Showing posts with label period drama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label period drama. Show all posts

10/12/2012

We'll Meet Again - 4-DVD Set Review

We'll Meet Again - 4-DVD Set
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Compelling war drama about a USA Air Base in England. Struggling B-17 crews find solace among British ladies. The Yank's money is appreciated but not always their ways with alcohol and women. This is a story of the small village of Market Wetherby and it's war-weary locals, and how they cope with the new arrivals, American bomber soldiers who freshly join the war, and expect to win overnight.
The British TV has always been excellent in period television series, war dramatizations, and this is no exception. War nostalgia. It is surpurb, with added interest of half a cast of Americans joining British actors. Brits have the preserved buildings to pull off a period series. They use that to advantage. Beautiful 1943 scenery, costumes, props. This show was actually filmed in the 80s but because of the historical setting, it is a timeless DVD set; classic. Perfect for those with war interest, awesome for those interested in what it was like living in a country waiting to be invaded by Hitler's army. It is something of a cousin series to the more recent homeland war drama of "Foyles War" (a must for all British Drama fans) and "Enemy at the Door" (also good).
WE'LL MEET AGAIN cleverly mixes in actual bomber air strip and bombing raid footage. But much of the action takes place in the village homes and the local pub. Dr. Helen Dereham (by Susannah York) and Maj. Jim Kiley (Michael Shannon) are only two that show the extraordinary work that war leaders had to complete, as well as the struggles romantically of working so closely in life/death living. There's is not the only romance. Plenty of hardship and lives lost. Very believable, although I'm too young to know first-hand, being a Baby Boomer.
The series ends well; but with a potential for another season, which, alas, never came. This set has no subtitles or CC. It's box warning of partial nudity refers to one breast exposed for 3 seconds.
My wife and I both enjoyed this, both sorry there were no additional episodes after the 13 provided in this set.
Episode details (each about 53 min.):
1 ALL DAY AND EVERY DAY-Market Wetherby, Suffolk, April 1943. American Air Force arrives in England ungraciously.
2 HANDS ACROSS THE SEA-Cocky American crews fail to perform well in the air & on the local ground.
3 THE MILK RUN-Letty's Uncle Sid arrives with contraband booze while she falls for a Yank on a 'milk run'-safe mission.
4 ONE STEP FORWARD,TWO STEPS BACK-Some romance buds but overall relations remain tense.
5 THE BIG ONE-Market Wetherby & the American Base find some agreeable relationships. 'The Big One' mission heads over Germany.
6 UP THE SMOKE-Some Yanks get London R&R while Dr. Dereham ponders her feelings between her injured husband & US Maj Kylie.
7 FIGHTING MEN-2 men in English woman's lives seems to become a minor epidemic, plus secrets are found out.
8 A WING AND A PRAYER-Yank marries a local just prior to a dangerous raid.
9 YOU'LL NEVER KNOW-2 Brit wives contemplate continued relations with Yanks. 3 sec. of female nudity.
10 OLD ENOUGH TO FIGHT-Maj Kiley halts his romantic relationship causing poor results at work.
11 ONE DAY AT A TIME-Maj Kiley gets more active in the air & personally as death touches others lives.
12 EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES-Dr. Dereham adds more bedside time to her manner dealing with Maj Kiley's injuries.
13 THE END OF THE BEGINNING-It's love & war and time to choose permanent sides on romance issues.

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10/06/2012

Scoop Review

Scoop
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This 1987 TV version is largely faithful to Evelyn Waugh's acerbic novel, a sendup of journalism's hapless, competitive reporters on foreign assignment, the assorted power brokers domestic and foreign essential for their journalistic success, and finally the absurd revolutionaries in third world hellholes. who supply the content inquiring minds back home are eager to read about through "scoops."
As the central character William Boot, an initially ineffectual reporter on British countryside flora and fauna in his weekly column called "Lush Places," Michael Maloney is a richly comic figure. Meek and bewildered at the outset, he is sent by mistake as a war correspondent to an African country called Ismaelia where in increasingly droll fashion he operates among power brokers and would-be rebel leaders.
If the production has a weakness, it's one of the sort frequently encountered in earlier Masterpiece Theater sorts of presentations, a kind of plodding pace more suitable to the movement of the novel than to a film version of it. Fortunately, this limitation is absent in the long, last section of the work, where Boot triumphs beyond his and the viewers' wildest imaginations yet at the same time reveals his ambitions to be hilariously those of a rural "downstart." Here, he has been said to bear some resemblance to the real Evelyn Waugh who had a keen nose for big-city corruption and a skill at succeeding without being enmeshed by it. Boot, though, might just as well be considered a winning, coincidental portrait of Waugh's alter ego, George Orwell, the archetypal journalist "downstart."
This TV version deserves to be far better known than it is.

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9/26/2012

Sky West and Crooked ( Bats with Baby Faces ) ( Gypsy Girl ) Review

Sky West and Crooked ( Bats with Baby Faces ) ( Gypsy Girl )
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17-year old Brydie suffered some brain damage in a childhood accident and now runs wild in her tiny West Country village, playing in the graveyard with small children and obsessing about death. The townsfolk look the other way, but when a young gypsy man starts following her, they fear for her safety.
Hayley Mills was 20 but looked 12 when she made this movie which was written by her mother and directed by her father. She's quite good as the innocent, damaged girl, even though she overdoes the hysterics a few times. Ian McShane, as the gypsy man who fancies Brydie, is good but looks a bit too old and menacing to be her love interest. The movie is very low-key and slow, wandering aimlessly for the first half and only developing some action at the very end.
"Gypsy Girl" was originally titled, "Sky West and Crooked," a phrase that refers to Brydie's mental state. It's a rare find for fans of Hayley Mills and an interesting, though decidedly low-budget-looking, film.

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9/09/2012

Executive Stress - Series One ( Executive Stress - Entire Series One ) Review

Executive Stress - Series One ( Executive Stress - Entire Series One )
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I adore Penelope Keith and have purchased all of her sitcoms that have been out on USA format ... lot of USA folks have watched with delight "Executive Stress" on our local PBS channels over the years ... PLEASE - bring out on USA format too so we can purchase!

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8/12/2012

Smuggler Review

Smuggler
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THIS SWASHBUCKLING ADVENTURE SERIES FROM THE 80'S IS PERFECT FOR ANY GENERATION. FULL OF EXCITEMENT, SUSPENSE,ROMANCE AND GREAT SCENIC LOCATIONS

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4/06/2012

Christabel Review

Christabel
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While the edits in this DVD version of a 1989 miniseries aired on Masterpiece Theater in the US aren't blatant, to anyone familiar with the original version, they are striking by their absence. And the material that has been cut makes the plot much richer without detracting from the suspense of the plot.
The story hews closely to the biography of Christabel Bielenberg ( available as When I Was a German, 1934-1945: An Englishwoman in Nazi Germany or The Past is Myself, with a followup volume, The Road Ahead), an Englishwoman who marries a German lawyer and makes her home in Berlin in the early years of the Nazi regime. Her husband and their circle of friends deplore the Nazis (anti-Hitler conspirator Adam von Trott, later executed, is one of their circle) and the plot revolves around Christabel's growing recognition that it isn't possible to just live one's private life -- or leave -- when confronted with the kind of evil that the Nazis represent.
Even this edited version presents a kind of viewpoint that is rarely seen of 'ordinary' educated Germans facing the conundrum of how to react to evil and forces us to question how we would have fared in a similar situation. As Protestant pastor Martin Niemoller famously wrote, when the Nazis took away the communists, social democrats, trade unionists and Jews, people didn't speak up because they didn't fall into those categories. "Then," Niemoller wrote, "when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out." This film looks at a group of people who did speak out.
Dennis Potter's imaginative touches (such as the scene where Christabel imagines, in a nightmare, parachutists invading her home and bayoneting her elderly father) make this a rewarding movie to watch, while the recurring echoes of the song to which Christabel listens dressing for her wedding in the opening scenes recurs throughout, sometimes offering an odd or jarring commentary on the scene.
All in all, this is an excellent film of a little-known story. But it deserves to be seen in full, so for anyone who hasn't yet discarded their VHS player, I'd urge you to get the complete version.

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10/06/2011

The Octopus 2 (La Piovra 2) Review

The Octopus 2 (La Piovra 2)
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Now this is ONE GREAT CLASSIC ITALIAN MAFIA THRILLER. If you like good acting and Mafia stories you will LOVE this DVD. There are many episodes so I suggest you purchase them all.

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