I siuspect the real reason they didn’t show any exhaust is that, no matter how well you do it, it looks hokey (at least in the pre-CGI era), so they simply left it out. And the result looks very sophisticated and adult.
Kubrick reportedly was also considering the use of atomic explosions as space propulsion, a la project Orion, but was dissuaded from doing so, probably for the same reasons – it’d be hard to show convincingly (not to mention that it would require a ton of not-very-useful exposition). So he simply showed us that row of hexagonal thrusters at the end of the Discovery and let the audience draw its own conclusions.
I noticed something odd about the “this is my rifle; there are many like it but this one is mine” scene from Full Metal Jacket. Watch it, tell me if you have the same question I do.Are Pvt. Joker and Pvt. Cowboy planning to sleep with their glasses on?
Not the millionth viewing, maybe the dozenth. I was watching The Wicker Man (the good version with Edward Woodward) a couple of nights ago and took notice of a scene where Sgt. Howie is looking through the island’s registries of deaths. He observes that two of them (Rachel and Benjamin, I think they were) were proper from-the-Bible names, and Ingrid Pitt who keeps the registries responds that they were both old.
It only then occurred to me that the first names we hear in the movie are those of younger folk–Rowan, Ash, Myrtle, Holly, and of course Willow–and all of them are botanical names as befitting members of a fertility cult. There’s Miss Rose too, but I think that’s her last name. The older people would have been born and named while the island was still Christian before the first Lord Summerisle changed the islander’s religion.
That said, Moore’s run on Miracleman is one of the reasons superheroes should exist. It’s that good.
Also, as an aside, *The Death of Captain Marvel *is, essentially, the first real big imprint graphic novel. Without the success of that and God Loves, Man Kills we might not have trade paperbacks today.
I was just watching the video for the Beastie Boys song “Sabotage” and I still think it’s great. It has this tongue-in-cheek vibe to it where it looks like a mid-70s cop show. It has all the clichés: Guys in bad hair and ties running, looking around on rooftops, a perp pulls out a knife and tussles with the hero, cop cars tearing down streets and bouncing over bumps. At one point, the video jumps to a scene of a car exploding with the words “For Screening Purposes Only” supered over the bottom. I probably noticed that back when it came out but had forgotten about it in the time since.
I’m 63 years old. My father was a music major in college, and when I was a kid my parents listened mostly to classical music. The only pop music I recall hearing at home was Calypso, which my dad liked.
Until the Beatles.
I was about seven years old when they hit the scene in the U.S. Dad didn’t care for their early rock ‘n’ roll stuff, but we all enjoyed the movie A Hard Days Night for its Goonish humor (for some reason, a local Baltimore radio station began running the Goon Show in the early 1960s, and we all became fans), and Dad appreciated the Beatles’ more sophisticated compositions, starting with “Revolver” and “Rubber Soul.”
But I never heard any other contemporary popular music in the house. I might have known vaguely about the Rolling Stones or the Beach Boys because friends were listening to them, but I didn’t.
So I was well into my adulthood when I realized that “Back in the U.S.S.R.” was a parody of Beach Boys songs.
Cabin Pressure, the BBC radio comedy, takes place mostly aboard a Lockheed McDonnell 312 jet. You will not be surprised to learn that Lockheed-McDonnell is not a real airplane manufacturer, but is instead a composite of Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas.
What took me an inordinate amount of time to appreciate was that the pilots of the plane are named Martin and Douglas.
I don’t think this was mentioned yet, but about a year or three ago I was watching the video for Billy Joel’s The Longest Time and noticed that it was almost a capella. There’s drums and a bass guitar in the background, but other than that (despite the video), it’s all Billy*.
*I’ve read some conflicting info about the exact instruments and background singers, but in any case, no guitar and no piano and it’s still a capella style.
Damn, I think John Finnemore is brilliant, and I’ve listened to the entire series four times through (from Abu Dhabi through Qikiqtarjuaq to Zurich), and never noticed this. Good catch.
Toy Story was the first BIG 3d movie…a format that was supplanting old school 2d movie making. In it is a story about a Cowboy, and is fear of being replaced by a Space man, and how they learn to coexist. Kind of a metaphor for 2d->3d movie making.
I think there are actually two versions of the video, the “For Screening Purposes Only” explosion, very fake dummy falling off the overpass and the guy getting thrown out of the car wasn’t in the version that used to air on MTV all the time. The MTV version also had a black dude kung-fu dude IIRC that’s not in the linked version.
Look, I am NOT playing Yellow Car. It’s a silly game that’s just so …yellow car… easy it’s barely a game at all.
In case anyone’s wondering, from the beginning of Cabin Pressure’s fourth episode:
ARTHUR: Here you are, skipper… wow, is that the Sahara?
DOUGLAS: The vast sandy thing on the ground? That’s the chap, yes.
ARTHUR: Wow. It’s brilliant!
DOUGLAS: Always at hand with the mot juste, aren’t you, Arthur? Yes, the Sahara Desert is brilliant, just as the Niagara Falls were brilliant, the Northern Lights were brilliant, and that chap from RyanAir burping the theme to the Muppets was really brilliant.
ARTHUR: Come on, that was brilliant. Wow, *camels! *
DOUGLAS: And how would you describe them, in a word?
