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Review Robert Keeling 4 Mar 2014 - 07:00

Death and trauma await the Easy Company in the seventh episode of Band Of Brothers, aptly named The Breaking Point...

Read the previous part in this series, here.

Perhaps even more so than Bastogne, this episode is a truly harrowing piece of television. The Breaking Point is a heart-breaking and unflinching look at the brutal toll the war took on this group of young men and continued to take on them for years to come afterwards.

The opening talking-head moments are extremely touching as the real men of Easy let us know just how horrifying their experiences in the forests near Foy were. Death was all around them, wherever they looked there was a dead soldier, and they had no time to look after their fallen friends when the worst came to pass. As one tearful veteran points out, the things he saw there...

Review Robert Keeling 27 Feb 2014 - 07:00

Our daily look-back at the superlative Band Of Brothers continues with episode four, Replacements...

Read the previous part in this series, here.

It’s made clear throughout this series that the men who trained together at Toccoa and took part in the Normandy landings shared a particularly special bond. The replacements who were drafted in to replace fallen soldiers therefore had to work hard to earn the respect of their fellow men.

This episode’s central focus is Denver ‘Bull’ Randleman (Michael Cudlitz), a Staff Sergeant who was widely held by Winters and the other men to be one of the finest soldiers in the company. Quietly spoken and full of home-spun wisdom, Bull is shown throughout the episode helping out and geeing up the new recruits. The Company is involved in Operation Market Garden, an ultimately doomed campaign where the Allied forces parachuted...

Zap2it: You play former Lapd Chief William H. Parker in the 1940s TNT drama "Mob City." What's your take on him?

Neal McDonough: He's such a good-natured person. He's just this guy from South Dakota that came to Los Angeles for high school, didn't really fit in, became a cop. He policed the streets, and he loved the city. Then he went off to Normandy (during World War II) when he was well into his 30s, and that's where he became great friends with Buck Compton.

Zap2it: Wait, is that the same Army officer Lynn "Buck" Compton you played in the HBO WWII miniseries "Band of Brothers"?

Neal McDonough: I know, exactly. So those guys, they were very tight because they were in Normandy together, police academy together and everything else.

Zap2it: Compton passed away on Feb. 25, 2012, at the age of 90. Did he know you were playing Parker?...

It’s now been twelve years since Band of Brothers hit our screens, yet HBO’s miniseries remains a timeless classic. Devised by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks in the wake of their success with Saving Private Ryan, the show was an adaptation of the book of the same name by historian Stephen E. Ambrose (who had served as Saving Private Ryan’s military advisor), which told the story of Easy Company, part of a parachute regiment from the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army during World War II.

The series tells the true story (though some dramatic licence is taken) of the unit and the men within it, who are shown participating in a number of major battles and events from the last year of the War in Europe, ranging from D-Day and Operation Market Garden to the liberation of Landsberg Concentration Camp and the capture of...

Buck Compton just wrapped up one of the best movie villain roles of all time on the FX Channel’s “Justified” Season 3. It’s too bad we won’t be seeing him again, but hey, them’s the breaks. You will be able to see the man who played Buck on “Band of Brothers” when “The Philly Kid” opens May 11 in theaters, as part of the After Dark Action line-up. Too bad they basically gave away ol Buck’s fate in the movie in the trailer. Oh well. Check out said new trailer and poster for the film, starring Neal McDonough, below. On the same night that he was crowned an Ncaa wrestling champion, Dillon McCabe (Wes Chatham) was involved in the killing of a cop and then sentenced to fifteen years of prison. Ten years later, Dillon is paroled back onto the streets of his run-down Baton Rouge neighborhood.

Most actors will tell you that when they play a villain, they don't really think of the character as a bad person. Neal McDonough is making an exception to that rule with the guy he's playing on Season 3 of "Justified."

McDonough ("Captain America," "Desperate Housewives") joins the FX series as Robert Quarles, whom executive producer Graham Yost describes as a "carpetbagger" from Detroit who arrives in Harlan County, Ky., with the intent of locking down the local oxycontin trade. He delivers an icy, sometimes frightening performance as a man who seems very calm and contained but can't (or won't) always control a nasty temper.

Quarles also, however, knows that what he's doing is wrong. "As the series goes on you see more and more bits of remorse in the character," McDonough tells Zap2it. "That's what makes him not just a chilling bad guy, but a guy grasping -- 'I have to get this done,...

Two major casting news for ya today, both on Marvel Studios films: Deadline says Neal McDonough (Buck Compton from the fantastic “Band of Brothers”) is in talks to play Dum Dum Dugan (above) in Joe Johnston’s “Captain America: The First Avenger”. Meanwhile, THR reports that Jeremy Renner is in “final negotiations” to play Hawkeye in the upcoming “The Avengers” movie, which is no real surprise, since Renner has been associated with the role for the last couple of years now, it seems. For Renner (below), joining “The Avengers” will mean co-starring alongside Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Chris Evans as Captain America, Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, and Don Cheadle as War Machine. The last part, with War Machine, comes from THR again, and I’m not sure if they automatically added his name because he was...