The mighty wind of speechifying can knock you unconscious in this 217-minute Civil War epic from the folks who brought you the 248-minute Gettysburg in 1993. That would be writer-director Ronald F. Maxwell, executive producer Ted Turner and some 7,500 battlefield re-enactors. This prequel to Gettysburg, based on Michael Shaara's book The Killer Angels, is derived by Maxwell from the bestseller by Jeff Shaara, Michael's son.

What the filmmakers fail to recognize is that history on the page is quite different from what it needs to be onscreen, namely alive and visceral. From the opening scene, in which Gen. Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall) sits down for a long chaw on why he, as a Virginian, can't lead Lincoln's army against the Confederacy, the film is hobbled by the sound of its own grandiose voice and its damn-those-Yankees bias. Duvall, Stephen Lang as Gen. Stonewall Jackson and Jeff Daniels as Lt. Col. Joshua Lawrence pontificate so often that the action, in the battles of Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, must fight to register. Gods and Generals, with a new Bob Dylan song, "Cross the Green Mountain," lasts from 1861 to 1863. It seems much, much longer.

“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.