Friday, October 9, 2009

Fog of War

Personally I do not like this documentary. This is the second time I have seen it and I have had trouble concentrating both times. For some reason when documentaries are mainly composed of interviews I have a hard time getting into them. I found the graphics, moving titles, and other visual effects entertaining in this film. They helped me get through it. I do not think they made the documentary seem less real. Some clips seemed irrelevant at times, but I think a lot of them had a clear purpose. I never really knew how damage we caused in Vietnam. The flashing of the percentages of cities bombed showed me how extreme the destruction really was there. There were so many towns that were basically destroyed that they could only be on the screen for a split second in order to show them all. I found it very effective and it made the film easier to watch!
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3 comments:

  1. Kelly LarkinOctober 11, 2009 at 8:21 PM

    I think that's funny, Hannah, because we're usually so on the same page, but I actually liked the movie! I thought the interview was really personal, and since I didn't know anything about McNamara in the first place, I was interested. I also found it really informative about the Vietnam war, like you did. I've never really known much about it, so that was interesting to me too! We sort of breezed through that unit in my AP History class...

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  2. Chris HuhOctober 12, 2009 at 1:18 AM

    The visual effects in this film helped me to pay attention to the film as well. They helped put an image to all of the information that was presented that otherwise I might not have been able to visualize. So in fact, the visuals helped make the film more real for me. The comparisons of Japanese and US cities also helped because I can't imagine the damage that was done to these cities. By comparing them to US cities it creates a more relatable scenario.

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  3. Charles ByrneOctober 12, 2009 at 8:35 AM

    It *is* very interesting -- sadly, not surprising -- as you mention, Kelly, that discussion of the dark side of World War II, not to mention of Vietnam, rarely makes much of an appearance in high school history classes. This was if anything more true when I was a student -- the excuse given, at least for Vietnam, was that it was chronologically near the end, so we had less time to cover it. They certainly aren't FUN topics, but what is the effect of *not* exposing kids to these facts?

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