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shoobe01
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Charlie Victor Romeo (2013)
"Speed... this is the sh*t that is going to f*** us."
It is one thing to read aviation accident reports (and I do) even to the transcripts. It is another to listen to them, and in 1999 someone made a purportedly-awesome stage play where actors read, in a mockup cockpit, with annunciators and stuff, actual CVR transcripts (almost word for word, almost in real time).
I had heard great things about it for CRM (crew resource management) training, and there was a low quality video that was distributed for only that purpose (which I never saw). But it turns out in 2013 they secretly made this and it. Is. Awesome. I know some of these accidents well and it adds an entirely other dimension to them. I stopped during the Aeroperu static tube crash to quote the line in the title to some people I know because as much as reading the report makes you go "wow, that must have sucked" this makes it really personal.
Sometimes uncomfortably so. I mean, it's super not for nervous fliers, and if you are flight crew be careful when you watch it, as you may not sleep. It is very, very well done I think. I also totally agree that it provides a nice launching off point for discussions of CRM, team dynamics, sterile cockpit rules, general crisis management, etc. so may have training value for you, and your coworkers.
All in all, one of the best things I have seen on film in years.
Okinawa (1952)
Small movie about a big action
I don't get the hate for this movie. It's not cheap, it's deliberately small, focused and about as emotionally involved as you can get with a small crew of men acting in a 1940s way. I almost wish we hadn't had the bridge scenes with the command crew, and had to entirely take it from the point of view of the gun crew. That's how history happens; people go about their little part, and get these rare little views of the big action.
I was unusually not disturbed by the cookie cutter characters. We rarely see how they really are, but instead get their public face, to their crewmen while at war. People fall into bravado and storytelling just like this. There were moments of doubt and fear that showed this off I think, very well.
Stock footage, sure. But only rarely did I notice the grain mismatching, and they spent an awful lot of effort to make it blend into the narrative. My favorite of these is about 50 minutes in when one of the characters grabs onto a fitting on the gun to lean out and look at a heavily damaged passing ship. They did this because in the foreground of the stock footage is a sailor doing just that. It brought the stock into the story, and is such unseen stock of such specific damage you could never have simulated it with new footage, especially in the 50s.
I was especially pleased with the sets. I guess they are sets due to lighting and so on, but the interior of the gun mount looks absolutely perfect and realistic, and absolutely unexpectedly so. It really helped with the verisimilitude of the whole endeavor.
Lebanon (2009)
Distractingly false
I don't even have to get to the story, much less the themes or worry about whether it's too blatantly anti-war, pro-Israeli or whatever your politics say. Ignore that.
No, it just seems so very, very fake. Like it's an elaborate stage production. Such that I'd have been happier if it was obviously so. If the exterior scenes were all similarly staged it would have worked.
What I mean is not minor gripes about detail: what tank their in, the amount of room, not wearing helmets, the tank being lower than a person, etc. Those are annoying, but not critical. No, I mean how the tank looks like a set. Different parts move, and they wobble like crew is behind it pushing it. Smoke, from starting or explosions, looks like someone off-stage puffed some smoke in. The grime is clearly not from action seen in the movie, but is painted on so is on the back of boxes and around corners and too consistent.
It doesn't match much of the dialog or implication that they are in this indestructible device. Of course it breaks down over the course of the film: it's made of plywood and paint.
This was only matched by the ham-handed characterizations, and the inexplicable inability of the crew to act human. Even before the first engagement (where it's like the gunner, then everyone, is being stalked by a horror-movie killer) they act like tween schoolgirls who don't want to clean their room. Forget soldiers, soldiers trained enough to operate a tank, what /adults/ act like this?
Vastly, vastly believable, so impossible for me to understand or care about anything, or anyone in it.