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gwat-91721
Reviews
Bad Boys for Life (2020)
Police violence
Thought we would love this. Great cast, engaging script, great action scenes.
We gave up when the supposedly good cops chained up a guy and started smashing his had to get information.
The US just normalises violence, how can they protest it on the street and then suck it up for fun at tyhe movies?
The Trench (1999)
Enjoyable but unexciting
I quite enjoyed this film. I saw the "trench" as a symbolic representation of the British Somme front as a whole.
I give it 6/10 - I mark it down a bit because it was rather slow and long-winded, and although the ending worked for me, it was a cliche. In fact the script as a whole was a bit lazy, for instance the incidents of the squaddy calling out to the commander "are you going too sir?", and the general handing out footballs to make a sporting challenge out of the attack, are both incidents that pop up in many accounts of the battle.
I do, however, take issue with some of the criticisms of anachronism put forward in other reviews. For instance: that there was too much swearing. Googling will reveal a number of contemporary accounts that expressed surprise that foul language was such a feature of the lower ranks, often prompting the authors to make up possible reasons for this.
In addition the criticism that the men were too diverse, and citing the existence of "pals" battalions, is wide of the mark. The recruitment of the British army in WWI went through several phases. Initially the army was a professional one of regulars, but it was very small. This was rectified by a major campaign to recruit volunteers ("Your Country Needs You") of which a feature was the recruitment of whole battalions from the same area or background - "pals" battalions. However the stream of volunteers dried up and conscription was introduced. This happened before the battle of the Somme, but the first conscripts only came into the line after that battle had started.
From their insignia (RF and a grenade badge), the blokes in the "trench" were from the Royal Fusiliers. This was a London, regiment so was likely to be pretty diverse anyway. But in addition (1) only the 1st and 2nd Btns of the R. Fusiliers fought at the Somme. These are the original regular battalions ("pals" btns would have later, higher, numbers) (2) it is made clear early on that the men in the trench are reinforcements - freshly trained and with no combat exposure (this why they are manning the forward trench while the more experienced troops rest before the attack, and why they originally expect not to be in the first wave). So they are a draft from the last of the volunteers - and as such it is reasonable that they would be a motley bunch collected to fill in the gaps before the new conscripted troops were ready.
Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)
Just OK
We went to see this film for an impromptu night out. My wife had read the book , but couldn't remember it, and I knew nothing about it.
The acting was OK, the dialog was OK - but with a reliance on monologues and characters watching TV or DVDs. Overall it was OK and passed an evening after a good meal.
The worst features were that the first third of the film was boring and unmotivated - we both agreed afterwards that we were independently thinking "why are we watching this?" at that point - and that the plot is just daft. The storyline felt as if it were a string of second rate sitcom epoisodes loosley strung together.
Dunkirk (2017)
wonderfully produced nonsense
My informal summary was: "a load of crap".
I could appreciate the wonderfully filmed set pieces, but the overall work was a mess.
First off the tripartite switching between Air:1 hour, Sea:1 day, Land:1 week, just didn't work. All 3 sections lost any sense of continuity, and you were left with a jumble of brief scenarios. For me this was particularly the case with the "Air" segments which just became boring interludes.
The other really bad decision, for me, was the choice of the incidents shown. They were just populist trivia that didn't give any sense of the actual battle. For instance, the "small ship" is obviously based on a well known case. But the circumstances were completely changed and sensationalised do it gave no insight into the actual events - and where did the manslaughter of the young kid come from??? This segment is actually an insult to the RN who organised and in most cases manned this aspect of the evacuation.
In contrast to the Air section, which was drawn out, the Land section was just a kaleidoscope of jumbled incidents that gave no sense of the passing of time (the evacuation took a week). There was supposed to be a minimal story line, but even so the uniform switching French guy and the prolonged hiding in an abandoned ship were pretty dumb, and where did the idea of "3 hour tides" come from. It was all pretty ridiculous, and furthermore the series of silly events, meant that there was no serious attempt to tie the "immersive effects" to any basis in the reality of Dunkirk itself.