Rowing this morning was fairly sucky, because boats are not supposed to rock from side to side while you’re rowing them. I was rowing port; I haven’t done that for months and I’m afraid it showed. I was able to have some effect on the set, more than I usually can from bow seat for some reason, but not enough to fix the rocking. Also, the guy coxing our first to 20-minute pieces had almost no clue what he was doing -- we nearly hit a bridge. For the last piece, Yosemite Sam swapped me into the coxswain’s seat, and I think I was able to get them to set a little better.
I was glad to get the chance to row port though; I like to swap sides, so that I don’t get in too much of a rut (many, maybe most, rowers will only row port or only row starboard). I’m a little worried because we have a race in two weeks where I’m scheduled to scull in a quad (two oars instead of one) and I haven’t done that for even longer.
Yesterday afternoon, we went to see Pearl Harbor. In some ways, I’d compare it to Titanic, for its length and its lushness, but I liked this much better. I left Titanic very irked at Rose, for being such an idiot. Her insistence on staying with Jack, forcing him to take care of her instead of using his wits to survive, basically got him killed. Not love, quoth I, but vanity sets love a task like that.
Pearl Harbor, on the other hand, was the story of people trying to do their duties and snatch a bit of happiness, in difficult and unsettled circumstances. Even the Japanese were not portrayed too unsympathetically, I thought; there’s a great line where someone tells an admiral he’s brilliant, and he responds, "A brilliant man would figure out how to avoid going to war." Granted, they are shown going to war basically over oil, but it’s difficult, these days, for an American to point the finger at others for that. I appreciated the choppy cinematography in the stressful and gory parts. I thought it conveyed the intensity and terror without driving home the gore, though some people will hate it for that reason. Also, of course, I loved all the flying footage, which was extremely well done.
And no one told me the movie also covered Doolittle’s Raid on Tokyo. For those of you who don’t know, it was an absolutely brilliant and very risky feat, whose psychological impact on both Japanese and Americans was huge. It was also a hell of a tricky bit of flying. The whole thing is described in much more detail in Doolittle’s autobiography, I Could Never Be So Lucky Again. Incidentally, despite all his aviation and military successes (not just winning races and raiding Tokyo but the first aerospace engineering PhD ever awarded and the development of instrument flying), the title refers to his persuading his the love of his life, Joe, to marry him.
I do have one complaint about the movie, though: not only does Alec Baldwin not look much like him, but Doolittle was only 5’3"! Fighter pilots were and are often smaller guys. That’s him, third from the right, in China right after the Raid.
Posted by dichroic at June 4, 2001 08:31 AM