Results tagged “soldiers”

Today is Memorial Day, the federal holiday where U.S. men and women who have died in military service are remembered. Federal and state offices are closed, as well as post offices, schools, financial markets, and banks. Alternate side of the street parking rules are suspended and mass transit is running on weekend schedules (though there's additional weekend service on some lines). There are also parades in each borough—details here; at a parade in Queens on Saturday, Mayor Bloomberg said, "There's bands and lots of smiling and laughing, but we have young men and women overseas who are protecting us in harm's way. The NY Times had a Memorial Day editorial; the Post's editorial quotes Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V; and the Daily News honors the NY State service people who were killed in conflict.

Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris was on hand last night for a Tribeca Film Festival screening of his new documentary Standard Operating Procedure, a nuanced exploration of the detainee abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those familiar with Morris’s innovative oeuvre won’t be surprised to hear that, far from a tendentious indictment of the perpetrators, his film is a circumspect consideration of some of the factors that contributed to those infamous photographs of humiliation. [Today, the NY Times' movie critic Manohla Dargis calls it a "blockbuster of a documentary."]