Helga without the H

Almost every year I attempt (with varying degrees of success) to watch as many Oscar nominees as possible before the ceremony. I post half-assed reviews here on my blog, and then at the end I write up some sort of silly analysis, predictions, reactions, etc. The quantity and quality depends entirely on how much time and energy I have each year, and I’m not gonna lie, this year’s already starting pretty dang rough! But let’s see how it goes. Today we turn to:

The Six Triple Eight

[1 nomination for best song]

Normally I don’t bother watching or reviewing movies that are nominated in the music categories. But I looked at the list of nominees and realized, “Oh hey, here’s another movie that’s technically been nominated for an Oscar that I’ve already seen!” So since I have a couple minutes to kill, I’ll go ahead and throw together a mini-review.

This movie is absolute rubbish. It was probably my most disappointing movie-watching experience of the year. Which is an extreme shame, because I was REALLY excited to see this movie when I first saw the trailer! I had never heard of the Six Triple Eight, and I was super stoked to learn all about them. What great history! How inspiring! I can’t wait! If anyone involved with this production deserves and Oscar, however, it’s whoever edited that trailer. The trailer was pure gold. The trailer made this movie look super exciting; it suggested that these women actually delivered the mail! It showed them being capable enough to accomplish what no white male units could do, while also showing them crawling through the mud. “Oh wow, they actually went out into the warzones for these deliveries! How brave!” No. They were nowhere near the front line. They were literally just sorting mail in a building somewhere in the UK. All of the badass action scenes were from their bootcamp montages. We hear lots of speeches from Major Charity Adams (played by Kerry Washington) talking about how they have to prove themselves by being not just as good as, but better than, all the male and/or white units. They’re doing jumping jacks and crawling under razorwire and gassing themselves and, eventually, marching. Which is great and all, but then when we get to the actual task assigned to them, they didn’t have to do anything badass. Look, in the real history they weren’t battling it out on the front lines, so I’m not expecting that from the film. I’m just saying that whoever edited that trailer did a pretty major bait-and-switch, and set us up to expect a much more exciting flick.

Trailer aside, this movie was painful to watch. It felt like it was written and performed by 5th graders. The beginning, especially, was so cheesy that I couldn’t believe I was watching Netflix instead of Hallmark Chanel. The characters were all so one-dimensional I wanted to scream. The acting was all over the place, with each actor doing their best with a terrible script and some pulling it off better than others. But honestly, I can forgive cheesy scripts and acting in a historical drama, cuz dang don’t I love me some historical drama. Swing Kids is my all-time favorite movie, for pete’s sake! But I just can’t forgive the absolute disregard for historical accuracy. The movie opens with trench warfare. TRENCH WARFARE IN WW2?!?!?! That’s the wrong freakin’ war!!! And it was all downhill from there.

All of this is a shame, because there is a legitimately fascinating story to tell here. If I can say one nice thing about this film, it’s that it inspired me to go read up about these women. And the best part of the entire movie was the very ending where they showed footage of the actual servicewomen. There was so much potential here. The film was so close to getting us there, but just kept stopping short. For example, everyone loves the scene in any bootcamp movie where we meet all of the recruits and learn about their backstories and personalities. In this movie we meet our cast and get to learn about the different women who would join up, from the boisterous country bumpkin looking for upward mobility and sexytimes, to the uptight educated city girls, to our protagonist whose white Jewish boyfriend got shot down earlier in the war. Sounds great, right? It’s not. It all fell flat. Ugh.

But none of this matters for the purposes of the Oscar Binge, of course, because this movie wasn’t nominated in any movie-related categories. Instead, it’s nominated for Best Song. So I just listened to the song and… it’s lackluster. Generic. Cheesy. Bad grammar. Very meh. So… fitting for this movie I suppose.