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Jul. 15th, 2012 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyfic- I watched This Means War, which is the most horrid conglomeration of offensive rom com cliches I've ever seen in one place. If you ever want a demonstration of what not to do, watch that movie. It says something that a movie with Chris Pine and Tom Hardy as best bros, where Tom says can you imagine having what we have with each other with a woman, and Chris says no, where they watch surveillance tapes of each other having sex, and it is still the least slashable movie in history. The least of the problems is that the two of them are inexplicably cousins.
I confess that I was mostly using it for background noise while completing other tasks, but it still made me feel like I needed a shower.
- On the other hand, I've started watching Foyle's War and it is fantastic. It is a police procedural set on the south coast of England during World War II. So though it's a procedural, and though it's on the homefront, it's really about the war. (And I need to warn for all sorts of horrible war related things. Let's just say, people of all ages die, and if you don't want to spend two hours bawling, skip the third episode.)
What I love about it is how it shows the little ways that the war changes things: like one character running late because she disabled the car the previous night, in case the Germans invade, and now can't find the missing part. Or that the only people around are children, old men, and women. And the few RAF pilots on active duty. That the town is populated by World War I vets, all of whom deal with the shadow of that war differently when facing this one. And that the crimes are largely opportunistic--people who think the war will cover for them.
It's really quite good, and packed with oh, it's that guy!s. In the first few episodes alone, you've got James McAvoy, David Tennant, the dude who played Brutus in Rome and some women who I swear were in Austen adaptations I've seen.
The only drawback is each episode is an hour forty minutes, so you put one on thinking you'll watch a little bit and take a break and next thing you know it's dinner.
I confess that I was mostly using it for background noise while completing other tasks, but it still made me feel like I needed a shower.
- On the other hand, I've started watching Foyle's War and it is fantastic. It is a police procedural set on the south coast of England during World War II. So though it's a procedural, and though it's on the homefront, it's really about the war. (And I need to warn for all sorts of horrible war related things. Let's just say, people of all ages die, and if you don't want to spend two hours bawling, skip the third episode.)
What I love about it is how it shows the little ways that the war changes things: like one character running late because she disabled the car the previous night, in case the Germans invade, and now can't find the missing part. Or that the only people around are children, old men, and women. And the few RAF pilots on active duty. That the town is populated by World War I vets, all of whom deal with the shadow of that war differently when facing this one. And that the crimes are largely opportunistic--people who think the war will cover for them.
It's really quite good, and packed with oh, it's that guy!s. In the first few episodes alone, you've got James McAvoy, David Tennant, the dude who played Brutus in Rome and some women who I swear were in Austen adaptations I've seen.
The only drawback is each episode is an hour forty minutes, so you put one on thinking you'll watch a little bit and take a break and next thing you know it's dinner.
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Date: 2012-07-16 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 08:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 05:27 pm (UTC)So seeing active duty soldiers mixing with banal domesticity of the homefront, and seeing how inescapably the war touched everything, it's really interesting. And they also do a very good job at showing that not everyone was united in the war effort, despite how nostalgic takes on WWII often portray it. In hindsight it seems inevitable that Britain went to war with Germany, but I like how this shows that there were a lot of people who didn't agree with the decision to go to war. I also like the complexity of how the WWI vets deal with it. Some, like Foyle, tell their sons that it's something you just get through. And some know how hollow jingoism is and want to save their children from what they went through.
(As I side note, one of my great grandfathers, a WWI vet, did save his son from the frontlines--something my grandfather hated him for.)
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Date: 2012-07-16 08:18 pm (UTC)My dad fought in Burma. He hardly spoke about it and, while I have his letters hoime to my mum, it feels like an invasion of privacy to read them.
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Date: 2012-07-16 08:31 pm (UTC)The only time I've ever been to England I was eight (it was 1989). I do remember seeing a bombed room in Westminster Abby. But I think it's only in the last couple of years, as I've learned more about history, that I've begun to grasp how devastating the war was to England. Growing up a fan of Monty Python and knowing about the Beatles and things, I'd always assumed, with the amount of cultural exchange, that England was just like the US in the second half of the twentieth century. Never really thought about it. Then someone told me that food rationing didn't end until 1954 and I went o.O.
I mean, it all seems terribly obvious, but I never thought about it much--that America's industries were not devastated by bombing raids, and so the 1950s here was a boomtime.
I don't know--one of those separated by a common history kind of things. I'm always fascinated by the difference between what stories different countries tell about WWII. US? The Holocaust and D-Day. England? Dunkirk and the Blitz.
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Date: 2012-07-16 10:08 pm (UTC)Yeah, I think I discovered that last year, and had basically the exact same reaction. For the same reasons. We share so much culture--books, TV, movie stars, celebrity watching--that I'd never really before considered how different our countries' experiences of the second half of the twentieth century actually were. I'm embarrassed to realize how much I'd glossed over, in my head, how devastated all of Europe was.
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Date: 2012-07-17 12:02 pm (UTC)I was reading the record books for our local school - from 1855 ish onwards and it was really interesting to read about the wars. Some poor children dying of fright and the like. (Also US deserters from a local camp beaking into the school kitchen!)
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Date: 2012-07-16 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-17 11:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 05:07 pm (UTC)Re: This Means War, I think I read somewhere that the director had an ending written where the two guys end up with each other, but of course, didn't film it. Would that have made it better? I don't want to have to watch the movie to answer that question. :-P
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Date: 2012-07-16 05:22 pm (UTC)Also, as I mentioned, the two guys are cousins. So having them end up together would be a mite creepy.
I forgot to mention--the chick from Hex is in Foyle's War, too. (And if you're going to watch it, I'm not kidding about the warnings.)
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Date: 2012-07-16 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-17 12:45 pm (UTC)