Saving Private Ryan
Say, it seems likely that my Journal counter on the main index page will crack 3000 hits in the next couple of days. If you're #3000, or within one or two of being so, could you please drop me a line and let me know?
I got out of bed around 10 am mainly because the pager I was carrying for the last week went off. To my knowledge, this is the first time since we started this pager two years ago that it's gone off for any reason other than a low battery. The product I work on is mainly back-office stuff (claims processing, for instance) and it's unlikely that there will be an off-hours emergency regarding it (unlike, say, Epic's scheduling or medical records products, which are heavily used at all hours; not that my product doesn't have things come up, they just tend to be during business hours).
It turned out to be an easy call to field, though. And it was probably time to get up anyway. (I was up 'til 1:30 last night re-reading the Marvel mini-series Squadron Supreme.)
It turned out to be my friend Pat asking if I wanted to go to see Saving Private Ryan with her. That sounded like a pretty good deal, so we planned to make the 4:00 show.
I soon felt stir crazy again, though, so I went out to run some errands. Mainly I went to get cat food, but I did some other small things - like get gas! - on the way. (Didja know my car is still getting in excess of 40 MPG? Not bad for an 11-year-old beater!) I also listened to A Prairie Home Companion, which had liberal author and humorist Al Franken as a guest. Funny guy!
It's a very lively film during the combat scenes, and there are plenty of moments which will make you squirm or cover your eyes. However, it's not nearly as grotesque as it could have been, mainly because, unlike some slasher film, its intent is not to gross you out. It shows us the carnage because, well, war is carnage, and 20th century warfare is especially such. So if you're considering not going to see it because you can't stand gore (and I'm pretty squeamish myself), I'd say: Don't worry about it. Cover your eyes, but go see it.
It's interesting how Spielberg as a director has evolved some someone who pays attention to detail as a way to advance the plot or to set up a good gag (the sort of things that makes Raiders of the Lost Ark a descendant of Hitchcock's thrillers as much as of old adventure serials) to one who pays attention to detail to craft a better background and because the detail itself is inherently interesting.
Some things that caught my eye in the film: Bullets whizzing through the water at Normandy. The sound a bullet makes as it approaches its target (common-sensically, it sounds the reverse of what you usually hear in movies, fading in and increasing in volume and pitch until it strikes). The sheer mass of rubble and destruction in the French towns (it's remarkably hard to create an image of destruction). The scared manner in which troops on both sides react to the events they're experiencing. (What must it have been like a year later as the Allies marched on Berlin? At D-Day, the German troops still consisted largely of experienced commanders overseeing adult men on the lines. By 1945, a significant fraction of the German army consisted of young teenagers.)
The script is very strong, with emotional moments and some great humor, although the critics' charge that the characters are a bit two-dimension is not off the mark. But the characters are at their strongest when their human foibles are exposed by the pressure-cooker they're placed in.
Overall, I'd say it's a very good film - much better than Spielberg's earlier film Schindler's List, which I felt lacked exactly the blood-and-guts punch that Spielberg gives us here.
Pat asked me after the Normandy sequence why the Allies didn't send in hordes of planes to bomb the hell out of the Germans before sending the men ashore. My first response was that they probably did do this, but that the technology at the time probably wouldn't have allowed for many precise runs; the best they'd have been able to do was lay down suppression fire. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that a better reason was that the planes would simply have been shot down by anti-aircraft guns. Perversely, the aircraft were probably in shorter supply and more intrinsically valuable to the victory effort than the lives of the infantry, so such bombings probably would have been very costly and not very productive.
(Plus, it's just basically hard to achieve military objectives with planes alone. Even if they take out every bunker along the coast, it's fairly easy for the Germans to send fresh troops and new equipment to those locations since there won't be any allied forces there to occupy them! Planes are neat things, but they have a lot of limitations, not the least of which being that it's hard to find cover when you're in the air.)
In addition to reading the FBoFW collection, I finished Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which is interesting and informative, but perhaps overlong. I found after a bit that I often said to myself, "Okay, I get the idea here." So I'd skim a little bit until I came to something new, or something amusing (and Pinker can be a very amusing writer). Later this year maybe I'll tackle the other book of his my Dad gave me last year: How The Mind Works. But meanwhile, I have many other books stacked up to get read...
Whew; it looks like a full week this week: Gaming tomorrow, socializing with the SF3 people on Wednesday, and our monthly book discussion on Thursday. And I might go to see Sonia Dada in concert on Saturday. Plus, Titanic is playing at the cheap theatre, and I really ought to go see it.
But I shouldn't kill myself. If I can keep my current commitments and bike in three times this week, that's plenty!
|
|
|
|
