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Post by paulpogue on Sept 21, 2008 17:48:09 GMT -8
You know, I wouldn't vote for John McCain these days either, but regardless of the podperson he's become this last year, if he's elected, I at least have some respect for him and can find hope that the old McCain might still show up. He's 70 years old, he's survived cancer, he survived the POW camp, and realistically this is "the maverick's" last chance to make his mark on his country and the indeed world. There's a small part of me that wants to see somebody like that in office, regardless of party affiliation. John McCain might very well be the sort of man who'd metaphorically tell ANYBODY in Washington to go fuck themselves if he thought it was the right move for the country. I *almost* want to see that, excepting for the fact that I disagree with many things he'd probably do if elected. Does that make sense? I would totally be behind that -- even if it meant McCain supported policies I disagreed with -- except that ALL evidence for the last five years indicates that McCain has gone so completely pod-person that he'd be in the pocket of the neocons once he was in the Oval Office. And with Palin in the Naval Observatory, the wacked-out far right would NEVER let McCain forget what he owed them.
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 20, 2008 6:37:56 GMT -8
God help me, Ann Coulter was apparently actually quite cute in college. But that may just be the sword.
Everyone else, I can at least vaguely see their modern-day selves in the old pics. But Coulter 1988 has been completely wiped away in favor of the Bimbot of today.
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 17, 2008 13:25:10 GMT -8
Bill Paxton and Lance Henricksen, two of the stars of Near Dark also appeared in Aliens. Two for three, but I suspect even Pogue might not get the third casting link - Jenette Goldstein, who played Vasquez in Aliens, also played Diamondback in Near Dark. Cameron seems to have taken a shine to her, since he cast her again in Terminator 2: Judgement Day as John Connor's adoptive mother. Other movie stuff that everyone needs to see: TCM recently played "The Women" last night. I HIGHLY recommend you all pick it up on DVD (and avoid the current remake like the plague as far as it sucking and blowing). The dialogue's great and the casting knocks it out of the park. Your tastes surprise me sometimes, in a good way. I'd have caught the Goldstein one, and do you one more by mentioning I surprised my friends by pointing her out in "Titanic" as the redhead Irish mom. Also, "Near Dark" was directed by James Cameron's then-soon-to-be-wife Kathryn Bigelow.
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 16, 2008 9:23:43 GMT -8
Liking Near Dark earns you points on this forum. I'm waiting for Paul Pogue to point out its connection to Aliens ... I felt it so self-evident it didn't need to be said .
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 15, 2008 20:59:31 GMT -8
I'd actually rate Harry as Menace higher than 50%. Menace seems to have issues with Norman, and his equipment is refurbished Goblin equipment. 75%. I'd also say that Hal Jordan becoming a White Lantern is at about the same level. Hal Jordan is the Greatest Green Lantern That Evah Lived, There Can Be Only One, Hal Ours Who Though Art in Heaven and all that. Anyone else becoming a WL would go counter that. Maybe, but Geoff Johns, for all his Hal love, isn't actually one of those Hal-as-Messiah types that he seemed to threaten to turn into circa "Rebirth" -- he's got a pretty good grip on Hal's limitations. Sinestro as White Lantern, in retrospect, makes a tremendous amount of sense, given that Johns has gone to great pains over the last four years to backengineer Alan Moore's Blackest Night setup into a redemptive arc for Sinestro. This idea that Sinestro ALWAYS KNEW this hellhole was coming along like a freight train, and that EVERYTHING he has ever done has been part of a grand plan to stop it, is nothing short of brilliant. It also fits the general idea that Sinestro is, at heart, a basically decent individual who will stop at nothing for the greater good. (Not to mention someone who is so adept at this that he fucking outgamed the Guardians AND the Anti-Monitor in a carefully crafted scheme to move it all forward.) The idea of being forced to do evil for the greater good is a strong one, and one that deserves to be explored more in comics. (Genre stories as a whole usually follow the Star Trek II principle of "the good of the many does not outweigh the good of the few" and all that, but in the real world, it doesn't usually work that way. In the real REAL world, the few -- by which I mean all of western civilization -- benefit at the tremendous detriment of the many.) Hell, Tony Stark WOULD be a powerful case study in this, if it weren't for the fact that the creators themselves have relentlessly paraded him as some sort of paragon of Right and Good, and that he was totally right all through Civil War. But a decent story along these lines has to admit, first and foremost, that a person making these sort of moral compromises is still, at day's end, the Bad Guy. Doing that with Tony Stark is highly problematic. With Sinestro, it fits perfectly.
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 14, 2008 13:36:25 GMT -8
Paul Pogue here, looking for the private folder .
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 14, 2008 13:27:40 GMT -8
Oddly enough, I was just thinking about "The Karate Kid Part 2" not long ago, and almost posted something just with my random thoughts, because from a structural and storytelling standpoint, it is very nearly the perfect sequel.
For one thing, it does all the things a sequel SHOULD do, and does them very well. There really isn't any necessity for a sequel after the first thing, so the only real story to tell is "What kind of relationship do Miyagi and Daniel have after this?" (And given that the third movie did a HORRIFIC job of telling any kind of credible story, even with largely the same production team, the fact that #2 did so well is even more amazing.)
It picks up the character and plot strands from the original and carries them forward: Who is Mr. Miyagi, exactly? What is this elderly karate master -- who tells us very little about his past in the first one -- doing out in the middle of nowhere, and why is he so defensive about his past? (I forget the exact details all these years later, but I'm pretty sure the scene where Daniel makes him a case for his Medal of Honor and Miyagi rebuffs him was in the first one -- it was the biggest and for the most part only hint that Miyagi didn't simply settle here, but rather was running from something.) Why is a guy whose karate is, by what little he tells us, a critical family tradition, willing to teach it to a relative stranger? (Answer: The only other known living master of the art form is Miyagi's mortal enemy, and he feels that the knowledge should be passed on to SOMEONE in a form Miyagi approves of.) At the end of the day, if KK1 is Daniel's story, KK2 is very much Miyagi's story.
And, of course, it does the basic task of taking everything from the first movie, dialing it up a couple of notches, and escalating the threat levels. (Hence the remarkably potent performances for both Chozen and especially Sato.)
But my favorite bit of the movie is how it takes a lot of the basic elements of the first movie and then completely inverts them, sometimes in a way that is never even explained, but is perfectly logical.
Two prime examples: Miyagi is an excellent martial artist, but he's an even better talker. (I remain convinced that his poor American accent is at least partially an intentional trick on Miyagi's part to make people underestimate him.) Roger Ebert felt that Pat Morita had already completely earned that supporting actor Oscar by the time of Miyagi's scene in Kreese's dojo, when they set up the fight. Miyagi is in his enemy's home territory, surrounded by his students, and is yet completely in control of the situation. He uses words as deflecting devices so cunningly that Kreese never even realizes he's being played and Miyagi gets EVERYTHING he wants.
In other words, Miyagi's standard operating procedure in a crisis is to try to maneuver the situation to his best advantage with carefully chosen words. We see this in KK2 when he goes to speak to Sato while the latter is toughening his hands on a heavy block of wood. Miyagi adopts his best non-threatening tone and asks, "Is that the same trunk we discovered together on the beach?" -- trying to push things away from their feud and into happier times. Sato, however, doesn't buy it for a second. It's one of the reasons that Sato is such an effective threat -- he knows every one of Miyagi's tricks and can counter every one, to the point that Miyagi is boxed into an absolutely inescapable hole by the third act. Only the windstorm that proves both he and Daniel's courage convinces Sato that Miyagi really, really isn't a coward and spent those forty years precisely so he WOULDN'T have to kill Sato.
Bringing us to the other element that I think works so well, even though it happens in two seconds and is never explained. Early on in Daniel and Chozen's final fight, Daniel brings out the Crane Kick, the most potent tool in his arsenal. It's a nearly perfect weapon, we've been told -- "when done right, is no defense" Miyagi said first time around. Daniel fires it off at Chozen, apparently with perfect form -- and Chozen blocks it and smacks the hell out of Daniel for even trying.
When I was young, I found myself thinking "What the hell -- I thought that COULDN'T be defended?" But upon further reflection, it makes perfect sense. Yes, there's no defense as far as Miyagi knows, and in 1940, when he learned it, there probably WASN'T. But only two living people knew that move -- and one of them has spent forty years thinking about virtually nothing except how to defeat Miyagi in a fight. Sato, knowing full well the power of the Crane Kick, probably spent YEARS trying to develop a defense against it in case Miyagi tried it on him, and given that Chozen learned everything he knows about karate from Sato, it makes sense that he passed this secret on to Chozen, his heir and the person he intends to carry on the future of the Miyagi-do form.
So there we have it. Just two moments, but they reflect a tremendous amount of thought and structure applied to a genre that rarely has great amounts of either, and one of the reason KK2 is one of the great sequels of the 1980s.
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