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TechTheatreProf

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Posts posted by TechTheatreProf

  5. Posted

    After the Vicki and Father Cooper scene in the grave yard, we cut to Father Cooper performing some sort of Exorcism in the church. He chants "The body of Christ compels you!" multiple times, but it sounds more like "The Buddy of Christ compels you!" which is crazy because his nickname is Buddy. So he (Buddy) is asking Christ (as his buddy) to compel the evil spirit away.

  6. Posted

    My favorite moments are when guests channel June when she isn't there, especially Jason.

    I love this show and listen to it on my commute to work every week. I usually have my car's audio faded to the rear so I can tune out my children's music. This means that when I listen to the podcast, Paul, June, and Jason sound like they are riding in the back of my SUV, arguing over shitty movies. I love that they ride with me to work every day.

    I have a good friend at work with a similar sense of humor that likes similar movies. He is a science fiction lover and has spoken at length about Highlander. I made the mistake of introducing him to this podcast with the Highlander episode, thinking that it would be a great window into this podcast. Instead, the discussion about the definition of a highlander made him so upset, that he has refused to listen to this podcast ever again.

    TTP

  8. Posted

    The shrunken animals plan was unevenly executed. I am pretty sure there were full sized cows in the space ark as SC gets onboard. So were some of the animals shrunk, but not others? I don't get how this was supposed to work.

     

    Also, I thought for a second that PP was going to kill all of the animals when she pushed the button to release all of the animal pods. What if that button dumped all of the animals out into the atmosphere without parachutes, thus dropping them all to their doom? This would have been fitting with the rest of the film as none of the other collateral damage is a concern to our lead characters, so why would they care about a couple hundred pairs of miniature/normal sized animals.

    • Like 2

  9. Posted

    On the podcast it was brought up that Sky Captain is a complete dumb-dumb. The best example of this is in the "dynamite room" when he tries to use dynamite to blow open the door to escape from the other dynamite that is about to blow the entire room to smithereens. Luckily, not-Sallah arrives just in time to open the door and let them out before the room explodes. They run and are able to make it out of the blast zone unharmed. There is one gigantic blast, not two blasts; one for SC's escape blast and another for the room blast. This means that SC's plan would have blown them up completely, either he timed his fuse wrong and set it to blow at the same time or after the room blast OR his blast set off the rest of the dynamite in the room. Either way his plan was clearly not going to work. I understand that he had limited options, but this terrible plan was doomed from the start.

    • Like 3

  10. Posted

    I've come back after an extended absence, solely to defend this film.

     

    Actually, I don't know if it can be defended per se, but I can try and help explain it.

     

    Ya see, back in the 30s, world war 1 pilot Eddie Rickenbacker wrote a comic strip called Ace Drummond, that featured a daredevil esque pilot who fought various villains. This was later adapted into a movie serial by the same name (with Lon Chaney in a supporting role). There was also a run of stories about a hero named "G-8" who was a heroic aviator, there were the radio shows Captain Midnight (aka Jet Jackson: Flying Commando for TV), and The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen and the classic "AIRBOY". Whereas Spielberg/Lucas were going for the more swashbuckling intellectual hero (i.e. Doc Savage) with Indiana Jones, I think that the attempt here was to mimic the "daredevil pilot" troupe style story. In fact, this is a troupe George R.R. Martin pulled out in his first Wildcards book with the character of "Jetboy".

     

    Look at this picture of the last re-release of this series:

    wild-cards-i.jpg

     

    And that story is a very small (but crucial) part of that series of books. But there is something about the pilot, in his leather bomber jacket, scarf in the wind, gun in hand, that still has a visual appeal.

     

    That's the ascetic I believe the creators of this film were going for, much like The Shadow and The Phantom, they didn't succeed, at least the film LOOKED and FELT like those types of films, in fact I would argue Sky Captain is closer to that ascetic then those films did.

     

    I would also argue that the cast serves it's purpose as a homage to "pulp novels". In the original pulps you got a really high quality glossy cover promising action, danger and sex. This, one could argue, swaps out the high quality glossy cover for a cast of big name actors but like a pulp novel that was written quickly for a dime a word or something, this is stretched out without much story.

     

    Does that make it a good modern movie? No. Spielberg and Lucas were able to maintain the aura of the serial adventurer ala Doc Savage with a nice 80s touch (at least the first 3 movies. Crystal Skull falls apart for the same reason this does, it tries to hard to emulate a style of film that doesn't exist anymore) that Conran wasn't able to.

     

    Finally, minor correction, technically this is "DIESELPUNK" not "STEAMPUNK"

     

    I also assume that war planes and flying in general were still relatively new in the late 30s, that a flying ace with no super powers was pretty exciting for audiences at the time. What heroes of comics or radio had super powers at that time? I know that Superman debuts in 1938, which would have been around the time this film is set, but were super powers a new idea at the time.

     

    None of this means that a 2000s audience would find a simple fighter pilot, and a dim one at that, to be particularly exciting or interesting enough to create an entire film around him. It goes back to a point that was made a few times in the podcast that this might have been better at a short.

  13. Posted

    Watching Hard Ticket to Hawaii and there are a LOT more boobs than there were in Chopping Mall. This film takes the locker room mall scene and ramps it up to a topless jacuzzi needless exposition scene. It also has a "government agent" that is so untrained that she throws her nunchucks at a gunman. Later a henchman performs "surveillance" by riding a skateboard on his hands down a hilly two-lane road past the two "heros", it is super bizarre.

     

    TTP

    • Like 1

  14. Posted

    Paul played the trailer for our next assignment and the voice over uses the line, "The tantalizing wetness of the blue Pacific". How pervy is that? I feel like the Pacific should file a restraining order against the scriptwriter and the voice actor who did the trailer. Maybe the director of the Chopping Mall had a hand in its creation....

     

    I just discovered this podcast a month ago and I heart it so.

     

    TTP

    • Like 8
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