Valkyrie

It’s been ten years since the release of Valkyrie, the movie depiction of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on Hitler. Before elaborating, the other significant attempt worth mentioning is Georg Elser’s. The small town carpenter from southern Germany who planted a bomb near the Fuehrer only to have missed timed the explosion by thirteen minutes.
Valkyrie, based on Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt is after all, another historical movie and so the end result cannot be glossed over: the attempt is a failure. Some would argue that Hitler’s surviving these attempts assisted the end of the Nazi regime because, had Himmler or Goebbels taken his place, the threat of world domination was a real possibility.

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Kodachrome

We are taken on a road trip with three different characters whose lives appear to unravel before us. Forced to confront their shared past they attempt to reconcile their differences on the journey. From the outset my suspicions of a Beatnik-styled sojourn were dismissed as gradually, frame by frame, the substance of an original story reveals powerful social realism. Continue reading Kodachrome