Belly Button Lint: Rick Ramsey's Weblog

Originally written in May of 2000

Missus Moose wanted to watch Tootsie last night, but I talked her into watching a guy flik. Stalingrad. Last I heard, the city has been sold to a Norwegian car manufacturer in the great tradition of stadiums across America. It is now called Volvograd. But during WWII it was called Stalingrad.

Anyway, Stalingrad's director also made Das Boot, that awesome flik about footwear shortages among German troops in WWII. Needless to say, Stalingrad was also in German. It was also a downer, since it turns out the otherwise quite competent German army lost that battle. Let me summarize the movie for you:

- Our heroes, the footsoldiers are on leave sunning themselves on the shore of Italy, surrounded by Italian broads whom they impress by opening their C-rations with their thumbnails. They crack jokes so we can sympathize with them, but the jokes are in German so they aren't funny. Suddenly they are called into formation, given medals, and sent to the Russian front.

- At the Russian front they are quickly annihilated. Most of them die and the rest get Dear Johan letters from home.

- A cease-fire is negotiated to rescue the wounded and justify a scene of apocalyptic horror, but somebody freaks and starts shooting. More of the troops are wiped out. Those that survive have to crawl through the sewers where rats are feasting on the eyeballs of their comrades bobbing up and down in the sewage while innocent and impressionable school-age children watch from their hovels perched on the walls of the tunnels. It is abundantly clear that war is hell.

- In the next scene a bunch of the troops get slaughtered and the rest get sent to Siberia, where they begin freezing to death. After most of them have lost their noses, toes, and fingers to frostbite, they stumble into this underground hangar stocked with breads, meat, wine, cheeses, salami, dried fruit, and a hot Russian broad tied to the bedpost. Seems das generals had been hoarding the goods.

- After the troops get their fill of bread, they begin blowing out their brains. Post-traumatic stress disorder, I guess. The rest go back outside to die in the tundra.

Plusses: lots of killing, maiming, and being burned alive. Lots of explosions. The officers are almost all jerks, so it's realistic.

Minuses: No cool electronic or thermonuclear devices. It's in a foreign language. Everybody dies.