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.

Pentagram & Ghost

Here are two bands that take Black Sabbath as a starting point and each do something “completely different”.

Pentagram.  This band has been around since 1971, loosely based in the Washington, DC area, and essentially our equivalent of Black Sabbath.   For a band that’s been on-again, off-again for all that time without ever making it big – and only getting an album released in 1985 – they’ve had as much inconsistency and turnover on lineups as you might imagine.  The only consistent member is singer Bobby Liebling.  The band has several albums, and a recent studio album, Last Rites.  The music is close enough to Sabbath that it’s borderline a de facto tribute band, although Liebling sounds nothing like Ozzy, Dio, or any other singer for that matter.  I caught them recently in concert at American University in DC; from what I can gather, Liebling’s eccentric and unreliable personality may have made his band persona non grata at the established DC clubs like the Black Cat or 9:30 Club.  Hopefully if Liebling can stay clean - more likely now that he and his wife Hallie have a child, so he's settled down to a normal life as a responsible adult - the band may finally get its act together and start playing better venues.

    As of 2014, however, they remain a cult band.  The closest they got to the big time were a failed audition – in a band member’s basement – in front of Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley (who were NOT impressed) in December 1975, and earlier that year, a Liebling scuttled demo session in NYC with Murray Krugman, who worked with Sandy Pearlman in Blue Oyster Cult. 

    “Last Days Here” is a recent documentary about the band, which for obvious reasons focuses heavily on Liebling.  Until recently he was living for the past few decades in his parents’ basement in Germantown, Maryland, a virtually hopeless drug addict with zero marketable skills.  Eventually he moved up to Philadelphia, found a girlfriend (who is now his wife), and got the band going, with some of the inevitable hiccups along the way.  His persistence in sticking with the band is somewhat admirable, although it’s not like he has much of a choice.  Steve “Lips” Kudlow of Anvil – subject of a very similar documentary on that 80s metal band – at least has a catering business for elementary schools to fall back on. 

    Concert.  At American University, most concerts seem to be at the Bender Arena, a small basketball stadium, in between Richie Coliseum (1500) and Baltimore Arena (14000) in capacity – as indeed it is (4500).  I guess the AU student activities group couldn’t get that many, because this Mary Graydon Center Tavern can fit maybe… 300 people.  I don’t know if that many people were even there.  The “Tavern” was nothing more than a huge empty room with no seats.  Even the “stage” wasn’t even above the floor, so if you weren’t in the front row what you saw were the tops of the band member’s heads and not much more. 

    Liebling is a very strange person, visually:  he looks like an old woman, in fact a witch (!!!), with a beard.  His vocal style is distinctive.  His “stage presence”, as it is, seems to be his oddity.  The guitarist, Victor Griffin, reminds me a bit of Duck McDonald (Blue Cheer) but plays a Les Paul.  I know that Les Pauls can definitely give a heavy sound, but shouldn’t there be an unwritten rule that if you’re going for a Black Sabbath sound you should play an SG?  Anyhow.   The band doesn’t jam, and plays its own material fairly faithfully.  If you like their studio recordings, the live show should do just fine, and if you like Black Sabbath, chances are you’ll like Pentagram.

GHOST.   Also known as Ghost BC, this particular band is from Sweden and formed just a few years ago.  Aside from the singer, Papa Emeritus II (not his real name) the two guitarists, bassist, keyboardist and drummer are all known as Nameless Ghouls, and wear identical black robes and plague doctor-esque plastic masks.  PE2 dresses as a satanic pope or anti-bishop, with mitre, robes, etc. and face painted as a skull, a bit better detailed than the Misfits mascot. 

  They have two albums, Opus Eponymous and Infestissumam, with a covers EP called If You Have Ghost.  Soundwise?   Harken back to 1970-72, when Blue Oyster Cult, then known as Stalk-Forrest Group, were rejected by Elektra and told by Columbia to beef up, as that label wanted their own Black Sabbath (who were on Warner Brothers).  Oddly, none of BOC’s songs or albums sound like Black Sabbath.  I’d describe Ghost as, “Blue Oyster Cult with Tony Iommi on guitar instead of Buck Dharma”. 

   Back in December 2000, Wishbone Ash came by to a local club.  At that time, as now, the only original member was Andy Powell.  For that reason, I was skeptical, but 2 hours before showtime I decided, “what the hell”, and went.  WISE DECISION.  Although he wasn’t backed up by Ted Turner, Martin Turner and Steve Upton, the nobodies Powell did hire were certainly competent.  The three guitarists I’ve seen play with this band over the years, Mark Birch, Ben Granfelt, and Muddy Manninen, are all excellent (maybe even better than Powell himself).  I was blown away.

   Likewise with Ghost, who I had never seen in concert.   Here’s some advice: if you keep seeing bands you’ve seen before, you’re far more likely to be disappointed hearing the same sets than to be surprised hearing songs they’ve never played before.  The Nameless Ghoul Guitarists play reissued Gibson RDs (one black, one white); unlike the original 70s models, the reissues have stock PAFs and no active electronics.  Killer guitar sound, mind you, although the tube amps were tastefully hidden away.  Behind them, a backdrop of a cathedral with faux stained glass images of quasi-satanic subject matter, and various smoking braziers of incense.   If Anton LeVey were alive today, he’d probably be their biggest fan.  Like KISS, what you get is a full concert experience, but the music is still a compelling ingredient of the live show.  They even covered the Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun”, as heavily as anyone could imagine that song being played… “it’s alright…”   Check them out on Youtube (apparently they don’t have any concert DVDs yet) or better yet, do yourself a favor and see them live.   

Shirley Muldowney vs. Danica Patrick

Recently NASCAR legend Richard Petty got in hot water for saying that the only way Danica Patrick could win a NASCAR race was if no one else showed up.   The issue of women drivers, and particularly women race drivers, is this week’s blog topic.

Before Danica Patrick, the most successful female race car driver was Shirley Muldowney, who was active in NHRA (drag racing) from the mid 60’s up until her retirement in 2003.   Not merely competitive, she actually won three NHRA Top Fuel championships, in 1977, 1980, and 1982.   That means not merely winning ONE event, but the entire season.   The nature of drag racing means that winning an event means not beating 35 other drivers on a dragstrip simultaneously, but winning a bracket of paired races. 

Danica Patrick started out in Indy Racing League (IRL) before NASCAR.   From 2005 to 2010 she raced in IndyCar, switching to NASCAR in 2010, initially in Nationwide (2^nd tier) and bumping up to Sprint Cup (top tier) in 2012.   Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jimmy Johnson, etc. are in Sprint Cup.   In her entire career, through IRL to Sprint Cup, Patrick has won ONE race, in 2008.  Her highest position was 5^th place in the standings, the 2009 IRL season.  While she has won pole positions, these are won by driving quickly alone on the track, and do not translate into results amidst the full field of competitors on the track at once.  To date she does not appear to be competitive. 

Granted, there are big differences between drag racing and stock car racing.  In drag racing you drive the dragster from a dead stop for a quarter mile, racing at most one other competitor in the other lane, in as close to a straight line for that 1320 feet as you can.  NASCAR means driving around a track, among a field of 30-something other drivers. 

The local tracks have “bracket racing”, which means you can literally bring your street car to the track, zip off at the same quarter mile as the NHRA legends, and compare your E.T. and mph to theirs in an apples-to-apples comparison.   Obviously a street car isn’t going to compete with a top fuel dragster (the fastest category), or even the Pro Stock dragster (the slowest category), but the track and measurement are the same.   A street car might be anywhere from 20 seconds (slow minivan) to 14 seconds (fast muscle car) to 12 seconds (Dodge Viper or Z06 Corvette).   Race motorcycles are even faster.   

            To give examples, my best speed in my fastest car, a 1992 Pontiac Firebird Formula 350, was 14.28 seconds and 98 mph.  The current NHRA records are: Pro Stock, 6.471 ET, 214.69 mph; Funny Car, 3.965 ET, 324.15 mph (John Force); Top Fuel 3.701 ET, 332.18 mph.   This means John Force covered the same quarter mile it took my car to cover in 14.28 seconds, in just under 4 seconds (10 seconds faster), at over 3 times the speed by the time he reached the end of the track. 

            Needless to say, the same does not hold true for NASCAR.  You cannot bring your street Camaro or Mustang down to Daytona and race your buddies.  For that reason, drag racing appeals more to me as someone who sometimes drives “performance” cars., emphasis on “sometimes.”

Also, I’ve noticed that NASCAR has a bit of a soap opera element to it.  Fans get passionate about their allegiances to different drivers, and subjective qualities of the drivers come into play.  Jeff Gordon, in particular, seems to elicit the same hostility as Justin Bieber.  But the world of drag racing also had its drama.  Muldowney was dating Connie Kalitta, “The Mongoose”, a rival of Don Prudhomme, “The Snake”.  Don Garlits and Jungle Jim and Jungle Pam were also colorful characters in the 70s.  Some of this can been seen in “Heart Like A Wheel”, the movie about Muldowney, featuring Bonnie Bedelia as her, though Muldowney was not impressed by the film or Bedelia. 

Anyhow.  If you look at many of the records Muldowney and Patrick have made, almost all of them are “first” or “best” by a woman, not first or best overall.  There are so few women in racing that either of these two were bound to break some of these records.  Clearly among the sports, Muldowney was far more competitive.  As it stands, Patrick’s only virtue appears to be as a photogenic, articulate Go Daddy spokesperson amidst a male-dominated sport.  The likelihood of her of winning a Sprint Cup race is extremely low.  Her likelihood of winning the trophy – top points score by the end of the season – is effectively nil.   Contrast that with Muldowney’s three championships. 

Why are women not more competitive in racing?  Given how diligently the engineers try to reduce weight in the race cars, a lighter woman (e.g. 5’2”, 100 lb Danica Patrick – no Brienne of Tarth!) should be competitive against a bigger, heavier man driving the exact same vehicle.  Neither a vagina nor ovaries appear to have any direct impact on steering, shifting, accelerating or braking, relative to male anatomy. 

In Puttering About In A Small Land, an early Philip K. Dick novel with no science fiction elements, the major character Roger Lindahl articulates why he believes women make poor drivers:  because they don’t focus on driving.   The book was written in 1957 but not published until 1985, a few years after Dick died.  By 1957, automatic transmissions had become popular in American cars.   With an automatic, as opposed to a manual, a driver can shift attention away from shifting the transmission and let his – or her – attention to other things, which may not even include driving.  I find my own attention wanders immensely if I’m tired.  The safest and most effective driving is when you’re focused exclusively on driving.  While I can’t speak from my own nonexistent experience in NASCAR (though I have bracket raced, as noted above) it takes little imagination to ascertain that what holds true at 70 mph on I-95 is even more important at over 200 mph at Daytona. 

I’m not going to suggest that Danica Patrick isn’t winning NASCAR races because she’s fixing her makeup or thinking about wallpaper or the argument she had with Ricky the night before, or worried that her race jumpsuit makes her butt look fat.  This isn’t the blonde chick on “The Big Bang” (who we know is no bimbo in real life anyway).  I’m sure she’s 100% concentrated on finishing 30^th instead of last, on not crashing again, and on finishing the race.  But results are results.   She is NOT competitive.  Why is that?

Women love to brag about their ability to multitask.  Relative to men, they are definitely better.  Men think in linear, series, terms:  focus on one thing to the exclusion of all others, do that, do it right, then move on to the next task, tackling problems and assignments one at a time.  Women think in parallel: they are more apt to try to do many things at the same time, but while they may be better at doing so than men are, none of the individual tasks will be completed as competently as if it had been done exclusively.  While this may apply to most of the women drivers out on the roads today, I don’t think this is necessarily the issue with Patrick, as noted earlier. 

So I remain stumped:  problem identified, but not conclusively solved.   Perhaps it is a male-female brain thing.  In my earlier blog I suggested that gays are people with the wrong-sex brain.  Notwithstanding “Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby”, that Will Ferrell NASCAR parody in which a competing driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen) from “Formula Un” – a GAY driver! – defeats Ricky Bobby, I’m not aware of any NASCAR champions who are gay.  For that matter, I’m not aware of any lesbian race car drivers either, and by all appearances, Danica Patrick only sleeps with men.  For that matter, the same holds true for Shirley “Cha-Cha” Muldowney.  While I’m not a big champion of gay rights, maybe a lesbian NASCAR champion could resolve this issue once and for all.