiven for thinking that at times this film is pro-Unionist. Rather than being completely neutral or on one side, it portrays both sides pretty strongly.)

However, its hard not to sympathize with the Secessionist cause after seeing this film. We hear what the Confederate Irish have to say about their cause, we even hear them sing for Texas, we see the Union Irish as brave fools who march to their deaths in battle.

Missing too are Lincoln’s loyalist Southerners. Would portraying them be tokenism? No more so than depicting the Zouaves (were there really that many Zouaves? They had to be included because their costumes added to the sense of lawlessness of the Northern troops.)

If you have an open mind, and you’re interested in knowing why people fought under the battle flag, take a few hours off and watch this.

DVD extras

Watch them! They really add to the background of the film. I’d give the extras five stars.

You learn about the extra research the actors brought to this film, and how it affected them.

The crew is also wonderful, and what they went through to get the shots to look just right is phenomenal. When you consider the budget of this film, a lot was achieved. It’s interesting to see just how they made the money stretch so far.

Gods and Generals / Gettysburg [DVD] [2003]

* apparently there’s a 280 minute directors cut on blu-ray.   When I get a blu-ray player…

The plot is simple.  Velma is infatuated with an horror author Ben Ravencroft.  Ben invites her and the rest of Scooby Doo gang to stay at his home in Oakhaven.  (Oakhaven isn’t Salem, but parallels are mentioned by the characters.)

Sarah Ravencroft, Ben’s ancestor, is reportedly haunting the town.  Ben expresses a desire to find Sarah’s journal so he can “clear her name.”  Wiccans, he says, were the innocent victims of intolerance and of the paranoid imaginations of their persecutors.  Sarah was “a healer” who used “herbal” remedies to help the poor.

Soon, we see that Sarah’s “Ghost”, like any typical apparition in a Scooby Doo cartoon, was a fake.  When the “witch” is unmasked, and we learn that “she” was actually a pharmacist.  The pharmacist is the father of Thorn, who is the leader of a Gothic rock band called The Hex Girls.  Dad just wanted to sell a few more t-shirts.  It is soon revealed that pretty much the entire town was involved in the hoax.  Hey, it attracted tourists didn’t it?

At this point, Ben reminds the heroes that he wanted to clear his ancestor’s name.

Scooby Doo and friends find Sarah’s journal by an old tree stump.

Then things get weird.  As soon as Ben touches the book, he admits that his true motive was world conquest.  Sarah really was an evil witch, and everything we know about history is a lie.  After sharing his evil ambitions in a monologue, Ben uses the book to acquire magical powers.

Ben seems to have no problems keeping the heroes at bay, and eventually releases his ancestor from the book. 

Sarah wants revenge for having been locked up in the book, and destroys everything.

Finally, the Goth band member is called upon to stop the witch.  Those who are descended from Wiccans, it seems, are the only people who can do it. For some reason no one asks Thorn’s dad.

Soon, Sarah is sucked back into the journal, and takes Ben with her.  The book is burned by a falling tree branch and the world is safe.  Though the heroes don’t intentionally burn the book, they are naturally relieved that the trouble is gone.  “Ben Ravencroft’s last book is one that the world will never buy.” affirms Velma.  “Thank goodness” adds Daphne.

Is the film saying that witches are real and book burning can be a good thing?  That probably is not the intention.  After all, in the concert afterwards, the Wiccans do proclaim that we should look after the earth. What about saving the books?

“My favourite part is when Alvin was on a mini motorbike when he was trying to save the Chippets from Ian. Alvin got the Chippets and Ian stole this Toy helicopter and a remote control to control it from a toy shop. Then Ian was controlling the toy and Alvin and the Chippets got onto the toy helicopter and the Chippets and Alvin threw their helmets on Ian and he let go of the remote control. One of the Chippets caught it and Ian was on the floor on his back and the motorbike that Alvin and the Chippets were on was still moving on its own and it was going to Ian and it hit his willy.”
-boy aged ten

“My favourite parts are when Alvin gives wedgies to the naughty boys, and when Alvin and Simon beat up the naughty boys.”
-boy aged eight

Alvin And The Chipmunks: The Squeakuel [DVD]