100 years since World War I

Rating: 8/10 (29 June 2014)

We just passed the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to the first global war. Since that war - now known as World War I - created the conditions and caused World War II, that makes "The Monuments Men" all the more important. Hitler's rise to power and subsequent occupation of Europe could never have come to pass without the crippling reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles negotiations. That in addition to the fact that at the negotiations, the racist crook Woodrow Wilson refused to listen to a young Ho Chi Minh, setting the stage for the Vietnam War, and the carving up of the former Ottoman Empire by the British and French set the stage for the current horror in the Middle East. Basically, the so-called War to End All Wars set the stage for all future wars. Gavrilo Princip was simply resisting the occupation of his land and he inadvertently changed the course of history.
The movie itself isn't a masterpiece but is still worth seeing. It's a funny collection of characters, especially Bill Murray's character. And of course it's neat to see Neuschwanstein Castle (which also appeared in the 1962 movie "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm"); I once put together a 6,000-piece jigsaw puzzle showing that castle.
Nonetheless, movies need to get made about the conditions that drove Gavrilo Princip to assassinate Franz Ferdinand and about the Versailles negotiations. Whether it's the Israel-Palestine conflict (caused by the Sykes-Picot Agreement), the horror that the former Yugoslavia witnessed in the 1990s (caused by the artificial creation of the Yugoslav kingdom), or the Russia-Georgia War (rooted in the Armenian Genocide), it seems that almost every part of the planet remains f***ed up because of World War I.