From Over the Pond, a Touring Car race at the Goodwood Revival (what I done missed this year sob sob) that features practically every Le Mans-winning driver of the past two decades, some former F1 drivers, NASCAR’s Jimmy Johnson, and Rowan Atkinson: all driving cars what I loves (okay, the Ford Galaxies not so much).
Next year, I promise… I’ll sell some guns if I have to — just watch me.
Via Insty, here’s another piece about how today’s movies suck, from a sound perspective. (The article is only listed as “Updated Sep 22, 2022”, so it may actually be a rewrite — and a lot of it seems familiar.)
I was going to comment on it in a post, but a lot of what I planned to write seemed awfully familiar to me. And somewhere in my broken memory, I remembered that I’d already done just that, in Mumbles In The Darkness earlier in June of this year.
So that’s my comment.
Which leads me to a tangential thought. In looking to see whether I had written on the topic earlier, I used the “Search” function on this very web site, to the right of the page, just under the header.
All I did was type “movie” in the search bar, and a veritable timeline of my writings on the topic followed.
And I found myself wasting spending the next hour or so re-reading some of my old posts, and apart from anything else, I was amazed at how little my opinions have changed (not too surprising, considering the writer, but still).
Here’s a thought. If ever you’re horribly bored with life, are sick of playing on the Internet but couldn’t be bothered to get out of your chair, type in a random topic (e.g. “rifle”, “travel”, “Colt” or “socialist” and so on), and go back in time to see what I’ve written on the topic.
As journeys go, it’s cheaper than driving or going to the range (!!!!!!). As to how much you might enjoy it, I make no comment.
Ron Spomer reminds us that in the end, shooting is just plain fun.
I have sufficient .22 ammo supplies on hand to support such a shooting activity for about the next ten years.
And let me tell you that if I had a place like his, with .22 spinner targets and such scattered all over the countryside, you’d never get me away from there.
I mean, never.
I see with sadness that veteran Brit actor David Warner has gone to join the Choir Invisibule, and the screen has lost one of its better character actors in consequence.
My favorite of his roles is in the (apparently-forgotten) time-travel piece, Time After Time, in which he played Jack The Ripper to Malcolm McDowell’s H.G. Wells (storyline here).
What I loved about this movie was that when H.G Wells (the good guy) is transported from his comfortable Victorian life forward to modern-day San Francisco, he finds it incredibly difficult to cope. Not so for the Ripper (Warner), who finds that evil transcends culture and, for that matter, time as well — and among San Francisco’s prostitute population, he has an even greater choice of victims than in 19th-century London. And Warner is beyond-words excellent in the role.
R.I.P.
Part One:
One of the greatest aircraft ever. Sit back and spend an hour to see why.
Part Two:
Fascism, explained. 45 minutes
Excellent analysis, from an unlikely source.
Part Three:
Middle-Aged Sex. 30 minutes
I find the parallels to today quite interesting.
Here’s an article which resonated with me:
Why are today’s TV shows and movies so GRAY?
I’ve now got to the point where the movie has been consistently dark during the first five or ten minutes, off I go to somewhere else. Ditto the Brit movies in which the dialogue is either mumbled, spoken in an unintelligible accent or both. Also, the ones where impenetrable slang is in more than half the dialogue — I know, it’s realism, but still — I don’t expect characters to speak Received English via the Royal Shakespeare Company either.
And for gawd’s sake, S-L-O-W D-O-W-N when you speak your lines.
Pardon me if I just want to know what the hell is going on in your precious Work Of Art. Cinema is becoming like modern art, where the expression is so personal that it needs explanation by the auteur. And don’t give me that “mood” jive, either. You wanna see a mood, just watch my expression as I hit the “outta here” button on the remote.
I do make an exception for the Scandi-noir movies and TV shows, because the Scandis only ever get about two hours of sunlight a day, so an average production would take years to shoot if they waited for sunny days.
But even that’s a problem: in every police station I’ve ever been in (and there have been quite a few hem hem), the rooms are brightly lit to almost daylight levels. In the movies, I’m constantly yelling at the screen for someone to hit a light switch.
No wonder they miss so many clues: they can’t fucking see them.
And no wonder so many people are ditching Netflix, Prime et al., when so many movies are being made according to the Intangible / Unintelligible Sludge formula.