Boy, finally finished with the TA stuff.

Am starting another history book: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussel, which explore how the WWI was represented and mythologized in British literature. For some reason I am in a big WWI-period kick. The last three books I read have to do with the period: A People's Tragedy (about Russian Revolution), Silent Night (about the massive informal truce during Christmas 1914) and Rites of Spring (a cultural history of impact of WWI on European psyche). I even watched a pretty shitty movie called Lost Battalion last week, which is about an American battalion trapped behind enemy lines.

Speaking of war movies, saw a real good one too, curtesy of Netflix. Ballad of A Soldier, a Russian movie about a simple, naive and kind Russian soldier (Alyosha) in WWII who almost accidently became a hero, and is granted a six-days leave to go visit his mother in a village. Along the way, he meets and interact with various people, bringing them hope and joy with his simple goodness. He even fell in love with a girl who stow away on the same train, but it's definitely not Pearl Harbor kind of romance, as they never even kiss. The greatest scene has to be when the soldier only have a few minutes to drive to his village to see his mother. But the mother is out in the field working so when she hear the news of her son's coming she runs and runs and runs through the wheat field trying to reach him before it's too late. It was gloriously shot and built up to just the right emotional pitch. If you don't have tears welling up in your eyes at the end of this scene . . . . well, you should be summarily executed. From the beginning of the movie, the narrator tell us Alyosha will not survive the war, so the knowledge that this is last time he will ever be back home and see his mother make the scene even more poignant. This is a movie about the home front, where the cost of war is not merely measured in mangled bodies and lost lives, but in the lives-unfulfilled, love-unrequited and grief-unending.

Two counter-points: The way Alyosha destroyed two German tanks single-handed is simply too implausible. Two shots from a puny anti-tank rifle took the panzers out. Okay, I was not at the Russian Front, but (god this sound lame) being a veteran of numerous WWII computer games, it shouldn't happen! And after reading A People's Tragedy, which is filled with descriptions of the unspeakable habitual cruelty of Russian peasantry who mostly seemed stuck in Middle Ages barbarism, I had a hard time accepting the movie's implicit theme that Alyosha is a representative of the millions of his fellow peasant soldiers.

Whew, that's a lot. Oh yeah, Chris, what was your favorite episode of Band of Brothers? Mine is probably the one with the dead paratrooper with the Edelweiss flower.
How about changing the name to: The League of Gallant Fools.