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felixthefelix
Reviews
Midway (1976)
Off-brand Tora! Tora! Tora! - it's dreadful, and I love it.
In all seriousness, this is a bad, bad movie. The acting is hilarious, the direction would have been archaic in the fifties (this is from 1976) and the battle dialogue is straight out of "Airplane!". The footage is half stock and stitched together with nonsensical cutaways - some is even borrowed straight from "Tora! Tora! Tora!" itself, without the slightest shame or effort to choose some less obvious shots.
But apart from the father/son storyline, in which the pathos is simply bad and not really funny bad, it's completely compelling and I find myself watching it with a big grin on my face. If you have a love of film and film editing you might just have a great time appreciating just how amateur, cheap and nasty it is, how funny the tragic parts are (largely due to acting), that real battle footage of a Japanese plane is used to show an American going down and it's sooo obvious fifty years later can you imagine how obvious it was back then? It's as cheap as you can get. It's just appalling, and I'll never not watch it.
WWII in Color: Road to Victory (2021)
This is actually very good work - IN FRENCH
One of the most bizarre narrator choices I ever heard. Intensely irritating and horrifically inappropriate, like the man were voicing a discount supermarket advert - all plummy with a lisp, cheerily singing about thouthandth dying in the Atlantic or the thythtematic murder of the jewth. Mind-bendingly bad, and completely intolerable.
But the writing is in fact very good, as you will discover if you set the audio language to French and put on subtitles. There are many dumbed-down documentaries in the genre, this isn't one of them. I can hardly imagine, we're this my work, how horrified I would be by the end result. So few will be able to sit through the narration to find out if it's any good. It badly needs to be re-recorded.
The War Below (2021)
Frankly, it's the dialogue
If you are very young and this movie is your very first education about the first world war, perhaps it may teach you a couple of things. For everyone else, here's what to expect:
"I've got an idea, let's try something new" - said as if no-one had ever said that before. Seriously.
"think carefully diagreeing with me, you have a promising career ahead" (Hague) - delivered like it were a soap opera baddie. Please...
It's painful. Everyone does a fine job - design, actors, photography, effects, particularly for the budget. It's just mind-numbingly dumb, and deeply disappointing for all the effort made.