Hollywood to make a World War 2 movie based on Stephen Hardings’s “The Last Battle"

StudioCanal is developing a World War II movie about U.S. and German soldiers teaming up for a rescue of French prisoners near the end of the war in the Austrian Alps.

The French company has acquired movie rights to Stephen Harding’s “The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers Joined Forces In The Waning Hours Of World War II In Europe.” The Picture Company’s Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman will produce with Bryce Zabel, who adapted the book.

Harding’s book, published in 2013 by Da Capo Press, describes a mixed force of U.S. Army, German Wehrmacht and Austrian resistance fighters acting together to prevent the recapture of 14 French prisoners being held at Itter Castle. An SS assault party had been ordered to retake the prison shortly after Adolf Hitler’s suicide in April, 1945.

The Gettysburg Address — as Donald Trump Might Deliver It

As Donald Trump seeks to become the presidential candidate of the party of Lincoln, the Financial Times has found transcripts of the great speeches and text from US history as delivered by The Donald.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. But let me tell you. They were not all created equal. Some of them were created Muslim and others were created disabled going “wa, wa, wa”; and some of them weren’t even created men at all. They were created women with blood coming out of their noses. Though some of them, like my daughter, are really hot. I mean seriously, if she weren’t my daughter . . .

“Suffragette” (the movie) and the cost of winning the vote for women

Before looking at the differences between the British and American militants in the votes-for-women movement, let’s note a few key aspects of the British movement that were absent from the film, as Suffragette dramatized history from the perspective of one person, inevitably limiting the filmmaker’s ability to provide an overview.

Throughout the film, we only see glimpses of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), an organization spearheaded by Emmeline Pankhurst, a leader of the movement, and her daughter Christabel Pankhurst, a law school graduate who was the brilliant mind behind many of the demonstrations. Indeed, the film suggests that the women’s activism was largely improvised and confined to a small group. when in fact, the WSPU prided itself on its almost military organization.

Russia in marathon reading of Tolstoy's War and Peace on web

Russian film stars, a cosmonaut and French actress Fanny Ardant are among 1,300 people reading Leo Tolstoy's epic War and Peace live on the internet - a 60-hour marathon spread over four days.

'Top Gun,' 'Shawshank' Added to National Film Registry

It's a bro-centric year for movies added to the prestigious National Film Registry. Two of the most popular male-bonding movies of all time — "Top Gun" and "The Shawshank Redemption" — are being added to the collection of films preserved by the Library of Congress, the library announced Wednesday. They'll be joined by an all-male quartet that's about to get an all-female reboot — the gang from "Ghostbusters."

Lolita Turns 60

Though Vladimir Nabokov was living in America when he wrote Lolita, the novel was first published in Paris in 1955—by Olympia Press, whose list included many pornographic titles. On the sixtieth anniversary of Lolita’s first publication, we asked ten writers to reflect on their changing experiences with the novel in the course of their reading lives. Each day for five days, we are posting two reflections, each revisiting a section of pages from the book—we are using Vintage’s 2005 edition, a complete, unexpurgated text.

For a Shakespeare Anniversary, an Online Re-Creation of a 1796 Show

The coming year promises to bring global Shakespeare mania, as the 400th anniversary of his death prompts a cavalcade of performances and exhibitions around the world. In advance of that deluge, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are offering a more unusual view of the playwright’s early celebrity: a meticulous online re-creation of the long-vanished, and wildly popular, first museum dedicated to Shakespeare. The three-room Shakespeare Gallery, opened by the publisher John Boydell in 1789 on the fashionable Pall Mall in London, closed in 1805. In its day, it was a sensation, attracting emotional crowds who came to gawk at enormous canvases depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies and history plays, commissioned from Britain’s leading painters and hung cheek by jowl on the pale blue walls.

5 Statements On The Wrong Side Of History (NPR)

In many cases, hindsight and history are 20/20. Here are five proclamations that turned out to be mistaken:

1. "The South will triumph," a Knoxville, Tenn., newspaper crowed, according to theDaily Journal of Wilmington, N.C., on New Year's Eve, 1862. "Calamities may befall us, and defeat may hurl back our armies, but we have only to bear patiently all present and future ills, till the North abandons the combat in despair." ...