What a ridiculous name...Blake.

Spinozasgalt wrote:What a ridiculous name...Blake.

Blake sounds like just the sort of person who would command a small group of rebels against a totalitarian government, 700 years in the future.

Seven of them?

Fallible wrote:Seven of them?

I think that's a good number for a ragtag team comprising crooks, smugglers, and killers.

Cooks, jugglers and millers? An interesting concept.

Alright, you people made me post it...

45 minutes of every prop and model built for the series. In many cases, it's disclosed precisely who built which model, how it was built and how it was filmed...



Excellent craftsmanship on a limited budget...

It's amazing what they could do back then with a few empty washing-up liquid bottles, toilet rolls, and sticky-back plastic.

They also admit to some 'kitbashing', mostly for surface detail.

Spinozasgalt wrote:What a ridiculous name...Blake.

As a first name yes. Works as a last name.

It reminds me of shortcrust pastry.

Nice lookin' caek! Finish with 100s &1000s and it'll sparkle luverly.

felltoearth wrote:

Spinozasgalt wrote:What a ridiculous name...Blake.

As a first name yes. Works as a last name.

LucidFlight wrote:

Spinozasgalt wrote:What a ridiculous name...Blake.

Blake sounds like just the sort of person who would command a small group of rebels against a totalitarian government, 700 years in the future.

There are other Blakes.

Ummm...is that gif from Hollyoaks? Haven’t you got enough shitty soaps of your own to be going on with, young man?

By the way, the name Richard Burton reminds me of red towelling socks.

Ah no ok, it’s an Eastenders gif. You are forgiven. I am sorry to have doubted you. It’s just that what with the whole Emmerdale episode and everything...you understand.

Yes, it’s nearly 2 am and I’m here. The crochet item I’m working on became obstinate as my hands were apparently too warm and sweaty for its liking...we had words. Words like ‘oh!’ ‘Uuuurgh! ‘Shit!’ ‘You little woollen bastard!’

Fallible wrote:Ah no ok, it’s an Eastenders gif. You are forgiven. I am sorry to have doubted you. It’s just that what with the whole Emmerdale episode and everything...you understand.

*remembers how the Emmerdale storyline ended*

7500 (2019) (Prime)

With one exception so far (Snowden), I've never found Gordon-Levitt's nonverbal acting interesting. He's kinda like DiCaprio that way: three stock emotions, practiced in the mirror, but anything more subtle has to be carried in the meaning (or the loudness) of the words; so they both tend to play characters always explaining things out loud. Inception was weird because someone decided there needed to be two such leading roles in the same movie. The director in 7500 splits the difference: a lot of the story is nonverbal, so Gordon-Levitt has to do a lot of that thar physical acting; on the other hand, the verbal parts are disciplined, and it looks like the director (Patrick Vollrath) is restraining Gordon-Levitt's instincts to lean on the usual surface tricks. When the dialogue seems improvised (often), it's dictated by whatever panicked motion is happening at that moment, and it's very trim. It looks like G-L (cheers, Raffi) is, even then, very "disciplined". When I was first typing this paragraph a few days ago, I was imagining the director's deliberate hand in it... but now I think it was a conscious choice by the actor, and something that bled over from Snowden, which was his previous 'real' movie role.

(Wtf is THIS. <-- This looks amazing!) Anyway, go watch Snowden, it's very good, and he's very good in it.

Scattered plot stuff, from my notes app & from memory (I've excised items that happen outside of the plane):
1) Promptly informing the cabin that he plans to land at a different destination in 30 mins (mentioned previously) happens only to trigger other events, and isn't how a pilot is likely to behave in that specific circumstance. Unfortunately, if it jumped out at you this early on, then almost every bad thing that subsequently happens is grueling for the wrong reasons. A pilot feeling suicidal afterwards just for that one action would make a lot of sense to me.
2) You've barely subdued the one guy who has effectively murdered the other pilot & likely wants to (this is post-9/11, and it's on everyone's mind) murder everyone on board and on the ground, but you don't bash his head with that fire extinguisher when you have the chance, instead succumbing to queasiness, or christian masochism, or whatever... which is fine, but
3) in later scenes when it might've come in handy, that fire extinguisher doesn't exist anymore. Huh. Much more problematic, though:
4) you are almost never interested enough to check how the killer is doing, tied up cozily in your 1-handed cocoon, directly behind you, waiting for when the plot needs him to get back into things. This was the dumbest, tropiest insult: the moment that metal canister was not put to good use, I knew what would happen in the third act... but did they have to leave the in-between so dumb and so empty? Come on, G-L. Anyway, even the night-night was immediately followed by a hilariously uncautious response to biological processes (another example below, #6). I guess, like G-L, we're supposed to react as though the immediate danger has passed for now. This is before the cocoon and before #1 above. So by the time #1 happened, I'd checked out, plot-wise. Plot was dead. Yet, plot is all this movie is - I think, right? It's a movie about things that happen, and what people do. Plot.

Act 2 is a series of crises, & the above hints at a rational response to them. Notable weirdness includes:
5) Restoring your co-pilot's headset would've allowed crucial communication with the ground in those few minutes when you had other priorities & your headset apparently couldn't stretch past the seat for whatever fucking reason; it would also have helped to keep him cogent and responding, which was on your mind, since you were trying to do just that; and if he's mostly incoherent, that's info the ground would still appreciate, as they can't see into the cockpit to know even who's in control from moment to moment. And
6) you don't even check for a pulse before pounding his sternum, knowing he's bleeding out from stabs to the abdomen, thereby possibly killing him yourself.

In the last third:
7) Sleepy-boy is awake, and in charge (dun dun dunnnnnnnnn)... yet, confronted with the blubbering baby-jihadist next to him, entrusts him to carry out a murder. And has to tell him over and over again, to do it. Over and over. And over. You would think, considering how uncertain his overall task now is, and the blubberer's clear indication he's not up to it, that sleepy-boy would realize the danger in relying on him. Fuuuuck no, says the screenwriter (Vollrath himself). Blubberer, also, seems to be the last person aboard to know what the plan was - did you notice this? Yeah, weird. More to the point: an extra reason for sleepy-boy not to be so naive.
8) The manifesto is garbage. But if this is how the Crash Syndrome is expressed, I guess that's ok. Better than some projective circle jerk. I guess this is German-flavored liberal guilt (the production is German) so it makes sense that way. The last big wave of idealized, secular, organized terrorism in the west was probably German anyway, and they remember that shit with some nuanced feelings. However, the movie thirsts for 9/11, throughout (with Twilight Zone revamp). The 9/11 hijackers' motivations weren't this adorable. Their elderly handlers' wet dreams about an earthly caliphate factored greatly in each of their minds. And I guess it's possible that clashing with western fascism in their backyards partly fueled the 19 themselves. But this doesn't work so well with a group of Turks born & raised in Germany... or a group of Turks generally. It's just German psychological pastiche about a national discomfort with their largest minority group. Just as most successful American movies about racism have to keep social commentary neat enough for pamphlets and tweets.

I did like the landing sequence quite a bit - if I ignore plot and motivations. The technical execution was thrilling. Almost everything else in the movie is angst with no heart, and politics with no brain.

Prospect was a pretty good low-budget, hard sci-fi movie.

Spinozasgalt wrote:

Fallible wrote:Ah no ok, it’s an Eastenders gif. You are forgiven. I am sorry to have doubted you. It’s just that what with the whole Emmerdale episode and everything...you understand.

*remembers how the Emmerdale storyline ended*