City of Life and Death

At The Cinema                            City of Life and Death Since Maryland football is so predictably bad of late, games are relegated to ESPN 3, or on-line television.  Last year nearly an entire half  of one game was broadcast without announcers.  All you could hear was stadium noise—like you were actually at the game. So blessed was this novelty that I hoped it was the format ESPN 3 would stick with.  Sigh. Of a sudden the glitch was fixed and the blah-blah-blah was back.  Segue. City of Life and Death is an extraordinary movie.  This Chinese film is about the "Rape of Nanking," when the Japanese Imperial army captured the city in 1937.  What's extraordinary is the entire film is shown without subtitles, at least on my NetFlix version on ROKU. The Chinese, Japanese, Germans and Americans speak in their native tongue.  It was like being there; and it was brutal.  And so well produced that I had no problem following the story line.  I know this because when it finished I checked it out on Wikipedia (a valuable resource for understanding plot lines gone over my head). It helped  that I knew about  the "Nanking Safety Zone,"  run by German businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe and other Westerners.  This refuge was constantly violated by Japanese looking for "comfort girls," or Chinese women they would repeatably rape.  Like the opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan," the violent fog of war is so realistically produced as to be real.  It's sort of what to expect if Obama hangs onto his office and his OWS thugs are left to rampage.   That's what I saw. As you can see in this clip, there are subtitles.  It was a glitch after all. Never mind.