I clearly meant a "sticky" for the List Thread, not the discussion one. A list thread falls off the front page not because it's inactive, but because all the dedicated participants, after a certain point, are editing their posts, not creating new ones. Editing a post does not move a thread up. For those of us who are active participants, a "sticky" makes the list much more accessible and convenient to add new entries. If we have to go looking for the List thread on a second or third page, it becomes a big pain in the ass. I've already got this site bookmarked. I don't feel like bookmarking an individual thread.

In regards to the list thread being stickied, maybe I'm in the minority but even when I don't participate in a challenge I still often visit the list threads to find new movies.

Same here. I don't think we need to be debating the merits of this as I would guess that the majority of people visiting the thread do so through clicking, and not through bookmarking. For the record, I usually bookmark the challenges on my main computer, but I like the sticky for accessing the threads on other computers, ipods, phones, etc.

There are plenty of other stickies that could go away before we make our way to the Challenge List Threads. I actually think it helps us get more participants and influences greater discourse. I'm pretty sure I first noticed the challenges through a sticky.

I think the practical reason for this is that people might be more likely to "bump" a thread that is falling off the page, which would clutter up the list thread for any late participants.

I started off with The Hurt Locker so I could finally get the Platinum award for Academy Award Best Picture Winners from iCheckMovies.com.

My little story about this movie is I was working in a movie theater when the movie came out on Christmas and it was dead. I assume it came out that day because it was considered an Oscar bait movie.

The next year, Ali, came out on Christmas and it was packed so I was glad I worked the year before and not this one.

As for the movie itself, I was bored by it and to this day all I can remember about it is that Elliott from E.T. was in it.

Started off late last night with Law and Order a 1953 Western starring Ronald Reagan as Frame Johnson. It was the third film adaptation of W.R. Burnett's novel, "Saint" Johnson. This was the first time I've ever watched Reagan as an actor. It's a fairly unoriginal, predictable story but Reagan infuses his performance with an earnestness that makes it work.

It was particularly fascinating watching him in a role as a U.S. Marshal who calls for an ordinance to be passed outlawing guns in town. When challenged by an irate citizen what they're supposed to do for protection, Reagan as Johnson replies, "That's for the law to do" [paraphrasing]. I'm not going to comment any further about the topic, but it's an interesting element to watching a movie starring someone who did eventually rise to prominence in the realm of politics. Fun to watch Reagan in action, too.

After that, I finally got into my Victory at Sea set, which I bought for $5 forever ago. I plowed through the first four episodes and loved it. The footage is astounding, even if some of it is rather crude (from a technical perspective, rather than one of content). Really looking forward to making my way through the remaining 22 episodes throughout this challenge.

Has anyone watched the WWII in HD series that came out recently? I'm considering giving that a run for the challenge.

This Day in History: 2 June
1774 Parliament completed the Coercive Acts with the Quartering Act
1815 Philip Kearny is born
1823 Ashley's fur trappers attacked by Indians
1865 American Civil War ends
1886 President Cleveland marries in the White House
1915 Austro-German forces attack Russians at Przemysl
1921 Flash floods ravage Colorado
1924 Coolidge signs Indian Citizen Act
1935 Babe Ruth retires
1944 United States begins "shuttle bombing" in Operation Frantic
1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
1954 McCarthy charges Communists are in the CIA
1962 Ray Charles takes country music to the top of the pop charts
1965 First contingent of Australian combat troops arrives in Vietnam
1967 Green Beret doctor convicted in court-martial
1970 Race car driver and designer Bruce McLaren dies in car crash
1977 Raymond Carver quits drinking
1985 Serial killing spree is put to an end; English football clubs banned from Europe
1989 Dead Poets Society released in selected theaters
1997 McVeigh convicted for Oklahoma City bombing

I've never understood Reagan's appeal as a politician or as an actor. I've only seen him in a couple of small roles in A-movies and larger roles in B-movies from the late 1930s and early 1940s. He's kind of handsome, but his acting seems a bit stiff and artificial. I recently picked up Law and Order on DVD, so maybe I'll take the opportunity to see if his acting improved over the years.

As a politician, he often seemed stiff and artificial in his delivery, and I thought he wore way too much makeup. Obviously, a lot of people didn't agree with me. My politics are pretty much the polar opposite of his, but one of the things that I remember most about his administration is one of his aides (I think it was Michael Deaver) explaining that when Reagan lied, it was on the front page, but when they acknowledged that his statement was false, it was buried on an inside page. This has become one of the most important lessons in modern American politics. At least when Nixon lied, his aides didn't wink at the press and suggest that it was okay because everybody loved him.

I'll try to keep my political dislike for him separate from my assessment of his work as an actor.

Reagan wrote (or at least his ghost writer wrote) in An American Life that he had an experience very early in his career where the makeup made him look garish and from that point on he wore little or none in front of a camera. Whether that's entirely true, I cannot say, but that's what he said.

It's really hard to focus exclusively on his work as an actor while ignoring his political career, unless you were around before he entered politics. I was born 1 December 1978, so I have no memory of the final two years of the Carter administration. Reagan was really my first president, so I compare all the others (and would-be others) to him. Politically, I'm with you on the left, but there are some things I think he got right and I find him genuinely likable and fascinating as a person. In recent years I've found myself delving into memoirs written by those who worked with/under him, largely scouring for the inevitable anecdotal gems. I don't think it undermines my opposition to some of his specific policies to like other things about him.

As I mentioned, this was the first time I've ever seen one of his movies so I can't really comment on his performing style. In Law and Order I found his earnestness helped rescue what is otherwise a very paint-by-numbers lawman Western. Some of the dialog is great, but mostly everything in the film is perfunctory and one-dimensional.

I'm sure this will read as a back-handed compliment, but I felt the film's saving grace was Reagan. Other actors might have tried to infuse the character with some kind of brooding, or appearance of inner reflection or conflict. Not Reagan. His Frame Johnson is the same guy at the end of the movie as he was in the beginning, not once evolving in any demonstrable way. And I think it works in this specific film to have a performance like that. Frame Johnson isn't written as a particularly developed, or developing, character.

One of the most frequent characterizations I've encountered about Reagan was that he was "entirely without guile," and I think that's on display here. There's a sense watching this performance that Reagan's Frame Johnson already knows who he is and it's the world that will have to adapt; not him. It's not an approach that would work for all stories, but the simple--lazy, even--Law and Order practically demanded someone who was going to play it the way Reagan did.

Since the American Civil War ended this date, today seems a good day to watch Gods and Generals and Gettysburg.

I saw Massacre in Rome last night what a let down, it must have been at least an hour of how many italians for every nazi killed in the attack. 50 to 1, 30 to 1, 20 to 1. and so forth. and then coming up with the numbers to satisfy the ratio. I think the IMDB score is fair.

I watched THE FIRST TEXAN, an OK bio of Sam Houston on Netflix. This title will be dropped from online streaming on June 5, so I thought I'd give a heads up in case anyone else wants to watch it.

I've seen about 15 of Reagan's movies, mostly on TV in the 1970s before his election to the presidency. (His movies stopped getting aired whenever he ran for office.) Some of them were quite fascinating. For this challenge, I recommend SANTA FE TRAIL (1940), a pre-Civil War epic in which future Confederate general Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn) and future Union officer George Armstrong Custer (Reagan) team up to put a stop to the anti-slavery efforts of John Brown (Raymond Massey). It's a film with some very confused racial politics. (Follow it up with SEVEN ANGRY MEN, 1955, in which Massey reprises the role of Brown, this time much more sympathetically.)

Reagan co-starred as the sympathetic adult mentor to the Dead End Kids in ANGELS WASH THEIR FACES (1939) and HELL'S KITCHEN (1939). He was in a bunch of adventure films produced by Pine-Thomas in the 1950s, including HONG KONG (1951), in which he's dressed like Indiana Jones, and TROPIC ZONE (1953), in which he helps independent banana growers in Central America fight off the tentacles of a big fruit company. Of course, when he was president he showed absolutely no sympathy for the subsequent generations of "Dead End Kids" nor any for the independent farmers in Central America who were displaced by the United Fruit Company and other conglomerates who had Reagan in their pocket.

In his last theatrically released feature, THE KILLERS (1964), he plays a real bad guy. Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson and John Cassavetes co-star. Highly recommended.

For the TV on DVD challenge I watched an episode of "Death Valley Days," in which Reagan played a real-life New York cop-turned-Colorado sheriff in the late 1800s who insisted on performing his duties unarmed. Not such a good idea, given the fact that he makes enemies who insist on being armed, leading to a surprise tragic ending.

I vaguely remember this being Oscar bait...apparently, no one took the bait.

I seriously had no idea that the guy was Elliott. My thought while watching was, "hey, that's Leo's friend from Gangs of New York."

Thanks for the comments; learning new things is my favorite aspect of the challenges.

Watched my first movie of the challenge today, a rather long, but enjoyable film about the Texans fight for independence from Mexico called Texas, based on James Michener's novel. Saw it on Encore Western this afternoon.

This Day in History: 3 June
1780 Former Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson dies in England
1800 President John Adams moves into a tavern in Washington, D.C.
1864 Union disaster at Cold Harbor
1916 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs National Defense Act
1936 Western author Larry McMurtry is born
1937 Duke of Windsor weds, Josh Gibson hits ball 580 feet feet in Yankee Stadium
1940 Germans bomb Paris
1956 Rock and Roll is banned in Santa Cruz, California
1957 U.S. Supreme Court rules against Du Pont in General Motors suit
1965 An American walks in space
1968 Le Duc Tho joins negotiations in Paris
1970 Nixon calls Cambodian operation a success
1989 Crackdown at Tiananmen begins, Natural gas explosion kills 500 in Russia
1990 Bush and Gorbachev end second summit meeting
2002 Lew Wasserman dies
2010 Van der Sloot arrested for murder in South America

I had planned to start with I BOMBED PEARL HARBOR (1960), but I was in my local supermarket on Tues. night and they have a rack of discount DVDs and there was CASABLANCA, which I didn't have on DVD and it was $6.99 so I bought it. I watched the beginning to check out the quality (a procedure I do on every DVD after buying it) and I got caught up in it all over again, so I decided to stop and finish watching it on Wed. morning, the first day of the challenge, to start this off with an old classic.

So I followed up yesterday with I BOMBED PEARL HARBOR, which turned out to be mostly about the Battle of Midway. An interesting film for the insights into the way the Japanese viewed the war and their efforts. But also quite disturbing since there's no critique of the militaristic mindset that pushed the Japanese to behave the way they did during the war. At least not until a sentiment about peace voiced by the protagonist at the very end, when it's a case of too little too late. It's as if an American filmmaker did a film about the Vietnam War and showed the soldiers and pilots gleefully dropping Agent Orange and carpet-bombing villages and torturing captives (see: Operation Phoenix) and slaughtering villagers (see: My Lai), as if this was all the noblest thing to do and then...only at the end, as the North Vietnamese overrun Saigon and the last Americans flee by helicopter does a character voice some doubt about the whole operation. Or a film about Custer's Last Stand that totally endorses the genocide of the Indians until the ending when a soldier looks out over the scene of the massacre and begins to wonder if this is the right way to deal with the Indians.

I read comments on IMDB on I BOMBED PEARL HARBOR and they call the Japanese pilots things like "decent, ordinary men." No, they weren't! That's like characterizing Nazi concentration camp guards who were "only following orders" the same way. You're not decent or ordinary when you devote yourself to participate in a brutal, murderous war of aggression against people who did nothing to you. Just ask the residents of Nanking in 1937, to name only the most famous setting of Japanese atrocities. The Japanese soldiers and pilots were brainwashed by a fanatical military government whose behavior was responsible for the deaths of millions throughout Asia and in Japan. Brainwashed killers are not "decent" or "ordinary." And certainly not heroic.

Of course, I don't know how the Japanese version of I BOMBED... played out, since I watched the 20-minute-shorter English dub on VHS. The dub opens and closes with speeches by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt on the soundtrack. I imagine the original Japanese version opened and closed with radio addresses by Emperor Hirohito, which would have had very different messages.

So I followed that up with MIDWAY (1976), the Hollywood account of the battle, which uses footage from I BOMBED PEARL HARBOR, in addition to tons of actual color combat footage from the battle itself, which is ingeniously interspersed with studio shots of the pilots and officers. There's a whole soap opera subplot about an officer's conflict with his son, a combat pilot who's in love with a Japanese-American girl who's set to be sent to an internment camp. Once they shunt this annoying business aside, it's just straight action and suspense as the battle is waged. I wish I'd seen this in a theater when it first played. But it got bad reviews at the time and I stayed away.

Interestingly, Toshiro Mifune is in both I BOMBED PEARL HARBOR and MIDWAY and is dubbed by the same voice actor in both, Paul Frees. Now every other Japanese character in MIDWAY is played by Japanese-American actors who speak flawless unaccented English (e.g. Pat Morita), yet when Mifune opens his mouth out comes Frees' labored attempt to do a Japanese accent. Bizarre.

TORA TORA TORA is next. I missed that when it came out--more bad reviews--and when I finally saw it on TV a few years ago, I kicked myself for not having seen it in a theater. It's great! Well, I finally have a DVD of it, so I'll be able to see it in a much better presentation than when I saw it on TV cut, full-frame and interrupted by commercials.

so can we include the new X-Men movie since it takes place during the JFK/Cuban missle crisis?

Yeah, that's definitely more suited for next month's Sci-Fi/Fantasy Challenge. I'm half-tempted to allow it as a "Right When, Wrong What" Wildcard choice, though.

Incidentally, I've updated the Online Resources list to include Crackle.com, Sony's website that offers free streaming movies. Currently there are only a handful of selections under Biography, Documentary, Historical, War and Western, but hey: they're free!

Sam Raimi's western The Quick and the Dead is on there.

Started my challenge with The Cowboys, one I've been meaning to watch for years!

As a kid, I read the spoof in MAD magazine ("The Cowkids," I think) so I knew the basic plot, and I always remember the final panel. A fun watch if a little overlong. Easy to recognize A Martinez as one of the kids.

I finally got started, opting to begin with war documentaries. First up is "WWI: The War to End All Wars".

The "reviews" at amazon are pretty spot-on with this one. Very poor narration (inflections used at times made me feel as if I were in a 3rd grade class being lectured while a paragraph later in a 12th grade History class being lectured by your most boring teacher) with many mispronunciations (mainly foreign names/locations), inappropriate use of classical music (good music, poorly placed), lots of recycled footage, horrible overly reused "maps" which helped little while describing battle tactics, and the one that bugged me the most is the way dates are presented. One time they'd use the British convention of "5, May, 1913" and *in the same sentence* say "June 3, 1913"! I don't care which format they used but they should have stuck with *one*. I've done some narration and would *always* edit the script for consistency if needed. This one sounds like no one bothered to edit at all. Overall, this is a solid 2.5 out of 5 mainly for the video. Fortunately I picked this up at BL for under a fiver.

I've been somewhat on the fence about picking up a copy of "The First World War: The Complete Series". Watching "WWI: The War to End All Wars" has me convinced I need something better!

I'm eight episodes into Victory at Sea and while I feel that series has been more rewarding than you've found to be the case with this documentary, I have to say that so far I've been bugged by the same problems. Leonard Graves's narration is generally fine, but whenever the subject becomes particularly grim he begins to sound like he's narrating a trailer for a cheesy horror movie instead of commenting on footage of mankind's darkest hour.

Likewise, Richard Rodgers's score is gorgeous, but often feels entirely inappropriate for the visuals. Maybe for a dramatization it would be fine, but I find it vulgar to hear lush strings while witnessing mass destruction.

Lastly, Victory at Sea rarely puts any date on the screen and while it's fairly easy to follow the continuity within a given episode, the series itself jumps around within the war from episode to episode. For instance, one episode I watched last night concentrated largely on events in 1943, but the very next episode was on Malta--in 1940! I think they were right to organize the series into these episodes for thematic simplicity, but I'm puzzled by the presentation sequence.

Now, of course, I'm conscious of the fact that these elements were standard for their era and that my sensibilities have been crafted during a lifetime long after this documentary was produced and I know I oughtn't hold it to my contemporary standards. To that end, I'm aware of the things that bug me but I know to make that a separate issue from judging the series itself--and the footage is astounding so far. Yet, I am human and it does become distracting to witness the juxtaposition of some terribly somber visuals with some glaringly distracting theatrical music and narration.