Steadily progressing through my library rentals

The Melbourne Public Library system is the most generous I have ever patronized. Whereas Los Angeles allowed you a maximum of three movies for a maximum of two days -- at least when I lived there seven years ago -- Melbourne is a comparative embarrassment of riches. You can total up to 50 items that can be taken out for three weeks at a time -- and then renewed, and then renewed one more time. Unless there's a reservation for one of them, in which case you have to return it at the end of your current rental period. A near perfect system.

And in the past, I've come close to those 50 items. With a combination of books, CDs and DVDs for myself and my kids, I've probably flown well past 30 items, maybe even up to 40. I've never been cut off, but that kind of makes me happy, because that sort of profligate behavior would seem to be taking advantage of the library's good will.

Unfortunately, when the libraries shut down back in March, I had nowhere near 50 books, movies and CDs out. In fact, I had ten. Four of which were books for my older son.

They're the same ten books and movies I still have out. Every time I check, their due date has been pushed forward, in recognition of the uncertainty of when the library will open again. The last time I checked before writing this post, they were not due back until May 17th. Comically, checking again just now, I see that that due date has been moved forward by exactly one day. However, we would all agree that at the moment, the due date doesn't mean much.

Now under ordinary circumstances, I pick up whatever movie catches my fancy, as I am unconcerned whether I watch it or not. That's both new-to-me movies and those I want to revisit. I like having the choices around. Under ordinary circumstances, I return more than half of them unwatched, not because I run out of time per se, but because I face the reality that the situation to watch them just never arose. As there was no cost to borrowing them, there's no consequence to not watching them.

All Quiet on the Western Front, which I believe is the first best picture winner I ever saw when I watched it during history class back in high school, would ordinarily have been one of those that got returned unwatched. But during the pandemic, it's been easy enough to decide I will, indeed, watch 100% of those I borrowed.

I just wish that number were higher than five.

The three I've watched previously are:

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (for the second time)
Fahrenheit 451 (the new one directed by Ramin Bahrani, which was not good)
Careful, He Might Hear You (an Australian movie from the 1980s, which was also not good)

Which leaves only my second viewing of Life is Beautiful -- intended as a recontextualization of the movie in its recent comparisons to Jojo Rabbit. I have until May 18th, or in reality, probably a lot later.

My tenth item, if you are doing the math, is the graphic novel Watchmen, which I finished about a month ago.

Now, I think I did have more movies out prior to this, but returned some of them that I'd watched, and possibly some I had determined I would not watch. It's starting to feel like ancient history now so I can't really remember. But if I'd known the libraries were about to close their doors -- something I probably could have figured if everything hadn't been so strange at that time -- I would have gone in and started indiscriminately sweeping armloads of DVDs off the shelves.

So as not to squander all of your attention span, let's switch now to discussing All Quiet on the Western Front in particular.

Boredom. That was my memory of watching this film. I remember wondering when this movie would ever end, a reaction that was probably exacerbated by the fact that it likely took nearly a week's worth of high school history classes to watch it all. (It's only 128 minutes, but I doubt we would have watched more than 35 minutes per day.)

My impression of it was that it was some sort of square John Wayne war movie -- well before John Wayne of course, but lacking in grit and realism. I say this without ever actually having seen a John Wayne war movie. But the point is, I remember it being a long slog in which men exchanged thoughts while holed up in a bunker or in the trenches. The 15- or 16-year-old me would have been thinking "Give me some action! I want some action!"

Well, AQOTWF is not at all like I remembered. If it's boring -- and my attention did wander from time to time -- it's not because nothing happens. In fact, quite the contrary. This is a very mobile movie, frequently changing locales and scenarios, such that it becomes a succession of wartime set pieces, each of which is kind of doing something different. Those different things are all a variation on the same thing, which is the theme that there's nothing glamorous about war and that it is not, as the poet Wilfred Owen once wrote (and as quoted here in this movie), dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. ("It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.")

In fact, the movie was so different from my memory of it that it makes me wonder if I actually sat through the whole thing, or whether I was absent for part of the week and just watched one disconnected 35-minute segment of it. Or maybe the movie was on but I was doodling and making paper airplanes in the back of the room.

One thing I had clearly not remembered was that the characters we follow in this movie are German. I would have bet my bottom dollar that they were American, or maybe British, and I can see why the younger me would have remembered that, given that all the German characters speak with the actors' native American accents. (Not Native American accents -- important distinction.) Films intended for American audiences preferred accessibility to realism at that time. The poster above plays no small role in deemphasizing their problematic German identities, as the helmet you see this soldier wearing is not the very easily identifiable World War I helmets worn by German soldiers, called Stahlhelm ("steel helmet"). The characters in the movie wear that helmet, but the character on this poster does not.

In fact, I wonder if All Quiet would have been one of the movies that prompted a move toward greater realism in depictions of characters from other countries. Although the movie was obviously highly acclaimed, I can't help but feel like it makes the characters seem far less German, and far more hokey, that they speak in American accents. You could argue that the point is to make audiences better identify with the characters -- you know, all soldiers are human beings and the like -- but my guess is that the concession to realism was largely commercially inspired.

I was surprised at how intense this movie actually gets. It makes use of a highly sophisticated grasp of editing, especially at that time, to give us chaotic war scenes and scenes of panic among the soldiers. One particular sequence involving rows of attacking soldiers getting mowed down by a machine gun stuck out to me for being simultaneously expressionistic and realistic, a profound combo. You also get a lot of people with amputated limbs, one soldier who is blinded by shrapnel or some other warfare byproduct, and others who go stir crazy inside the bunker. As a matter of fact, it's kind of the opposite of the John Wayne stoicism I attributed to this movie. It gets under your skin.

I still found it distended at times, and with a few exceptions, it wasn't all that easy to always know who was who, even though director Lewis Milestone et al make an effort to differentiate them in the classroom scene that starts the movie, when they are eating up the propaganda fed to them by a military recruiter/teacher. As a few of the characters die off, though, the cast gets winnowed down and the narrative moves toward an affecting finish.

So now I can really say, with absolute certainty, that I have seen all the best picture winners.

Stay tuned for a post about Life is Beautiful, probably next week.