Personal War Drama

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.