James reviews The Greatest Events of World War Two (Blitzkrieg) on DMAX and Crazy Rich Asians (2018) on BBC1.

Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the thirty-first episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’ 

This is where I review upcoming Freeview programs. Go to IReviewFreeview.com to search, listen, or indeed read and/or comment on all my reviews. And if you want to see what I’ll be reviewing next time, visit the page ‘What’s up next.’ That’s IReviewFreeview - all one word - dot com.

In this episode, I will review:

The Greatest Events of World War Two on DMAX and 

Crazy Rich Asians (2018) on BBC1.

Yeah, only two this time. I’ve been finding three was taking up too much effort and - crucially - making the episodes a tad too long. I’m aiming for about 15 - 20 minutes, as I’ve been unreliably informed that’s about the right length. So: two reviews it is. But next week? Who knows.

I’m a boomer, so WW2 was a constant thread in my childhood. So when something WW2 based comes up, I get the nostalgic urge to watch. I’m expecting black and white stock footage and talking heads. Heavy stuff: so I’ve balanced it with a film, which looks like a light and fluffy bit of fluff. (Ha!) We’ll see.

By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:

While a WW2 spitfire flies over the white cliffs of Dover, a modern Asian couple are energetically dancing by a rolls-royce.

I’m surprised: there were more than one reasonable image. So I didn’t push my luck. Like trying to teach elephants to dance, I’ve learnt not to expect too much from free stuff.

Now, let’s begin.

The Greatest Events of World War Two (S 1 E 1: Blitzkrieg) on DMAX, Monday, August 12, 9:00pm

As I said, WW2 was a constant in my childhood. The crowing cockerel of Pathe news showing demobbed soldiers mowing lawns. Front pages full of Winnie with his cigar. Older sisters pointing at the sky and talking of searchlights and vapour trails. 

It was all simple and laced with jingoistic triumphalism. It had been just us against the Germans, and we had won. That was all we needed to know. At school, a better informed boy who claimed we would have lost if it hadn’t been for the Yanks and the Russians, had rice pudding thrown at him.

But I was a curious child, and read anything I could get my hands on. And somewhere in the written word, knowledge lies. Gradually, the black and white of WW2 acquired shades of grey, even colour. Russia’s casualties were enormous. China lost millions. And as for the Yanks, well, that rice pudding shouldn’t have been thrown. 

And in the 1970s, my understanding was turbo-charged when the ‘World at War’, complete with the sonorous voice of National Treasure Sir Laurence Olivier, was broadcast on ITV. I watched every single episode. 

Good documentaries, like reading, thinking, discussion and an open mind, add more grist to the mill.

(Ha!)

Which - finally - brings me to ‘The Greatest Events of World War Two (Blitzkrieg)’ on DMAX.

This is an entertaining and informative gallop first - with a very broad brush - through the events leading up to the war (Hitler, Munich, the Polish invasion, biff bang bong.) - then quickly zips over the ‘phoney war’ - before slowing to a more sedate canter for the blitzkrieg proper. When France, with the largest and most modern army in Europe, was overrun by German Panzers in just 6 weeks.

6 weeks! And we think we live in fast-paced times!

Meantime, we plucky, lucky Brits only just managed to escape back to blighty via Dunkirk. Lucky? I’ll go into that later.

Now I’m not going to go through the events. That’s the job of the documentary, which I’m assuming you’ve watched or will watch. But if you don’t, but still want a Brit-focused, 30 second precis in what happened to our soldiers over there, watch the opening credits of ‘Dad’s Army.’

By concentrating on the Blitzkrieg and not worrying unduly about the politics or what else was occurring, the documentary was an effective military summary of what happened. The talking heads - well edited and adroitly positioned - were precise and analytical. 

Some surprising facts were unearthed. 

The German troops, to keep going relentlessly, aggressively, for day after day, were given an early form of crystal meth. It’s staggering to think France was conquered by short-haired hippies driving tanks instead of beach buggies.

And - despite all the film clips of tanks grinding along, treads carving deep ruts in foreign lands, the German Army was basically horse-powered. The tanks got there with diesel. Their ammo, like as not, by horse and cart.

At the start of the Ardennes offensive, there was a such a large traffic jam of stationary German armour and transporters the whole war might have been decided in a couple of days had the allies bombed the heck out of it. When a professor told us this, and showed a clip of mile upon mile of stationary German vehicles, his voice rose into a crescendo of regret, indignation and disgust. They didn’t bomb because the French high command (cue grainy footage of old men with big moustaches and plenty of braid) well, they refused to believe the evidence of their own reports. In fact, they - ensconced in a villa on the outskirts of Paris - didn’t even have a telephone.

While the germans had radio, the French had unreliable field telephones and messengers increasingly held up by refugees crowding along the roads.

And as for the miracle of Dunkirk, when nearly 90% of the B.E.F. (the British Expeditionary Force) were evacuated back to the UK with a well co-ordinated operation of small boats and the royal navy, well, we got away with it because, at the critical moment, Hitler turned his army southwards towards Paris, leaving it up the Luftwaffe to finish the job. But the weather turned cloudy, the Stuka bombers were ineffective and Dunkirk was well within the range of our fighters. So they failed.

Churchill, it is worth noting, expected to save maybe 45,000 soldiers. But the eventual total was some 340,000.

By the way: there have been many films about Dunkirk. But the one I enjoyed the most is ‘Their Finest’, which is less about the Dunkirk evacuation and more about the filming of a propaganda film about the evacuation. (Chuckle) Look, OK: just watch it when it’s next on.

Back to the review.

I think maybe there was not enough mention of how quickly changing circumstances can cloud judgement. Commanders who came of age in the machine gunned, static trenches of WW1 found it difficult to adapt to ‘Blitzkrieg’, which in translation means ‘Lightening war:’ agile, fast moving and co-ordinated.

This applied to both sides. The German High Command ordered one of their generals to stop his advance. But he ignored them and pressed on, successfully gaining the Atlantic ports. One of the many ‘what ifs’ is: what would have happened had he actually obeyed and stopped?

But then, pivotal moments of the past are always endlessly chewed over, with hindsight trampling like an elephant over considerations of what it must have been like to be living through it. To go back to an earlier point, it’s easy to say ‘all they needed to do was to bomb the stuck convoy,‘ without also considering the overall circumstances that drove that decision.

For speculation on what might have been is intrinsic to historical analysis, be it in a documentary, lecture, or book. Presenting a narrative that is both balanced and fair is hard: the temptation is always there to descend down the endless, branching rabbit holes of alternate possibilities. 

But we all do this, all the time. Allowing us to analyse and project onto own past is exactly what memory is for, and holds a fascination that’s hard to resist. Who hasn’t wondered what their life would’ve been like if - for instance - they’d married X instead of Y, or not married at all, or won the lottery, or had the good sense to buddy up to Bill Gates and invest £100 in his fledgling company, Microsoft?

Memory is all we have. Without it, we are but nothing.

(Ha!)  

I seem to have gone off topic. Again.

To sum up.

I found ‘The Greatest Events of World War Two (S 1 E 1: Blitzkrieg)’ a fascinating journey through familiar, nostalgic territory. I relished the fast-paced narrative, the use of maps and old clips and the digging out of aspects I hadn’t known before. It was solidly crafted and worked well as a simplified military analysis of complex events. 

For anyone interested, a worthwhile watch. For anyone not interested, well, watch it anyway. It might get you interested.

Time always moves on. The generation that actually fought in WW2 is now extremely thin on the ground. And boomers like me, who grew up with it as an integral part of childhood, are also dying out. In 20 years - less - we’ll be just about extinct, and WW2 will be even more rapidly vanishing in the rear-view mirror of history.  

Which I find sad, as it probably means mistakes made then will be repeated. But if I’m feeling cynical, I’d say that’s what recorded history is for: to allow us to know when we’ve made the same mistake again and again and again.

(haha!)

This is my podcast, and I’ll be as caustic, sardonic and as cynical as I like.

Which is probably not the best transition I’ve ever made as we segway to:

Crazy Rich Asians (2018) on BBC1, Monday, August 12, 11:10pm

This is interesting. I watched ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and didn’t really rate it much: just another poor-girl rich-boy romance, with a predictable story-line and the sort of weepy-eyed ending we’ve all come to expect. I sat down to write yet another sarky review, full of phrases like ‘run of the mill’, ‘do it by numbers’ etc etc. I even planned to moan at the title for being ambiguous. Was it ‘CRAZY! Rich Asians.’ or perhaps ‘crazy-rich Asians?’ 

But I needed to check the opening sequence which runs before the credits. I hadn’t been paying attention. The sound was on the blink and I was pottering around poaching an egg and doing toast. By the time I sat down, the opening credits were running. My chance had gone.

But on reflection, I thought it must be significant, so I rewound and sat down.

It’s London, 1995. It’s pouring with rain, and a somewhat bedraggled Asian mother and children turn up at a snooty London hotel, claiming to have booked a suite. They are turned away. Then it transpires she is the wife of the new owner. Imperiously, she tells the staff to clean the floor as she sweeps past them.

Having by now watched the whole film, this opening made sense, and encouraged me to watch it all again. Which I did.

And d’you know what? I enjoyed it far, far more than when I’d first seen it, less than 24 hours before. Of course, there were no surprises. Nothing was out of place. Every conversation, expression, hand gesture, wide-lens shot .. you name it .. were exactly and precisely the same as before.

The only thing that had altered was my enjoyment. Which sort of seems weird. But, let me park that for the moment. I’ll come back to it later.

The film proper starts in a bar in New York, where Rachel (a professor of economics specialising in game theory) is talking to her boyfriend Nick (job unspecified) about going to the Singapore wedding of his best mate, Colin.

A nearby Asian girl recognises Nick as someone of consequence. She takes a photo and pastes it into social media. For a brief, delightful minute, the screen is filled with texts, photos and comments as the news whizzes around the globe. In seconds Nick’s mother, Eleanor, phones from Singapore to tell him she’s having the house reorganised, so if he’s bringing that girl, there’s no place for her to sleep in their house.

And so - although Rachel doesn’t know it - the battle lines are drawn before she even sets foot on the plane.

In Singapore, Rachel calls first on Peik Lin, her close roomie from her student days. Peik Lin’s a perky lass, enthusiastically fulfilling the mandatory role of ‘kooky BF.’ They go together to Nick’s family residence, a huge, opulent and totally over the top palace. Columns! Gold! Servants galore! Aunts, cousins and friends everywhere! Rachel gets a courteous but undeniably frosty reception from Eleanor.  

Nick’s Dad is absent: in fact we don’t get to see him at all, which is fine, as already I’m finding it hard to keep a track of who’s related to who, who’s friends with who and .. well, who actually matters for the plot and who does not. 

To save you the bother of trying to remember them all, there’s really only one other significant character we need bother about: Astrid, one of Nick’s many cousins. She’s rich and beautiful and has married a man of lower status and wealth.

(Ha!)

Well, dang my boots. We’ve got rich-boy poor-girl as the narrative centre. But there’s always a need for a contrasting sub-plot. So how about poor-boy rich-girl? It must have taken them all of 30 seconds to dream that up. And I’ll wager someone said, ‘we can draw all kinds of parallels!’ (Huh!)

But, but but but … when watching, I didn’t think of that. If you’re in the right mood, and you’re sat before a screen filled with beautiful people and sweeping, adoring shots of luxurious architectural bling, it almost doesn’t matter that the plot is as old and as familiar as a pair of manky socks. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment. Or, to put it another way, if you don’t watch out, you’ll lose your critical balls.

Which, I freely admit, at the second time of asking, happened to me. And why not? If you suddenly find enjoyment, go with the flow. 

Admittedly, I missed some enormous plot holes. For instance, Rachel and Nick had supposedly been together for a year, yet she is still completely unaware of his wealth. But we all live in the Googleverse. And even if Rachel was so curiously uncurious not to do a two second search, surely her mum or one of her friends would have done.

In fact, in the film, it’s not until she’s in Singapore and sharing a meal with her old uni friend Peik Lin and her family that the penny finally drops. She mentions his full name, and a silence descends. Jaws are dropped. Even the dog is astounded. Well, to tell true, I think I just made that last bit up. But a fluffy canine looking super surprised would be absolutely in keeping with the light-hearted vibe of the film.

The plot trundles predictably on. There’s a stag do so completely over the top it makes the wolf of wall street’s office celebrations with a band and dancing girls look as tame as morose kids chewing gum, while the matching hen do quickly turns nasty for Rachel with a bloody dead fish and graffiti accusing her of being a gold digger.

But she decides not to be intimidated, remembers she’s meant to be an expert in game theory and fights back, putting on a dress that Primark would reject, lifting her chin to a noble angle and attending the wedding, in which the bride gets her feet wet walking along an indoor stream. 

As an aside here, to me the dress seemed unflatteringly rubbish, but then my interest in fashion is absolutely zero. It was probably meant to look as if it cost thousands, I dunno. Don’t care either.

Eleanor becomes increasingly hostile. Carefully staged confrontations between Rachel and Eleanor are strategically placed in the narrative arc. Private detectives are employed, a devastating secret is unearthed, all lost! (Aarrghh!) 

It almost looks as if the plot roller-coaster must flatten out and tamely end at ground level, but of course it doesn’t. How could it? With a magnificent final flourish, it defies gravity, departs from the track, and ascends into heaven, leaving us weeping with joy.

(Ha!)

Oh, the course of true love never, ever runs smooth. After all, where is the enjoyable drama in that?

On the whole, the director makes a good fist of melding together those basic dramatic staples of fun, joy and emotional depth. There is - for want of a better word - chemistry between Constance Wu and Henry Golding as Rachel and Nick. Michelle Yeoh plays Eleanor with fitting gravitas while Gemma Chan makes the best of a poorly written, cliche riddled Astrid and comedic relief is competently supplied by Awkwafina as the perky Peik Lin.

To go off on a slight but relevant tangent, in my previous review in this episode, I recommended a film called ‘Their Finest.’ One of the last scenes in that film is set in a cinema. A film is being watched. When it ends, a couple of women, with tears in their eyes, don’t move from their seats. They’ve already seen it twice and are staying to watch again.

Which brings me back to the not really burning question of why I watched ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ twice, and enjoyed it more the second time around.

Well, in considering this, I did what we do now-a-days: asked AI, and was rewarded with a comprehensive breakdown of reasons. The final para was:

Ultimately, rewatching familiar content offers a combination of comfort, emotional resonance, cognitive ease, and personal satisfaction. It’s a way to reconnect with emotions, stories, and experiences that have brought joy or meaning in the past.

(Ha!)

And to think I just thought it caught me in the right mood! But then perhaps serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding some fictional rich people being nice.

And that awkward misquote from Julius H. Comroe Jr. concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Don’t forget, contact me via email to contact@ireviewfreeview.com or through the website Ireviewfreeview.com where you can also click on the page ‘What’s up next.’ to see what programs I’ll be reviewing next time.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.