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What Have You Watched Recently?


Susano

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MLB.tv is frustrating me today. Apparently they are in a rework at this particular moment prior to the 2014 regular season starting next week -- a reboot that guys their Xbox 360 support (presumably at Microsoft's behest) and keeps me from watching on my PCs too. Radio still works for live sprint training but not for archive.

 

What is baseball's service selling -- baseballs or next-gen consoles?

Yes

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Just got home from a small cinepub screening of The Monument Men. The movie was not in the main theatres in the US very long and was quietly overlooked.

 

That doesn't mean you shouldn't see it (or rent it or put it in your Netflix queue).

 

In the Second World War, Hitler had many enemies. Among them, apparently, was the human spirit itself. Everywhere the Wehrmacht went, the Germans confiscated thousands of works of art (in many cases killing the original owners), theoretically to stock the grandiose "Fuhrer Museum" Hitler was going to build in his home town after the war. And what he couldn't have he wanted nobody to have. As the Reich crumbled, there was a genuine fear that the entirety of Europe's cultural heritage would be destroyed. Standing against that is a group of art experts, assembled at FDR's orders to save as much art as could be saved -- in a race against time against the Germans' self-destruction and the Russians' desire to grab and keep as much art as they could for themselves. The Monument Men is their story.

 

Action heroes these are not. Most of the contingent is too old and out of shape to be "real soldiers". But they manage a great achievement, at great cost -- rescuing tens of thousands of paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and other artifacts, as well as millions of books and thousands of Torahs. It was as grand and heroic a gesture as any of the war. And it really happened.

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Near the end of the film the commander of the unit (an understated George Clooney) confronts a Nazi officer who had been in charge of "securing" much of the stolen art. It turns out that officer had also run a concentration camp earlier in the war, and was so thoroughly convinced of his Anti-Semitic rhetoric that he thought the American should thank him for killing Jews. The American then tells this monster that when he gets home (this was right after V-E Day) he will go to his favorite New York delicatessen, get an onion bagel and coffee, read in the Times abot the Nazi having been hanged for his crimes, and then "never think about you again".

 

Two of the works that feature prominently in the film are the Ghent Altarpiece and the Bruge Madonna (a Michelangelo statue that was the only one to leave Italy during his lifetime).

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