T.L.: PS: I worked on a major motion picture ("At Play in the Fields of the Lord") in Belem, Brazil, the Amazon, in 1990. I was the aircraft mechanic for the Dehavilland Beaver in the movie.
T.L., the movie business is a business. It's all egos, money, and danger. There were three plane accidents during filming. No one was injured or died but the planes took a beating.
PPS: During the day in Belem, it was usually 120F with 90% humidity. Every afternoon a huge storm would come in from the Altantic with lightning, thunder, and a deluge of rain. The tides were 18' which served as a twice a day flushing of all the shit from the city of 1 million (now 2 million).
T.L.: One more David Jones story. He was a Marine helicopter pilot. He never told me about those years. But he knew choppers. He didn't know airplanes as well.
Barry Morris was the Canadian ferry pilot who flew the Dehavilland Beaver from St. Cloud, Minnesota to Belem, Brazil. The Beaver had a 60 gallon ferry tank in the camera bay. That's a story in itself.
In any event, Barry checked out Jones for landing the Beaver on that narrow and short dirt strip at the Madre de Deus movie set site.
Barry told me at the hotel that night that Jones could land the plane, "But he comes in low hanging on the prop. If that engine hiccups, he's going in the river."
I read Kurt Schlichter's review of this movie and he makes the claim that the movie was leftist jaded by making the President in the movie 'Trump-like'. Mike Shelby of 'Forward Observer' reviewed it on YouTube last weekend and his remarks about it are pretty much in line with yours, T. L.
In any event, the wife and I plan on seeing it this evening.
"...the superb acting of Kirsten Dunst." Now there's something more shocking than a civil war.
From my view at 30k feet in my White Rage hatecopter, I am naturally suspicious of anything hollyweird in that predictive programming sort of way, and the general tendency toward humiliation and subversion that has come to define the ethos of the entertainment industry.
But merely as a product of our times, I find this curious in many ways. That said, being neither a proper film consumer or a gamer, I offer many grains of salt - and a lime, with my hip shot.
There seems to be a trend in production, certainly in many ways a function of the changing economics and market characteristics driven by the rise of streaming, that is resulting in the increasingly blunted commodification of the end product.
Part economic, but also a kind of off-balance-sheet leveraging of the intensely online zeitgeist of the modern media consumer.
I.e. a coherent and sophisticated backstory that drives a robust plotline through characters developed in ways that further reflect a depth and breadth and continuity of that universe is apparently no longer necessary.
Instead, it seems they can merely draw from their predictive algos of themes and "chatter" of the online soundbyte socials and iterate some strings of storyline to which they just hook a big old flashbang and call it a day.
Conversely, for a while now the storytelling industry in gaming has taken the baton in terms of lavish and intricate backstories and the construction of universes and character-driven experiences that capture a much deeper market, which now likely surpasses passive entertainment in a big way.
So perhaps it is just a function of that passive vs active consumer model. Either way this film has apparently followed this model, a packaged commodity produced for the passive consumer.
And yet its entire impetus is culled from the current year milieu, which has direct ties to actual real-life situations, context, and motivations that are in the forefront of many who would self-select to consume this media.
Interesting.
This is specially the case for the extremely online cohorts. The CW and related "unrest" are regular hot gasses passing through the piping hot carburetor algos as well as the Narrative mills of the propaganda organs which have been othering and unpersoning and generally constructing a real-world alt-reality that is fairly well defined in terms of its moral footing and thus good guys v bad guys sides at this point. Hence why we want to separate.
Yet the CW that is drawn front and center in this mass media product not just ignores all that but actively countersignals against what would constitute common sense assessment of the situation and story.
IOW, handled in the same way one might draw up a space opera with a universe cobbled together just enough to establish that we have always been at war with Jupiter. Because if there are enough explosions and maybe some titties and cool weapons - and it all goes ludicrous speed, there is no need to ponder the mental map of the landscape. It just is.
This proximity/distance, reality/fantasy juxtaposition might just be the way the producers figured it would have to thread the needle to avoid "taking sides", which of course means avoiding anything even remotely pro American/Trump/White/Christian/Rural/Male and so on.
This treatment of the real-world factions, forces, ideologies, and realities of the physical/social landscape that are well understood by even passive observers, calling attention to certain realities of war but ignoring many others, and choosing to make the protagonists members of specific mainstream media megaphones of the empire are all curious choices.
Especially the latter. Which is that while not "taking sides" or following any icky parallels to our present reality they chose to make CW a character study of "journalists". Active propagandists of the Fake News empire in our living reality suddenly become passive observers in this scripted CW; protagonists documenting the unfolding truth. Again, curious.
It is no wonder the war on screen makes no tactical sense and motivations are blurry and it is mostly just "bad things are happening". I reckon that is enough to be entertained. But I can't help but to feel like there is something slippery at hand.
Thanks for the review but I'm done with Hollywood propaganda movies and so called journalists, even on film. The lousy plot line would drive me mad.
Thanks again for the review.
T.L.: PS: I worked on a major motion picture ("At Play in the Fields of the Lord") in Belem, Brazil, the Amazon, in 1990. I was the aircraft mechanic for the Dehavilland Beaver in the movie.
T.L., the movie business is a business. It's all egos, money, and danger. There were three plane accidents during filming. No one was injured or died but the planes took a beating.
PPS: Here's an essay and photos I wrote on my wordpress account about Belem and the movie:
http://timmytaes.com/2024/01/29/david-jones/
PPS: During the day in Belem, it was usually 120F with 90% humidity. Every afternoon a huge storm would come in from the Altantic with lightning, thunder, and a deluge of rain. The tides were 18' which served as a twice a day flushing of all the shit from the city of 1 million (now 2 million).
T.L.: One more David Jones story. He was a Marine helicopter pilot. He never told me about those years. But he knew choppers. He didn't know airplanes as well.
Barry Morris was the Canadian ferry pilot who flew the Dehavilland Beaver from St. Cloud, Minnesota to Belem, Brazil. The Beaver had a 60 gallon ferry tank in the camera bay. That's a story in itself.
In any event, Barry checked out Jones for landing the Beaver on that narrow and short dirt strip at the Madre de Deus movie set site.
Barry told me at the hotel that night that Jones could land the plane, "But he comes in low hanging on the prop. If that engine hiccups, he's going in the river."
Well, a chopper pilot would hang on the prop, eh?
I read Kurt Schlichter's review of this movie and he makes the claim that the movie was leftist jaded by making the President in the movie 'Trump-like'. Mike Shelby of 'Forward Observer' reviewed it on YouTube last weekend and his remarks about it are pretty much in line with yours, T. L.
In any event, the wife and I plan on seeing it this evening.
Thank you for the review, it seems thorough.
I am very likely to avoid any movie theater now, and the last time
we went to one there were very few customers. It will be a DVD
for us, if at all.
"...the superb acting of Kirsten Dunst." Now there's something more shocking than a civil war.
From my view at 30k feet in my White Rage hatecopter, I am naturally suspicious of anything hollyweird in that predictive programming sort of way, and the general tendency toward humiliation and subversion that has come to define the ethos of the entertainment industry.
But merely as a product of our times, I find this curious in many ways. That said, being neither a proper film consumer or a gamer, I offer many grains of salt - and a lime, with my hip shot.
There seems to be a trend in production, certainly in many ways a function of the changing economics and market characteristics driven by the rise of streaming, that is resulting in the increasingly blunted commodification of the end product.
Part economic, but also a kind of off-balance-sheet leveraging of the intensely online zeitgeist of the modern media consumer.
I.e. a coherent and sophisticated backstory that drives a robust plotline through characters developed in ways that further reflect a depth and breadth and continuity of that universe is apparently no longer necessary.
Instead, it seems they can merely draw from their predictive algos of themes and "chatter" of the online soundbyte socials and iterate some strings of storyline to which they just hook a big old flashbang and call it a day.
Conversely, for a while now the storytelling industry in gaming has taken the baton in terms of lavish and intricate backstories and the construction of universes and character-driven experiences that capture a much deeper market, which now likely surpasses passive entertainment in a big way.
So perhaps it is just a function of that passive vs active consumer model. Either way this film has apparently followed this model, a packaged commodity produced for the passive consumer.
And yet its entire impetus is culled from the current year milieu, which has direct ties to actual real-life situations, context, and motivations that are in the forefront of many who would self-select to consume this media.
Interesting.
This is specially the case for the extremely online cohorts. The CW and related "unrest" are regular hot gasses passing through the piping hot carburetor algos as well as the Narrative mills of the propaganda organs which have been othering and unpersoning and generally constructing a real-world alt-reality that is fairly well defined in terms of its moral footing and thus good guys v bad guys sides at this point. Hence why we want to separate.
Yet the CW that is drawn front and center in this mass media product not just ignores all that but actively countersignals against what would constitute common sense assessment of the situation and story.
IOW, handled in the same way one might draw up a space opera with a universe cobbled together just enough to establish that we have always been at war with Jupiter. Because if there are enough explosions and maybe some titties and cool weapons - and it all goes ludicrous speed, there is no need to ponder the mental map of the landscape. It just is.
This proximity/distance, reality/fantasy juxtaposition might just be the way the producers figured it would have to thread the needle to avoid "taking sides", which of course means avoiding anything even remotely pro American/Trump/White/Christian/Rural/Male and so on.
This treatment of the real-world factions, forces, ideologies, and realities of the physical/social landscape that are well understood by even passive observers, calling attention to certain realities of war but ignoring many others, and choosing to make the protagonists members of specific mainstream media megaphones of the empire are all curious choices.
Especially the latter. Which is that while not "taking sides" or following any icky parallels to our present reality they chose to make CW a character study of "journalists". Active propagandists of the Fake News empire in our living reality suddenly become passive observers in this scripted CW; protagonists documenting the unfolding truth. Again, curious.
It is no wonder the war on screen makes no tactical sense and motivations are blurry and it is mostly just "bad things are happening". I reckon that is enough to be entertained. But I can't help but to feel like there is something slippery at hand.