hauberk

9 hours ago, JGP said:

The Boys was an Ennis creation. 

For me  it's less about Miller and more about everyone. I mean, in 33 Superman is anyone's to fuck with. Marvel, Netflix, whoever. However. 

And I'm feeling weirdly precious about that lol

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. 

4 hours ago, JGP said:

Had a long ass nap today, that I’m sure will tilt my wonky sleep patterns further, so while perusing headlines I saw something about Mark Miller maybe doing something Superman related once the IP hits the public domain and… I got some pretty conflicting feels going on.

As a creative copyright is a very important thing to me, yet I also believe it’s a good thing it eventually expires. And yet, I really don’t want to see everyone’s grasping little fingerprints all over Superman.

I really don’t.

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. 

15 minutes ago, dbunting said:

This went under the radar for me, first I heard it. Loved him in pretty much anything he did. Seemed like a genuinely good person, someone you'd want as a dad.

Strange Brew and Stripes. Small roles but he was good.

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. 

On 3/24/2024 at 7:24 PM, hauberk said:
 

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.  

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. 

44 minutes ago, Ran said:

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.

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!

1 minute ago, Ran said:

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.

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.

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

I don't think that was the Red Tails. They were operating out of Italy as their main engagement in Europe, and I don't think they ever flew alongside the bombers we've been following (some of the historical accuracy crowd were moaning about that). Certainly they noted the arrival of the Mustangs which allowed them to accompany the bombers all the way to Berlin and back though.

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. 

18 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I don't think that was the Red Tails. They were operating out of Italy as their main engagement in Europe, and I don't think they ever flew alongside the bombers we've been following (some of the historical accuracy crowd were moaning about that). Certainly they noted the arrival of the Mustangs which allowed them to accompany the bombers all the way to Berlin and back though.

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. 

1 minute ago, Corvinus85 said:

I guess that would have been the better episode to introduce some of the fliers.

No disagreement.

3 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

They certainly weren't used the best way. Maybe if we had seen a mission where they provided escort to the bombers (even if not the 100th), it would have been better. It was Crosby who wrote a book that the show used, hence why he is the narrator.

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.

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

I wonder if it's a budget consideration: doing stuff in the planes is very expensive, doing stuff on one set in the camp for three episodes (and I suspect reuse of some of the airbase sets, redressed) is a lot cheaper.

Clearly the show isn't cheap, but I'm not getting the sense it had anything like the money spent on The Pacific or even, in its day, Band of Brothers.

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.

3 hours ago, DMC said:

Yeah I think this has been mentioned before, but my favorite part of that is you could 110% see Walter White doing the exact same thing.

I was a pretty big fan of My Name Is Earl.  Haven't seen it in a very long time now, but IIRC it gets better.

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

3 hours ago, Maithanet said:

Rewatched Alien for the first time in ~15 years (although I watched it many times as a teenager).  It really stands up as an all-time great film.  The movie does an incredible job of making both the text (killer alien on a spaceship) and subtext (anti-capitalism) work seamlessly.  The Company (never mentioned on screen, but visible in a couple screenshots as Weyland-Yutani) is faceless, unfeeling and unrelentingly evil. 

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It knew that there was an alien signal on LB-462, it knew it could be dangerous and wanted to bring back a specimen, so it sent a small crew least able to defend itself.  It replaced the science officer with Ash "two days before" they shipped out.  Ash is actually an android programmed to do The Company's dirty work, who sets about sabotaging everything the crew did to try and survive. 

Ash let the expedition party back on the ship when strict quarantine rules say they cannot be allowed onboard.  Ash knew something was implanted in Cain when he woke up, but didn't tell anyone or help him (this is clear in Ian Holm's acting and the camera focusing on his nervous face).  Ash yelled at Parker not to kill the Alien when it pops out of Cain "DON'T TOUCH IT!!" because at that time it was small and vulnerable.  Ash rigs up some tracking devices which he says key on "micro changes in air density".  This is a lie, as Ripley realizes, because it tracks Jones the cat through a sealed door.  It never tracks the Alien at all, and presumably was rigged specifically not to work in the hope the crew either fails to find the Alien or gets killed looking for it.  He does not help Dallas protect himself in the air shaft (a plan that could have worked) and thus Dallas gets only useless information from him and Lambert until he is ambushed.  And finally once Ripley catches wind to what The Company is doing, he attempts to murder her (and presumably would have killed Lambert and Parker next). 

The overall takeaway is that the film is contrasting the distant, homicidal greed of The Company with the unseen terror of the Alien.  The Company sets plans in motion to kill the crew for profit from star systems away, we never learn any of those people's names and we never will.  In contrast the Alien is also hidden for virtually the entire movie, if I had to guess it's screen time is probably about a minute for the whole film.  But the combination of The Company and the Alien strips away the humanity (logical thinking, empathy, communication) from the entire crew.  The exception is Ripley, who maintains all these human traits and survives. 

This is a great film, with great acting.  Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto are all great as supporting characters.  And of course Sigourney Weaver knocks it out of the park.  Ripley isn't quite the action hero superwoman she becomes in Aliens but she's still quite a badass and makes a lot of smart decisions under pressure. 

100% agree. 

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

I am one of those people. I've never watched any of the Godfather movies, Goodfellas, Casino, and same with TV shows like The Sopranos or Peaky Blinders. I watched The Departed and hated the story, I thought The Irishman was OK and yes a it's well done movie apart from the de-aging stuff. The only gangster related movie I've watched more than once and enjoy is The Untouchables, because there are clear good guys in it and it's based on real events with Capone getting his comeuppance in the end.

And you can add movies and TV shows about drug cartels for the stuff I don't care for. Breaking Bad is the sole exception, and even that one was a one time viewing for me. 

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. 

Just now, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Okay since we’re doing this, I thought The Avengers was a mediocre film….

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

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Sonny's death is  a moment of heightened reality to reflect the enormity of Sonny's assassination, and the larger-than-life nature of Sonny himself, although this aspect of things is much more explicit in the novel. James Caan was an average-sized guy, while Sonny Corleone in the novel is a massive hulk of a man, not especially tall (just short of 6') but built like a bull (also, hung like one, but that's a subplot that Coppola, uh, snipped.)

He essentially exists on a kind of grandiose, heroic scale, a man of excesses -- excesses of violence, of anger, of pride, of lust -- and dies in a suitably grandiose, excessive way.

Coppola was right on the mark, IMO.

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. 

1 hour ago, DMC said:

To be clear, here's the scene:

I dunno, seems fine to me.  And again, that's really not what I'd describe as chewing scenery.  Like, Jimmy Caan is taking direction for getting shot repeatedly.  The fuck else is he supposed to react?

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. 

49 minutes ago, DMC said:

Sonny "beating up" Carlo is a much better example of something that didn't age well.  Like, it's very clear he's not even in the vicinity of actually punching him.

As for Sonny getting shot at the tollbooth, um, k?  Mafia hits were way over the top back in the day, which was obviously the intent of that scene.  Also not sure how taking, like, thirty bullets really constitutes chewing scenery.

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.