I don't know, maybe it started with "The Americanization of Emily", a great movie which I loved then and still love except for the message. The message? That all wars and even WW II are wasteful, useless, stupid, dumb and that there is really not that much difference between them and us. In this case, "The Extraordinary Seaman", Alan Alda is prematurely playing the role of Hawkeye Pierce from "Mash". David Niven is a slightly loony ghost who believes in duty and honor. I guess that's why he's loony. In this farce (in the bad sense) the ghost is trying to do the right thing as he sees it while Alda knows he's wrong. Somehow, twenty-two years after the Greatest Generation saved the world for the rest of us ingrates, it became OK to poke fun at them and what they believed. They were apparently all Colonel Blimps.
Somehow, The rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the real Bridge on the river Kwai and the notorious vivisection and germ warfare experiments conducted in Manchuria by the Japanese either went away or became lost in some crazy moral equivilency drug haze by the folks who brought us this trash. Yeah, we flattened their cities but after they started it. Freshman logic, if A then B.
And yes, what a zinger of an ending, it was all for naught. I especially liked the chess game. A war just ended that took perhaps 50 million, yes that's million lives and our admirals and their admirals sit down for a game of chess. I wonder how Bull Halsey liked the movie? More than that, I really , really wonder how all those buddies of my father, who never came home in 1945 would have liked this movie? We don't deserve what those guys gave us.
To anyone who actually enjoyed this thing, I recommend mandatory viewing of "The Cruel Sea" until they finally "get it".
Somehow, The rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the real Bridge on the river Kwai and the notorious vivisection and germ warfare experiments conducted in Manchuria by the Japanese either went away or became lost in some crazy moral equivilency drug haze by the folks who brought us this trash. Yeah, we flattened their cities but after they started it. Freshman logic, if A then B.
And yes, what a zinger of an ending, it was all for naught. I especially liked the chess game. A war just ended that took perhaps 50 million, yes that's million lives and our admirals and their admirals sit down for a game of chess. I wonder how Bull Halsey liked the movie? More than that, I really , really wonder how all those buddies of my father, who never came home in 1945 would have liked this movie? We don't deserve what those guys gave us.
To anyone who actually enjoyed this thing, I recommend mandatory viewing of "The Cruel Sea" until they finally "get it".