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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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I think the vast majority of Americans of all stripes don't care about Brits playing Americans. If they care they care only very slightly and it's mixed with acceptance that Brits are just really good at acting.

To be clear, it didn't really upset me much: I still liked the show quite a bit overall. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I've seen a WWII movie written from a British perspective. The war has a very prominent place in American (and Russian) culture, but I'm not sure if I've seen a purely British take on it.

I highly recommend Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk" if you want to see a british ww2 movie.

To Americans, WWI is definitely seen as a second-rate prequel to the war that actually matters, but I get the impression that for Brits, the Great War still looms large, with WWII seen as a devastating but still far less psychologically damaging sequel. If I’m right about that, it probably explains why there aren’t (m)any British WWII movies.

There are many British WWII movies. I assure you. Many many.

I've only ever seen consternation over black British actors playing black Americans, obviously because there's a weird protectionist sensibility over that turf. Nobody was ever giving Christian Bale or Benedict Cumberbatch shit for their American accents. At most, we chuckle a little bit when the accents slip at some of the corners (for some reason the hard pronunciation of 'are' is often a giveaway to me), but we just take it for granted that the British are born with thespian genetics.