Lack of motivation, the director's cut

[gurdymonkey]

....so I popped "Das Boot" in the DVD player last night. Select German, select English subtitles, because a Unterseeboot crew singing "It's A Long Way To Tipperary" at the top of their lungs just does not have the same impact if you're watching the English dub. I stopped at the end of side one and watched side two this morning. I am so glad I fished this out of a remainder stack and bought it. It's a terrific movie in all it's bearded, grimy, claustrophobic, ultimately hopeless glory.  I remember seeing this one in a theater and finding myself breathing shallow during the sequence in which U-96 is bottomed in the strait of Gibraltar, leaking copiously and all seems lost. I also remember discovering that the U-96 was real and that the film was inspired by the time spent aboard by Lothar Gunter Buchheim, who went on to publish the novel the film is based on, and severalphoto-essays. I did get a look at a copy of U-Boot Krieg (U-Boat War) not long after the film was originally released and it was obvious Wolfgang Petersen relied on Buchheim's photos in the composition of a number of shots and scenes in the film.

EDIT: And then my body said, "Unmotivated, huh?  Have a headache, bitch!" I'm wondering if I picked up the summer cold Dad was complaining of, because it feels like a sinus thing, not migraine.

Comments

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

May be not a cold, but a reaction to the gunk in the air?
It took two forest fires to realize that when there is a forest fire someplace nearby I feel like crap. May be coming down with something, lungs hurt, sinuses not to happy with me, ears even hurt. Now a days, I hear of a forest fire and I prepare for feeling like crap. *sigh*
And this one is near my brother's house, so I get to add worry to the usual crap. *double sigh*

[elmunadi.livejournal.com]

Das Boot raised major hackles when we saw it in the theatre. It was the first movie I saw in THX-sound (or one of its immediate predecessors). The scraping, metallic moans of the hull above and behind us ruined my sleep for a couple of days after.

If you want another deeply thrilling account of life as an unterseebootoffizier und kapitan - read Iron Coffins by Herbert A. Werner. Werner was a successful u-boat commander, and one of the few to survive the entire war to be able to surrender when Doenitz said "Enough". I read it first when my sister brought home a galley of it from her job at Doubleday in 1968... still have the hardback, and it struck me then (a Jew, with parents who remember WWII) that even on the "bad-guy" side, there were Germans who weren't Nazis, and Werner's commentary on the socio-politics of wartime Germany has tended to color my view of war since.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

I think I did read Werner, years ago. It sounds very familiar. ;-D
Of course, I used to bike past this as a kid on a regular basis:
http://mysite.verizon.net/resx5uqm/savetheling/