O Que Aconteceu? 2014

Back in 2006 I posted a blog about Brazil’s loss to France in the World Cup.  That game was in Germany, and France won by one goal, 1-0.  A heartbreak, sure, but not the stunner of 1998 or the abysmal loss this was – at home.

            Here’s my “autopsy”, so to speak, applying my own logic to the situation.

The (Not Quite So Beautiful) Game.  Germany went up 1-0…and soon a blitz of goals put the game at 5-0 at the half.  Brazil’s counterattack was non-existent, as was its defense.  In the second half, Germany piled on two more goals to make it 7-0, and finally Oscar scored a goal to prevent a complete shut-out, so the final tally was 7-1.

This was, by far, Brazil’s worst defeat ever.  The commentators noted that the stadium remained full despite the lopsided score, and speculated that the mostly Brazilian crowd was remaining out of “morbid curiosity.”

            So, what happened? (“O que aconteceu?”)  One word: NEYMAR.   Brazilian Coach Luis Felipe (Felipão = Big Phil) Scolari built the team around the Barcelona striker, and when his back was injured by Colombia in the prior game, it was not only game over for Neymar, but also the Brazilian team.  They really did NOT have a plan.  Did they have other talented players?  Yes.  But no one of his caliber.

            Argentina has the same “problem”, which is not an issue so long as Lionel Messi remains healthy and active.  If anything happened to him – Tanya Van Harding, with a collapsible baton, for instance – his team would be history.  Is it so hard to imagine a team anchored around a single player?   Not if you watch the NBA.  Not if you watch how poorly the Patriots and Colts played when Tom Brady and Peyton Manning were injured for entire seasons.  Every now and then an unknown QB steps out from the shadow of the starting but injured QB and rises to the occasion, like Brady himself.  But it’s not likely, and Brazil did not have the depth to survive Neymar’s departure.

            Contrast this with the German team.  Klose is a good veteran, Özil and Müller are also good (I have Müller’s 2010 jersey).  Neuer shines defending the goal, but the German team is far more evenly spread in terms of relative talents.  They don’t have a single irreplaceable player, no star who shines brighter than all the others.  

            Look at 2002, in which Brazil and Germany faced off in the final in Tokyo/Seoul.  The situation was reversed.  Brazil had the more balanced team; although Ronaldo (Brazilian variant) was clearly the star and scored both goals, Rivaldo and Ronaldinho also contributed heavily to the team’s success.  Germany, on the other hand, was anchored by its star, Michael Ballack (now a commentator for ESPN) and he was knocked out, like Thiago Silva, by a yellow card disqualification in the prior game against South Korea.

            Scolari himself countered that Neymar is a striker, not a defender, so his presence on the field would not have helped.  Much as I admire Big Phil – he did bring the trophy back in 2002 - I think he’s wrong here, for two big reasons.

            1.  Neymar’s presence on the field, by itself, inspired the rest of the team.  Messi does the same for Argentina, as Brady and Manning do.  The whole team plays better with him on the field.

            2.  So long as the opposing goalie is conscious, coherent, and competent, you cannot score from your side of the field.   A strong attack keeps the ball on the other team’s side.  Not only does this increase your chances of scoring, it also deprives the other team of the opportunity to try kicking the ball into your net.  The complete absence of any semblance of an offense then puts all the pressure on the defense, which was missing Thiago Silva.  Because – aside from the goalie – the players operate on both sides of the field whether attackers, midfielders or defenders, Neymar’s presence also improved Brazil’s defense as well as its offense.

            Factor that you probably need to take 10 shots at the goal to get one actual goal.   If you can keep pressure on the other team such that you make 20 shots and he can only make 5, chances are the score will be 2-0.  Though Germany’s percentage appeared to be MUCH higher in this game….

            Even if Neymar had played, I’d still have put the odds of a Brazilian victory at 50/50.  Brazil was underwhelming in the group phase and only beat Chile by penalties.  But a loss would have been 1-0 or 0-0 on penalties, not this 7-1 rout we saw.

Allow me to inject three instances of NFL disappointment – as a Minnesota Vikings fan.

1997-1998 Season.  The Vikings made it to the NFC Championship against the Atlanta Falcons.  Despite leading until the end of regulation, they missed a field goal and allowed the Falcons to push them into overtime.  I knew if that happened, the Falcons would win – and they did.

2000-2001 Season.  They get to the NFC Championship again, only to fall 41-0 to the New York Giants.  ??? Which team was this?  How does this happen?  This game, more so than these other two – which were actually close games – is what most closely approximates the sheer disbelief of the Brazil-Germany blowout. 

2008-2009 Season.  We finally get Brett Favre as QB.  He brings us all the way to the NFC Championship game again, this time against the New Orleans Saints.  We could have gone for a field goal.  But Favre had to throw that damn interception, and the Saints did the rest.  I know the Vikings could have beat the Colts, so this was a blown opportunity to get the first Super Bowl trophy.  And the next season was abysmal.

I’ll be rooting for Germany against Argentina, which in itself will be a rematch of the 1986 (Argentina) and 1990 (Germany) World Cups.   As a fan, my allegiances are to Brazil, Germany, and the US, in that order.  Sou Americano de verdade, ich weisse.  Since none of the current roster were playing on the German team in 1990, when they last won the World Cup – US coach Jurgen Klinsmann was on that team – this is their chance to get a victory for themselves.   This is particularly important for Klose, who played on the 2002, 2006, and 2010 teams and will almost certainly not play in 2018.

Hope for 2018?  Neymar is young, he can recover and fight again in Russia.  I’m most optimistic for the US team, though.  Klinsmann had the same problem as Scolari: a key striker – Altidore – suddenly knocked out.  But Dempsey was strong enough to pick up the slack.  Had Altidore not been injured, the US might have tied Germany, beat Belgium, and conceivably gone neck-and-neck with Argentina.  Look at Julian Green, who scored the US’ only goal against Belgium coming off the bench late in the game in his first appearance.  He plays for Bayern Munich, Germany’s top team!  Altidore will be 29, not too old for ’18, though Dempsey will be 35; the big problem is goalie Tim Howard.  For the US to emerge from its group at all, much less missing Altidore, is amazing.  Moreover, more US players are getting experience either overseas on top tier European teams, or in an MLS which is upping its roster with more experienced Europeans.  Beckham was at the Galaxy, Thierry Henry is with the NY Red Bulls, and Kaka will be joining the Orlando expansion franchise.  The irony is that America has more reason to be proud of its own team – which only lost to Germany by one goal – than Brazil has to be proud of this year’s Seleção, even if it was just Neymar’s bad luck to be injured.   Brazil survived its loss to Uruguay in 1950 to win in 1958, and its loss to France in 1998 to come back and win in 2002.  Let’s see if they can do it again in 2018.

Mary Poppins

By this I mean the classic 1964 Disney film, right before the 1965 R&H “The Sound of Music”. 

            It’s London in 1910.  The Banks family sees yet another matronly nanny quit abruptly, unable to manage the two children, Jane and Michael (Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber).  The father, Mr. Banks (David Tomlinson) is too busy working at the bank, and the mother (Glynis Johns) is too busy as a suffragette, i.e. tireless advocate of getting women the right to vote, to look after or raise the children herself; thus a nanny is necessary.  Along comes Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) to set things right.  Her supernatural abilities are complimented by a charming and talented chimney sweep, Bert (Dick Van Dyke).  She even brings the children to defuse Uncle Albert (Ed Wynn, the voice of the Mad Hatter from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland) whose incessant laughter has put him up near the ceiling.

            The big sequence in the film is the excursion into Bert’s chalk painting.  Bert and Mary enjoy a meal at the penguin-staffed restaurant while the children enjoy the merry-go-round.  “Supercalifragilisticexpialadocious” is explained at length, until a downpour in real life brings the group back to reality. 

            Mr. Banks disapproves of Mary Poppins’ supernatural supervision, but she calls his bluff by manipulating him into bringing the children to the bank with him on her day off.  Panic ensues when the children prove immune to the bankers’ ecstatic description of compound interest and investment in infrastructure – the head banker (played by Van Dyke himself in heavy makeup) snatches the boy’s “tuppence”, and the boy’s reaction sparks a run on the bank.

            Predictably, Mr. Banks is fired, but with some advice from Bert in chimney sweep mode, eventually realizes that children are children and his role as father has to take that into account.  Finally he’s “saved” and flies a kite with the children, and the bank staff – also flying kites – notifies him that not only is Banks not terminated, he’s made partner.  “And there was much rejoicing…”

            I just imagine MP flying off from London in 1910 and re-emerging in a convent in Salzburg, Austria, in 1937, just in time to rescue another family in need of a wonderful nanny.   Mary Poppins and Fraulein Maria have almost identical roles and missions:  rescuing children from an emotionally distant father.  Obviously, “The Sound of Music” was a true story and “Mary Poppins” was fictional.   I do prefer Julie Andrews as a brunette, and her 1910 attire is more flattering than the outfits she wears in Austria. 

If you enjoyed that, you may also enjoy…

Saving Mr. Banks (Blu-Ray).   Mr. Banks is, of course, the father of the two children in “Mary Poppins”.  This is the story of how Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) managed to persuade Pamela Travers (PT) (aka Helen Goff) (Emma Thompson) to give him the rights to make the story into a movie, despite the fact that the movie would add in music and animation and substantially change many elements of the story.   The movie suggests that Disney finally persuaded her to agree, but it seems that in real life, Disney managed to get her sign off but gave himself the final word on the adaptation.

            So… it’s 1961, and Disney has invited Mrs. Travers to L.A. to supervise some of the work on the film, which has begun despite the fact that PT has STILL not signed off on the rights.  Paul Giamatti plays the Disney-assigned limo driver and BJ Novak (from the US “The Office”) is one of the writers.  But the film cuts to flashbacks of PT herself, as the young girl Helen Goff, in Australia in 1906.  Her father, Travers Goff (Colin Farrell) is an unsuccessful bank manager, dreamer, drunkard – a hopeless bohemian type who can’t seem to survive as a round peg in the square hole of turn-of-the-century Australian banking. 

            At every turn, PT is rude, abrupt, contemptuous and arrogant.  She insults everyone.  She insists on changes everywhere – even when the writers point out that their material comes right out of her books - and pretty much vetoes what we know to be the best elements of the film.  Disney makes concessions here and there, but for his part seems equally determined that the film WILL emerge consistent with his own vision – complete with music and animation – and on his terms.  So it’s a battle of wills between him and PT. 

            Although the enthusiasm of the creative team and the honesty of the chauffeur make some headway into penetrating PT’s extremely gruff and intolerant exterior, they can’t prevent her from petulantly returning to London without signing off on the movie rights.  It takes a personal, surprise visit from Walt himself, and a deep, meaningful conversation in which Walt explains that he does in fact understand Mr. Banks is meant to be none other than Travers Goff, which finally breaks down PT’s resistance and induces her to sign.

            Really:  if you’re going to watch “Mary Poppins” again, no matter how many times you’ve seen it, do yourself a favor and watch this film immediately thereafter.  Hanks has a remarkable ability to dial back the smaltz in his roles and give just enough realism and grit so we don’t vomit up the sugar.  Thompson, of course, plays her as an arrogant bitch we can’t stand.  No wonder she (Travers) was never married, and her only son was adopted; she may have been a lesbian.

            Normally I’m the type who goes back and reads the original source material – as I did on “The Wizard of Oz”.  In this case, I’m less inclined to do so.  The movie seems to indicate that the original character was closer to PT’s gruff but competent aunt.  Granted, the movie was also calculated to make Disney look good at the expense of PT herself.  Perhaps Disney ripped Mary Poppins away from Travers and turned her into a warm, affectionate supernatural being who children might actually love.  In that case Disney not only “saved Mr. Banks”, but also saved Mary Poppins from being the same, cold, heartless bitch that Travers was.  Disney and his writers had children: Travers never did.  Every now and then a film adaptation actually improves on the original story.  

Admiral & Generation War

While I’m on the topic of war movies, I might as well follow up with these two, which are Russian and German, and well worth the viewing.  Both are fairly recent.

Admiral (DVD).  In Russian with English subtitles.  A historical romance about Admiral Kolchak, the White Russian leader during the Russian Civil War (RCW).  After the Bolsheviks murdered the Romanovs in Sverdlovsk in July 1918, the Whites were left without an obvious leader.  Several generals and this admiral popped up to try to assert that role, desperately courting Allied favor and support.  The British and French latched on to this guy, operating in the East, to somehow make something happen.  As we can guess, it didn’t quite work out. 

            Never mind that he was a Navy officer – apparently one of Russia’s few naval heroes from WWI, a war in which the Russians were usually on the losing end of most battles – active well inland without a single ship or fleet under his command.  The chaos of the war left him with scarcely any armies to command either.  Once the Bolsheviks had taken care of the White armies back west, they turned their attention east, made a deal with the Czechs, and outmaneuvered the White forces in this part of Russia, including Kolchak.

            But there’s some juicy romance here as well.  It turns out he had the hots for one of his fellow Russian naval officer’s wives, Anna Timireva, and the two had an affair during the RCW.  When the second Revolution broke out in October 1917, his wife and son managed to escape off to Paris, which left him free to pursue Anna.   She decided to stay with him as much as she could, so their relationship blossomed in the middle of a crazy, chaotic war. 

            The movie starts with his WWI heroics, some scenes with the February and October Revolutions (1917) (he meets Kerensky, but Lenin & Co. are off-camera) and then his role in the RCW, gradually going east by train across Siberia, his forces melting away around him.  He is captured by the Czech Legion and turned over to the Bolsheviks and shot. 

            It’s a decent film, not too long, with good production values: and it turns out that Anna survived all the way to the 1970s (though she was sporadically imprisoned several times over that period).  The Bolsheviks play little role in the film, too minor to even count as villains.  Kolchak comes off as a tragic hero defeated by a mostly offscreen nemesis – fortunately enjoying an on-screen mistress, though the romance is more implied than explicitly intimate. 

            The most obvious comparison would be with “Dr. Zhivago”.  That film gives us more of the Red side of the equation, but even with competing romances, the older film drags on.  It feels like we could walk across Russia’s vast empty expanses by foot in the time it takes the damn film to finish up.  Prefer something short and sweet?  Non-Red?  In Russian?  “Admiral” is your movie.

           

Generation War (Blu-Ray).  In German with English subtitles.  This came by the local artsy theater but I didn’t find out until the run had ended.  Then it turned out the DVD became available, so I bought it.  This is a very recent film about Germany during WWII from the perspective of 5 young people:

1.         Older brother Wilhelm Winter, a Wehrmacht 2LT.  As with most of these war movies, he’s the smart, sympathetic, idealistic, honorable Army officer leading his men as best he can.  After Stalingrad he’s convinced the war cannot be won, and eventually winds up in a penal battalion after deserting – lucky not to be simply shot.

2.         Younger brother Friedhelm Winter, a Wehrmacht private.  Nominally a coward, ultimately he turns into a very good soldier (10x better than Samwell Tarly), but he’s about as cynical as Wilhelm.  Instead of vocalizing his dissatisfaction he just goes with the flow and tries to survive.  He really doesn’t say much. 

3.         Viktor Goldstein, a Jew.  He’s a young, handsome guy and the BF of Greta, the singer.  Like many German Jews, he can pass for Aryan but arouse suspicions depending on his behavior.  He’s sent to Auschwitz but manages to escape the transport train and join Polish partisans who are just as anti-semitic as the Nazis, so he has to keep his identity hidden.  Mostly he keeps his mouth shut.

4.         Charlotte (Charly), a cute, peppy, German girl, Wilhelm’s fiancé.  She volunteers as a nurse on the Eastern Front and sees some nasty stuff.  As you can imagine, her youthful idealism and good cheer soon dry up.  Charly befriends a Jewish nurse and a Russian girl, and even winds up in bed with the unit’s doctor, an older father figure, but only because Friedhelm told her that Wilhelm had died.  When she does meet Wilhelm again, among the living, she’s torn between joy at his survival and grief at cheating on him.  Like Friedhelm she accepts and understands German guilt for the war but unlike Wilhelm, who acts out and verbalizes his anger and bitterness, Charly absorbs it more like blows on her soul, which she absorbs on behalf of her guilty country and conscience. 

5.         Greta del Torres, Viktor’s GF, a popular singer.  She also sees unpleasant things.  She has an affair with the local Gestapo officer which ends poorly – with her in prison.  Although easily the most glamorous character, she’s also the least interesting.  She tried to save Viktor, but that effort backfired into Viktor’s deportation and her own arrest.  The glamorous singer wilts and decays in prison, kept alive only by her hatred for the regime. 

            The movie is very violent, and shows a small amount of Einsatzgruppen action (though none of the main characters are directly involved).  It covers the period 1941-45, but all the combat is Eastern Front and all enemy soldiers are Soviet, who also come off as very brutal, e.g. they capture a hospital and simply shoot all the German soldiers who are patients left behind.   In fact, there’s lots of combat.  Plus the tanks are authentic: Tigers and T34s, so us WWII buffs can really sink our teeth into it.  Warning, though, it is long: 3 90 minute parts, or 4.5 hours total.  It was a miniseries in Germany.

            The basic theme is that World War II took and destroyed an entire generation of Germany, stuffing it through the meat grinder of war, atrocity and depravity - the women too, and not just the men.  However, it’s not too much on the “let’s feel sorry for ourselves because of all the horrible things that happened to us during the war.”  Wilhelm is the most vocal in not merely articulating defeatism, but also acknowledging Germany’s fault in starting the war.  When an SS officer brutally murders a Jewish child at point blank, the viewer knows the movie is not apologizing for Nazi Germany.  Soviet brutality is not merely expected: it’s well deserved. 

            “Final Victory has been cancelled,” is the sentence Greta utters to a squad of horny German soldiers, deflating their egos, and landing her in prison.  “Final Victory” is the phrase uttered by the uber-Nazi nurse Hildegard – because anything else is unthinkable.  Even Wilhelm isn’t overly troubled that Germany started the war – invading Czechoslovakia (March 1939), Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, etc. countries without the means nor the inclination to threaten or oppose Germany – until after Stalingrad.  Are we the bad guys because we’re losing the war, or are we losing the war because we’re the bad guys?  Could the generals and leaders stupid enough to waste the goodwill of the Eastern Europeans by mistreating them, be also stupid enough not to manage a war against Stalin & the West at the same time?  The same arrogance which leads us Germans to brutalize the Russians and Ukrainians who welcomed us as liberators, could be the same arrogance persuading us that we can somehow defeat three major powers simultaneously? 

            With the Russians pushing us back on all sectors of the Eastern Front, with the Allies in Italy and France, with the people at home pulverized by bombing raids – can the war possibly be won?  Of course not.  Will our enemies meekly stop at the German borders and allow us to continue as we were? Of course not.  Will the Russians be gentle and kind when they rampage through the ruined streets of Berlin?  Of course not.  What we sowed, so shall we reap.  But if the Fuhrer, who must know something we don’t, promises “Final Victory”, despite all the evidence to the contrary, which would we rather believe?  “Final Victory” is what we cling to, desperately.  This is the only hope of Generation War.

D-Day

I missed my deadline for last Friday, so I pushed it to this Friday.  Sorry for the delay.  

Back in college, my buddy Phil and I were helping one of his suitemates – we’ll call him Jim – study for a history exam.  Unlike Phil and I, Jim grew up in the US, far from the beaches of Normandy.  Apparently his high school education somewhere in Virginia failed to include a discussion of World War II, so this important topic came to a complete surprise to him.  Of course, after getting over our shock and horror when Jim gave us a blank stare of zero recognition of “D-Day”, we filled him in.   My own source for this blog is The Desert Fox in Normandy: Rommel’s Defense of Fortress Europe, by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.  I had read it earlier and simply reviewed parts of it here, but it can be considered a fairly detailed account of the D-Day operation, including the subsequent battles in Normandy until the Allies finally broke through in late July 1944.

June 1944.  World War II was in full swing.   The Nazis still occupied most of Europe, and no Allied or Soviet army had yet to set foot on German territory.   By most of Europe, I mean: Greater Germany, which included Austria, part of Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), and parts of Western Poland (Silesia); Denmark; Norway; Holland; Belgium; France; most of Italy; Poland; Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Yugoslavia; Greece; Romania; Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia; and much of Ukraine.   The Allies were pushing up the Italian boot, and in the East, Stalin had taken the initiative after the battle of Kursk in August 1943 and was gradually pushing the Germans westward.  However, Soviet offensives came in bits and spurts as they had to re-establish supply lines, which gave the Germans time to regroup and counter-attack.  While the Germans had permanently lost the offensive initiative on all fronts, they were by no means out.  Germany itself was not penetrated (!) until early 1945.

            The Germans knew the Allies would be landing somewhere in France, probably at Calais – the closest point to England – but also knew that since that was too obvious, it could be anywhere else.  In fact, the invasion occurred on the north coast, but much further west at Normandy.   There is some debate about how delusional Hitler was at this point as to whether or not the war could be won.  The general consensus among the Germans – including their top general, Erwin Rommel - was that their only hope was to blunt the Allied invasion and throw them into the sea; another invasion would take at least a year to launch, giving the Germans time to re-deploy their Western front armies eastward and hold Stalin to a stalemate.  However, if the Allied invasion did succeed, it was definitely game over for Adolf & Co.

            The Allies divided the invasion beaches into five zones, from west to east:  Utah, Omaha (#18!) (US targets), and Gold, Juno and Sword (British/Canadian).   After the Allied weather wizards initially blocked off June Sixth from “good time”, they reconsidered and told the US commander, Eisenhower, that the Sixth was OK.   Fortunately for us, the German weather wizards still thought the Sixth was no good.  Weather patterns generally move from west to east, meaning whatever weather northern France would have would be coming from the west.  With the US and Canada on the Allied side, the Allies had weather stations further west than the Germans and thus more accurate information on what would be coming.  Rommel took off on vacation because no Allied invasion was expected at that particular time - due to the Germans' less accurate information.  

Allies.  Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, in charge of (quoting Mitcham), 45 full-strength divisions, all of which were armored, mechanized, airborne or mobile; 17,000 aircraft against the Germans’ 160 (“Luftwaffe?  What Luftwaffe?” – in fact, all but two of the 160 had been transferred to Metz, well out of range of Normandy), and overwhelming naval superiority, as the German Navy decided that the weather was too rough to invade and stayed in port.  The Allies had the aforementioned superior intelligence and a unified chain of command.  The odds were stacked heavily against the Germans.

Germans.   The commander of the Western Front forces was Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt, a seriously old-school guy who didn’t understand modern warfare.  Somewhat under him was Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the Germans’ best commander.   Unlike Rundstedt, Rommel did understand mobile warfare – he’d spent two years dancing across the deserts of North Africa (including Benghazi) somehow competitive with the British Eighth Army with just two panzer divisions – AND he also understood Allied mobile warfare strategy.   Plus he understood that unlike the Russians, who thought planes were nice inventions but no substitute for a tidal wave of fresh meat, in the form of masses of peasants and workers equipped with PPSH submachine guns, riding T34s, the Allies were deadly in the art of fighter-bombers and fully understood how to use their massive air superiority.  Why kill Private Ryan, who might grow up to invent a better light bulb, when you can send a “Jabo” (German slang for fighter-bomber) to get the job done quicker?

            The Germans’ 58 combat divisions were spread out across France because they didn’t know where the invasion would occur.  Many divisions were second tier or first tier understrength recuperating from battles against Ivan.  Logistics were a nightmare because many of these divisions were equipped with a mishmash of mutually incompatible captured and obsolete equipment.  Tanks were short of spare parts and fuel, and France had no Autobahn, meaning beautiful, tree-lined two lane roads everywhere with no bypasses around villages, towns, or cities.  Transport was slow and generally had to take place at night to avoid the ever-present threat of Allied fighter-bombers, and the rails were subject to sabotage by the Resistance or poor service by the SNCF. 

            Nevertheless, the Germans did manage to get the Second SS (Das Reich) and Twelfth SS (Hitlerjugend) Panzer Divisions to Normandy.  In early July, while Cherbourg had been taken (late June – although due to German sabotage, it wasn’t usable until a month later), Caen was still in German hands, holding off the Brits and Canadians and preventing a breakthrough.   

June 6.   The day in question.   Resistance was fairly light on Gold, Sword, and Juno beaches which were taken by British and Canadian forces facing the 716 Division.  German resistance was stiffest on Omaha Beach, where a veteran Wehrmacht unit, the 352 Infantry Division, had been transferred without Allied knowledge, and the preparatory barrage of bombing fell inland a few miles and completely avoided the Germans: thus the US First Infantry Division faced an intact enemy division it had no idea to expect.  Of 48 Sherman tanks devoted to the beach, 32 were landed too far out and sunk immediately, and 8 were destroyed by anti-tank fire.

            The tide worked both ways.  Rommel had assumed the Allies would land at high tide, to minimize the amount of beach the soldiers would have to cover under fire.  His obstacles were designed to destroy landing craft at high tide, but would be useless at low tide.  The low tide landing, as the Allies did it, avoided the beach obstacles but left the soldiers more vulnerable to machine gun fire for another 300 feet of exposed beach. 

            It was naval gunfire that took out the German guns, plus the 352 began running out of ammunition and could not be resupplied (without ammo trucks being attacked by Allied fighter-bombers); this allowed the soldiers to finally cross the beach. Thus despite heavy casualties, US forces were able to establish a beachhead by the end of the day – though they still had no heavy weapons and the beach was not completely secure, alone of the 5 beaches, as by nightfall the 352 was still a going concern.  

            The British and Canadians on Sword, Juno and Gold found themselves up against the 716 Division.  Part of the division were former Russian POWs who simply ran away (which the Germans predicted would happen: “we are asking rather a lot if we expect Russians to fight in France for Germany against Americans.”)  The Germans of the 716, veterans of the Eastern Front, would hang back and hide, then attack the flanks and rears of the British and Canadian forces.  Thus while the beaches themselves were taken fairly easily, German resistance stiffened substantially inland.  British General Montgomery, who had been counting on a 32 mile penetration by June 7, had advanced well short of that – and would not take Caen until weeks later.

            After that, the Allies put together their fancy, clever, artificial harbor and began moving more troops, tanks, and supplies ashore, though a big storm screwed this up somewhat on June 19.  Initial attempts to break out were hindered by the peculiar “hedgerow” country of Normandy, a terrain which favored the defense, particularly if the defenders were crafty, veteran SS tankers in Tigers and Panthers, tanks which outmatched the Shermans and Churchills the Allies were using. 

Aftermath.   By the end of July, however, the Allied onslaught – particularly a viciously nasty carpet bombing of the German forces – blew through the German lines and the breakthrough occurred.  Moreover, at the same time, Stalin had launched another offensive in the East, which likewise broke through Army Group Center and led the way into Poland.   Factor in also July 20, 1944, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on Hitler failed (as seen in the movie “Valkyrie”), but succeeded at shaking up not only the Fuhrer but also the German high command.  Rommel was implicated in the plot and by October 1944 forced to commit suicide.   

            Paris was liberated in August 1944, Belgium entered in December, the Battle of the Bulge in late December, but by January 1945 the game was back on.  The Rhine was crossed in March 1945.  Back east, Auschwitz (in western Poland) was liberated in January 1945, and by April 1945 the Russians were in Berlin.

As you might imagine, there have been movies made, and the top two are the following:

The Longest Day (1962).  Up until “Saving Private Ryan”, this was the definitive version.  In black & white, and an all-star cast (John Wayne, Sean Connery, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, etc.), even featuring considerable screen time of the German perspective.  It’s almost 3 hours long, but it covers the bases fairly well.  It’s not nearly as high octane intense as “Saving Private Ryan”, but it’s a good start.  It was nominated for 5 Oscars and won 2.

Saving Private Ryan (1998).  Now the gold standard, although in terms of scope “The Longest Day” still covers more of the battle:  this film gives us Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and his squad’s experience on Omaha Beach on the first day, rapidly followed by their Quest to Seek Private Ryan, a 101 Airborne trooper who is the last of his 5 brothers left alive.  If you combine this with “Band of Brothers”, which tracks a company of the 101 Airborne from training in England all the way to the end of the war in Berchtesgaden in 1945, you’ll have more of the airborne element of D-Day, but even there you’re missing the British experience which “Longest Day” still gives you. [If I were British or Canadian I’d be pissed that “SPR” implies that the Yanks did all the hard work in Normandy.]  Better to say that “SPR” complements “LD” rather than replaces it.  ** Note that the characters in “Saving Private Ryan” are fictitious, while those in “Band of Brothers” are based on real veterans. 

            I’ve never been in combat, much less participated on Omaha Beach decades before I was born.  But my impression is that this movie captures more of the intense insanity and chaos of combat, more so than “The Longest Day”, where it seemed like the Germans were just a minor obstacle to overcome.  Spielberg makes you wonder how the hell ANYONE survived Omaha Beach, much less took it.  Even after having seen the movie several times already and know who will live and who will die, the combat sequences still make my heart pound faster.  If “Shakespeare In Love” had come out any other year, this movie would have completely blitzed the Oscars in 1999 – and won the Best Picture award.   

June 4, 1984.  I have been to Normandy, in fact, on the 40^th Anniversary of D-Day.   Unfortunately, our visit to the beach area did not give us access to any of the actual beaches or any of the concrete fortifications or bunkers which are still there.  What we experienced was a huge crowd of French and US civilians and lots of Allied veterans, PLUS a big speech by US President Ronald Reagan (too far away to actually see, and well too far away to meet) which we heard from the big crowd.   While it was a fun day trip, I was disappointed that what we actually got was just a big speech.

A Million Ways To Laugh In The West

As I noted in my blog on “The Long Riders”, I’m not much of a fan of westerns.   However, here are a pair of western comedies – a genre so sparse I can identify both films which qualify as such.   I don’t think of “Back to the Future Part III” as a comedy.

A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014). This is Seth MacFarlane’s take on westerns, appropriately set in the right time (1882) and place (somewhere out west – Wyoming?  Utah?).  

Albert (MacFarlane) is a mild-mannered sheep herder whose girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried) dumps him because he’s a bit too mild-mannered.  She immediately hooks up with the local mustache merchant, Foy (Neil Patrick Harris).   Fortunately for Albert, a mysterious woman, Anna (Charlize Theron) takes it upon herself to coach Albert in gunfighting so he’ll have a ghost of a chance of surviving a duel with Foy to occur in a week.   Meanwhile, equally mild-mannered Edward (Giovanni Ribisi) counts the days until his fiancé Ruth (Sarah Silverman) marries him and then shifts her carnal attention to him instead of the incessant array of customers – she’s a whore.  Aside from Albert, he's about the only one in town not romping in bed with her.

Naturally there’s a showdown by the end of the film, and along the way we get lots of laughs.   Perhaps the John Wayne fans of my dad’s generation might not be laughing too hard, but my peers and younger will probably appreciate MacFarlane’s humor.

Incidentally, the title comes from an ongoing diatribe Albert has about the state of affairs in the Wild West in 1882.  Apparently MacFarlane is upset that so many contemporary Americans wax poetic about this period of American history, and damn it, MacFarlane is going to set the record straight!    It was a dangerous, nasty time!  A FOX animator/humorist with zero gun skills would last…. 5 seconds?  Maybe less….in such an environment.  Poor baby.  The proper solution for Albert – MacFarlane’s 1882 equivalent - would have been to sell his farm and move to San Francisco, New York or Chicago, somewhere he could survive on his humor skill set without worrying about gun fights.

Blazing Saddles (1974).  Here’s the only other Western comedy I know of, and it’s fairly famous - and it's even celebrating its fortieth anniversary.

Out in the west, the railroad is coming to a small town where everyone’s name is Johnson.   The Attorney General Hedley – NOT Hedy – Lamarr (Harvey Korman – missing his surgically attached sidekick Tim Conway) plots to clear the locals out of town so he can snatch it up and make a profit.  He sends a black man, Bart (Cleavon Little) to the town as their sheriff, knowing the locals won’t accept a man of that race in that position.  Bart’s assisted by the fastest shot in the West, the “Waco Kid”, Jim (Gene Wilder).   Eventually Bart wins the townspeople’s affection and they cook up a plot to defeat Lamarr and his army of malcontents – quite literally, as it includes a squad of WWII German soldiers. 

Although the n-word is heavily abused here, it’s really meant to ridicule racism.   Farting cowboys?  Got it.  “Mongo just a pawn in the game of life”?  Yes.   Sultry German songstress, Lili Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn)?  Yep.  And because Mel Brooks apparently couldn’t figure out how to end the film, he broke down the fourth wall that Frank Underwood talks through and pushed the whole shebang out of the filming lot and into downtown Los Angeles.   Comic genius?  Maybe not.  But certainly entertaining.  And he beat “Holy Grail” by a year in the “absurd ending” department.

Simple Pleasures

By this I mean, small things that make you happy, calm your nerves, or otherwise produce a pleasant impression.  I had mentioned one of these in my much older Happiness vs. S**t That Sucks:  observing a thunderstorm from the security of shelter, but most of the other posts were more substantial items;  winning a case, getting a new car, etc. 

The problem is that we can’t always count on big ticket items, and while intense and impressive they come along at long intervals.   They’re great, and we enjoy them, but how do we extract happiness and pleasure while we’re waiting for the next big thing?   How can we extract happiness and pleasure from every day life?

It’s like that “Success Baby” meme of the triumphant baby.   “Favorite song on the radio ends just as I pull into my parking space”, was one of my favorites.   Generally with me it’s the opposite:  after blathering with commercials, traffic, weather, etc. they finally get around to playing the song I want to hear just as I’m pulling into the place I want to park.   I guess that’s a “simple pain.”

Other examples of simple pleasures?

1.         Sunshine – particularly after a rainstorm.

2.         The vending machine has the item you want:  and it GIVES it to you.

3.         A cold beer at the end of day of work – or after a workout.

4.         Enjoying a classic album – and it doesn’t have to be on vinyl.

5.         DVD extras which justify the extra time watching them – like really juicy scenes they had to delete to keep a PG rating, or including actors who are only in that scene, or alternate endings (the alternate ending of “Natural Born Killers” is actually better than the original one).

6.         As Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell) advised in “Modern Family”, try to experience at least one sunrise a day.  (I prefer sunsets, which give more purple tones.  Sunrises are too yellow-orange.)

You get the idea.  And leverage it:  use the simple stuff to improve your attitude, take out your happiness on random, innocent strangers, annoying co-workers, or even your spouse, children, or pets.  Yes, I know I’m hopelessly upbeat – most of the time (rarely on Monday, though).   Anyhow.

“I tell you to enjoy life, I wish I could but it’s too late.”  (“Paranoid”)

Gravity & Solaris & Burn After Reading

It’s movie time again, folks.  In this case, it’s a tiny tribute to George Clooney.  Let’s get started.

Gravity (2013).   This film won a few Oscars this time around.   Although George Clooney plays an important role, the main character is played by Sandra Bullock.

            Bullock plays Ryan Stone, a medical engineer on a Space Shuttle mission.  Her comrade is veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky (Clooney).  While the pair of them – plus red-shirt space walker #3 (hereinafter, RSSW3) – are out spacewalking, disaster strikes in the form of a sudden impulse by the Russians to destroy some satellites.  Not good.  The resulting debris comes by and kills RSSW3, blows open the space shuttle, and thereby kills the astronauts inside who weren’t wearing space suits, also rendering the shuttle useless as a vehicle.

            So now it’s down to Stone & Kowalsky.  Err, make that Stone.   AND she loses contact with Houston, so now she’s really completely on her own, unlike the heroes in  “Apollo 13”.  “Gravity”, though, seems less of an enemy than “space” – cold, quiet, airless, pressureless, with no food or shelter, no friends, no assistance, and a shortage of suitable re-entry vehicles.  Space is liable to kill you long before gravity pulls you to the ground.  You share Stone’s fear and anxiety:  how do I un-f**k this situation?  How do I survive?  How can I get home to Earth?   Does she do it?  Stay tuned.

Solaris (2002).   Note, this is actually a remake of a Russian 1972 film which I haven’t seen, which itself was based on a 1961 Polish novel which I haven’t read.   I bring it up because the main character, Chris Kelvin, is played by George Clooney, again in an astronaut/space context.

            A space station orbiting a distant planet calls in a discreet distress signal.  They ask for Kelvin to come, but are vague on what happened or why they need him, presumably they’ll tell him when he gets there.  Sure enough, he does, and finds that half the crew is missing, and with a few exceptions the rest are dead.  Those still alive refuse to return to Earth, for reasons which we’ll learn later. 

            Once on the station, Clooney dreams of his dead wife.  Then he wakes up, and there she is: in the flesh.  WOW.  Jeremy Davies, who studied Charles Manson for a prior role, seems to enjoy Mansonizing all his subsequent roles as well – including this one, as crew member Snow.  

            The film has a glacial pace and intensity almost indistinguishable from “2001: A Space Odyssey”.  While it’s not nearly as impenetrable, it is just as boring. 

Burn After Reading (2008).   While I’m on the topic of George Clooney, without getting drawn into an exhaustive review of all of his movies, I would like to mention this one.  It’s a screwball comedy.  And it’s very good.

            The movie starts with Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), an extremely foul-mouthed and bad-tempered CIA field agent who is abruptly demoted to desk duty in Langley.  Obviously unhappy with this change, he goes Miles Kendig and starts writing unauthorized memoirs – which he promptly loses.  David “Sledgehammer” Rasche and J.K. Simmons (Travelers insurance commercial dude) are some of his hapless colleagues at the Company.

            The CD-R is found by a pair of clueless gym employees, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), who conspire to extort Cox and/or release the disc to the Russian Embassy (did I mention, the film takes place in the DC area? Sorry).   At some point, Litzke, who was angling to somehow procure cash for various elective surgeries her health insurance refused to cover, winds up dating Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a buffoonish but endearing US Marshal.  It turns out Pfarrer had been cheating on his own wife with Cox’s wife (Tilda Swinton), oblivious that Mrs. Pfarrer (Elizabeth Marvel) was also pursuing extramarital excitement.  Are you confused yet?  Don’t worry, the confusion is part of the humor.

            I bring this up because – not only is it a great film – Clooney jumps into the comedy like a natural.  Is he the best actor, ever?  Maybe not.  But his case is certainly helped by this film.  Enjoy.