Still going through reviews....
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Blurb for homepage, including ratings:
Few critics dispute Ken Burns’ talent as storyteller and historian, but reviews of The War, his 15-hour WWII series, have been mixed. Some critics have questioned whether his bottom-up approach sacrifices the basic big picture—such as European involvement—and others are getting tired of Burns’ signature music-image montage. Several Latino groups aren’t satisfied with how Burns added material on Latino and Native American vets to the end of several episodes. Meanwhile the series, which began on Sept. 23 and continues this week amidst a slew of network premieres, has garnered fairly good ratings, beginning with a 5.0 and slipping to a 3.6 by Wednesday. According to TRAC Media Services, the majority of viewers are under age 65 and about 60 percent of viewers are men. Ratings appear to be lower in areas with large Latino populations, which may have something to do the controversy about no Latinos in the doc.
Quotes/descriptions of several reviews:
“…the vaunted ‘Ken Burns Style’ has become way too predictable. Nostalgic music underneath vintage still photographs, caressed by a panning and zooming camera, while letters are read in voice-over or survivors give us their oral-history version of events.”
Rickard Nilsen, The Arizona Republic
“Many Canadians will be upset that Canada rates barely a mention in tonight’s 2 ½-hour opener of the seven night, 15-hour opus. Others will be upset that Burns frames his war entirely within the confines of the American effort. He opens his film in December 1941, as though the previous two years never happened.” Alex Stachan, Montreal Gazette
“Burns' unparalleled talent for matching pictures to words has never been displayed more amazingly than it is in The War. Culling from published memoirs, his own interviews and countless thousands of feet of rare footage from combat photographers, he turns The War into something approaching a virtual-reality experience, always striking and often horrifying.” Glenn Garvin, The Miami Herald
“The film's strongest moments come at the end of the first, fourth and seventh episodes, when Burns and co-director Lynn Novick unleash the heartbreaking song ‘American Anthem’ in montage sequences. With vocals by Norah Jones, this haunting ode complements the patriotic sacrifices of that era and defies viewers not to have an emotional response. It's a tearjerker in the best sense.”
Rob Owen, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“The decision to tell all by not telling it all is sensible enough, but the structure is also a straitjacket -- in a roundabout way it's what led to protests by Latino American advocacy groups who felt their contributions had been scanted, and to the addition of three segments (one dealing with Native Americans, or rather one Native American) at the end of Episodes 1, 5 and 6. These passages are separated from the film proper by titles reading, "More than 16 million American men and women would serve in uniform during the war. They came from everywhere and each had a story to tell," the "each" stressed as if to say, almost grudgingly, that these added stories are no more important than anyone's.
“Which is, after all, the point -- not to be inclusive but universal, to represent the experiences of many through the few. But war is not universal; it is horribly particular. As it was, Burns made sure to spend time on the Japanese American experience both in the American camps and European combat. And it may be that Burns is so used to seeing America's race problem in terms of black and white -- the African American experience is a repeating theme in his work -- that by addressing the irony of segregation in the armed forces and defense plants, that he had everyone covered.” Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times
“World War II didn’t happen just to us. But it would be hard to glean that from Ken Burns’s 7-night, 15-hour tribute to the greatest generation that ever bought war bonds, joined the Marines or tightened rivets on a B-17 Flying Fortress. … The tone and look of Mr. Burns’s series, which begins Sunday on PBS, is as elegiac and compelling as any of his previous works, but particularly now, as the conflict in Iraq unravels, this degree of insularity — at such length and detail — is disconcerting. Many a Frontline documentary has made a convincing case that the Bush administration’s mistakes were compounded by the blinkered thinking of leaders who rushed to war without sufficient support around the world or understanding of the religious and sectarian strains on the ground. Examining a global war from the perspective of only one belligerent is rarely a good idea. … Public television is too often in a defensive crouch, fending off attacks by right-wing groups that accuse it of liberal bias. That insecurity has perhaps driven PBS to underestimate its audience’s appetite for widened horizons.”
Alessandra Stanley, The New York Times
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