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Cranmer's Replies
Rachel is super hot in series one but sadly for reasons I won't reveal she loses her looks considerably in series two.
She's got quite a deep voice as well. I find her pretty, but her character has such a bad/spoilt attitude that looks aren't enough to make up for.
The brother is cool though.
OK thirteen years on but I'll reply. Basting is not a 'tailoring technique of 100 years ago' it is how hand made suits have been made for centuries and still are made by the best tailors. However, the tearing off of basted components during the fitting is rather theatrical and is not, I believe, done by most tailors (I've never had it done to me and have had several suits cut bespoke).
OK four years on but I'll reply anyway. Adams could not cash the bank note because, as was mentioned in the cafe scene, only two are in existence. If he took the note to the Bank of England (the only institution able to tender gold for the note) the governor would hear about it and inform the two brothers.
The girl got Kim's voice just right, so much so that I wondered if it was actually Kim's real voice dubbed over.
I was actually quite surprised by the twist, because I thought it was so obvious that they wouldn't use it. The 'conman gets conned' storyline is pretty hackneyed. Although I certainly did not guess the reason why Betty did it.
The only brief nudity is two topless pole dancers in a scene where Roy visits Stringfellows strip club in London.
There is a sex scene in the flashback sequences but it is fully clothed and partially behind a screen.
He was just telling the soldier that the queue (line) was for soldiers of the Grenadier Guards regiment only. I think the point was to show that despite the potential for chaos, the soldiers were still forming orderly queues according to their regiments. Also, the Guards regiments are the elite of the British army, and so probably did not want soldiers of 'fish and chip mob' (lower class) regiments associating with them.
My guess is that Pip is so mentally disturbed that he is not thinking rationally. If he is prepared to burn alive several people in a wardrobe it probably does not matter much to him if one or two are 'innocent' - they will just be 'collateral damage'.
What puzzles me more is whether he was actually able to do any damage. Those little cabinet locks on wardrobes can be easily broken and a bit of lighter fuel would be unlikely to cause a large fire straight away. My guess is that Pip set himself on fire but the others were able to get out of the wardrobe once he had been overcome.
I avoided the film previously as it looked to me like the usual tedious overwrought WW2 drama with modern ideas shoehorned into the heads of 1940s people.
I could not have been more wrong! It's nuanced, sensitive, well written, with a balanced view of the Germans and the British and is not afraid to shy away from showing the effects of the destruction of war after the glory of victory is over.
It reminded me a little of 'Brief Encounter' in its stiff-upper-lip British romance theme also.
I have a couple of nitpicks; how on earth did Miss Knightley have so many beautiful gowns, after six years of war and clothing rationing, and only one suitcase to carry them in? And why was the colonel using what looked like a Colt automatic pistol (when he beat up the Nazi in the Russian sector)? The British officer who shot the fleeing German was, correctly, shown using an Enfield or Webley revolver, which was the pistol issued to British officers at that time.
The tube train scene was a dramatic device intended to show Churchill's common touch and ability to accurately read the mood of the nation. It's rather clumsy, and of course totally fictional, but it was a neat way of summing up the conversations Churchill would have had with people from different walks of life over a period of several months.
I am British and have worked with quite a lot of 'Bridgets' in publishing, and her accent is spot on.
Tony is a fairly typical example of someone from that kind of northern working class background. Although he appears to be a thug he actually has a sensitive side and is willing to accept Billy's dancing when he sees how talented he is. Some men from that background would never accept such a thing and would cut Billy out of their lives completely. So he's not all bad, just with limited horizons.
It's possible his boots had Blakey's - also known as 'taps' or 'segs' on the soles and heels. These are small metal plates which are hammered on to prevent wear. Although they were already going out of use by 1984, they were still fairly common especially in a poor northern town such as Billy's where money was tight. They make a 'tap dancing' sound, though not as loud as real tap shoes.
In the film it's suggested several times that people are downsizing ostensibly to help save the planet, but in reality they are just doing it for their own selfish reasons and to feel good about themselves. It's a satire on the environmentalist guilt-tripping of our own age.
I just hope there's going to be a Skinny Pete and Badger spin-off series. They're the Cheech and Chong of the new millennium.
Skinny Pete seemed somehow less menacing to me. Less of a 'badass' and more of an 'ass', as if it was a parody of the character from the series.
The impression I got was that Jesse had become sort of 'institutionalised' into living in the cage. He had been beaten down physically and mentally so much that he couldn't break out. IIRC similar things happened in WW2 when British soldiers in Japanese prison camps were liberated, some of the men just refused to come out of their cells because they couldn't cope with the outside world any more.
Todd so fat, the nearest he comes to dieting is deleting cookies on the internet.
Yes fatter/older Todd was very noticeable. I liked the way they tried to hide it in the first scene by showing Todd's face partially obscured by iron bars. Maybe they have a slimming effect as they only show half his face, LOL.