Make Way! Here Comes The Film Pedant's First Battalion
Why this title? Because I've just finished reading "Watching War Films With My Dad" by Al Murray. Al Who? You enquire? (not "who's that bloke then?" as reading BOOJUM! has by now taught you a modicum of refinement).
| Like wot these laydeez is refined. Innit. |
Al's dad was a proper soldier, and when the two of them were watching war films on the telly, all Murray Senior would do was criticise the films: "They're doing that wrong" "That didn't happen" "That did happen but to someone else" "That did happen to him but somewhere else" "They're jumping out of the plane too far apart" "That tank wasn't invented then". Al has continued the family tradition of yarking and barking at films that aren't accurate enough, and is trying to pass the baton to his daughters. Especially by watching "A Bridge Too Far"
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| What a cast! Paid the equivalent of the entire Belgian GPD for a year |
I can tell that you believe me but - you can't stop me! Carping and harping faculties engaged!
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| Pedantry, splitting hares, close enough |
"Where Eagles Dare"
This is not a serious film. Well, I mean it's not a comedy, but you can't take it seriously. Seriously. The plot is a convoluted triple-cross about a rescue mission that's actually an infiltration mission to get real traitors presented as fakes in order to get - actually I forget what (but I was playing the "When Eagles Dare Drinking Game" at the time).
A few sounding shots first. The British agents all speak with their normal accents - we are supposed to realise that this is them being fluent in German - yet the Germans all speak English with a German accent. What?
Then there's the helicopter. The Germans did have some crude helicopters in service, that were barely able to get aloft, and they certainly didn't look like the 1960 model used in the film.
Then there's the armoured vehicles seen occasionally in the town. These are modern (i.e. 1960's) panzers, not WW2 vintage ones.
Let us then be specific. Notice how nearly every German soldier carries an MP40 sub-machine gun. In reality these were normally issued to NCO's or officers, so maybe one man in five would have one.
Now, everybody - I mean absobloodylutely everybody - who carries and uses one of these handy-dandy weapons fires them from the hip. I will presume that you do not have the wide variety of firearms experience of Conrad, so I will tell you that shooting from the hip may look cool but will also guarantee that you miss. At best, one bullet will get near your target. Nobody - incrediruddybly nobody - bothers to unfold the folding stock, put this against their shoulder and aim. Nor do they fire controlled bursts. No, they empty the whole magazine (28 - 30 bullets) in one go. Again, this looks cool, and guarantees you will get near your target with the first bullet whilst the rest end up pocking holes all over Southern Bavaria.
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| Mister Hand apologises for all this boring stuff about guns. Have some begonias! |
Now, at one point Clint is out to sabotage the Schloss Adler's ammunition stores. To do this he uses a bundle of dynamite, armed with a fuse that has two settings - "Instant" or "Delay", setting it to a Delay of five minutes. He then casually chucks it underhand between the iron bars of the ammunition store, from a height of three feet. Ouch! What if it had fallen on the switch and flicked it to "Instant"? Eh? Well there'd be no radio-room shootout.
The radio-room shootout. For reasons best known to the scriptwriter (Alastair Mclean - yes, that Alastair Mclean), Clint attempts to kill the radio operator with a knife, whereas up until then he had killed a whole cemeteryful of people with his silenced handgun. Things go wrong, the alarm is raised, dozens of Germans converge on the radio-room, where Clint wreaks bloody execution amongst them. At one point he's firing an MP40 in each hand, which looks cool but <Mister Hand refers readers to points above>. There are no ricochets into or around the radio-room, despite the solid stone walls and the hundreds of bullets that get fired at our hero
| The very last thing 187 Germans see |
Now, <Mister Hand moves the blog on lest readers die from pedantry in concentrated, lethal form>
Conrad's Secret Shame
At least this is one of them. Conrad has a weakness for Jaffa Cakes. Staff at work know they can distract him easily by simply walking past him eating a Jaffa Cake, since his eyes will swivel to follow the biscuit, then swivel back to see where the source was. Past tense because once he's identified it, he homes in like a guided gustatory missile and - goodbye JC.
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| 5 minutes after opening |
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| 6 minutes after opening |
The Dancing Dog
Our miniature domesticated wolf, Edna, continues to develop her training. She can do "sit", "stay", "down", "paw", "hello" and is learning "fetch". She can also do "frantic jumping and licking and gnawing in excitement" when Conrad gets in from work.
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| "Frantic jumping" mode |
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| "Can I have a sweetie? Pleeeeeease?" mode |
This is a book I read a few years ago, an okay-ish thriller. I only use it because a thought occurred to me about dodo's and I wanted to run on from Edna.
"What does dodo taste like?" wondered Conrad a few days ago.
Well, since sailors passing Mauritius, their island home, scoffed the lot, they must have tasted delicious.
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| A Komodo. Close enough. |
Right! I need to get ready for PUB QUIZ! and tonight we'd better lose conclusively again, or there will be talk of bonfires and witchery the night ...
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