Too much of everything

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Blistering performances.

On the cashing-in-on-the-youth-market front, there's William Hale's ridiculous Journey to Shiloh. A band of suspiciously late-20s looking 18 year olds leave Texas to go off to find the Civil War. If one can forgive the leaden performances, the Quick-Draw McGraw accents, the idiot-level plotting and action, the obvious Southern California locations, the 1870s armaments, and those gawd-awful wigs, one might find a movie that could have been a wee bit interesting.But it sucks on every level, thereby rendering whatever chance there was for not nodding off as dead as the Confederacy.Which, for the modern-day youth market, may come as a surprise. The Civil War was between the Germans and the Japanese, right?

A handful of Texas cowboys make the journey a thousand miles east to fight at the Battle of Shiloh. They're a varied lot. The most mature of the bunch is James Caan who has an easy smile, a cowboy hat with a white feather sticking out of the band, and he always says "Yes, sir," and "No, Ma'am." There is some talk of who is the fastest gun. There is the occasional outbreak of some abrasive feelings in the group but on the whole they're a good old bunch.I found it predictable, unimaginative, and boring. The men wear the long, carefully groomed styles of long hair found among the hep cats of 1968. The women folk have long hair too, and even longer eyelashes, some as long as the marquees that stretch out over the lawn at a fancy outdoor wedding. A good thing there was no wind. I winced when the character said over a man dying of a gunshot, "Get that preacher in here. He purely could use some readin' over." The script defies anything resembling credibility. During a stop over in a small town, Caan meets the uber-yummy Brenda Scott, who practically salivates over him and invites him to stay with her overnight because she ain't never met nobody as nice as him before. This happens to me all the time, but I have this cloud of pheromones I carry around with me and it's clear James Caan doesn't. It's true. A beautiful woman once fainted while walking past me in Julius's in the Village before it went gay. Couldn't take my molten hotness, I guess.I have a good deal of respect for hastily assembled and inexpensive Westerns but this one has no poetry. You know what this movie would have been good for? You take your girl to the drive in movie theater in 1968 Sweetwater, Texas, and then you turn down the volume, roll up the windows, and roll around in the back seat until the windows are all fogged up. Once having gotten that out of the way, you clamber back into the front seat, turn the volume back up, and doze off. But you can only do that if you're under twenty-one.

I saw the very young Harrison Ford and had to watch this late 1960s action film about 7 friends from west Texas who are drawn into their imagined adventure of joining the American Civil War and fighting for the Confederate States (south). Harrison Ford probably has the fewest lines of the seven friends. What happens on the journey? Everything goes wrong. In fact, they do not make it to their destination, Virginia. Their ideals begin to drop off, along with their numbers, along the way as they see a runaway slave being hung from a tree. They encounter prejudices against them as they try to join upper-class party in east Texas, dishonesty at a saloon gambling game in Louisiana, and the bloody severity of war at The Battle of Shiloh.The strong premise about the destructiveness of war and civil rights is obvious, but offered up with a "teenage adventure" smile on the easy to criticize setting of the South during the Civil War. This may have been one of the earliest anti Vietnam War movies out of Hollywood and is worth watching to see how an anti-war message was beginning to come out of Hollywood. You can see the conflicting messages as The Green Berets was made the same year.There are some historically accurate portrayals that are worth seeing, such as 2 different treatments of African-Americans - one had a comfortable life and another was lynched. Some of the battlefield scenes looked like they were taken from another movie. And what happens to the main character at the end is a surprise, but keeps with the premise.

It is a shame more people will not see this movie. From what I can find out, it has never been released for home viewing. Regardless that the weapons they used were not made until after the Civil War, I would not have known this if I had not read others comments. Its kinda like learning the secrets of magic, it just doesn't matter, you still enjoy watching. Nothing in this movie could be less real than any movie about Custer being a hero! Anyone interested in movies about how bad we did the Indians needs to see "I Buried My Heart at Wounded Knee". What a shame.If anyone has any luck finding "Journey to Shiloh" on video or DVD, I would appreciate them contacting me.da23mj@hotmail.com Thank-you