The Monuments Men

On the weekend after D-Day, we watched The Monuments Men, written, directed, and produced by George Clooney from a book by Robert Edsel. It's the story of a bunch of art historians who both help the army figure out what buildings to be careful about bombing, and then helping find the art that the Nazis had plundered from the countries they'd overrun. Edsel's book details the whole unit of Monuments Men, even though the movie focusses on half-a-dozen of them. It was straight-forward, but arduous, detective work, but the guys doing it were heroes of western civilization. The movie should have been either longer or shorter. Longer would have given us more detail of their work and allowed us to get to know the team. Shorter could have cut through a lot of the long-winded setup, and gone straight to the detective work. Plus, it can't decide if it's a drama or a comedy. I'll report back on the book another day.  I also need to watch the documentary on the same topic, The Rape of Europa, available for streaming from Netflix.