I watched two movies over the weekend, streaming via Netflix (natch). The first was Precious and the second was Max Manus.
I’d put off seeing Precious because I was pretty sure it would be a harrowing experience. It was. The acting was uniformly outstanding. Mo’Nique deserved her Oscar. The editing is really superlative as well. If you’re just looking for an evening’s entertainment, this picture is not it but not only is it well worth watching, it deserves to be seen. It needs to be seen. I’m surprised that the reviews don’t seem to comment on it but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more scathing indictment of AFDC.
Max Manus is a Norwegian biopic about Norway’s most prominent resistance fighter during WWII, one of the most successful saboteurs of the war. He and his team managed to take out a number of transport ships in harbor including the large SS Donau using limpet mines, a mine attached to the hull of a ship with magnets.
Manus himself was a very interesting guy. He’d spent his adolescence bumming around Latin America, returned to Norway to volunteer to fight the Soviets in Finland and then, when Germany invaded and occupied Norway, he joined the resistance and fought the Germans. As best as I’ve been able to tell many of the incidents portrayed in the movie are true. He did, in fact, escape after being capture by the Germans by jumping out a window, being taken to the hospital, and escaping the hospital by climbing out the window on a rope. The guy was incredibly Norse. Entertaining film.
One odd little sidelight: although in real life he received a lot of his training as a saboteur in the States and Canada in the movie you receive the impression that he got all of his training in Scotland.
At least of couple of the people on the Kon-Tiki expedition were also involved in espionage/sabotage of German forces during WWII. After that, drifting across the Pacific on a raft probably seemed like an okay idea.
Excuse me, I should have mention that they were also Norwegian.
I recently saw a documentary ‘Rosies’ on Netflix streaming. It’s about the female mathemeticians who worked as ‘computers’ during WWII. Some went on to become the first electronic computer programmers, working on ENIAC.
The editorial/production quality wasn’t top notch, but the info was quite interesting.
And speaking of movies about Norwegian Resistance fighters, The Heroes of Telemark will be on TCM sometime in the next day or two. “Based on a true story” but possibly worth watching because of Kirk Douglas.