still trying to watch Band of Brothers
Jun. 13th, 2014 04:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI give you my thoughts while watching episode 4 (in stream-of-consciousness form) under the cut:
OMG I still don't know who most of these people are, how is this even possible? The only regulars I can usually identify are Winters and Nixon, and then I have to look at the shapes of their eyebrows to be certain.
Oh, hello baby!James McAvoy! I know you!
Yay, I can sometimes recognize you even when you're wearing a helmet! It's a miracle!
. . . goodbye, baby!James McAvoy.
The bit about the eyebrows, by the way? Not joking. That is my desperation facial-recognition technique. I don't normally need to use it. But in the case of BoB, even eyebrows are of limited usefulness--it works if the camera actually lingers on someone's face for long enough to check, but I'm still hopeless during battle scenes.
(Also, WTF, did American officers not wear insignia? Being able to tell officers from enlisted men would be a big help and I never can when they're in battle dress. Or in dress uniforms, actually--I read somewhere once that one reason American soldiers stationed in Britain might have been so romantically popular is that all ranks' dress uniforms looked like British officers' uniforms, and some young women may even have thought they were dating officers when they weren't. At the time I found this ridiculous, but now I can see how the mistake could happen. ETA: I can of course tell NCOs by the stripes, when I can see them, but everybody else confuses me.)
It would help me even more if the characters had distinct personalities, but that's not happening so much.
Am I the only one who had this much difficulty with the show? I know I have some tendency to face-blindness, but it's mild and I can usually learn to tell characters apart fairly quickly.
As of ep 4, the one person I can fairly easily recognize, Captain Sobel, is back. His reappearance makes me wonder how much the show is fictionalized. Sobel is so clearly being built up as a villain, and his turning up again is so story-like, that my default explanation for the structural and characterization weirdness of the show ("they're trying to keep strictly to events as they really happened, and also all these characters were real so they don't dare show anyone in a potentially bad light or even give them much personality") no longer seems valid.
OMG I still don't know who most of these people are, how is this even possible? The only regulars I can usually identify are Winters and Nixon, and then I have to look at the shapes of their eyebrows to be certain.
Oh, hello baby!James McAvoy! I know you!
Yay, I can sometimes recognize you even when you're wearing a helmet! It's a miracle!
. . . goodbye, baby!James McAvoy.
The bit about the eyebrows, by the way? Not joking. That is my desperation facial-recognition technique. I don't normally need to use it. But in the case of BoB, even eyebrows are of limited usefulness--it works if the camera actually lingers on someone's face for long enough to check, but I'm still hopeless during battle scenes.
(Also, WTF, did American officers not wear insignia? Being able to tell officers from enlisted men would be a big help and I never can when they're in battle dress. Or in dress uniforms, actually--I read somewhere once that one reason American soldiers stationed in Britain might have been so romantically popular is that all ranks' dress uniforms looked like British officers' uniforms, and some young women may even have thought they were dating officers when they weren't. At the time I found this ridiculous, but now I can see how the mistake could happen. ETA: I can of course tell NCOs by the stripes, when I can see them, but everybody else confuses me.)
It would help me even more if the characters had distinct personalities, but that's not happening so much.
Am I the only one who had this much difficulty with the show? I know I have some tendency to face-blindness, but it's mild and I can usually learn to tell characters apart fairly quickly.
As of ep 4, the one person I can fairly easily recognize, Captain Sobel, is back. His reappearance makes me wonder how much the show is fictionalized. Sobel is so clearly being built up as a villain, and his turning up again is so story-like, that my default explanation for the structural and characterization weirdness of the show ("they're trying to keep strictly to events as they really happened, and also all these characters were real so they don't dare show anyone in a potentially bad light or even give them much personality") no longer seems valid.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-13 10:55 am (UTC)There are so many people there, it took me two or three watchings to start recognizing most of them. Winters is clearly kind of a main character so he's pretty easy to follow. Some episodes are centred on certain characters so they become more easily recognizable as you watch on.
(There is also Michael Fassbender with his shark smile as Christenson in case that is an interesting tidbit of information.)
no subject
Date: 2014-06-14 12:08 am (UTC)I'm looking forward to Michael Fassbender! Learning that he and James McAvoy were both in BoB was one of the things that helped lure me into watching it.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-16 10:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-16 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-16 11:39 am (UTC)