OK. Pearl Harbor, as in the movie. I pretty much agree with the critics that the characters needed a lot more development and that the script needed a few more rewrites. Well, OK, more than a few. The love story was simplistic and underdeveloped. The cinematography as a whole was uneven. There were far too many cliches. The continuity in the attack scenes was apallingly bad -- shouldn’t the ship we saw blown pretty much in half almost right away have sunk rather quickly? It won’t win any awards.

BUT, all in all I thought it was entertaining -- as much as a war movie can be, anyway. There were some mighty nice-looking people cavorting about on screen. When the cinematography was good, it was spectacular (that boy pitching the baseball -- which you’ve all seen in the previews -- comes to mind). The special effects were good. It was fun to see all these places I know up on the big screen and pick apart the boo-boos -- the gross mispronunciation of Haleiwa, the one military dude (sorry, but I don't know ranks and that stuff) saying that the Japanese fleet could round Diamond Head and that would be the first the Navy would know they were there, which is a far reach, since the Oahu-Molokai channel is only about 30 miles across, and they'd have to come down quite a few miles of coastline through that channel before rounding Diamond Head. And the Alec Baldwin character calling aloha shirts "hula shirts."

I do agree that there could have been a LOT more local people in the movie, which would have made a more realistic picture. We counted one Samoan bartender and a brief glance of four Hawaiian women as the battle started, plus a couple of Asian women (presumably prostitutes) in a bar. All the kids and other "ordinary people" shown first spotting the bombers (all those scenes you see in the previews) were white, which was not even close to representative of reality in the 1940s, or now, for that matter.

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Life continues to be a little crazy now. I worked almost all weekend on the smaller of the two freelance projects I have going right now, with only a couple of breaks to recoup on the beach and at the movies. This entire weekend will be spent at Raku Hoolaulea (yes, I plan to take a bunch of pictures). Next week we welcome a friend of a friend and her husband to Honolulu, and I have book group on Thursday night. The long Kamehameha Day holiday weekend will be spent mostly working on the other freelance project, with a break for an OSU alumni event on Saturday night. I leave for my trip on the 15th.

The Mystery Sickness is thankfully gone, just shy of Day 28.
- posted by Lori @ 7:56:00 PM | permanent link | |