"Band of Brothers" appreciation thread

Good show . . .

Is it? Coming off The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, I wasn’t ready for another intense drama series right away, so I haven’t watched it. Especially now, the timing is all f***ed up. Or maybe not. I don’t know.

What’s it got that appeals to you?

The guy who told what was his name, McBryde? to realize that you are already dead; was he crazy himself or had he discovered how to deal with combat?

I assume you’re talking about the guy who found Blythe out investigating a noise. I think it’s a bit of both. He certainly has found a way to deal with combat, but the way he found is more than a tad sociopathic. Compare him to Lt. Winters, who has also found away to deal with combat, but his way is much different. Then there’s the one guy(Lusk? i think thats his name), who seems to deal with combat by using humor as a coping tool.

OK, I’m back, my boss walked in as I was starting this thread yesterday.

The guy who talked to Blithe was Lieutenant Strain, who (I think) was the guy who machine-gunned those prisoners after D-Day (including the German from Oregon). Hence the sociopathy.

What I love about this miniseries is that it deals with war on a purely realistic level. There’s no John Wayne patriotism, no cliches about the personnel (i.e. the platoon isn’t just made up of the Italian, the Midwesterner, the Southerner, etc.), no hoary allegory about the nature of war (which I felt held Saving Private Ryan back).

It’s unafraid to depict the chaos and pain of combat, and it doesn’t offer any sort of small-scale consolation for the viewer about what these men went through (it’s based on a true story). They just do their jobs as best they can. The consolation must come at the end of the series–the war is over and the company has secured Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. (Not that I have seen all 10 episodes.)

And in response to your question about my attitudes towards it in light of last Tuesday’s attacks, that’s a valid question. I got hooked on the first two episodes, which aired back-to-back the Sunday before the attacks, and this last one seemed a little flat to me; it might have been a combination of my mentality after watching CNN 10 hours a day, or the writers’ decision to emphasize newer characters at the expense of the ones established in the first two episodes.

In fact, that’s my one complaint so far: besides Lieutenants Miller and Nixon, Guarnere, Compton and Lipton, it’s hard as hell to tell the soldiers apart. Didn’t GI’s have nametags back then?

Quick question about the series.
!!!POSSIBLE SPOILER ABOUT WEEK OF 9/23 EPISODE!!!
I love the series so far, however the tank scene with Bull confused me. The one after the assault was turned back, and he was crawling in the ditch next to the tank. What were they trying to show? His reaction looked like the tank was about to run over him, however the cut shots showed the tank was no where near him, and it would have been very easy for him to stop crawling and get out of it’s path in any case. If it was an attempt to create drama that he may have been run over, then it was a horrible shot. And if he was simply crawling along side it for cover(which seemed obvious) then what was with the dramatic music and expression of horror. Am I missing something, or was it just a bad attempt to inject drama?

I think he was nervous about a lot of things. His company was retreating and he couldn’t stand up and run because the tank crew might have spotted him or the infantry would have mowed him down. He was running the risk of being left behind so the music was dramatic.

Marc

Marc

You beat me to it, Airblairxxx!
I generally reserve my Sunday nights for “whatever HBO’s showing” and I haven’t been disapponted yet. Band of Brothers is very “gritty” looking - and I don’t mean that in the “tough rough angry movie” way. I mean after I watch it I feel like I need to take a bath.
Also I get something I don’t get from alot of other war movies - I get how very scary it must be. Not that other shows don’t try to say that but there’s usually some guys with a “No guts, no glory” attitude running full speed into a spray of bullets or at least dying taking out the bad guy. I think with Band of Brothers I got how easy it was to be killed - like when the guy got shot in the head in the middle of a conversation?
Of course, this is all coming from someone that has never been in the military and has seen alot of Rambo-type movies, so take it for what you will.

Is anyone else getting a little chuckle seeing a soldier being played by the guy from “Office Space”?

I have gained a new respect for Ron Livingston (the guy from “Office Space”) for his roles in both “Band of Brothers” and “The Practice”.

I don’t have much to add except that I really like “BoB”, and plan to purchase it on DVD if \ when it is released.

MH

I’m developing a critical theory about this show.

Oh, crap, the boss just walked in, gotta go. . .

I only caught the 9/23 episode so far. I really liked it.

I like that they are using relatively unknown actors - no “Saving Private Damon”, no Tom Hanks pontifications - just men in uniform that you get to know in a different way. Although I have to say David Schwimmer was a jarring presence - who did his agent fellate to get him THAT job?

I liked the information that episode gave us about Dutch society - their rejoicing, their hardship, their hatred for collaborators, the dangers of living off the land, the extent to which the Army was dependent on the Dutch for information and cover.

Very interesting stuff. Coming from Hanks & Spielberg, I was expecting something more bombastic, and I am pleasantly surprised.

I think BoB is ok. Frankly, I’m having trouble telling who’s who. They all look the same in their uniforms (when they’re helmets are on.) The only ones I can recognize are the fat guy who was left behind and was in that barn, and Ron Livingston (from Office Space, which was a great movie.) This makes it pretty much impossible for me to keep up with the plot.

According to the book (which is phenomenal) he was worried about the tank coming into the ditch and crushing him. The tank crew was dead and the tank was moving, on its own, at a slight angle towards the ditch.

He really couldn’t just stop crawling. He was ahead of the tank, so if he stopped crawling he ran the risk of the tank running off the road into him. It was better for him to keep moving and try to stay ahead of the tank.

I think the series is very good, though I missed the D-Day episode. Anybody who hasn’t read the book should read it because it fleshes out a lot of the events.

It’s worth noting that the mini-series depicts the actual people and events. It’s not so much “based on a true story” as it is a true story. I’m not sure if that’s what you meant, but I wanted to point this out.

This is the reason that you don’t have Hollywood moments. The stuff depicted happened as described. The book’s author, Stephen Ambrose, extensively interviewed the men of Easy Company when he wrote his book. That’s why the series is so good – it’s real. That’s also what makes the book so great. The soldiers were very honest and really didn’t try to make themselves into John Wayne.

I’m taping the series. At least I think I am. The way HBO is showing it, I couldn’t figure out what the hell they were doing. So I guess if I tape it every Sunday night I’ll get the entire series. They seem to be showing the same episode several times a week, which threw me off.

BoB is TV Guide’s cover story this week and features comments from the surviving soldiers portrayed in the series. They noted that a couple of events weren’t exactly as in the series, so evidently Hollywood did just a bit of embellishing.

Yeah, some stuff has been condensed or altered slightly from the book. What I was really trying to say is that HBO didn’t create any “John Wayne moments” for the series. The stuff is pretty accurate and no heroic acts were invented for the sake of drama. I should have been clearer in my earlier post.

Take it easy, I was agreeing with you. :slight_smile:

I’m starting to think that the confusion over which character is which is intentional, or at least unavoidable.

Keep in mind a few things: first, that the story is about a group of American men who were plucked out of whatever civilian lives they were living and placed into a grueling, elite Army unit. It can be said that a theme of the series is their anonymous heroism, that these soldiers accomplished what they did DESPITE their not being “John Wayne”-type characters, just regular hombres.

Second, remember that we’ve only seen the first four episodes of ten. As the series advances, we may have the characters in the squad boil down to a manageable number.

I haven’t read the book but I am planning to once the series is over. I am watching this as a work of fiction, and I don’t want the ending to be spoiled. I’m already kind of pissed at myself that I searched for news articles about the real soldiers depicted, and I thus found out at least some of the characters which will survive.

Spoiler

Bull is alive and well in Texarkana. The actor has the only accurate Southern accent I’ve heard on TV, probably because they talked to each other quite a bit.
:slight_smile: