I'd like to start of by wishing my wife, Melissa, a Happy Birthday for tomorrow. We were able to get out for a date tonight thanks to my folks. They're in town visiting and offered to watch the kids. We don't get that chance very often. Babysitters are expensive and we don't have a lot of local family at the ready that we can depend on. Plus, with my son's health, it's hard to entrust that care to someone else. But I digress...
For date night we went to see the movie Monuments Men. I've been excited for this movie every since I heard they were adapting the book (by the same name). I first caught onto the topic a couple of years ago, when I went to the National Archives in DC to see a lecture given by the author. Robert Edsel gave perhaps the best lecture I've ever experience. He spoke for over two hours without notes. The only assistance he had was a PowerPoint presentation. And that only had audio and video clips of the folks he interviewed for the book. You had no choice but to be captivated by all of it. I was hooked from there. And when I found a year ago that it was going to be a movie as well, the anticipation was hard to keep down. I liked it. However, I think it could've been much, much better. It was a little too cheeky for me. It seemed as though they morphed Ocean's Eleven into a WWII flick. That treatment was not my cup of tea. The folks in the actual Monuments Men took this stuff very seriously. They thought art, architecture, the bare essence of culture was of the utmost importance. Those things (among others) represented culture, and this culture was representative of society. They wanted this culture to survive the war and to be shared with generations to come. I guess in the end, it would've been nicer if the subject of the Monuments Men was given the same HBO treatment, as in The Pacific or Band of Brothers. Regardless of my feelings, go see this movie. My wife was able to get me to see that the film would open up the topic; make it more accessible. That way more folks would learn about it. No matter what, you should definitely read the book, and it's follow-up, Saving Italy.
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B.D.SchmittHusband, Father, Archives
November 2015
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