I’d prefer her in nothing… And by that I mean her birthday suit 
I enjoyed both the movie and the book, but I really don’t like to compare the two because the movie took only a few story lines from the book and personalized them (very well).
The book is more like a history book. Very good, much better detail, but it doesn’t flow like the movie.
Thanks for the link. I see a handful, which I will try. I’ve only heard very negative comments about Black HawkDown, though, so I’ve been a little nervous about that. (From acquaintances and friends who like war movies).
Black Hawk Down has it good points and bad. But man, the movie is exausting. By the end of the film I felt I had stayed up all night and then jogged twenty miles with a fifty pound pack.
BHD is basically one-sided. You don’t know what the heck is the deal with those other people. Some may not like that, but I think it is an more honest portrayal of how it is to be a soldier.
I thought that sex scene was so interesting. They didn’t have them sneak off to some romantic setting (of course where could they have found one) and the atmosphere was so…different.
Leo Tolstoy could write an exhaust pipe gag that would really make you think.
Actually, I agree. There was a tension and build up of anticipation that was really unique. It really gave me the exact sense trying to sneak sex as a teenager, lacking privacy but having to have each other, hoping not to get caught.
I think the build up of anticipation is a major part of what made that brief bit of nudity so effective- also the fact that it was Rachel Weisz’ naked butt, which would effect me in any situation.
The scope of the Battle of Stalingrad, the single bloodiest battle in human history, remains beyond the ability of a movie to do justice to it. Even the snipers’ war-within-the-war was writ large. Over the course of WWII, 2000 Soviet women were trained as snipers, and many of them fought in Stalingrad. I have no idea how many dedicated snipers, male and female, Soviet, German, and affiliated Axis, fought in Stalingrad, but the number must have been in the hundreds, if not 1000+.
In its focus on Zaitsev, the film understandably telescoped the scale of the action from the battle in general to not just the sniper’s war-within-the-war, but Zaitsev’s corner of that action, and even further: mostly to Zaitsev’s duel with the German major, even though there’s only the sketchiest contemporary historical evidence that such a duel ever took place. The film has one scene depicting Zaitsev as a teaching (or supervising) two other snipers, but that’s a vitally important aspect of Zaitsev’s war that was otherwise overlooked in the film. Zaitsev was addressed in only two or three paragraphs in the book Enemy at the Gates, and Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad offers a better, if still sketchy, general overview of the sniper component of the battle, IIRC – but both mention Zaitsev’s teaching the craft to others, although the allusions to “running a sniper school” may be a formal way to put what might have largely consisted of lessons conducted out in the field on live subjects. But there’s no question that Zaitsev’s greatest impact during the war was less attributable to his own kills (the stats of which varies considerably source and degrees of confirmation, which is reasonable considering the nature of sniping), than to the multiplier effect he and other top-tier snipers had in schooling others. Many of Zaitsev’s students went on to rack up kill totals numbering in the dozens, with a very few doing much better.
As for the famed snipers’ duel, Vasily Grossman, the Soviet writer-turned-war-correspondent who covered much of the fight for Stalingrad, noted that there was a rumored skirmish between Zaitsev and a German sniper which was said to have lasted for a few days, IIRC, before Zaitsev triumphed, but that Grossman wasn’t able to verify the details. Neither Zaitsev nor anybody else made a big deal of it at the time, nobody apparently knew who the German was or his rank, let alone if he had headed a German sniper school or been dispatched to Stalingrad in order to eliminate Zaitsev, and no mention of it was made in the Red Army field action reports. [Not that this is sufficient to discredit it either; it may very well have happened in every detail, down to Major Thorvald’s having been on a mission to kill Zaitsev in particular, and the Germans may have been loath to record this mission due to its adverse outcome, etc… but it remains largely undocumented and unverified.] It was not unusual for snipers to square off in this fashion; according to the Zaitsev entry in Wikipedia, Zaitsev killed eleven enemy snipers at Stalingrad. Basically, the Zaitsev-“Konig” (Thorvald) duel is a minor, if fascinating, anecdote from a notoriously amorphous and elusive aspect of the war, sketchily documented, and easily mythologized in the years to come.
An interesting detail of the Soviet snipers’ Stalingrad activity from Grossman’s accounts: as the Soviet forces (well, snipers, at least) secured their hold of a narrow strip of land along the Volga, they were able to restrict the Germans’ access to the river, which was a key source of water for them. The snipers took great pleasure in picking off the hapless low-ranking water-carriers who had to traverse this no-man’s-land. The Germans took to using non-Germans and some unfortunate Russians to carrying the water, but they would get shot too…
FWIW, the co-authors of the U.S. Marine sniper’s memoir Shooter made greater mention of their study of (and admiration of) the great Soviet female sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko than of Zaitsev, although they learned about him as well.
Oh man… I HATED the first mission of the Russian campaign in Call of Duty! 
When you’re crossing the river in the barge, you’re at one of those points in the game where you can look around, but you can’t move. If you don’t start crouching before the planes strafe the boat, you die before the mission starts :smack:
Now, the SECOND mission, in the city square, THAT was cool. 
Erm… yeah, hijack done here.
That’s what I was trying to say!!
Then you need to see Dead Calm.
Why?
Nicole Kidman has a great butt shot.