![Medievalism: Key Critical Terms](/uploads/profile_image/f5d/19501313-5e46-4243-8736-eddc0dd2ef5d.jpg?m=1522335851)
Medievalism: Key Critical Terms
Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz
Book
The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of...
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Virgil Wander
Book
The first novel in ten years from award-winning, million-copy bestselling author Leif Enger, Virgil...
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Mississippi Blood
Book
#1 New York Times Bestselling Author The endgame is at hand for Penn Cage, his family, and the...
![The History of the Welsh Pony](/uploads/profile_image/7ec/27df816f-9db0-4960-b815-cfd24b5d97ec.jpg?m=1522326812)
The History of the Welsh Pony
Book
The Welsh Pony, or Welsh Section B as it is commonly known, is the most recently developed of the...
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Bob Mann (459 KP) rated Greyhound (2020) in Movies
Aug 9, 2020
The battle of the Atlantic, which ran from 1939 to the end of the war, was a key battleground of World War 2. Failure to supply the European battlefront with fresh supplies and troops from the States would spell certain failure. (The wiki page addressing this is here.) But it's a field of combat that has been relatively overlooked at the movies. Of the handful of feature films, the most famous are that famously stiff-upper-lipped British offering "The Cruel Sea" from 1953 and Wolfgang Petersen's original 1981 U-boat film, "Das Boot", seeing it from the German's side.
Here, the subject gets the full Tom Hanks treatment. Not only does he star in the movie, but he also wrote it, based on the C.S. Forester novel "The Good Shepherd".
We join Captain Krause (Tom Hanks, with a strangely German-sounding name!) on dry land awaiting his beloved Evelyn (Elizabeth Shue) for a proposal. But that's the last dry land we see in the movie, since Krause is captaining the US destroyer "Greyhound" on its maiden voyage to protect a convoy of UK and US ships heading for England. But danger lurks beneath the waves as a pack of U-boats attempt to sink as many vessels as possible.
The issue with a movie about a war-time transatlantic crossing is that the ships are grey, the sky is grey and the sea is grey. It's a monochromatic and rather depressing context for a movie. To combat that, the CGI used to recreate the action needs to be good, and thankfully the film delivers in that department.
Where I had quibbles - and I'm not sure whether this was in Hank's original screenplay or the result of director Aaron Schneider's attempts at "added flair" - was in stopping the action mid-scene for a zoom up above the clouds to see the Aurora Borealis. Unnecessary and distracting.
Where the film really scores is in the tense action sequences. As a viewer, I found myself straining forwards in my seat for the "ping" of the sonar! The cat and mouse games being played out with the hidden foe are certainly well done.... albeit a colleague of mine refuses to watch it because "torpedoes don't bounce off the sides of ships" as shown in the trailer!
Perhaps what might have made the film richer still would have been the view from the German side. Another star name as the 'heard but never seen' mocking U-boat commander might have turned this into even more of a Shakespearean battle-royale.
Overall, this is an enthralling and enjoyable watch that I would recommend. Tom Hanks delivers YET another compelling captain role. It seems to be the rank that he naturally gravitates to.... having the gravitas to command, but not being too far removed from the common man. Here he is supported by the omnipresent Stephen Graham, also equally good.
It's a great shame that this never got the wide-screen cinematic release, because Greyhound deserved it. Who knows, perhaps with cinemas spasmodically opening up, there's still time for a national release. That would be good, and I'd certainly go and see it again on the big screen.
And, by the way, the answer to my trivia question is this film - Greyhound - and 1917. The reason being that in both movies the actresses named were the sole female players within the whole cast.
(For the full graphical review, please visit https://bob-the-movie-man.com/2020/08/01/one-manns-movies-film-review-greyhound-2020/ .)
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Whatchareadin (174 KP) rated The Girl on the Train in Books
Apr 9, 2019
I have been waiting to read this book for a very long time. It has been on my hold list at the library for about 4 months. I couldn't put it down. It kept me on the edge of my seat and I had to know what was going to happen next. There were a lot of shocking things about this book that makes you want to know who the culprit was. Who has Megan and what have they done with her? There were times where I was a bit confused about the different dates. The book goes from present to past from chapter to chapter and from person to person. I found myself flipping back to see where I was in the story to keep myself straight.
Overall, this is a good book. One that I will recommend over and over. It's a great thriller that you will not want to put down.
![The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm](/uploads/profile_image/b15/4e9cd71b-d1ce-452c-a323-1b3a12118b15.jpg?m=1522334490)
The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Noel Daniel, Wilhelm Grimm, Jacob Grimm and Matthew R. Price
Book
This is a compendium of the Brothers Grimm's most beloved fairy tales, newly translated and...
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Emergency Powers (Imogen Trager #3)
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The accidental president is no accident. The investigation that was FBI Agent Imogen Trager’s...
Suspense Thriller Imogen Trager
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Contemporary Human Resource Management: Text and Cases
Tony Dundon, Adrian Wilkinson and Tom Redman
Book
Whether you're a student studying HRM or a forward-looking manager, Contemporary Human Resource...