Moving Across the Waters

Conditions: Brisk

Looking But Not Seeing
In the time since flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur and vanished there has been a huge amount of speculation over where the plane ended up. Because we do not yet have a global tracking system for airplanes, once it was out over the ocean it was effectively invisible, and it seems we’ve all been guessing since as to what happened next. One tool that has been made available is from the Tomnod website, allowing ordinary people to scan across great big photographs taken from satellites of the ocean surface. Now it seems to me that, of all people, Courtney Love actually found something.

If you follow her facebook link, not only will you see the map grid she flagged, but also an even more interesting snapshot of how people look at the messenger rather than the message. See, in the bottom left corner it really does look like there’s a submerged fuselage of a large airplane. But if you look at the comments, everyone is completely dismissive of it. Because they’ve all gone to those coordinates with an underwater sensor unit? No, it’s because it’s Courtney Love. And while the line about a plane wreck being found by a train wreck is kind of funny, it’s also in another way kind of sad.



Film Review: The Monuments Men

George Clooney’s latest film is a World War 2 movie about an unlikely group of men, authorised by the President, sent in to France just after D Day in order to chase down art that was looted by the Germans. Their goal is to find where the Nazi’s stashed all the paintings and statues, and restore them back to the rightful owners. In some ways it’s got a Raiders of the Lost Ark feel to it, but it’s actually a slow-paced and thoughtful exploration of this odd viewpoint of the last great war. Hitler really was trying to take it all with him, and Clooney’s point about how important it was to preserve not just people's lives but also who the people are, is a powerful point.

And it’s tested a couple of times, with generals not wanting to cooperate with the Monuments Men if it means risking their own men’s lives, and more directly with members of the team actually getting killed trying to chase down leads for where the artworks were taken to. The ticking clock is provided by the Russian army, also sweeping across Germany and willing to take any artworks they find as war reparations. So can the Monuments Men find and recover the vast amounts of stolen art before the Russians?

This is another well made and thoughtful film from Clooney, who also plays the lead character. He’s assisted by a great selection of actors who convincingly portray a disparate team of art academics brought together through a belief in the importance of what they’re doing. I don’t think this film is what people might expect, it’s quite deliberate in its pace, and despite being set in a war there is only really one shootout – and even that one is anti climatic. I really enjoyed it, the only issue I had was with the music, which I thought was a bit to light and breezy for the subject at hand. I really like what Clooney and Grant Heslov are doing with the films they’re getting to make, and while naturally not all of them are my cup of tea, the ones that do work tend to work very well. Four Rembrandts out of five.



- Peace out