hauberk

Whoops! I’ll confess, I don’t much like Ennis doing capes either. I get where you’re coming from there, thinking about John Oliver’s piece with Steamboat Willy.

I’d just as soon he find something that diverges from any capes. I’m incredibly tired of the ultra-cynical perspective that seems to be so prevalent in his work (that I’ve read or seen adapted). I have a fairly healthy comics blind spot due to time away/mostly away for kids but Old Man Logan (I’m a sucker for that kind of story (see also The Last Avengers Story)), Kingsmen and Red Son. Skipped Kick-Ass entirely due to the cover to cover JRJR spew. Besides, didn’t he already do a take on Superman with Homelander, or is that just the Amazon adaptation?

Just started a coordinated reread for me and first read for my daughter of The Tyrant’s Law by Daniel Abraham. I quite like this series. Abraham is someone I hold up as one of the best contemporary world builders.

I have fond memories of SCTV, though there was some crazy talent on that show. He was also terrific as the dad on Freaks and Geeks.

Best I can tell, Open Road Media, the current publishers of Wing and A Prayer, just scanned an old manuscript, used text recognition/conversion software and didn’t bother to actually review the conversion. It’s disappointingly sloppy. It’s well written and very much fleshes out the TV series. I’ll be looking for an older edition for the shelf and skipping Open Road editions in the future.

Louis Gossett Jr. has passed away at 87. Great in so many things, for me he stands out as Sgt Foley in An Officer and A Gentleman, for which he won best supporting Oscar and Golden Globe, Drac in Enemy Mine, for which he was nominated for an Oscar and Chappy in the so terrible it’s kind of fun Iron Eagle.

Scheduling issues kept us from finishing the series until last night. Overall, I’m satisfied. I do think that it would have benefitted from a couple of more episodes and a slightly bigger budget - flipping on the red tail model from earlier, the absence of B17Gs was also noted, and likely for similar reasons. I cheered when I saw the Toby jug.

Wrapped up Erikson’s Fall of Light last week. It was a super dense read, covered a bunch of stuff that felt superfluous while circling around some pretty relevant story beats while not fully touching on them. Started Harry Crosby’s A Wing and a Prayer - one of the source books for the Masters of Air. Good info and is mostly accessible but it’s not told in chronological order. It also suffers from what appears to be some aggressive copy editing. Multiple instances of his/a service .45 being described as a revolver. Very specifically when describing the runway configuration at Thorpe-Abbott being similar to a pistol it looks like someone went looking for synonyms and came up short.

I have completed Fall of Light. Overall, I think I enjoyed it but it was a dense read and his loose continuity was challenging. My high point in it was encountering a pair of characters and making the internal comparison with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to then look online and see multiple discussions comparing them. I do think that the device he used to break down the final battle sequence was a bit of a cheat and that there were other things that could have been cut if needed.

M. Emmett Walsh passed on 19 March at 88. He has over 200 roles in his filmography but he’ll always be Captain Bryant from Blade Runner to me.

It seems odd that they would unintentionally do that for what amounts to the longest shot of the fighters sweeping by. Sloppy. That said, while I knew that they operated out of Italy, I just assumed that it was a combined group mission. I’ve got both Miller and Crosby’s books near the top of my read pile, shortly after a book on the 442nd RCT - another candidate for BoB treatment!

Good to know. Looking at the 334th, it appears that pretty much just the rudder was red. Looking at this clip. 1:07-1:10, the tail markings are much more extensive. There's not enough detail on the nose to say say for certain, but the tail markings are closer to the 302nd.

Went back and reviewed ep 7. Exterior shot during voiceover shows mustangs with red noses and maybe silver tails. Interior shot looking out navigator?) red tail flies past. It’s quick, but it’s there.

I’ll go back and look again but my recollection is that we saw P-51s with the distinctive tail markings scream past the bombers.

No disagreement.

They did. During the previous episode when they were getting the long range fighter cover, the redtails where visible as a part of the fighter escort. There was no dialog pointing it out (like the Band of Brothers leg bag for instance), but they were present on escort duty.

I think that it's less budget and more story development. More flight time also means more face blindness for the actors - who are all dressed the same and wearing oxygen masks. Moreover, it's also going to very much be the same action each time. If the intent of the series is to address a specific group of people's experience in the Bloody 100th, all of the other stuff that they have been showing is super relevant. Also worth noting that this seems to have been supplemented by Harry Crosby's book A Wing and A Prayer. That said, completing eliminating anything to do with why they shuttled to Africa before returning to Thorpe-Abbott would maybe have helped. I had initially assumed that they were staging for Operation Torch, but that does not seem to be true. Likewise, perhaps a little more about D-Day might have been nice, including acknowledging, that by and large the preparatory bombing of the beaches was a massive failure with the bombs being dropped behind the German defenses to avoid dropping to close to the Allied landing forces. It's also possible that Orloff had a bit too much influence this time around. My guess is that an air war story about fighter pilots may have lent itself to more of the in air storytelling. As a sidenote, it appears that there was an entire section of the Pacific that was originally supposed to follow some Dauntless torpedo bombers. Covered in detail in the Pacific Companion by Hugh Ambrose.

Have only seen clips from the ceremony, but really annoyed that anyone feels the need to add production values to the In Memorium. This has been something of a complaint this entire awards season. Not being able to read the names of those being remembered because of a slow panning shot to pick up the interpretive dancers and then dipping so that their hands are obstructing the screens with the names is pretty absurd. The Cena costume award presentation was a pretty entertaining bit.

I would offer up Greg Garcia’s other series Raising Hope as a recommendation. Absolutely spectacular.

100% agree.

Peaky Blinders I quite liked. I sat through all of Breaking Bad. Initially mildly intrigued by the depths a desperate man would go to and then scratching my head at all the love it was getting. I have a lot of love for The Untouchables and quite liked the recent Highwaymen with Costner and Harrelson.

I dunno, Uma Thurman in a cat suit tried to make up for Sean Connery dressed as an acid bear.

I’ve not read the book so that may be a fair representation. I know that Coppola credited Puzzo due to how true to the book the script ended up being. I went into the viewing under the best circumstances I could - uninterrupted, unedited and in a hotel with no outside distractions. It just wasn’t to my taste. That’s true of the majority of Coppola’s work. Apocalypse Now, which I quite like, is not going to pull me in spontaneously. I suppose it’s also possible that I just don’t like mob movies to the extent that I’ve never seen Casino or Goodfella’s in a single sitting and what I have seen doesn’t inspire me to. The Departed was OK. Carlito’s Way left me cold. Scarface was over the top. However, I’m a huge fan of Peaky Blinders, so it’s not that clear cut.

He takes a conservative dozen rounds of .45 into the upper torso before climbing out the passenger seat - into the fire, standing upright and doing his little dance. It's well above over the top. You are right though, it wasn't Caan's fault. It's a poorly constructed scene. Coppola was in over his depth.

Agreed about Sonny and Carlo. The amount of rounds fired was not the over the top part. The over the top part was the amount of lead thrown at Sonny BEFORE Jimmy Caan got it of the car to deliver his scene chewing death stagger/spasm.