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Band of Brothers

Released: 2001

An impressively rigorous, unsentimental, and harrowing look at combat during World War II, Band of Brothers follows a company of airborne infantry--Easy Company--from boot camp through the end of the war.

The brutality of training takes the audience by increments to the even greater brutality of the war; Easy Company took part in some of the most difficult battles, including the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the failed invasion of Holland, and the Battle of the Bulge, as well as the liberation of a concentration camp and the capture of Hitler's Eagle's Nest. But what makes these episodes work is not their historical sweep but their emphasis on riveting details (such as the rattle of a plane as the paratroopers wait to leap, or a flower in the buttonhole of a German soldier) and procedures (from military tactics to the workings of bureaucratic hierarchies).

The scope of this miniseries allows not only a thoroughness impossible in a two-hour movie, but also captures the wide range of responses to the stress and trauma of war--fear, cynicism, cruelty, compassion, and all-encompassing confusion. The result is a realism that makes both simplistic judgments and jingoistic enthusiasm impossible; the things these soldiers had to do are both terrible and understandable, and the psychological price they paid is made clear.

The writing, directing, and acting are superb throughout. The cast is largely unknown, emphasizing the team of actors as a whole unit, much like the regiment; Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston play the central roles of two officers with grit and intelligence. Band of Brothers turns a vast historical event into a series of potent personal experiences; it's a deeply engrossing and affecting accomplishment. © Amazon.com

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Emmy®© Award Nominations

Band of Brothers recieved 19 Emmy®© ATAS/NATAS nominations for the 54th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards. The nominations for Band of Brothers included: Outstanding Miniseries, Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special and Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special. The award ceremony took place on Sunday September 22nd 2002 at the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium.

HBO's Band of Brothers also recieved the first Emmy Plaque for Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Television programming for the interactive media component of the miniseries. The plaque was presented at the Academy's Engineering Awards on August 21.

Band of Brother - Soundtrack

When Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks collaborated on the Academy Award®-winning Saving Private Ryan, an abiding passion to further honor the young fighting soldiers of World War II was born in both men, resulting in Band of Brothers, an ambitious 10-part miniseries based on historian Stephen Ambrose's account of a 101st Airborne regiment as it fought its way across Europe. In scoring the sweeping project, Michael Kamen has eschewed much of the martial music familiar from past war epics in favor of the quiet, largely introspective sound that's informed modern battle films from Platoon through Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. And if his reverential, often somber tones capture the dignity of the soldiers and the gravity of the events, they sometimes do so at the expense of other human dimensions--and the lively pop music of the '40s. Still, Kamen's work strikes an impressive balance, fusing the pastoral with subtle modern rhythm touches and utilizing spare piano solos, a darkly ironic use of Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, and a memorable, elegiac main theme. © Amazon.com

Click on the link to listen to samples of the soundtrack at Amazon.com: Band of Brothers  

Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest  by Stephen E. Ambrose

  As grippingly as any novelist, preeminent World War II historian Stephen Ambrose tells the horrifying, hallucinatory saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members he calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45. Ambrose takes us along on Easy Company's trip from grueling basic training to Utah Beach on D-day, where a dozen of them turned German cannons into dynamited ruins resembling "half-peeled bananas," on to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of part of the Dachau concentration camp, and a large party at Hitler's "Eagle's Nest". Of Ambrose's main sources, three soldiers became rich civilians; at least eight became teachers; one became Albert Speer's jailer; one prosecuted Bobby Kennedy's assassin; another became a mountain recluse; the despised, sadistic C.O. who first trained Easy Company (and to whose strictness many soldiers attributed their survival of the war) wound up a suicidal loner whose own sons skipped his funeral.

The Easy Company survivors describe the hell and confusion of any war: the senseless death of the nicest kid in the company when a souvenir Luger goes off in his pocket; the execution of a G.I. by his C.O. for disobeying an order not to get drunk. Despite the gratuitous horrors it relates, Band of Brothers illustrates what one of Ambrose's sources calls "the secret attractions of war ... the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction ... war as spectacle." © Amazon.com

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