Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Movies I have watched or re-watched recently:
Lake Placid (1999): Loved it! I don't care what anybody says, this is a much better movie than Jaws (1975); the pacing is faster, the characters are more endearing, the dialogue is funnier, and the special effects are prettier (the croc holds up very well for being a quarter-century old). Only the music is worse (nothing can compare to the legendary shark theme), but even then I found the use of Bob Marley's "Is This Love" at the end to be quite charming.
I was a little surprised by how open the characters are sexually; they don't actually show anything, but the female deputy literally tries to stop the rich guy from diving into the beast's lair by offering to sleep with him. I guess 90s movies were wilder than I remember.
Pearl Harbor (2001): Famously summarized by Roger Ebert as "a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle." That description is not wrong, exactly, but it makes it sound worse than it really is. Yes, as a result of the popularity of Titanic (1997), the movie was changed from a straight remake of Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) into a historical romance. And, yes, the Doolittle raid was unnecessary; the movie could have perfectly well climaxed with the attack on Pearl Harbor. But, for all of that, I found it very watchable. The two men had no chemistry with the female lead, but they sure as hell had it with each other, a bit like a live-action version of The Road to El Dorado (2000).
I actually watched this movie with my mother. It is very hard to find movies to watch with her, because she refuses to watch anything animated, anything science fiction or fantasy, and anything without a Spanish dub, while I refuse to watch terrible Netflix movies full of unnecessary gay characters and true crime slop. Her main takeaway was that the Chinese are bastards for bombing those poor people on the streets, and that I should not marry a Chinese woman. I tried to explain to her that A) the Japanese were the ones bombing Pearl Harbor; China was on the Allied side of the war, and B) Japan never bombed the hospital; that would be a war crime. She replied that "they can't make stuff up", therefore it must be true. So my main takeaway is how important it is to control what normies see onscreen, because to them, that is reality.
Taking any opportunity to promote the fantastic work being done by animated battle maps YouTubers:
Montemayor's ultra-high-quality and pedagogically-clear Attack on Pearl Harbor 1941
The Operations Room's recent 3-part exhaustive re-treatment Pearl Harbor - Tora! Tora! Tora!
and for good measure (though not maps):
Montemayor's three part series on the battle of Midway is fantastic. Much more interesting than the 2019 movie.
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