Napola - Men Make History. We Make Men.

There is a new movie in the pipeline about Joy Division - the band that will become New Order. It is supposed that Jude Law will be playing Ian Curtis. Moby is suppose to help out as the musical adviser. Anton Corbijn (wow!) will be the director. The movie has a tentative working title Control and will be based on Deborah Curtis' memoir Touching From A Distance and the title of the memoir is a line taken from Joy Division song Transmission.

Listen to the silence, let it ring on
Eyes dark, relentless, frightened of the sun
We would have a fine time living in the night
Left a blind destruction,
Waiting for our sign

We would go on as though nothing was wrong
Hide from these days to remain all alone
Staying in the same place,
just staring at the tide
Touching from a distance, further all the time

Well I could call out
when the going gets tough
The things we've learned
are no longer enough
No language, just sound
is all we need know
To synchronise love to the beat
of the show
And we could dance 

Why did I mention this on a blog entry that is titled Napola - which was a movie I watched last night?

Well, cause one of the male lead in Napola was Tom Schilling and he is going to be in a movie called Joy Division. Joy Division is the Jewish version of the Korean Comfort Women. I think Tom Schilling, who looks smack like a cross between Brian Molko of Placebo and Ian Curtis, could be a better lead for the Joy Division movie as Ian Curtis. Or Sean Harris, who acted as Ian Curtis in 24 Hour Party People.

But Jude Law's got the accent. So....

Back to the movie.

This was the most recent movie I watched after the dismal 7 Swords by Tsui Hark. And they are worlds apart. Like a good drama, character development was there. It wasn't fantastic but adequate nonetheless. Stereotypical I guess. Nondescript boy, Freidrich, categorised as nordic class 1B (according to the classification by hair colour, pupil colour, skin colour etc etc) with a talent for boxing was drafted into Hitler's Youth Wing - Napola, a training school for elite German youths, which is like OCS in SAFTI MI (ok, OCS cadets not that elite...). Then there was this Governor's son, Albrecht, who was deemed somewhat an underachiever by the power crazy dad, soon became great buddies with Freidrich. The historical background like dividing the youths from as young as 10 to as old as 18 into 8 columns were all accurately depicted. I suppose the settings were accurate, the plot was sheer genius in the way it unfolded.

Initially I thought it was a movie about Hitler's Youth Wing. But about halfway throught he movie, I figured that the movie was turning out better as well as different in content than I had expected. It was not about the Third Reich, not about Hitler's fanatics, not about Aryans reigning supreme over the Jews. All these were mentioned in the movie. But the over-riding impression I got was that of Responisibility. And in all sense of the word.

Freidrich forged his dad's signature to get into the school. Along the way we have this persistent bed-wetting youth, Siggi, who sacrificed his life to save 20 of his fellow mates when a grenade training session went awry, Albrecht's essay written in spite and with great passion against his father (very anti-Nazi, likening the Reich as the Evil he had wanted to purge since young when he imagined himself as a slayer of dragons and all things evil), how Friedrich stopped halfway into a boxing match he was about to win, only to be sacked by the Napola for being defiant.

There wasa great speech by Albrecht's father when Siggi died and his speech was about how our bodies were just tools for the greater good and that we were not responsible only to ourselves but also to the cause. Albrecht was more interested in being responsible to himself after a harrowing operation whereby he and a couple others killed some renegade soviet kids. Albrecht later drowned himself and Freidrich, who was his best mate in Napola, felt that he was partly responsible for his death because he did not support Albrecht in his time of need. The theme was recurring. But maybe it was because I only paid attention to this theme.

On a side note, there was this rank-less (hence private I suppose) army fellow in army greens seated next to me. It was rather weird....was he proving a point or just out from camp? Looking at this age and rank, he should be on ICT. But where got ICT private one?

When Albrecht was under the sheets of ice in the frozen lake, looks down into the darkness of the lake and sees a better life there, it was a very sobering.

To see a better choice in being dead.