Happy Thursday + "The Dirty Dozen"

Happy Late Night, Sweet Baby,

I hope you had a good show tonight at Sarah's cd party, and also a good day in general. We had another day of sunshine, but we're also back to sub-zero temperatures : man it is cold tonight! It's like December cold - fruh-HEE-zing - and it's just really weird because we are almost in March and in any other year we would have begun our Spring a couple weeks ago, and would have had many pre-Spring warm and balmy days interspersed throughout the Winter calendar beginning in mid January. But this year we've had none of that. It's just been full-on Winter Weather all the way through, like we live in another state.

Well, at least it stopped raining.  :)

Tonight at CSUN we saw "The Dirty Dozen", the classic WW2 film from 1967 which was directed by Robert Aldrich and which John Cassavetes acted in. I have seen bits and pieces of this movie before - a squib here and there on TV - but I had never before seen the whole thing before tonight. That seems unusual, with me being such a WW2 buff, and "The Dirty Dozen" being so famous, and I think it is exactly that factor that has kept me from seeing several "very famous" movies. I've still never seen "Gone With The Wind". I had not seen "Citizen Kane" until 2015. I'm sure there are a few others I could think of. Sometimes, with me, I think - "well, if a movie is that famous, it can't be that great".

I was 100% wrong about "Citizen Kane".

And I was pleasantly surprised by "The Dirty Dozen", which turned out to be one of the best WW2 movies I've ever seen, even though most of the action takes place in the last 30 minutes of a 2 1/2 hour movie. Still, the build-up to all that action is a very well told story of a Major (Lee Marvin) and 12 soldier/criminals who have been assigned a mission to kill several Nazi leaders who are holed up in a huge chalet. The incentive for the "dozen" wartime criminals is that their sentences will be commuted if they complete the mission.

The whole thing is extremely well done, it never lags, and everyone in the large cast creates a memorable character (especially Cassavetes, who was nominated for an Oscar). What is especially striking about the movie, though, is the realistic way it portrays the violence of war, and most particularly the cruelty of the violence. This aspect of the story is saved for the very end, and it must have been quite shocking when it came out in 1967, because it holds up now - to show the extent of what one "side" will do to the other "side", and how ruthless it can be. In this way it broke the ground for all-out 80s war films like "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon", in which nothing of the horror of war was held back.

"The Dirty Dozen" starred every Macho Man of that era, a necessity for such a film, but in spite of the Testosterone Factor it is not without a sense of humor, in fact there are laughs aplenty in the first two hours.

I know it's a Guy Thing, war movies in general, but I just report on it because I saw it, and it was a classic in all respects.

That's all I know for tonight. See you in the morning.

I Love You.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxo  :):)