Special Cinema Spotlight: The Monuments Men


A Vintage Nerd, Vintage Blog, The Monuments Men, Period Films, WWII Film Review

Last weekend I was ecstatic to be able to watch the film The Monuments Men. It was inspired by book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History and the true events of a unique group called The Monuments Men.

Directed by George Clooney and starring Matt Damon, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, and Cate Blanchet. Clooney stars as Frank Stokes who persuades the US President to allow him to create a team of people who will retrieve and protect art. He believed that if we do not protect the art of western civilization that victory from the war would be meaningless.

Stokes recruits seven museum directors, curators, and art historians to both guide Allied units and search for stolen art to return it to the rightful owners. Sounds like a special group of men doesn't it? Well it does and it is. Each actors character (some based on real like Monuments Men) brought something special to the story that could be seen as a "hard to watch" sort of story. 

War isn't pretty or fair and WWII was epic because it was fought on so many parts of the world. In WWII people were literally fighting evil in its purest form (my opinion of course). There were those who attempted to eradicate cultures, religions, and generations of people. A group like the Monuments Men fought against that horror and brought back to people their art which is representative of their cultures and basically a massive part of their identities.

I won't spoil it for those of you who haven't seen the film but there are many bright spots to the story Clooney told and there are darker ones. Nothing was done for the sake of drama but rather to tell the story of how far people would go to do the right thing. In comparison to the true life Monuments Men and the characters in the film, yes it is a bit different and yes it is more dramatically told than what happened to the real Monuments Men but so nothing took away from the story at all.

I loved how the characters interact with each other, how passionate and driven they were, and I LOVED how they were able to bring some humor into a heavy tale. Just a fantastic balance of history and humanity.

If you would like to read more about the story of The Monuments Men feel free to click on the links I added to this post as well as this article HERE all about the real Monuments Men. I highly recommend this film and when it gets released on dvd I will be adding it to my collection. 

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2 comments :

  1. I know the film got mixed reviews, especially over here in England, but it's still on my ever increasing "to watch" list :-)

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  2. This movie wowed me. I was 99.9% certain I was going to like it before I'd even seen it, but I wasn't aware of just how much I was going to love, admire and respect it. Hands down, this film has a solid place in my top 25 modern movies of all time. I can't wait for it to come out on DVD/Netflix, so I can watch it a second (and third, and fourth, etc) time.

    ♥ Jessica

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