It’s the patriotic Angelina Jolie! 

“If you can take it you can make it…. A moment of pain, is worth a lifetime of glory!” 

The guy’s a high school runner, and then a soldier, obviously, but as an intellectual I relate to that philosophy, because thinking about ornery smart people and the books they write can be quite pain-inducing, in a way, but it’s worth it for me. Even as a mystic, I think it has a relevance. We don’t want this…. Sorta, negative nothing, where you’re like the man who sat by the pool of water for 38 years saying, “I’m nothing; just let me rot”, you know. (They didn’t happen to mention that guy in the homily excerpt, but it was a nice homily.) And I don’t know; I just started to actually like the Man of the Forties in this movie, you know. And I like liking things. 

I guess in general I could say that this is a personal war drama—a personal crisis drama about a war, you know. Kinda like a horror movie, a personal fight, only military instead of supernatural. It’s not a social/political or ‘adventure’ kinda story, really. It’s about the personal struggle of a soldier or warrior. I know there are novels or whatever like that, although I don’t know that I’ve read them. I have read one or two military memoirs of enlisted guys, and it’s certainly not like a strategy book. It’s about his own life, you know. It’s about him. 

…. I guess I got the sense of what the movie was like in that first sitting or two, much less than half of the movie, 20-50 minutes, but the whole thing was done very well. It’s a nice movie. 

There are obviously reasons not to like this movie: woman director (wrong gender); portrayal of gender in war (not romantic or boys’ club-y); both its ambiguity and its moral stance (normally we try to go for one or the other—or better yet, neither!); its portrayal of a lesser known region (you could have made it about Italy instead!) by an outsider (you mean her parents aren’t FROM the former Yugoslavia? You mean artists can care about—Other People? But why, why? History is about being callous, right?). 

Although those are the reasons I liked it, you know. 

I also don’t think that it’s Serb-bashing (or West-bashing) in an unthinking, whining way, although it certainly doesn’t shy away from showing blood and coarseness and all the shit of war, you know. It does also show the Serb nationalist father and let him have his fifteen minutes of fame, and I think it’s good to let objectionable or whatever people have their fifteen minutes of fame. 

I didn’t like the male lead by the end, and he was a Serb, although it has much more to do with him as a man—gender is a part of war—than anything else. It also has to do with something he said near the beginning, which at the time you assume he doesn’t mean, but which you realize by the end, that he kinda does. 

But if he was broken, morally speaking, he was certainly placed under intolerable moral strain, you know. 

…. And I know I didn’t talk about the girl, but it’s a great feminist film. 

…. I guess you could say that the male lead is a ‘colorblind’ ‘racist’/ethnocentric, although it doesn’t seem quite “fair” to me, (O Lord), since plenty of us fit that description, and it doesn’t seem to end up for us like this, so sinned against, and so sinning, so sinning…. How could we be such sinners, out of such happy cloth? 

I don’t like to rate things, you know. I probably shouldn’t even say these things, in a way.