That’s the movie that’s based on the book that @docosc’s brother wrote.
Indeed! I know that @Docosc is quite proud of his brother!!!
I’m gonna read it next, so I can read it before my family and I go see it. I’m in the middle of reading a book on the history of concentration camps right now…
I like his stuff.
We watched Helsinki Napoli All Night Long (1987) yesterday fun movie. West-Berlin looks cool but Wim Wenders isn’t much of an actor.
That’s OK….he’s a great director!
I mentioned earlier that I started watching The Pitt. If you have Max, I think it’s really good. I also just learned something from the latest episode that I should have already known about, because this is history that should be taught in our schools, but it’s not. They had an elderly black patient come in, who had dementia, but they also found out pretty quickly that he seemed to know an awful lot about medicine. They discover he had been one of the original medics in the Freedom House Ambulance Service in Pittsburgh. This was a real group. It was the first modern EMS service in the nation, and it was staffed by local young black men who were given pretty advanced medic training. It served the predominantly black Hill District of Pittsburgh, and was so successful that the city decided to copy their model and create a city wide ambulance service…which of course was staffed with all white people, and which forced Freedom House to close. There are apparently a couple of documentaries about Freedom House, which I’m going to try to find and watch.
I second this recommendation for The Pitt in general and the last episode in particular.
This isn’t ER 2.0: the actors and the roles they play are truly diverse, there isn’t any workplace romance, and the medical details seem correct. It’s worth checking out.
Yeah, I always watch the Marvel movies and think “all of this looks extremely fake,” then I watch some behind-the-scenes snippet showing them filming that exact scene totally practically and it looks fine, but it’s increasingly common to not just have digital sets, but use filming techniques that create 3D digital representations of the actors that then get rendered for the final footage. So you have digital “costumes,” de-aging (and other touch-ups), re-lighting, even changing camera angles in post, such that none of the original scene is visible. So it doesn’t matter what was actually filmed, when they’re effectively covering it all up with CGI.
Hollywood being Hollywood, it’s totally believable that someone decided to replace her face because some dude was so angry that she’s not 25 anymore, but Marvel are also the kings of “we’ll make all the decisions about the film in post, and if we don’t have what we need, we’ll just fake it with CGI (oops, the budget ran out, so the FX houses will have to half-ass it).” It’s not unknown for (non-Marvel) films now to insert some dialog in post and use CGI to totally fabricate an actor’s face talking to match it, so I imagine the Marvel movies are doing all sorts of weird, completely unnecessary shit in that regard.
Every so often, I post up about The Thief and The Cobbler, the most amazing movie that was never released.
I learned about this movie when my daughter was young. We had a VCR in our minivan and were on a long trip. We stopped into a gas station and there was a bin of random VHS tapes in there. My daughter picked out this one that looked like some knock off Aladdin, (edit-this version is called Arabian Knights).
Turns out, Aladdin is the knock off The Thief and the Cobbler.
We came to love the movie we’d bought, but it was absolutely perplexing. There would be one scene of the most amazing animation we’d ever seen, then another of the most janky-ass stuff you could imagine.
That version we got on VHS was not the real The Thief and The Cobbler. That was the version that the insurance company took out of the hands of the director, Richard Williams, and turned over to another director with a ticking clock and a Korean animation studio to fill in the missing gaps.
The Thief and The Cobbler is Richard Williams passion project. It took over 20 years and was never completed. He took on directing Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to fund the production.
There are other places to go to find out the story of this incredible movie and why it never was released, but there is a team that is restoring the film to as close to finished as it can possibly be. They dug through dumpsters to find missing footage and raised funds to purchase old cells. They have restored the narration by Vincent Price, his last work.
I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend watching it. I don’t know how they did it, but there are no commercials in this FREE YouTube video.
It is all hand drawn animation.
FULL LATEST VERSION OF THE RESTORED THETHIEF AND THE COBBLER - NO COMMERCIALS
Here’s a few of the incredible scenes…
The Magician ZigZag’s moving playing cards - he has extra joints in his hands to make the animation extra challenging.
This chase scene that moves between 2D and 3D has long been one of my favorites. Watching the latest full length version, there are so many scenes that play with these illusions.
I’ve heard the legends about this movie but never seen it (or really been sure it’s possible to see it in any coherent form). Since you’ve so kindly provided that link, I’ll make sure to check it out soon. Thanks!
Yes! I’m so excited to talk about it with someone.
The new version is super impressive. I think I saw the Mark 4 version, and this new one, they’ve done so much. There are sections where there are only pencil tests, and I love to see those moments.
As someone who is a fan of animation, this team took on so many impossible tasks. Each character has its own animation style. The Thief’s character is amazing to watch. There is one scene where he is stuck in a pipe, and all the action is just the pipe wriggling a little bit, but you feel so much a sense of his movements. Insane. It’s so good.
There is quite a bit of history that i’ve also stumbled onto that left me stunned and then angry. Not having been raised in the US there are things that I might not be aware of that might be obvious to someone born and raised in the US, but finding out about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in the Watchmen TV series was sobering.
And not TV/movie content, but I also had no idea about the 1985 MOVE bombing by the police. I found out while listening to an episode of Questlove. 1985! When I found out about this I was so unbelievably mad. We aren’t talking about old times, this was in the mid-80’s.
A lot of people born and raised in the US didn’t learn about the 1921 Tulsa massacre until the Watchmen tv series. Because our schools don’t teach all American history. They teach white American history.
I saw it first in '97-'98 on VHS. When my kids were young I found a VHS at the local movie rental place, and that version seemed quite a bit different. Your explanation clears that up a bit
There’s a few explainer videos out there about this project. It’s really heartbreaking. There were literally people who missed their children’s births to work on it. If you think about Richard Williams doing Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as a fundraiser for this work, it gives you an idea of the impressiveness of the animation. Like, that animation is unbelievably good, and then he just saw that as a cash grab compared to The Thief and The Cobbler.
Season 1 was great. I think it’s the best Star Wars anything ever made. I’m excited for season 2, and may rewatch season 1 because it’s been awhile.
I read that title as And/Or and was wondering what it was
i was hoping someone beat me to to posting about it. it looks great! can’t wait. my small hope is that Andor runs into Andy Serkis’ character from S1 at some point, and that Serkis has some small hero arc as a result.
I’m definitely looking forward to it, but the very non-Starwarsian music in the trailer was creating a little bit of cognitive dissonance for me. I guess I’d get used to it if the show’s soundtrack featured similar music, but it would take a few minutes.
Andor season 1 writers: Hey, I have an idea. Let’s squeeze a great prison break movie starring Andy Serkis into one episode!
It sounds like the dumbest idea ever, but holy crap did it work.