Movie Night Rant

Ex#2 tossed some movie discount tickets at me for Yule, so I decided to catch some recent movies.

Defiance: This film, starring Daniel Craig, was nothing short of awesome. Set in the midst of the 20th century's largest ethnic cleansing effort -- the Holocaust -- in history's largest military campaign -- WW2 eastern front -- this film Gets It Right. It's based on the true story of three Belorussian Jewish brothers who escaped the visit of the Nazi Einzatsgruppen (roving paramilitary extermination squads) to their village and sought to wreck their vengeance on the killers of their kin. Along the way, they take on a somewhat larger mission: to save as many Jews as possible, becoming partisans resisting the occupation. Along the way they endure betrayal, Stuka dive bombers, der Whermacht, massive amounts of vodka, the Red Army, each other and a winter that made Valley Forge 1775 look like Club Med Spring Break 2008.

I'm really happy to see another true-story WW2 film about the sacrifices non-Anglo-Americans made to defeat Nazi Germany. Enemy at the Gates, from a few years ago, was most welcome. The Eastern Front was much more than one big blizzard in the winter, one large mudbath in the spring and one big bloodbath in between. I'm also happy the producers got the military end right; few things about a historical war movie annoy me more than not getting the details of uniform, kit, and especially tactics right. The final breakout battle scene was a work of art. The partisans were caught in a clearing coming out of a river ford by a couple of squads of infantry and a tank. Fortunately the river bank formed a reverse slope for cover. Shades of Waterloo . . .The partisans lacked a panzerfaust (the WW2 ancestor of the RPG-7) to stop the tank, having only grenades. As there were woods on the flank, the German commander, with a move right out of the tactical manual, sent a MG42 to the flank to lay enfilade fire onto the partisans that would be unaffected by the reverse slope. The partisans captured the gun and turnd it onto the Germans to strip away the infantry advancing with the tank, then grenade-rushed the tank (German tank commanders ususally fought with the hatch open to use the commander's pintle -mount machine gun). Scratch one Panzer.

Gran Torino: Clint Eastwood's put out a lot of really good movies. Like fine wine, he's getting better and better with age. Flags of Our Fathers was the last one of his I saw, about the story behind the famous picture of the Marines raising the American flag on Mt. Subiachi on Iwo Jima in 1944. His latest film, Gran Torino, is not so much about waging war as it is about finding peace. Eastwood plays an aged Korean War veteran, widowed but making his way in the world -- a world changed a great deal from the one of his youth. He finds that peace in an unlikely place: in the young Hmong neighbor boy who he catches trying to steal his prized Gran Torino at gunpoint as a gang initiation. Along the way he gives point (rifle, M1 Garand, to be exact) to the phrase "You Kids Get Off My Lawn!" and learns to tolerate and appreciate the Hmong. When the gang wrecks vengeance on the neighbor, Eastwood's character comes up with a tragic but fitting solution.

Awsome movie.