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Poster Lab: The Words
Bradley Cooper is an actor in a fairly common predicament. He's blessed with movie-star looks, yet he still needs to play characters with non-movie-star occupations. For Cooper, this is especially problematic, since it's tough to imagine him doing much of anything besides looking handsome, staying handsome, and watching televised sports. So right off the bat, there's an element of unintended comedy to the poster for The Words, which etches Cooper's face out of printing-press type because his character's a writer.
Something is up in Hollywood. This is the second movie in two years to cast Cooper as a working author (the other was the gonzo, pro-drug "drama" Limitless). What is it about Cooper that makes him seem, to filmmakers, like a plausible wordsmith? The slightly-boho shaggy hair? The serious arch of his pointed nose? That he was the small dash of brains in The Hangover's Wolfpack? The synopsis for The Words describes Cooper's character as "a writer at the peak of his literary success." At the risk of looking at things in stone-cold, stereotypical terms, that's not unlike casting Tara Reid to play an archaeologist.
Celebrity context and role appropriateness aside, the poster is artfully made, a tea-stained scroll with a kind of collage-relief that's nicely paired with the contours of its Sexiest-Man-Alive subject. There's a great strength of implied line, and a vintage mood established by its use of newsprint and choice of typeface. The first comparison one wants to make is to the poster for Sherlock Holmes, whose classic, cast-metal type would appear to have produced this very design. But the closer relative is actually the one-sheet for 2007's 3:10 to Yuma, whose font, palette, and scattered messages provide proof of The Words poster's Old West influences.
It's a pity the actual words have next to no intrigue, all of them as generic as the sentiments on candy hearts. You'd think that close examination would offer clues to help unlock the movie's plot (Cooper's scribe has to "pay the price for stealing another man's work"), but all that's given is humdrum twaddle like "Secret," "Kiss," "Erase the Past," "Tell Me the Truth," "What Do You Want," and "Fate." In other words, a bland litany of blockbuster tagline lingo. Thus, all of the text, all of the words on the poster for The Words suggest the project is one of rabid superficiality, as beyond Cooper, the cast list also includes Zoë Saldana and Olivia Wilde, another model-esque name who can't be taken seriously beyond window dressing. There's artistry here, but isn't it ironic that the title's blatant essence is the poster's weakest trait?
Review: The Call of the Wild Provides a Resonant Take on a Classic
The film's avoidance of cruel Gold Rush realities is more than made up for by its spirited kineticism.3
The latest cinematic adaptation of Jack London's The Call of the Wild is a surprisingly thrilling and emotionally moving adventure film. Its surprises come not only from director Chris Sanders and screenwriter Michael Green's dramatic overhaul of the classic 1903 novel for family audiences, but also from the way their revisions make London's story richer and more resonant, rather than diluted and saccharine.
It's worth recalling that London's vision of man and nature in The Call of the Wild is anything but romantic; indeed, at times it's literally dog eat dog. In his story, the imposing yet spoiled Buck, a St. Bernard and Scotch Collie mix, is kidnapped from his wealthy master's California manor and sold to dealers in Yukon Territory, where the Gold Rush has created high demand for sledding dogs. Buck's initiation into the culture of the Northlands involves severe beatings at the hands of his masters, brutal rivalries with fellow sledding dogs, harsh exposure to unforgiving elements, and an unrelenting work regimen that allows for little rest, renewal, or indolence. What London depicts is nothing less than a Darwinian world where survival forbids weakness of body and spirit, and where survivors can ill-afford pity or remorse.
Not much of that vision remains in Sanders and Green's adaptation. Buck is still kidnapped from his home and sold to dog traders, but his subjugation is reduced from repeated, will-breaking abuse to a single hit. In this Call of the Wild, dogs never maul one another to death, a regular occurrence in London's novel. And minus one or two exceptions, the human world of the story has now become uplifting and communal rather than bitter and cutthroat. In the first half of the film, Buck's sledding masters are an adorable husband-and-wife team (Omar Sy and Cara Gee) in place of a rough pair of mail deliverers, and in the second half, John Thornton (Harrison Ford), Buck's last and most beloved master, isn't revealed to be hardened treasure-seeker, but a grieving man who finds redemption in the great outdoors.
The film's avoidance of cruel Gold Rush realities is more than made up for by its spirited kineticism and by its deepening of the man-dog bond that forms the heart of London's story. This Call of the Wild relies heavily on a CGI Buck (and other virtual beasts) to create complex choreographed movement in labyrinthine tracking shots that would be impossible to execute with real animals. One might expect the artifice of even the most convincing CGI to undermine Buck's palpable presence, as well as the script's frequent praises to the glory of nature, yet the film's special-effects team has imbued the animal with a multi-layered personality, as displayed in joyously detailed, if more than slightly anthropomorphic, expressions and gestures. And the integration of Buck and other CGI creations into believable, immersive environments is buttressed by the cinematography of Janusz Kamiński, who lenses everything from a quiet meadow to an epic avalanche with lush vibrancy.
In the film's first half, human concerns take a backseat to Buck's education as he adapts to the dangerous world of the Northlands, but in the second half the emergence of Ford as Buck's best friend adds to the film a poignant human dimension. Thornton rescues Buck from a trio of inept, brutish, and greedy city slickers (Dan Stevens, Karen Gillan, and Colin Woodell), and Buck in turn saves Thornton from misery and drunkenness as he pines away for his late son and ruined marriage while living alone on the outskirts of civilization.
This is a welcome change from London's depiction of Thornton, who possesses on the page a kind heart but not much else in the way of compelling characteristics; the summit of his relationship with Buck occurs when he stakes and wins a fortune betting on Buck's ability to drag a half ton of cargo. In this film version, Thornton and Buck's relationship grows as they travel the remotest reaches of wilderness where Thornton regains his sense of wonder and Buck draws closer to the feral origins of his wolf-like brethren and ancestors. Ford lends gruff vulnerability and gravity to Thornton in scenes that might have tipped over into idyllic cheese given just a few false moves, and his narration throughout the film forms a sort of avuncular bass line to the proceedings lest they become too cloying or cute.
A paradox exists in The Call of the Wild, which is indebted to advanced technological fakery but touts the supremacy of nature and natural instincts. Yet there's a sincerity and lack of pretense to the film that transcends this paradox and evokes the sublime.
Cast: Harrison Ford, Dan Stevens, Omar Sy, Karen Gillan, Bradley Whitford, Colin Woodell, Cara Gee, Scott MacDonald, Terry Notary Director: Chris Sanders Screenwriter: Michael Green Distributor: 20th Century Studios Running Time: 100 min Rating: PG Year: 2020 Buy: Book
Review: Daniel Roher's Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band
Robertson's sadness was more fulsomely evoked by Martin Scorsese in The Last Waltz.2.5
Toward the end of the 1960s, with the Vietnam War raging and the civil rights movement and the counterculture in bloom, art was about taking political and aesthetic sides. As such, one can understand how Bob Dylan's electric guitar could be met with violent boos, as it signified a crossing of the bridge over into the complacent mainstream, to which folk music was supposed to represent a marked resistance. In this context, one can also appreciate the daring of the Band, whose music offered beautiful and melancholic examinations of heritage that refuted easy generational demonizing, while blending blues, rock, and folk together to create a slipstream of American memory—Americana in other words. Like Dylan, the Band, who backed him on his electric tour, believed that art shouldn't be reduced to editorial battle hymns. Complicating matters of identity even further, the prime architects of Americana are mostly Canadian. Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson were all from Ontario, while Levon Helm hailed from Arkansas.
Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band is concerned mostly with celebrating the Band's early rise and influence on American culture, as well as their sense of connecting the past and present together through empathetic lyrics. Holding court over the film is Robertson, the dapper and charismatic songwriter and guitarist who looks and sounds every inch like the classic-rock elder statesman. Airing sentiments from his memoir, Testimony, Robertson mentions his mixed heritage as a citizen of the Six Nations of Grand River reservation who also had Jewish gangster relatives, and who moved to Canada at a formative age. Richardson learned his first chords on the reservation, and began writing songs professionally at 15, after he met Ronnie Hawkins and Helm. Hawkins's group would over several permutations become the Band, whose musical identity crystallizes during their collaboration with Dylan.
Director Daniel Roher's glancing treatment of Hawkins, a vivid presence who also performed on Martin Scorsese's Band concert film The Last Waltz, signifies that Once Were Brothers is going to steer clear of controversy. Was Hawkins bitter to have his band usurped by the teenage prodigy Robertson? Even if he wasn't, such feelings merit exploration, though here they're left hanging. The documentary's title is all too apropos, as this is Robertson's experience of the Band, rather than a collective exploration of their rise and fall. To be fair, Danko, Manuel, and Helm are all deceased, the former two dying far too young, though Hudson perhaps pointedly refused to participate in this project—another event that Roher fails to examine. And the big conflict at the center of this story—Robertson's intense, eventually contentious relationship with Helm—is broached only in an obligatory fashion.
Although the fact that Robertson and Hudson are the only Band members left standing adds credence to the former's view of things, as he maintains that much of the group succumbed to drugs and booze, leaving him to write most of the music and to shepherd their joint career as long as he could. (Robertson's wife, Dominique, offers disturbing accounts of the car crashes that routinely occurred out of drunk and drugged driving.) Helm, however, insisted that the Band's collective influence on musical arrangements merited a bigger slice of royalties all around. Robertson and various other talking heads remind us of these grievances, though Roher quickly pushes on to the next plot point. Robertson is a magnificent musician and subject, but his devotion to his side of the story renders him suspicious—a cultivator of brand.
For these omissions and elisions, Once Were Brothers is a slim, if ultimately enjoyable, rock testimony. The highlight is the archival footage of the Band practicing and recording, including a privileged moment with Dylan after one of the controversial electric concerts, as well as interludes at the pink house in Woodstock where they recorded their defining Music from Big Pink, an album that included their classic "The Weight," which Dennis Hopper would turn into a master boomer anthem in Easy Rider. Moments of the Band at play affirm Robertson's idea of their early days as a kind of lost utopia, and his present-day nostalgia is cagey yet undeniably moving. Yet Robertson's sadness, his sense of having witnessed friends and collaborators get washed away by bitterness and addiction, was more fulsomely evoked by Scorsese in The Last Waltz, as he looked at the Band and saw an entire group, a dying unit, rather than Robbie Robertson and the other guys.
Director: Daniel Roher Distributor: Magnolia Pictures Running Time: 100 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Come and See Is an Unforgettable Fever Dream of War's Surreality
It suggests that a war's horrors were the ultimate unassimilable experience of the shadowy depths of the human mind.4
War movies largely condition us to look at warfare from a top-down perspective. Rarely do they keep us totally locked out of the commander's map room, the bunker where the top brass exposit backstory, outline goals, or lay out geography for the viewer. Both characters and audience tend to know what's at stake at all times. Not so in Elem Klimov's 1985 film Come and See, in which relentless bombings and frenetic camerawork shatter the Belarusian countryside into an incoherent, fabulistic geography, and the invading Germans appear to coalesce out of the fog on the horizon like menacing apparitions.
We experience the German invasion of Belarus through Flyora (Aleksey Kravchenko), a teenager who joins the local partisan militia after discovering a rifle buried in the sand. The early scene in which he departs from his mother and sisters presents a disconcerting, even alienating complex of emotions: the histrionic panic of his mother (Tatyana Shestakova), who alternately embraces and rails against him; the hardened indifference of the soldiers who've come to retrieve him; and the jejune oblviousness of Floyria himself, who mugs at his younger siblings to mock his mother's concerns. Eager to participate alongside the unit of considerably more weathered men, Flyora feels emasculated when he's forced to remain behind in the partisans' forest encampment with Glasha (Olga Mironova), a local girl implicitly attached to the militia unit because she's sleeping with its commander, Kosach (Liubomiras Laucevicius).
Glasha first takes on nymph-like qualities in Flyora's adolescent imagination, appearing in hazy close-ups that emphasize her blue eyes and the verdant wooded backdrop. This deceptive idyllic disintegrates, however, when the Germans bomb and storm the empty camp, kicking up clouds of dirt and smoke that never seem to fully leave the screen for the rest of Come and See's duration. The two teenagers flee, pushing through the muck of the now-fatal landscape, only to discover more horrors waiting for them back in Flyora's village.
The horrors lurking in the mists of a muggy Eastern European spring may not be what Carl von Clausewitz had in mind when he coined the phrase "the fog of war," but Klimov's masterpiece suggests a redefinition of the term, the evocative phrase signifying the incomprehensible terror of war rather than its tactical incalculables. Come and See's frames are often choked with this fog—watching the film, one almost expects to see condensation on the screen's surface—and Klimov fills the soundtrack with a kind of audio fog: the droning of bombers and surveillance planes, the whine of prolonged eardrum-ringing, an ambient and sparse score by Oleg Yanchenko. It's a cinematic simulacrum of the overwhelming, discombobulating sensory experience of war that would have an influence on virtually every war movie made after it.
And yet, in a crucial sense, there's hardly a more clear-sighted or realistic fiction film about World War II. Klimov refuses to sanitize or sentimentalize the conflict that in his native language is known as the Great Patriotic War. While fleeing back into the woods with Flyora, Glasha momentarily glimpses a heap of bodies, Flyora's family and neighbors, piled on the edge of the village where tendrils of smoke still waft from their chimneys. Despite the fleeting nature of her glance, the image sticks with the viewer, its horror reverberating throughout the film because Klimov doesn't give it redemptive or revelatory power. There's no transcendent truth, no noble human dignity to be dug up from the mass graves of the Holocaust.
Florya and Glasha eventually separate, Flyora joining the surviving men to scour the countryside for food, only to find himself the survivor of a series of atrocities perpetrated by the Germans. A full third of the Nazis' innocent victims were killed in mass executions on the Eastern Front—both by specially assigned SS troops and the regular Wehrmacht (though the myth of a "clean Wehrmacht" lives on to this day). As the end titles of Come and See inform the audience, 628 Belarusian villages were extinguished in the Nazis' genocidal quest for Lebensraum, so-called "living space" for the German Volk. As wide-eyed witness to a portion of this monstrous deed, Flyora's face often fills the film's narrow 4:3 frame—scorched, bloodied, and sooty, trembling with horror at the inhumanity he's seen.
Like his forbears of Soviet montage, Klimov uses a cast stocked with nonprofessionals like Kravchenko, and he doesn't shirk from having them address the camera directly with their gaze. In Klimov's hands, as in Eisenstein's, such shots feel like a call to action, a demand to recognize the humanity at stake in the struggle against fascism. Klimov counterbalances his film's apocalyptic hopelessness with a righteous rage on behalf of the Holocaust's real victims. The film, whose original title was Kill Hitler, takes as its heart-shattering climax a hallucinatory montage of documentary footage that imagines a world without the Nazi leader.
Come and See bears comparison to Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, which likewise narrates a young boy's conscription into the irregular Russian resistance to German invasion. But whereas Tarkovsky embellishes his vision of a war-torn fairy-tale forest in the direction of moody expressionism, Klimov goes surreal. Attempting to make off with a stolen cow across an open field—in order to feed starving survivors hidden in the woods—Flyoria is blindsided by a German machine-gun attack. Pink tracers dart across the fog-saturated frame, a dreamlike image at once unreal and deadly. Taking cover behind his felled cow, Flyoria awakes in the empty field, now absolutely still, with the mangled animal corpse as his pillow.
As an art form, surrealism was fascinated by the capacity for violence and disorder lurking in the psyche. Without betraying the real—by, in fact, remaining more faithful to it than most fictional remembrances of WWI have been—Come and See suggests that the war's horrors were the ultimate unassimilable experience of the shadowy depths of the human mind. For Klimov, the dreamscapes of war realized surrealism's oneiric brutality.
Cast: Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Laucevicius, Vladas Bagdonas, Jüri Lumiste, Viktors Lorencs, Evgeniy Tilicheev Director: Elem Klimov Screenwriter: Ales Adamovich, Elem Klimov Distributor: Janus Films Running Time: 142 min Rating: NR Year: 1985
Review: Corpus Christi Spins an Ambiguous Morality Tale About True Faith
It's within the murky realm of self-doubt and spiritual anxiety that it's at its most audacious and compelling.3
Using as its jumping-off point the surprisingly common phenomenon of Polish men impersonating priests, Jan Komasa's Corpus Christi weaves an elaborate, thoughtful, and occasionally meandering morality tale about the nature of faith, grief, and community in the 21st century. Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia), a 20-year-old juvenile delinquent, is a recently converted believer, but he's also an opportunist. After finding himself mistaken for a man of the cloth upon arriving in a small, remote town, Daniel decides to strap on the clergy collar from a costume and play the part for real. Better that than head to the sawmill for the backbreaking work his former priest, Father Tomasz (Lukasz Simlat), has lined up for him.
This setup has all the makings of a blackly comic farce, but Komasa and screenwriter Mateusz Pacewicz play the scenario straight, using Daniel's fish-out-of-water status as a catalyst for interrogating the shifting spiritual landscape of a Poland that's grown increasingly disillusioned of both its religious and political institutions. For one, a general wariness (and weariness) of the cold, impersonal ritualism of the Catholic Church helps to explain why many of the townspeople take so quickly to Daniel's irreverent approach to priesthood, particularly his emotional candidness and the genuine compassion he shows for his parish.
That is, of course, once the young man gets past his awkward stabs at learning how to offer confession—by Googling, no less—and reciting Father Tomasz's prayers, discovering that it's easier for him to preach when shooting from the hip. The convenient timing of the town's official priest (Zdzislaw Wardejn) falling ill, thus allowing Daniel to slide comfortably into the man's place, is a narrative gambit that certainly requires a small leap of faith. But it's one that engenders a fascinatingly thorny conflict between a damaged imposter walking the very thin line between the sacred and the profane, a town still reeling from the trauma of a recent car wreck that left seven people dead, and a shady mayor (Leszek Lichota) yearning for a return to normalcy so that his corrupt dealings can run more smoothly.
The grieving process of the family and friends of the six teenagers lost in this tragedy is further complicated by rumors that the other driver had been drinking, leading to his widow (Barbara Kurzaj) being harassed and completely ostracized by the community. The falsity of this widely accepted bit of hearsay shrewdly mirrors Daniel's own embracing of falsehood and inability to transcend the traumatic events and mistakes of his own recent past. Yet, interestingly enough, it's the vehement young man's dogged pursuit of the truth in this manner, all while play-acting the role of ordained leader, that causes a necessary disruption in the quietly tortured little town. His unwavering support of the widow, despite the blowback he gets from the mayor and several of the deceased teenagers' parents, however, appears to have less to do with a pure thirst for justice or truth than with how her mistreatment at the hands of those around her mirrors his own feelings of being rejected by society.
It's a topsy-turvy situation that brings into question the mindlessly placating role that the church and political figures play in returning to the status quo, even if that leaves peoples' sins and darkest secrets forever buried. And while Daniel's adversarial presence both shines a light on the town's hypocrisy and their leaders' corruption, his own duplicity isn't overlooked, preventing Corpus Christi from settling for any sweeping moral generalizations, and lending an ambiguity to the ethics of everyone's behavior in the film.
Whether or not the ends justify the means or fraudulence and faith can coexist in ways that are beneficial to all, possibly even on a spiritual level, are questions that Komasa leaves unanswered. Corpus Christi instead accepts the innate, inescapable ambiguities of faith and the troubling role deception can often play in both keeping the communal peace, and in achieving a true sense of closure and redemption in situations where perhaps neither are truly attainable. Although the film ends on a frightening note of retribution, it's within the murky realm of self-doubt and spiritual anxiety that it's at its most audacious and compelling.
Cast: Bartosz Bielenia, Aleksandra Konieczna, Eliza Rycembel, Tomasz Zietek, Barbara Karzaj, Leszek Lichota, Zdzislaw Wardejn, Lukasz Simlat Director: Jan Komasa Screenwriter: Mateusz Pacewicz Distributor: Film Movement Running Time: 115 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Stella Meghie's The Photograph Isn't Worth a Thousand Words
The film is at its best when it's focused on the euphoria and tribulations of its central couple's love affair.2.5
Near the middle of Stella Meghie's The Photograph, Michael (Lakeith Stanfield) seduces Mae (Issa Rae) after dropping the needle on a vinyl copy of Al Green's I'm Still In Love with You. The 1972 soul classic is a mainstay in many a foreplay-centric album rotations thanks to the smooth atmospherics set by the Reverend Al's dulcet tones, but it's not the aptness of the music choice that makes this encounter so strikingly sensual. Rather, it's the leisurely, deliberate pacing with which Meghie allows the scene to unfold. As the mellow "For the Good Times" smoothly transitions into the more chipper and frisky "I'm Glad You're Mine," Michael and Mae engage in playful banter and subtle physical flirtations. The sly move of having one song directly spill into the next offers a strong sense of this couple falling in love, and in real time. The subtle surging of their passion occurs along with the tonal change of the songs, lending Michael's seduction of Mae an authentic and deeply felt intimacy.
The strength of this scene, and several others involving the new couple, is in large part due to the effortless chemistry between Rae and Stanfield. When the duo share the screen, there's a palpable and alluring romantic charge to their interactions, and one that's judiciously tempered by their characters' Achilles heels, be it Mae's reluctance to allow herself to become vulnerable or Michael's commitment issues. As Mae and Michael struggle to balance their intensifying feelings toward one another with their professional ambitions and the lingering disappointments of former relationships, they each develop a rich, complex interiority that strengthens the film's portrait of them as individuals and as a couple.
The problems that arise from the clash between Mae and Michael's burgeoning love and their collective baggage are more than enough to carry this romantic drama. But Meghie encumbers the film with a lengthy, flashback-heavy subplot involving the brief but intense love affair that Mae's estranged, recently deceased mother, Christina (Chanté Adams), had in Louisiana before moving away to New York. These flashbacks aren't only intrusive, disrupting the forward momentum and emotional resonance of the film's depiction of Mae and Michael's relationship, but they provide only a thinly sketched-out, banal conflict between a woman who wants a career in the big city and a man content to stay put in the Deep South.
The overly deterministic manner with which Meghie weaves the two stories together adds an unnecessary gravity and turgidity to a film that's at its best when it's focused on Michael and Mae's love story. The intercutting between the two time periods is clunky, and while both narratives eventually dovetail in a manner that makes thematic sense, Meghie extends far too much effort laying out Christina's many mistakes and regrets for an end result that feels both overripe and overwritten. When The Photograph lingers on the euphoria and tribulations of Mae and Michael's love affair, it's rich in carefully observed details, but the gratuitous flourishes in its narrative structure gives it the unsavory pomposity of a Nicholas Sparks novel.
Cast: Lakeith Stanfield, Issa Rae, Chelsea Peretti, Teyonah Parris, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chanté Adams, Rob Morgan, Courtney B. Vance, Lil Rel Howery, Y'lan Noel, Jasmine Cephas Jones Director: Stella Meghie Screenwriter: Stella Meghie Distributor: Universal Pictures Running Time: 106 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2020
David Lowery's The Green Knight, Starring Dev Patel, Gets Teaser Trailer
Today, A24 dropped the trailer for haunting mustache enthusiast David Lowery's latest.
Jack of all trades and haunting mustache enthusiast David Lowery is currently in pre-production on the latest live-action adaptation of Peter Pan for Disney, which is bound to be full steam ahead now that The Green Knight is almost in the can. Today, A24 debuted the moody teaser trailer for the film, which stars Dev Patel as Sir Gawain on a quest to defeat the eponymous "tester of men." Scored by Lowery's longtime collaborator Daniel Hart, The Green Knight appears to have been shot and edited in the same minimalist mode of the filmmaker's prior features, which include Ain't Them Bodies Saints and A Ghost Story. Though it's not being billed as a horror film, it's very easy to see from the one-and-a-half-minute clip how Lowery's latest is of a piece with so many A24 horror films before it.
According to A24's official description of the film:
An epic fantasy adventure based on the timeless Arthurian legend, The Green Knight tells the story of Sir Gawain (Dev Patel), King Arthur's reckless and headstrong nephew, who embarks on a daring quest to confront the eponymous Green Knight, a gigantic emerald-skinned stranger and tester of men. Gawain contends with ghosts, giants, thieves, and schemers in what becomes a deeper journey to define his character and prove his worth in the eyes of his family and kingdom by facing the ultimate challenger. From visionary filmmaker David Lowery comes a fresh and bold spin on a classic tale from the knights of the round table.
The Green Knight is written, directed, and edited by Lowery and also stars Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, and Barry Keoghan.
See the trailer below:
A24 will release The Green Knight this summer.
Review: Onur Tukel's The Misogynists Stagily Addresses the State of a Nation
Tukel's film doesn't live up to the promise of its fleet-footed opening.2
Taking place on the night of the 2016 presidential election, Onur Tukel's The Misogynists begins, fittingly, with the sound of a woman crying. Alice (Christine Campbell) explains to her concerned daughter that she's sad because half of the country has made the wrong decision, prompting the child to respond that her mother has herself been wrong before: "You were wrong when you thought that black man stole your cellphone." Defensively writing off this past instance of casual racism as nothing more than an honest mistake, Alice sends the girl back to bed, after offering a weary "probably not" in response to her asking if she could be elected president someday.
In just a few lines of dialogue, Tukel exposes the moral blind spots and hypocrisy of otherwise well-meaning liberals, not to mention the irresponsible vanity of outrage and despair in the face of a stinging electoral defeat. This short scene highlights the emotional vulnerabilities that often underpin, and undermine, political convictions, and it serves as a perfect encapsulation of almost all of the film's thematic concerns.
Unfortunately, the rest of The Misogynists doesn't live up to the promise of this fleet-footed opening. Set mostly within the confines of one hotel room and featuring sex workers, a Mexican delivery boy, wealthy businessmen, and other roughly sketched characters from the contemporary political imagination, Tukel seems to be aiming for a broad comedy of manners in the key of Whit Stillman and early Richard Linklater, but there isn't enough attention to detail, sense of place, or joie de vivre to make his scenarios come to life.
The narrative revolves around Cameron (Dylan Baker), a friendly but obnoxious Trump supporter. Holed up in the hotel room where he's been living since breaking up with his wife, he invites various visitors to share tequila shots and lines of coke in celebration of Trump's victory, while he holds forth on such hot-button topics as racial hierarchies, gun control, and gender roles. Baker delivers a spirited performance as Cameron, but the character is little more than a one-dimensional stand-in for a particular reactionary attitude, especially compared to the more nuanced and conflicted figures he interacts with. As the script isn't bold enough to dig into the deeper emotional appeal of Trump's nationalistic fervor and old-school machismo, Cameron's smug, pseudo-intellectual cynicism is mostly unconvincing.
Tukel realizes one of his few visual flourishes through the TV in Cameron's hotel room, which switches itself on at random and plays footage in reverse, transfixing whoever happens to be watching. This works well as a metaphor for the re-emergence of political beliefs most people thought to be gone for good, as well as the regression that many of the characters are undergoing in the face of an uncertain future. It provides a hint of the more affecting film that The Misogynists could have been had it transcended the staginess of its setup.
Though the film's dialogue rarely offers enough intellectual insights to justify a general feeling of artificiality, it does effectively evoke the media-poisoned discourse-fatigue that's afflicted us all since before Trump even decided to run for public office. The film shows people across the political spectrum who appear to have argued themselves into a corner in an effort to make sense of their changing society, and their failure to live up to their own beliefs seems to be contributing further to their unhappiness.
Going even further than this, one of the escorts, Sasha (Ivana Miličević), hired by Cameron offers up what's perhaps the film's thesis statement during an argument with her Muslim cab driver, Cairo (Hemang Sharma). She insists on her right to criticize whoever she wants, claiming that "Americans wouldn't have anything to talk about" without this right. This idea of conflict being preferable to silence ties into the ambiguous denouement of The Misogynists. Tukel ultimately seems to suggest that the freedom so many Americans insist upon as the most important value is, in fact, so lonely and terrifying that even the spectacle of the world falling apart is a reassuring distraction.
Cast: Dylan Baker, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Ivana Milicevic, Lou Jay Taylor, Matt Walton, Christine Campbell, Nana Mensah, Rudy De La Cruz, Hemang Sharma, Cynthia Thomas, Darrill Rosen, Karl Jacob, Matt Hopkins Director: Onur Tukel Screenwriter: Onur Tukel Distributor: Factory 25, Oscilloscope Laboratories Running Time: 85 min Rating: NR Year: 2017
Review: Downhill Is a Watered-Down Imitation of a True Provocation
Downhill never makes much of an impact as it moves from one mildly amusing cringe-comedy set piece to the next.2
Ruben Östlund's 2014 film Force Majeure brims with precisely calibrated depictions of human misery—shots that capture, with a mordant, uncompromising eye, the fragility of contemporary masculinity and the bitter resentments underlying the veneer of domestic contentment. The observations it makes about male cowardice and the stultifying effects of marriage aren't exactly new, but Östlund lends them an indelibly discomfiting vigor through his rigorous yet playful compositions. Given the clarity of that vision, it probably goes without saying that Nat Faxon and Jim Rash's Downhill, an Americanized remake of Östlund's film, faced an uphill battle to not seem like an act of redundancy.
Downhill not only borrows the basic outlines of Force Majeure's plot, but also attempts to mimic its icily cynical sense of humor. The result is a pale imitation of the real thing that never builds an identity of its own. Like its predecessor, Downhill tracks the fallout from a single catastrophically gutless moment, in which Pete (Will Ferrell), the patriarch of an upper-class American family on a ski holiday in the Alps, runs away from an oncoming avalanche, leaving his wife, Billie (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and two sons, Finn and Emerson (Julian Grey and Ammon Jacob Ford), behind—though not before grabbing his phone.
This scene, which Östlund covers in a single indelible long take in Force Majeure, is broken up here into a conventional series of shots. It's reasonably well-constructed, and it effectively sets up the chain of events that follow, but perhaps inevitably, it doesn't carry the same weight. And the same is true of so much of Downhill as it moves from one mildly amusing cringe-comedy set piece to the next, never making much of an impact.
Comedy of discomfort usually depends on the willingness to linger on an awkward moment, to make it impossible for us to shake off that discomfort. But Faxon, Rash, and co-screenwriter Jesse Armstrong lack the courage of their convictions. They craft some truly cringe-inducing scenarios, such as an explosive debate between Pete and Billie as they attempt to convince a couple of friends, Rosie and Zach (Zoe Chao and Zach Woods), whose version of events about the avalanche is correct. But they don't give us enough time or space to soak in the uneasy atmosphere. During the debate, for example, Billie rouses Finn and Emerson and has them testify before Rosie and Zach that her memory is correct. But almost as soon as the sheer inappropriateness of the decision to bring her kids into the center of a brutal marital dispute hits us, the moment has passed, and the film has moved on to the next gag.
It's hard not to feel like Faxon and Rash are pulling their punches, perhaps anxious that going a little too dark or getting a bit too uncomfortable might upset the delicate sensitivities of an American audience. Rather than really dig into the marital strife at the heart of the film's premise, they're mostly content to step back and let Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus do their thing. And the two actors bounce off each other with a pleasantly nervous energy, Ferrell's clammy desperation so well contraposed to Louis-Dreyfus's rubber-faced emoting.
Ferrell plays Pete as a man terrified of his own feelings, unable to reveal his deep insecurities to anyone, including himself. Louis-Dreyfus, on the other hand, wears every emotion, however fleeting, right on her face, which is in a state of constant flux. Throughout Downhill, Billie's emotions range from unease to anger to self-doubt to pity, often in the span of seconds. More than anything else, it's Louis-Dreyfus's performance that sticks with you after the film is over.
If Force Majeure was essentially a film about male cowardice, Downhill is in many ways about the lies women must tell themselves to remain sane in a man's world. It's apt, then, that one of the pivotal images in Östlund's film is that of the husband's pathetically weeping face as he breaks down in a fit of self-loathing in front of his wife, and that the most lasting image in this remake is the look of shock, confusion, and rage on Billie's face as Pete tells her the same. Unfortunately, it's one of the few truly striking and meaningful images in the entire film.
Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Will Ferrell, Miranda Otto, Zoe Chao, Zach Woods, Julian Grey, Kristofer Hivju, Ammon Jacob Ford, Giulio Berruti Director: Nat Faxon, Jim Rash Screenwriter: Jesse Armstrong, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash Distributor: Searchlight Pictures Running Time: 86 min Rating: R Year: 2020
Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, a Tribute to Journalists, Gets First Trailer
Anderson's latest is described as a "love letter to journalists."
Today, Searchlight Pictures debuted the trailer for The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson's first feature since 2018's Isle of Dogs and first live-action film since 2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel. According to its official description, The French Dispatch "brings to life a collection of stories from the final issue of an American magazine published in a fictional 20th-century French city." The city is Ennui-sur-Blasé and the magazine is run by Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), an American journalist based in France. The trailer, just a hair over two minutes, quickly establishes the workaday (and detail-rich) world of a magazine, a travelogue struggling with just how much politics to bring to its pages during a time of strife.
A French Dispatch is written and directed by Anderson, whose described the film as a "love letter to journalists," and stars Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park, Bill Murray, and Owen Wilson. See the trailer below:
Searchlight Pictures will release The French Dispatch on July 24.
Review: Sonic the Hedgehog Doesn't Rock, Even After a New Paintjob
Throughout, any and all subtext is buried under the weight of Jim Carrey's mugging.1.5
It's only fitting that director Jeff Fowler's Sonic the Hedgehog, the belated big-screen debut for the eponymous Sega mascot, feels like a blast from the 1990s. Eschewing the emphasis on world building that pervades so many contemporary blockbusters, the film remains intensely focused on the personal travails of its supersonic protagonist (voiced by Ben Schwartz) and opts for telling a single, complete story over setting up a potential franchise universe. Indeed, despite Sonic being an alien from a distant planet, we only briefly glimpse other realms besides Earth throughout the film, and we only get enough of the blue hedgehog's backstory to know that he fled his homeworld (modeled on the original video game's starter level) after being hunted by other residents afraid of his superpowers.
Using rings that can allow him to pass through dimensions, Sonic ends up on Earth, settling in the woods around Green Hills, Montana. He remains hidden for his own safety but suffers from intense loneliness. This much is obvious from the way he darts around the outskirts of town, watching people from afar or spying on them through windows and pretending to have conversations with them. But Sonic the Hedgehog repeatedly makes its hero reiterate his feelings in endless monologues and voiceover narration. If the best contemporary children's films trust young viewers to follow at least some of the emotional beats of a story on their own, Sonic the Hedgehog is frustratingly old-school in its condescension, as the filmmakers constantly hold the audience's hand in order to make sure that we understand why the hero looks so crestfallen as he, for example, plays group games all by himself.
Eventually, Sonic's high-speed, energy-producing running causes a power surge, and after the Pentagon enlists a private drone contractor, Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey), to investigate the cause, the hedgehog finds himself in the government's crosshairs. As originally conceived in the video game, Robotnik had little depth or motivation beyond providing a megalomaniacal impedance to the hero, but there's something gently unnerving about how little updating had to be done to Robotnik's simplistic backstory to credibly present him as a mercenary in a modern military-industrial complex wielding destructive drone technology without oversight.
Of course, that subtext is rapidly buried under the weight of Carrey's mugging. As the actor is wont to do, he lunges at each line like a starving animal, pulling rubber faces and jutting his limbs in angular motions as he says every other word with an exaggerated pronunciation. In depicting a mad scientist, Carrey over-exaggerates the madness at the expense of the rare moments in which Robotnik conveys a more compelling kind of super-genius sociopathy, a tech-libertarian's disregard for anything outside his own advancement.
Through a series of mishaps, Sonic accidentally opens a portal to San Francisco with his rings and drops the remaining transportation devices through it, necessitating a retrieval mission to California. To do so, he enlists Tom Wachowski (James Marsden), a local Green Hills cop, to escort him. Having Sonic travel with Tom is an obvious pretense to give the former his first true friend, but the pairing comes at the expense of all narrative logic. Sonic can sprint from Montana all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back within seconds, yet he opts to tag along in a pickup truck doing 60mph for a mission where time is of the essence.
To Marsden's credit, there's a natural camaraderie between him and the computer-animated Sonic, which is impressive given that the critter was likely represented on set by a tennis ball on a stick. The jokes are almost all uniformly awful, following a formula of some zany thing happening and a character merely describing aloud what just happened in an incredulous voice. But Marsden impressively imbues Tom with a sense of pity as the man contemplates Sonic's life on the run—one that finds the hedgehog living in the shadows and heading to new, sometimes miserable worlds to outrun forces that might exploit and harm him.
For a film that gained notoriety well before its release for how wildly Sonic's original animation diverged from his well-established look, Sonic the Hedgehog does show a clear understanding of the source material and its essential nature. Sonic, fundamentally, is a goofy character with a specific power who just wants friends, and as exasperating as the film can be in its overbearingly clumsy humor, it at least never tries to make the character more complicated than he really is. But the lack of any greater depth to the core of the material limits the possibilities of making any of this meaningful to anyone.
Video games long ago began to reveal their cinematic aspirations, but the Sonic the Hedgehog series to this day continues to channel the old-school cool of platformers that prize gameplay—and testing the player's hand-eye coordination—over matters of story. There's plenty of potential for movies and games to inform one another, but perhaps the only aspect of video game culture that Sonic the Hedgehog brings to cinema is the trend of allowing preemptive fan outrage to necessitate overhauls from already overworked animators.
Cast: Ben Schwartz, James Marsden, Jim Carrey, Tika Sumpter, Adam Pally, Lee Majdoub, Neal McDonough Director: Jeff Fowler Screenwriter: Pat Casey, Josh Miller Distributor: Paramount Pictures Running Time: 99 min Rating: PG Year: 2020 Buy: Soundtrack
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text:
It's a tradition that dates back to 19th Century Ireland but carving a pumpkin is still one of the most popular Halloween pastimes.
And with the spooky day just around the corner destinations across the country are gearing up to welcome families eager to pick the perfect pumpkin.
But what do you need to look for when visiting a local pumpkin patch so you can carve out a spectacular spooky offering to greet your trick or treaters?
You may be tempted to hunt for the biggest pumpkin in the patch but a medium sized one is going to be easier to carry and carve.
It's also important to pick a ripe pumpkin with a hard shell and one that has a flat surface so it will stand up to straight.
Now you've picked the perfect specimen it's all about transforming it with a ghoulishly good design.
Preparation is key so lay down newspaper sheets to avoid mess and make sure you have a stencil or idea of your design before you start hacking away.
Once you have cut the lid off with a carving knife you can hollow out the insides, remembering to save the flesh for cooking some hearty soup later on.
Tape your design stencil onto the pumpkin and use a pen or sharp implement to draw before cutting.
It's easier to carve straight lines rather than circles so an angular creation is the best method for beginners.
Finally sprinkle a little cinnamon on the underside of the lid to fill your home with a perfect autumn smell and make your pumpkin last longer.
Although many may believe pumpkin carving was a tradition conjured up in America their origin comes from an Irish myth about Stingy Jack, who tricked the Devil for his own monetary gain.
Legend has it when Jack died, God refused him entry into heaven, and the Devil would not let him into hell, so he was doomed to roam the earth for all time.
In Ireland, people started to carve scary faces out of turnips to frighten away Jack's wandering soul.
When Irish immigrants moved to the America they began carving the lanterns from pumpkins instead as these were native to the region.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Cool Products March 2009
Clip it Up! Ribbon Organizer
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DYMO LetraTag Plus LT-100H
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Interactive Albums
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text:
Two weeks after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff arrived in Washington to meet with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S. Joint Board, forerunner of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Allied leaders agreed to a "Germany first" strategy, declaring that once that country was defeated, they could then turn their attention to Japan. Ultimately, the United States did not hold entirely true to the plan, as it engaged in major Pacific operations before Germany's surrender. Nonetheless, at this—the first meeting of what became known as the Combined Chiefs of Staff—the United States and Great Britain agreed in principle on its top war priority: returning to northwestern Europe to defeat Nazi Germany.1
Getting there, however, would be no mean feat. Operation Neptune, the naval and amphibious assault phase of Overlord—the Allied invasion of France's Normandy—would require a monumental expenditure of maritime resources. Surface combatants would be needed to supress the many bunkers and coastal batteries that guarded the invasion sites. The number of landing ships and craft necessary to transport a large ground force and its equipment and supplies to the Continent exceeded the Allies' current inventory. German air and naval forces, including the feared U-boats, would certainly try to wreak havoc on any major movement across the English Channel. And finally, overcoming doctrinal as well as personality clashes between senior U.S. and British naval commanders would prove a daunting task. In the end, the U.S. Navy and Royal Navy overcame all these obstacles to make possible the liberation of northwestern Europe.
By late December 1941, the Allies had the benefit of more than a year of cross-Channel invasion planning. Following their expulsion from the Continent in early June 1940, the British had undertaken numerous studies on the subject. In early 1942, those efforts yielded Round Up, the earliest version of a cross-Channel invasion plan, and Sledgehammer, a contingency plan to land troops in France should the Soviet Union suddenly collapse. But cross-Channel initiatives were constantly interrupted by the immediacy of other pressing operations, such as the August 1942 Dieppe Raid; Operation Torch, the November 1942 landings in North Africa; and the 1943 invasions of Sicily and Italy. During this period, many different plans for invading northwestern Europe were considered, some more feasible than others. Even U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in December 1943 would be selected as Supreme Allied Commander, submitted their own ideas concerning the invasion.2
Achieving an Overall Outline
Eventually, under the guidance and direction of a group of senior British military officers known as the Combined Commanders, these efforts evolved into a number of appreciations, or studies, of the feasibility of a cross-Channel attack. One of the most important conclusions reached was the invasion should take place on the Cotentin Peninsula, in Normandy, and not the Pas de Calais, which was closer to England but more heavily defended than the peninsula. At this stage COSSAC (Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander [designate]) became involved in the planning. The forerunner of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), COSSAC was headed by British Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan. It combined all of the earlier efforts and, because of lingering doubts, revisited the question of whether the landing site should be the Cotentin Peninsula or Pas de Calais. The invasion's top planners reached a compromise solution: Normandy's Calvados coast. The culmination of COSSAC's efforts were released in the summer of 1943 as the Overlord Outline Plan.3
The plan called for:
a three-division assault with two follow-on divisions
a significant reduction of the Luftwaffe through an Allied air campaign of attrition—Operation Pointblank
a deception plan, which eventually evolved into Operation Fortitude, to mislead the Germans into thinking the Allies would land at the Pas de Calais.
naval gunfire support to reduce German coastal defenses.
It furthermore specifically recognized that success would require that the Allies build up their forces in France faster than the Germans could bring their armored forces, held in reserve, to bear.4
At Churchill's insistence, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay was appointed Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Force (ANCXF)—overall naval commander of Operation Neptune—in July 1943. A consummate planner and a stickler for detail, Ramsay was involved in the preparations for almost every Royal Navy amphibious operation from Dunkirk to Sicily. His top subordinates would be the commanders of the Eastern Naval Task Force (ENTF), Royal Navy Rear Admiral Philip Vian, and the Western Naval Task Force (WNTF), U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk. Their commands, in turn, would comprise five assault forces corresponding to the invasion beaches in Normandy.5
Despite the presence of subordinate staffs for each force, the ANCXF staff did the bulk of the naval planning at its headquarters in London. A good amount of preliminary work had been undertaken, but a number of unanswered naval operational questions remained. For example, how were the Allies to deal with the many mines the Germans had planted in the English Channel and the significant threat from the enemy's U-boats and E-boats (fast torpedo boats)? What steps were needed to protect the naval task forces from Luftwaffe attacks, and what would be the U.S and Royal navies' role in reducing German coastal defenses with gunfire? Finally, what time of day should be selected for H-hour—the precise moment of the initial landings?
Anvil and the Landing Craft Debate
One of the first challenges confronting the naval planners was determining the amount of lift, or amphibious shipping, needed to carry Allied ground forces to the shores of France. The Royal Navy calculated it could support the Overlord Outline Plan's three-division assault and two-division follow-up with the existing number of landing ships, landing craft, escorts, and other naval assets then in England. On 2 January 1944 General Bernard Law Montgomery, the hero of El Alamein and leader of the British Eighth Army in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, arrived in Britain as the commanding general, 21st Army Group and overall commander of Operation Neptune's ground forces. "Monty" quickly announced to Ramsay as well as SHAEF that the frontage of the invasion needed to be doubled to 50 miles and the size of the initial landing force increased to five assault divisions with two to follow up. This expanded Neptune's lift requirements markedly.6
In addition to the sudden increase in the number of ships and landing craft necessary for the invasion, General Eisenhower arrived in London on 14 January intent on proceeding with a planned amphibious invasion of southern France, code-named Operation Anvil, that would occur almost simultaneously with Overlord. That meant landing craft and ships from the Mediterranean that Allied planners in England might have relied on for the newly enlarged cross-Channel invasion would not be available.7
Between early January and mid-February, planners in England wrestled with ship capacities, ground-force footprints, and expected operational availabilities of landing craft and ships. They eventually settled on the needed number of ships and landing craft, but only after Eisenhower and Marshall agreed to postpone the landing in southern France. Montgomery, in turn, conceded to reduce the number of required vehicles and other materiel for the ground forces, and the planners sidestepped other space requirements by overloading landing craft and in some instances reassigning some cargo from assault ships to merchant shipping.8
Naval Gunfire Support
Another important question was how much naval gunfire the invasion would require. To determine the answer, Allied planners first had to account for the priority targets the gunfire would need to neutralize—the formidable German coastal defense batteries that could range the assault beaches and shell amphibious vessels and transports. Second, lessons from the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps in the Central Pacific suggested that naval bombardments of coastal defenses needed to last days and sometimes weeks if hardened positions, such as bunkers, were to be destroyed. In fact, Rear Admiral Charles Cooke of the Chief of Naval Operations' War Plans Division gave a presentation to Prime Minister Churchill in February 1944 on the benefits of using battleships to destroy hardened defenses like pillboxes, which the U.S. Navy claimed to have effectively done earlier that month during its Kwajalein operation.9
For the Normandy landings, naval planners ultimately decided to reject the lessons of the Pacific regarding naval gunfire support. Initial reports from the November 1943 Tarawa Atoll amphibious assault indicated that naval gunfire had been ineffective in destroying the hardened defenses on Betio Island. Unlike the amphibians of the Central Pacific, who concluded that heavier naval bombardments of longer durations were needed to fix this problem, the Normandy planners specifically decided not to attempt to destroy hardened defenses.10
There were naturally significant differences between operating in the Pacific Ocean against an island and in the shallower, more restricted English Channel against a coastline. A preliminary study undertaken in the summer of 1943 suggested that to destroy the German coastal defenses along the invasion beaches the Allies would need more than 100 surface combatants.11
The Graham Report, a study commissioned by the British to analyze naval gunfire-support requirements, concluded that given the resources available, the Allies were better off attempting to stun German defenders with a sudden, massive barrage of naval gunfire and then quickly assaulting the beaches before the enemy could recover. The Allies' failure to effectively destroy the Italian fortress on the island of Pantelleria, near Sicily, with an air bombardment in June 1943 suggested that demolishing hardened defenses required time and resources U.S. and British forces did not have.12
Army planners and commanders who had witnessed the inability of artillery to destroy fixed and hardened targets during World War I were inclined to agree with those conclusions. The overriding concern that virtually eliminated the requirement for a long bombardment was the importance of tactical surprise. To spend hours, let alone days, pounding away at German coastal defenses—some of which were 11.5-foot-thick reinforced-concrete gun casemates—would have led to the Allies losing the race to build up forces in Normandy.13
The ANCXF staff concluded from a study undertaken in December 1943 that the number of surface combatants necessary to stun defenders in German coastal fortifications was roughly equivalent to the number of defense batteries that could range the Normandy invasion beaches. Moreover, some of the vessels, as well as landing craft armed with artillery and rockets, could also saturate open gun emplacements and other "lighter" defenses with naval gunfire. Additional ships, primarily battleships, would be reserved to support ground forces maneuvering ashore. Finally, as a further measure the Allied air forces would bomb the beach defenses just prior to H-hour.14
Tactical Control of Aircraft
By the time of the Tarawa assaults, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were singing the praises of giving centralized control of an invasion's tactical aircraft to a Navy staff located on the amphibious task force flagship. This method was very effective in the Central Pacific campaigns but was rejected by the naval planners.15
For numerous reasons the Allied Expeditionary Air Force (AEAF) in England exercised control of all Allied tactical aircraft involved in the Normandy invasion. First, Mediterranean commanders had granted the Allied air forces tactical, land-based control during Anglo-American combined operations as far back as the North Africa campaigns and continuing through the operations in Sicily and Italy. As Supreme Commander, Mediterranean, General Eisenhower had repeatedly discussed this question with Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, the commander of U.S. naval forces in northwest African waters, but decided in favor of centralized control by the Allied air forces. Since many of the same planners and commanders involved in the Mediterranean operations were now in charge of the Normandy landings, they saw no reason to change the command and control of aircraft support that had suited them in the Med.16
Second, the missions U.S. and British tactical aircraft would fly on D-Day extended far beyond protection of the amphibious task forces, which was the U.S. Navy's primary concern. Many planes would conduct interdiction missions deep into French territory, while others would be assigned to intercept V-1 rockets and attack their launch sites (Operation Crossbow). Third, neither the U.S. Navy nor the Royal Navy had a flagship that could manage the robust communications requirements necessary to control thousands of aircraft.
A final and perhaps most important reason AEAF should control of all the tactical aircraft was that Allied planes would be taking off from hundreds of airfields in England and daily flying many different missions. It made more sense to centralize control of all of the aircraft from an Allied air forces headquarters somewhere in England. To address the navies' concern that there be a means to direct fighter cover over the naval task forces if German aircraft attacked them, ANCXF and AEAF would deploy fighter-direction tenders (FDTs)—three specially equipped LSTs, one stationed in the Western Task Force area, one in the Eastern area, and one mid-Channel—capable of communicating between the naval task force commanders and the Advanced Headquarters AEAF at Uxbridge, England, which was responsible for dispatching tactical aircraft to France.17
Convoy and Port Operations
For D-Day and in the following days, the Allies would need to execute one of the most complex convoy, escort, and offload operations ever undertaken. This was in part because no large-scale ports were along the stretch of coastline being invaded (the capture of Cherbourg at the tip of the Carentan Peninsula was a key early objective). For offload of troops, vehicles, and cargo, landing ships and craft would need to pull onto the beach, or vessels would need to dock in artificial ports transported and towed across the Channel.
Because hundreds of supply ships of varying types would be shuttling back and forth between France and England, the Allied navies needed to track which ships were going to which destinations to ensure supplies and reinforcements arrived where needed. Naval planners devised a system for doing so based on their experiences in Operation Torch. Four letters were painted on the hull of each cargo-carrying convoy ship, designating country of departure, destination, convoy type, whether a ship had joined a convoy already bound for its destination, and if the convoy had been split into two groups. This allowed observers in the Channel to alert ports back in England of the impending arrival of certain types of ships, which in turn eased harbor traffic management.18
The Allies designated ports from the Thames River around southern England to Bristol Channel be used specifically for the invasion build-up. Ports east of Southampton were reserved for British troops and equipment, while those west of Southampton supported U.S. troops and equipment. Southampton itself and the nearby port of Poole were joint U.S.-British support facilities. On return trips, LCTs and LSTs were ordered to use the same "hards" from which they had departed England. Merchant ships were to be preloaded before D-Day and sail directly from their ports along the Thames and Bristol Channel to their destinations in France on D+1 and D+2.19
The planners had to coordinate precisely the process of feeding returning merchant ships into ports recently vacated by naval-assault and follow-on forces. To accomplish these tasks ANCXF created a Force Maintenance Headquarters as well as special organizations that coordinated tug operations.
When to Set H-Hour and Other Questions
The most vexing problem confronting Allied planners was what time to set H-hour. The preferences and requirements of the various types of invasion units helped shape their answer. Landing-craft coxswains desired a high or rising tide so that when they offloaded troops their vessels would not be stranded on the beach. Naval Combat Demolition Units preferred a low and falling tide so that they would have maximum time to destroy beach obstacles before they were submerged. A high tide would, and eventually did, make it close to impossible to eliminate these obstructions. Needing visibility to shell and bomb coastal defenses, navy gunners and air force bombardiers preferred an H-hour after sunrise. And finally, assault troop commanders wanted a high tide because it would leave less beach for their men to charge across while taking mortar, machine-gun, and other small-arms fire.
The eventual deciding factor that overruled all considerations was General Montgomery's requirement that the invasion have two full high tides on D-Day to ensure that LSTs could offload the maximum amount of personnel and materiel on the beaches before German armor arrived on the scene.20
Taking all of these factors into consideration, the planners concluded that the least problematic H-hour should be a compromise—40 minutes after sunup, which also happened to be three hours after low tide. That meant that H-hour would be 0630 on the two American beaches and, because of different tidal conditions, roughly an hour later on the three British assault beaches. The LSTs would get two high tides, warships and bombers would have visibility for attacking coastal defenses, and the demolition units would have a brief window to clear paths through the beach obstacles and mines before the incoming tide covered them.
In addition to these requirements, the naval staffs had to sort out a wide range of other tactical naval issues. How were they to coordinate aircraft flying from England to serve as air spotters for naval gunfire-support ships? A significant engineering challenge was determining how to move the large artificial harbors across the Channel and where off the Normandy beaches to set them down. How to screen the naval task forces and convoys from U-boats and surface threats was another vexing problem. Finally, one of the most daunting tasks was choreographing the movement of landing craft in the assault areas. In what order should the different types of vessels hit the beaches? How fast should they proceed? How far apart should the craft and the waves of boats be spaced?
The Neptune Operational Plan
In late February, Admiral Ramsay issued the invasion's detailed naval plan, which was intended as a general guide for ANCXF's staff and task-force and assault-force commanders as they began detailed problem-solving and planning. ANCXF followed up on 10 April by releasing Neptune's final operational orders, which were divided into 22 separate sections and comprised more than 1,000 pages, including appendices and charts. The plan, which specified the movement of the assault forces and naval support vessels in minute detail, has been hailed by British military historian Correlli Barnett as a "painstaking and brilliantly successful exercise in operational predetermination."21
Following D-Day, the U.S. Navy complained that the orders were far too rigid and did not give the task-force and assault-force commanders any room to take initiative. The Royal Navy, however, countered that for an operation as complex as Neptune, the movement of all the naval components had to be specified in ANCXF's operational orders. Failure of any of the naval forces to move exactly where they were ordered, at exactly the proper time, would have had a catastrophic effect on the invasion. Whatever the ground truth, the Operation Neptune plan nonetheless put in motion one of the largest and most complex amphibious invasions ever undertaken.22
1. Meeting Minutes of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, 24 December 1941, Combined Chiefs of Staff Meeting Minutes, RG 216, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereinafter cited as NARA).
2. "Initial Planning for a Cross-Channel Attack," Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, RG 165, NARA; Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY.: Doubleday, 1955), p. 47.
3. "Offensive Operations in Europe," Combined Staff Planner's Appreciation, April 3, 1942, Combined Commanders Appreciations and Reports, RG 331, NARA and Minutes of the Combined Commanders Meeting, 30 September 1942, Operational Plans and Appreciations, NARA.
4. Operation "Overlord" Outline Plan and Appreciation, 30 July 1943, Operational Plans and Appreciations, RG 331, NARA.
5. David G. Chandler and James Lawton Collins Jr., eds., The D-Day Encyclopedia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), Andrew Lambert, "Bertran H. Ramsay," pp. 449-51; David Brown, "Philip Vian," pp. 584-85; John C. Reilly Jr., "Alan G. Kirk," pp. 331-32.
6. Bertram Ramsay, Year of D-Day: The 1944 Diary of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, Robert W. Love and John Major, eds. (Hull, England: University of Hull Press, 1994), pp. 4-5.
7. Ibid, pp. 9-10.
8. Ibid, p. 30; Stephen Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 358; Robert Coakley and Richard Leighton, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1943-5 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), pp. 335-6.
9. Prime Minister Winston Churchill Minute to the First Sea Lord, February 20, 1944, SHAEF Overlord-Anvil Planning Records, RG 331, NARA.
10. Gordon Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack (Washington, DC: Office of Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1951), pp. 192-3.
11. Ibid, p. 193.
12. "Report on Operation Neptune", vol. 1, pp. 62, 66, ANCXF Operation Neptune Reports, Joint Forces Staff College Library, Norfolk, VA (hereinafter cited as JFSCL); Bertram Ramsay, Year of D-Day, p. 51.
13. Christopher Yung, Gators of Neptune: Naval Amphibious Planning for the Normandy Invasion (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), p. 78; "Report on Operation Neptune", vol. 1, p. 66, JFSCL.
14. Annexe C, Enclosure No. 3 to ANCXF letter to Admiralty, Letter No., 128/x/0672, December 9, 1943, ANCXF Correspondence, RG 313, NARA.
15. "Amphibious Operations During the Period August to December 1943," COMINCH Report P-001, April 22, 1944, 2-13, COMINCH Reports, Second World War Published Material Shelves, JFSCL.
16. Arthur Tedder, With Prejudice: The War Memoirs of Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Tedder (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967); Vincent Orange, Coningham: A Biography of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham (London: Methuen: 1990); and Wesley Craven and James Cate, eds., Europe: Torch to Pointblank, August 1942 to December 1943, vol. 2 of the Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 28-9; Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 3, The War Years (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 1437-38. The following senior commanders were involved in both the North African-Mediterranean landings and the Normandy invasion: General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, General Bernard L. Montgomery, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, Rear Admiral Philip Vian, Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk, Rear Admiral John L. Hall, and Rear Admiral Don P. Moon.
17. "Amphibious Operations: Invasion of Northern France, Western Task Force,"September 1944, 3-1, COMINCH Reports, JFSCL; http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/comnaveu/comnaveu-7.htm.
18. Christopher Yung, Gators of Neptune, p. 140.
19. Ibid; Office of Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Force, "Operation Neptune—Naval Orders (Short Title ON), " 10 April 1944, ANCXF Operation Neptune Naval Orders, Second World War Operational Archives Shelves, JFSCL.
20. Bernard Montgomery, Normandy to the Baltic (Federal Republic of Germany: Printing and Stationery Service, British Army of the Rhine, 1946), p. 32; see also Adrian Lewis, Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 150.
21. Office of Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Force , "Operation Neptune," 10 April 1944, JFSCL; Correlli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), p. 797.
22. See Alan G. Kirk, "Reminiscences," Oral History Collections, Naval Historical Center, Operational Archives Branch, Washington, DC, p. 261 for the U.S. perspective on the operational plan. Also see Kenneth Edwards, Operation Neptune (London: Albatross, 1947), p. 35. For Ramsay's view, see "Report on Operation Neptune", vol. 1, 6, JFSCL.
Christopher D. Yung is the author of Gators of Neptune: Naval Amphibious Planning for the Normandy Invasion (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006). A senior research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, he earned his Ph.D. at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
Operation Neptune Glossary
AEAF-Allied Expeditionary Air Force
ANCXF - Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Force
COSSAC-Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander
SHAEF -Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
Landing Craft and Ships
LCA-Landing craft, assault; British version of the LCVP
LCI-Landing craft, infantry
LCI(L)-Landing craft, infantry (large)
LCM-Landing craft, mechanized
LCT -Landing craft, tank
LCT(R)-Landing craft, tank (rocket)
LCVP-Landing craft, vehicle and personnel; commonly known as a Higgins boat
LST-Landing ship, tank
Anvil-Original name for Allied invasion of southern France; later changed to Dragoon
Crossbow-Allied air operation to attack V-1 rocket launch sites
Neptune-Naval component of Overlord
Overlord-Allied invasion of northwestern Europe
Pointblank-U.S. and British bomber offensive to crush the Luftwaffe and Germany's aircraft-related industries
Torch-November 1942 Allied invasion of Northwest Africa
The Contentious Naval Commanders
The two most important personalities in the development of the Operation Neptune naval plan were Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Force, and Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk, commander, Western (U.S.) Naval Task Force. The two officers got off to a rocky start when in the fall of 1943 Ramsay informed Kirk that it was his intention to have Kirk serve as the head coordinator of U.S. naval forces strictly within a Royal Navy command structure—in other words, Kirk was expected to command nothing.
Taking advantage of his long friendship with the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the American admiral complained that he saw his role as an operational commander, directing U.S. Navy ships, landing craft, bases, and personnel. In the end, the expanding number of American naval assets supporting Neptune necessitated a command and organizational arrangement akin to Kirk's vision; however, this initial testy exchange was a harbinger of things to come.
Doctrinial differences further strained the two officers' relationship. To the U.S. Navy, the landings should be conducted in accordance with lessons learned in Central Pacific campaigns—particularly in such areas as control of aircraft and duration of bombardment of coastal defenses. Ramsay tended to dismiss such suggestions from Kirk and his staff.
The relationship soured to the point that there is some evidence suggesting Ramsay attempted to have Kirk relieved and sent back to the United States. Admiral Harold Stark, the commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe, sent a message to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King several weeks before the invasion, hinting that Kirk should be relieved for the sake of Anglo-American relations. King briefly considered the request before he decided it was too late to make such a significant change.
Conflicting personalities was at least partly to blame for the commanders' poor relationship. Some of Kirk's contemporaries accused him of being a "showman" and overly ambitious. Ramsay, on the other hand, has been described as very inflexible and rigid. Beyond style and temperament, most of the officers' clashes were over substantial differences of opinion on how amphibious operations should be conducted.
The tension arising from these disagreements was compounded when major setbacks occurred in the invasion preparation process. That was what happened when German E-boats penetrated Royal Navy defenses in April 1944, intercepted American LSTs conducting exercises off Slapton Sands, England, and sank two and damaged one of the ships, killing more than 700 Soldiers and Sailors. Kirk later blamed Ramsay's command-and-control arrangement in which Royal Navy Home Commands were assigned to protect the U.S. forces conducting the exercises.
In early May 1944 General Dwight D. Eisenhower got word that Kirk had insisted on a naval bombardment of E-boats in port at Cherbourg but had been turned down by Ramsay. The British commander came close to relieving Kirk for insubordination but thought the better of it and instead simply smoothed out the issue with Eisenhower.
A week later, however, the conflict between the two admirals exploded when during the final presentation of the invasion plan before King George VI, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Eisenhower, Kirk implied that the command arrangements were unclear. Neither Churchill nor the king was pleased with the 11th-hour criticism. Ramsay reserved the most vitriolic language for his diary, writing that Kirk "is getting me amazed by his willful stupidity."
Despite these incidents, Ramsay and Kirk managed to keep their relations positive enough to successfully plan and execute the naval portion of the Normandy invasion. Following the operation, the two actually got along quite well, cooperating as the Allies advanced toward Germany. When Ramsay tragically died in a January 1945 plane crash, Kirk was temporarily made Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Force.
-Christopher D. Yung


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Windows 7 Graphics – High DPI
High DPI is not new to Windows; however in Windows 7 we made few changes that developers should be aware of. The goal is to encourage end users to set their displays to native resolution and use DPI rather than screen resolution to change the size of displayed
text and images. Windows 7 can auto-detect and configure a default DPI on clean installs on machines configured by their OEMs using DPI settings. Join Silvana Moncayo and Matthew Blackshaw, PM in the graphics team and Yochay Kiriaty, Technical Evangelist,
on a discussion on Windows 7 High DPI.
This is another video in a sereis of Windows 7 Grahics videos on Channel 9
Right click or Alt+Enter to download this episode
- High Quality WMV (181.6 MB)
- Low Quality MP4 (68.2 MB)
- Mid Quality WMV (107.0 MB)
The Discussion
Wow the audio is messed up for me on this video. Oh wow, maybe it isn't the video, perhaps silverlight..
Thansk for giving a hint. But unfortenately I think currently there is way too many applications that break if you set the High DPI. For instance MS SQL Reporting Services 2008 fails. Just tried it -> some text is not being displayed any more in reports. So even MS itself did not really take care about this really important Windows feature - which is by fact in Windows since Win98 (or was it Win2000).
So i guess it will take a while until this wil be really useful.
Link speed limited, i can only click "WMA" ...
so where can i find a desktop monitor for say 18" to 22" that's even 100PPI ? I hate to say this but there are so very few montiors that are high-dpi. seems like small laptop displays are the only common ones.
who wants a an 12x8 inch desktop screen?
Where is the example? I see the manifest (which gives a warning when added during linking), but not the full example on MSDN.
I don't like it how that setting is treated. The DPI setting should define the real DPI value that the display has. It's not a zoom setting. Zooming should be another setting entirely.
For example, on netbooks you usually have 114 - 147 DPI. In order to be able to set proper sizes and proportions towards real world elements that you might display on the screen, you would need the correct DPI value. However, you wouldn't want everything to scale that much, because you are very space constrained. Or, there's also displays with a 72 DPI, where setting that value would have a really bad result. Therefore there should be a separate zoom setting that allows elements which have been defined with pixel based sizes to scale accordingly for people that want things to display larger.
The DPI setting on the other hand should only be used to be able to specify the size of an element in Point (pt) for print media or other real world measurment units like inches, and centimeters.
You should also use a bicubic resizer for the magnifying tool or images at high DPI... it gets pixelated.
PS: If anyone knows of a 32" widescreen display with 200 DPI or more... I want one (or two)!
very nice, this should make using my tv as my pc monitor easier! also my netbook.
that stinks...
video seems kinda formal compared to the typically charles video.
it was mention that WPF scales but Win32 and MFC doesn't what about WinForms?
Kinda useless (rarele used) feature, btw...
To make it work properly ALL (anything and everything) must use "millimeters of screen", instead of whole bunch of "measures" such as "pixel", "point" etc.
This is very important, certainly not useless. Apps are supporting this pretty well. I've been using "high dpi" for a long time and while really bad in XP, by 2007 in vista most apps would scale correctly, with bugs now and again mostly in in minor applications, and now almost never happen. In fact it's more and more common for app icons to have 120dpi etc versions so there is no pixellation even here.
Having a per-user setting in Win 7 is an expected and good addition.
There should also be a nag screen when a user has a non-native resolution, allowing a one-click fix. It's ridiculous to see the display technology that microsoft and others have developed, cleartype for example with it's sub-pixel precision and find that people are sending the screen a low-res image.
i totally agree. DPI is a screen calibration setting, not a "zoom" setting. besides the lack of hardware (high dpi screens) available, and the lack of Windows handling high DPI correctly (or easily for the programmer), i think that the confusion caused by the poor naming and poor explanation of windows dpi has really held back the high dpi world. If your screen is 144DPI, then the OS should be set to 144DPI. After that, if you want more "screen realestate", there should be a separate setting to reduce the size of UI elements (font sizes, width of title bars, icon sizes, etc). UI designers and programmers should be designing their UI around the inch (or centimeter) instead of the pixel.
the high dpi world is in shambles with so much misinformation and misconceptions around. but what do i know? my opinion doesn't matter at all.
Same experience here. We have a collection of 15" laptops with 1920x1200 displays, and you have to sit with your nose touching the screen to be able to read any normal text at 100% DPI. Hence we run at 200% DPI but soooooo many applications break down horribly...
Let's hope Win7 gets quick adoption to move in the right direction.


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Give Terrell Owens credit for doing everything possible to make sure he gets in his football workouts. No matter how random his crew is.
A few weeks back, Owens worked out with Drew Brees, Carson Palmer and Kyle Boller. On Monday, Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Golden Tate revealed T.O.'s new posse.
Just got some good work with @JimmyClausen cromarti , and T.O dude still has it. #ilovemesomemeâ Golden Tate (@ShowtimeTate) July 16, 2012
A few thoughts here:
1. We're not huge hashtag fans in general, but that's how it's done.
2. "Cromarti" probably is New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie, but it could also be Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie. Discuss amongst yourselves.
3. T.O. took a Curtis Painter-sized step down in quarterbacks between his last workout and this one.


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National Student Poets Celebrate Poety Month Across the United States
Anne Sparkman Scholastic Art & Writing Awards 212-343-6657 firstname.lastname@example.com
White House-sponsored poetry program sends student ambassadors into diverse communities to encourage the art of poetry
New York, NY — April 1, 2013 — At a time when the arts in schools are being cut across the nation, America's inaugural class of National Student Poets, five teenagers who serve as literary ambassadors for poetry, are spending the month of April spreading the word about their craft. During Poetry Month, each young poet will visit diverse communities across the United States to host workshops and participate in events that encourage other young people, interested adults, and educators to see poetry as a dynamic and thriving literary form.
"Through reading and writing poetry, young people learn to be creative, think critically, and broaden their horizons – and those lessons will stay with them for the rest of their lives," said First Lady Michelle Obama. "I am proud of these five young people, not only for working hard and expressing themselves so beautifully, but also for challenging the rest of us to see the world in new ways as well."
The National Student Poets are Luisa Banchoff, age 17, of Arlington, VA; Miles Hewitt, age 18, of Vancouver, WA; Claire Lee, age 16, of New York, NY; Natalie Richardson, age 17, of Oak Park, IL; and Lylla Younes, age 17, of Alexandria, LA. They were selected by a renowned panel of jurors in 2012 from a pool of outstanding writers, grades 9-11, who received a national Scholastic Art & Writing Award for poetry through the nonprofit Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. The National Student Poets Program is the nation's highest honor for youth poets and a signature initiative of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the Alliance.
Each of the National Student Poets' events and community service projects recognize the power of young writers to impart new skills, inspire their peers, and engage others in the appreciation of poetry:
- Luisa Banchoff and the Red Mountain Writing Project in Birmingham, AL will collaborate on student and teacher workshops focusing on the power of words in effecting change, honoring the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement.
- Miles Hewitt will organize and facilitate an At Home At School poetry workshop and performance for youth ages 6-12 at Washington State University, Vancouver.
- Claire Lee will conduct a series of workshops for third- and fourth-graders to help students strengthen their reading and writing skills at the East Harlem Tutorial Program in New York City. Additionally, Claire will read original works at the annual Academy of American Poets gala, which directly benefits National Poetry Month.
- Natalie Richardson will be featured as part of Feed Your Soul, a poetry festival for engaging those in the community who are new to poetry, hosted by 826michigan, Inside Out Literary Arts and the Detroit Public Library.
- Lylla Younes will conduct a workshop with inner-city youth in Albuquerque, NM in partnership with the New Mexico Department of Health and the National Hispanic Cultural Center.
For the most up-to-date information about the National Student Poets' events, please visit the media room.
The National Student Poets Program reflects the national imprimatur of the President's Committee in advancing arts education, links the National Student Poets with audiences and resources in their respective geographic regions through IMLS's community-based network of libraries and museums, and builds upon the Alliance's long-standing work with educators and creative teens through the prestigious Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. The winners of this year's Scholastic Art & Writing Awards have recently been announced, kicking off the selection process for the second class of National Student Poets, who will be introduced in fall 2013. More information on the National Student Poets Program can be found at www.artandwriting.org/NSPP.
The National Student Poets Program is an initiative of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, in coordination with the Library of Congress and the U.S. Department of Education. Academic awards are provided by the Bernstein Family Foundation. More information on the National Student Poets Program can be found at www.artandwriting.org/NSPP.
The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) is an advisory committee to the White House on cultural issues. Its core areas of focus are arts and humanities education, cultural exchange, and community revitalization. First Lady Michelle Obama, like other first ladies before her, serves as honorary chairman of the committee. www.pcah.gov.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Through grant making, policy development, and research, we help communities and individuals thrive through broad public access to knowledge, cultural heritage, and lifelong learning. To learn more about IMLS, please visit www.imls.gov.
The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, identifies teenagers with exceptional creative talent and brings their remarkable work to a national audience through the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Founded in 1923, the Awards is the longest-running, most prestigious program of its kind, having fostered the creativity and talent of millions of students through recognition, exhibitions and publications. Over the past five years alone, students have submitted nearly 900,000 pieces of work and over $45 million has been made available in scholarships and awards to top winning participants. www.artandwriting.org.


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Issues Library—Parental Rights
Custody Disputes
Disputes over the custody of minors occur on a daily basis—when parents who were never married move away from one another, during and after a divorce, or when an extended family member or friend demands access to a child. In these situations, if the parties cannot resolve the matter privately, they often invoke a third party—usually the court system—to intervene.
What is the Best Interest of the Child Standard?
When a dispute over custody goes to court, the judge reviews both parties' requests and any relevant evidence and then makes a decision based the best interest of the child, a legal standard defined and applied both in statutory and case law.
In What Situations Do Custody Disputes and Homeschooling Intersect?
There are two primary ways in which custody disputes can impact homeschoolers.
First, especially in the early years of the modern homeschooling movement, families often had their right to homeschool challenged by the state. HSLDA has successfully represented homeschool families in many such cases over the years, and courts now consistently acknowledge the parental right to choose homeschooling for their children.
Second, as homeschooling has become a more popular educational choice, it has also become a source of contention between parents, particularly divorcing parents. In many cases, the children were homeschooled before the divorce, but after it, one of the parents disputes the other's decision to continue homeschooling. If both parents are still considered to be "fit", that is, neither parent's rights have been terminated, then both parents have an equal "say" in how their children will be raised. Thus, when the disagreement about educational choice cannot be resolved privately, a judge makes a decision based on what the evidence shows is in the children's best interest.
Do Judges Ever Decide that Homeschooling is in the Child's Best Interest?
Yes. In fact, HSLDA has compiled a number of cases in which homeschooling is an issue in a custody dispute. You can find this research on our website >>