Ran

Not seen the Point Break remake, but lets be honest, Bigelow's Point Break is a much better film than the original Road House. The latter is a cult classic, for good reasons, but it certainly could be remade in a way that could yield a better film (but one that will have to lose some of its essence in the process; see below). But the thing that makes the "cult" part of it -- the sheer over-the-top 80s-ness, the "I-don't-give-a-fuck"-ness of it, the Swayze-ness of it -- that stuff can't really be replicated. I sound like a broken record mentioning Sean T. Collins (he of the 365 essays on Road House), but he saw the film early and remarked that you can't really purposefully make a film as stupid as the OG Road House was at times these days, but you could quite purposefully make an odd one, and I think that holds. There's a real weirdness at the core of the film's depiction of Dalton, of the villains, of the whole conflict, everything, and that has to be deliberate. But I don't think it makes a better movie. The fight choreography, especially the way they blended VFX into the fights to get what looked like some truly real punches to the face in, was pretty good, but otherwise...

Just a note for folks using this thread to talk about the show, remember it is not marked spoilers, so all spoilers related to the shows should be hidden in spoiler tags. Feel free to make a spoilers-marked thread if you wish.

I knew they used the Volume for the causeway scenes, but honestly I thought that was a good use of it, and it worked for me. And of course I think it was an excellent thing to use for dragon flight scenes.

Watched the new Road House, directed by Doug Liman and starring Jake Gylenhaal as a very different take on the character of Dalton. I'd describe him as a slacker sociopath more than a philosophical bouncer, and in fact his performance kind of reminds me a little bit of Swayze's character in Point Break moreso than the original Road House Dalton, with a smattering of Gylenhaal's Lou Boom from Nightcrawler. Connor McGregor (who hit the "supplements" hard) is almost certainly getting a Razzie for his performance, but I admit there's one scene where you realize that he really means to be playing a complete nut and it's just so hilarious. I don't think this one is going to be a cult classic, but the fights were pretty interesting and Gyllenhaal was kind of charming in a goofy way. And, going back to Liman, Casey Neistat is a long-time friend of his and ended up doing a pretty interesting video leading up to the SXSW premiere. Lets just say that Liman and Amazon butted heads over the movie, and he's not afraid to be very voluble and explicit about the beef (and, ultimately, its resolution):

A Fire on the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky were mind-blowing works of science fiction. RIP, Vernor.

I was actually thinking about that aspect of the show. And about Exo-Squad, too, funnily enough. Yeah, the serialized nature of the stories (and of Gargoyles, although to a lesser extent as I recall) was the thing that set them apart from what came before.

Landslides loom large for Linda because this happened in her place of birth very shortly after her and her parents moved away. And that was a baby compared to the Shogun landslide. Biggest earthquake I've been present for was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which was a 6.9. I was just a kid, lying in bed watchin the start of Game 3 of the World Series (which by some coincidence was between San Francisco and Oakland, neighboring cities). The bed starting shaking a bit, and then more violently. I thought at first it was my brother playing a trick on me by hiding under the bed, because I had tried it on him relatively recently, but then I noticed everything else was shaking and things were falling off cabinets. I can't believe I ran down the stairs while it was happening, it was shaking so much. Power went out for at least a day or two, and my mother had me and my siblings (plus some neighbors' kids) sleep under a huge, heavy work table my dad (who was on deployment to Korea at the time -- IIRC, I was even recording the baseball game for him so he could watch it when he got back) had in the garage under the theory that it'd protect us if a bigger earthquake brought houses down. Not fun, but not as scary as it probably was for some of the adults -- it quickly turned into some strange sleepover for us kids. (The A's went on to sweep the Giants, the only World Series championship the 'Bash Brothers'-era A's would get.)

Google says that 14 of the 15 fighter groups had P-51s by the end of 1944, so they certainly weren't last. That said, within their group, they seem to have gotten them later than some, at least. One of the things I learned from the video above, though, is that there really weren't all that many Mustangs to go around to begin with. The March 6 raid had slightly over 100 of them, total.

Finally watched Ferrari on Amazon Prime. It's mid-tier Michael Mann, but that means there's still some really excellent stuff. Penélope Cruz is particularly really good as Enzo Ferrari's long-suffering wife, rendered bitter by losses she's suffered and humiliations she's enduring. Adam Driver is not very much like Enzo Ferrari, but he has real presence on the screen and conveys the ruthless single-mindedness of Enzo really well. Shailene Woodley as his mistress (that's who @Relic mentioned awhile ago) was definitely not the best casting choice, she felt pretty weightless, but otherwise it's a good cast. The only downside is that they really pushed the budget on shooting on location and recreating some of the races, so the VFX is sometimes quite poor, which is a shame when Mann's such a meticulous craftsman.

Ten in total. This past episode was the 5th. I suppose it is bingable but I'm liking it at this pace.

*Shakes Magic 8-Ball* YOU MAY RELY ON IT

I can't find any evidence that they were flying escorts to Berlin on March 6. In fact, an amateur enthusiast who volunteers at his local aviation museum with a focus on WW2 Bombers posted a historical document listing all the fighter groups involved in the operation in the course of a video he made pointing out historical inaccuracies: No 332nd involved. In comments, people make the assumption that budgetary constraints led then to just use their Red Tail model for that close-up sweep because it was the most detailed model they had since they were featuring in the next episode. ETA: Ooooh. Came across an interesting detail when digging further: So they wouldn't even be flying P-51s for the March 6 bombing raid. Obviously, they're so famously associated with it (alas, P-38 Lightning never gets any love) that I'm not surprised if the show went a bit ahistorical. A lot of people feel the VFX budget was stretched to the limit, so I suppose they cut corners where they could.

(Basically, no, though there are points where they start getting everything together more smoothly and things are not quite as tense. But they still shout to make sure everyone hears.)

Rewatched in 4k that moment to get more detail, and you're right, that looks like they reused a Red Tails model even though the next episode establishes they've been operating in Italy. The only thing that gave me pause was a small dark blob of color on the forward part of the tail... but then I looked quickly at some material from the next episode (at the 37 mark, I'm linking a couple of seconds earlier) and you can actually see that the flight leader's plane has that very square of black on it. So either they mistakingly used that model, because the VFX people thought the 332nd was there, or they just decided not to bother dressing another model and just reused what they had made for the 332nd.

Yeah, excellent episode, I love the delving into the completely different ways of looking at things. Fuji is to some degree very unhappy to be consort to Blackthorne... but when they're arguing after Buntaro abuses Mariko, and Mariko tells her there's nothing to dishonor in the Anjin's house, you can see that at the same time there's a sting to that because she was consoling herself somewhat that at least he was hatamoto and held in favor by Toranaga -- but it's not real honor or title, it's illusory, simply a way to hold on to the foreign pilot. Torenaga's rueful laugh when Blackthorne offers Fuji's father's swords to him, especially when we've since learned their actual origin as something purchased off some drunken samurai to tell Fuji a pretty story about how brave her coward of a father was, was terrific. Also, LInda remarked that she'd never seen a landslide depicted on screen like that before, and I agree -- how often do we actually see landslides on shows? That was genuinely terrifying, especially with the VFX showing trees sliding down the mountainside.

The 334th Fighter Group was based in England and escorted bomber groups in Mustangs on the Berlin raid featured in episode 7, and their planes had red noses (fairly common for American fighters, that) and also red tail markings. So I suspect that's what was shown, or at least intended to be shown.

This was referring to the scene with Croz and crew not being able to get their gear when they were supposed to be wheels up in a few minutes, and he kicked in the door so they could get at it. Then he went and shoved the guy who was in charge of the equipment into his food in front of everyone. Think that was the previous episode. I definitely think that I would have gone with splitting time for the whole show between the 100th and the Tuskegee Airmen, and then having them finally meet up as they did when they were introduced, finally given P-51s to fly.

Some of it looks pretty cool. Some of it makes me a little sad. I was not a fan of the prequel Jedi/sith wire-fu gymnastics, and they're doubling and tripling down. At the same time, you know, I do love good wuxia and they are obviously borrowing its choreography language here such as the masked woman sliding back dramatically when Force pushed. It's also great to see multiple Jedi working together and investigating things.

Funnily enough, just the other day I got the 431 issue on my own phone (Google Pixel 6a) as well. I cleared cookies and cache and it sorted out. I will make more attempts to see if we can improve the situation further.

Eh, Backdraft was pretty well-regarded at the time, as I recall. I certainly had no problem with him in it, his faults didn't really seem to matter much given the form of the thriller and the cast around him. But YMMV.

Very different thing, but just as good, I agree. Lanthimos and Stone are an incredible team.

Okay, folks, so far I've seen no issues and the server is now steady, so I think we're fine to say that you can now work on this wiki. Do let me know if there are any issues with things like uploading images, getting thumbnails made, etc.

Quick note, folks, we are testing moving the wiki to a brand new server. The DB is up to date through the 16th, but any changes made after that may be lost ATM. Apologies for that. I would suggest not doing much work until I give the all clear. Hammering out some issues still. ETA: Also, those who make family trees and maps and such which uses specialized extensions, if you can poke around and see if those still seem to be looking right, let me know. And any other issues, let me know!

Having recently watched Kore-eda's Monster, I saw that he had directed a series for Netflix called The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, which seemed intriguing. It was not entirely what I expected, but was actually even more interesting. First, it's very much a slice-of-life, low drama show [ETA: Just learned it's based on a manga, Kiyo in Kyoto], but the setting is what's interesting. Two 16-year-old girls, Kiyo and Sumire, are best friends who set out from their home (Aomori, a city in northern Japan) for Kyoto in hopes of becoming maiko, apprentice geisha. Kyoto prides itself as the center of traditional Japanese culture, and getting a glimpse into the lives of maiko and geiko (the regional term for geisha in Kyoto) was really unexpectedly fascinating. There's a lot of details that I would never have realized. A small one is the fact that two men, father and son, seem to have some special relationship with Saku House (the yakata, apprentice house) that appears to be a family tradition based on a joke that the father's own father had been doing the same sort of work. They are handymen, but they also help the maiko dress in their elaborate kimonos on certain occasions, which I wouldn't have expected. And makanai, the title of the show, is a term for the custom of making a daily meal for staff (or in this case the residents of the yakata) rather than for customers. Kiyo turns out to have no talent for being a maiko, but is a first-rate cook and loves nothing more than to be in the kitchen, so despite her youth she ends up becoming the makanai for the house. I mean, I need to emphasize, it's a slice of life show. Stakes are low. No one ever raises their voice in anything like anger. But it's pretty neat to get a look into Japanese traditional culture, and the performances are sweet and gentle. It's a nice way to while away the time from heavier stuff. (Saku House is associated with the provinces leading geiko, Momoko (playd by the striking Ai Hashimoto). Kore-eda and his writers have fun with her, as we soon learn she's a fanatic for zombie films with a bunch of zombie paraphanelia in her apartment, where she plays Splatoon with her erstwhile boyfriend who'd like to be more than that... but the life of geiko is very tradition bound, and if you marry or have a child, you have to leave the profession; this is one of the aspects of the show that adds a little tension... but just a little, as characters are not given to making dramatic, precipitous decisions.) Beyond that, Netflix also added Ford vs. Ferrari, which I've never seen before. What can I say? It's good! Really professionally directed and composed, and Damon and especially Bale are great. As I understand it, a part of the film -- when Ford courts Ferrari -- is seen from the other perspective in Michael Mann's Ferrari. And finally, as it appears on a bunch of indie best of lists, I checked out Passages from director Ira Sachs, the story primarily of Tomas, a gay married film director who is one of the most incredibly malignant narcissists ever put to screen. Played by Franz Rogowski, Tomas ruins his relationship with his husband (played by the ever-wonderful Ben Whishaw) when he has a one night stand with a woman (played by Adele Exarchopoulos), and then can't help himself but going back for more as it strains the relationship to the breaking point. And then... well, he wants his cake and he wants to eat it too, and proceeds to cause chaos in everyone's lives as he tries to get everything that he wants without any seeming genuine care or, even, understanding of what the people he's screwing (quite literally) are thinking or feeling.

Sneak peek for X-Men '97: