Pearl Harbor is not a good movie. It’s so long. It’s so Affleck. It’s so Alec Baldwin Takes Giant Gaping Bites Out of Scenery. And thus it’s crazy easy to turn on while you are working, because you can glance up and take in Kate Beckinsale’s lipstick or Affleck’s highlights or Jaime King’s curls or Jennifer Garner’s uptight nurse and be like, “Oh, right, okay,” and then go back to what you were doing, and then get sucked into the battle scenes for a bit, and so on and so forth. It will be a little tough for Midway — which also stretches from Pearl Harbor through, yes, the Battle of Midway — to live up to that level of fromage in my estimation, so I guess I have to hope it’s actually just… good? I have two beans, one more than the other, who are really heavily into World War II right now (they watch The Longest Day four times a week) and I suspect I’m going to have to watch this, let them know in advance whether it’s scary and who dies, and then in six months run it in constant rotation on our DVR.

[Photos: Shutterstock]