Film Club

Quoted from Sandford1981

Ordinarily I watch a lot of films and TV anyway but I’m motoring through loads at the minute. I copy and paste a synopsis (usually the shortest one) from the the bible that is IMDb.

Keep them coming mate. I hope you are on the mend as well.

Wooden Horse
7.5/10

In a POW camp, the Nazis have placed the huts far from the boundary so that any escape tunnel would have to be a long one. One British officer has the idea of starting a daily gynmastics routine using a vaulting horse: they can place it near the boundary and start a tunnel from under it. He and two others do escape the camp by this means and plan to make for neutral Sweden. To do that, they'll not only have to move around without arousing any suspicions, but also find a stranger from a neutral or occupied country who'll be willing and able to help them.

I remember watching this with my Dad several times when I was a kid. The film is a good one without my nostalgia but that’s just the icing on the cake. I put it on to pass a few minutes and ended up watching it all.

Don’t look up on Netflix is excellent.

Cracking metaphor for climate change but also touches on big pharma and the way the public just blindly follow whatever they’re told, be it true or not…

This made me laugh - https://newsthump.com/2022/01/.....vtdvp-ZTcdWv0RckuzZ0

Quoted from Roast Em Bobby

This made me laugh - https://newsthump.com/2022/01/.....vtdvp-ZTcdWv0RckuzZ0

Ha! Brilliant
I read that and heard Chris Morris’ voice in my head.

The Mauritanian
9/10

Mohamedou Ould Slahi fights for freedom after being detained and imprisoned without charge by the U.S. Government for years.

An absolutely disgraceful and unfathomable story about the detention, abuse and torture carried out by the US against an innocent man in Guantanamo Bay. A film not for the feint hearted but a must watch in my opinion.

Shock and Awe
6/10

A group of journalists of the Knight-Ridder news service covering President George W. Bush's planned invasion of Iraq in 2003 are skeptical of the President's claim that Saddam Hussein has "weapons of mass destruction."

This story has a really good film in it but unfortunately this isn’t it. It’s not bad don’t get me wrong but it’s too short and shabby to do the events justice despite a decent director and cast.

Kate.
6/10.

A female assassin working in Japan on her final job is given a dose of poison and has 24 hrs to find out who did it and take her revenge. Only decided to watch it as it also stars Woody Harrelson who I like in most, but not all of his stuff and it is set in Japan, which is a country that intrigues me. As in most of these films, it involves the Yakuza.

Very formulaic, very violent, very predictable and a tad unbelievable, but well made hokum, which passed a hour and a half. Lot's of action and well staged fight scenes if you like that sort of thing.

Munich: The Edge of War
7.5/10

Based on the international bestseller by Robert Harris. It is Autumn 1938 and Europe stands on the brink of war. Adolf Hitler is preparing to invade Czechoslovakia and Neville Chamberlain's government desperately seeks a peaceful solution. With the pressure building, Hugh Legat, British civil servant, and Paul von Hartmann, German diplomat, travel to Munich for the emergency Conference. As negotiations begin, the two old friends find themselves at the center of a web of political subterfuge and very real danger.

Forgetting the historical inaccuracies, and from a purely entertaining angle I quite enjoyed this film. Heavy in dialogue it’s not too dissimilar to ‘The Crown’ stylistically. Jeremy Irons is unsurprisingly good as Neville Chamberlain as are the two male leads MacKay and Niewohner.

Two Second World War films I’ve watched recently.

(1) Midway (not the one with Charlton Heston)

Absolute shight. Everyone looks too chiselled (look at pictures of men from that era, especially pilots, and they are not hench). There’s none of the discussion of ambiguous sigint and attempts to second guess the opposition. They have a meeting and Admiral Nimitz (Woody Harrelson) stands up and says ‘we’re laying a trap for the Japs’. That’s it.
It’s cartoonish. The CGI doesn’t look realistic (I’d rather have the incorrect but real planes from the 1970s version), and the action scenes are no more plausible than the average superhero film. Even the scenes with the actors look a bit cartoonish. A bit like 300. Completely un-engaging.
James Holland on his We Have Ways podcast hit the nail on the head, ‘how can you make the Battle of Midway boring? But they managed it.’

(2) Persian Lessons.
About a Belgian-Jewish man’s attempt to survive a concentration camp by pretending to be Persian and teach a German officer Farsi. A little bit fantastical but very engaging. It makes some effort to get into the characters of some of the SS, especially the said officer’s background. Not always easy to watch, but two hours flew by.
Couple of familiar faces in it. Her from off of Around the World in 80 Days, and him off of Deutschland 83 and 86.
Slight historical quibble, and I may be wrong, but an SS woman gets sent to the Eastern Front for crossing an officer. I’m pretty sure the Germans kept their women well away from the war zones. They didn’t mobilise women to the extent Britain and the USSR did. Maybe it was a translation issue and he really just said ‘to the East’ and sent her to work in a camp in Poland.