war and remembrance

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When I was dating the AW, I purchased the 1988 TV miniseries War and Remembrance, soapy historical fiction that follows a family's travails during WW2. I'd hoped to successfully marry 1) my interest in history with 2) her interest in Us magazine, thereby helping her to accidentally learn something.

She saw right through my ruse. Inside of 10 minutes, she was ejecting the DVD.

And so it gathered dust for eight years, until I recently started watching the set. For the most part, it's been an exercise in "What's more implausible? 71 year-old Robert Mitchum as a 50 year-old who marries a 30 year-old hottie, or Jane Seymour as an American Jewess?"

Meanwhile, if there's anything worse to watch while gnawing on baby back ribs than concentration camp footage, I don't know what it could possibly be. And I don't mean re-enactments. I mean actual footage of GIs carrying around mutilated, emaciated corpses and near-corpses.

Yeah. Who else is hungry?

I laughed during one horrible scene, though. Seymour is being coerced by Nazi guards. They're doing so by threatening to rip her three-year old child in half. Clearly, not remotely funny. What made me laugh, then? A guard held the child by his ankles, upside-down, and although we heard the kid screaming in terror when he was off-camera—moooom-MYYYYY!—when he was on-camera, the look of unabashed delight on his face was unmistakable. "Again! Again!" the face said.