joel_rosenbaum

You know what's even better? Oatmeal cookies... without raisins.

If we were going to go with that reggae vibe, I would have picked Rockers.

alright folks, let's get into this. Let's start with some Keith Haring...

It's like a whimsical Festen!

The logic of this movie is an impregnable fortress, but here's another issue. When taser thug is planning to kill Max, he brags about its "fifty thousand volts, motherfucker" before preparing to shoot. Well, sure, a taser does have 50kV of electrical potential but only a few milliamps of current. That's why a taser is a non-lethal weapon. Shooting the taser into a puddle of water is just going to reduce the net potential of the electrical charge since the current has so many more places to go. In other words, it won't do a damn thing. Maybe the movie is positing lethal tasers in 2004, but why bother? Those lasers seem to be way more effective. That thug is a goddamn idiot.

When Max carries Mia Sara from the house with the armed bomb inside, he sure takes his sweet ass time. After actor/activist Ron Silva dies, Max has about fifteen seconds to grab Mia Sara and get the hell out of the house. Granted, he might not know how much time is left on the bomb, but some urgency might be in order. You would think that an elite police officer would know that a fireman's carry is far more efficient than a bridal carry, but even if he didn't, he should probably be running down the stairs to get out of the house as quickly as possible. But setting that aside, why not just throw the bomb out the window? It's not very large, and a good athlete should easily be able to throw the bomb a safe distance away. Max knows roughly how powerful the bomb is because he remembers it from his lived experience. He could throw it in a direction opposite from where his unconscious younger self is, so that the house itself can shield him and Mia Sara from the explosion. It doesn't look like neighbors are a problem, either.

That might have been subconscious part of my decision making process. This was my second idea. You don't wan't to know what my first idea was.

This is the middle movie of a Michael Schultz trilogy of sorts. You could argue that it's his own "Three Flavors".

I could hear that interpretation, but I actually took the reference more straightforwardly -- "You're are shark, George, but this guy is a bigger shark".

Okay folks, sorry for the delay. I was going to put together a clever write-up, but my brain isn't functioning today. Without further ado:

Oh shit, I'm on the clock! Grab a snack folks, I'll have my pick later today.

Did anyone else notice how long Max and his former partner were falling during his jumper scene? On first watch, the scene seemed a little long. So I rewatched the scene and counted twelve seconds between their leap out of the window window and the time portal opening up to bring them back to the future. Apparently they would have fallen approximately 1400 feet during that span. Not only did they not hit the ground, Max and his partner had about twenty storeys to spare when the portal opened up. Well, there were no buildings in the world tall enough for them to fall for that long. The closest would be the Chrysler Building, which was ~1000 feet tall. While the Chrysler Building is in New York, it is definitely in Midtown and not on Wall Street. Now the second tallest building in the world at the time was 40 Wall Street, which is obviously on Wall Street and currently goes by a different name that we can preferably not discuss. That building is ~900 feet tall and the top floor lies somewhere below that. No matter how you add it up, neither of these buildings were tall enough for Max and his partner to survive the jump. Even if they had jumped from the apex of the Chrysler Building, those dudes would have been dead for going on three seconds by the time the time portal pulled them through. P.S. There's a fascinating discussion about these exact two buildings on this episode of 99% Invisible.

Re: reminiscing over home videos in happy times... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADl0wC_cAbk

The Pauli Exclusion Principle is almost certainly what Timecop Theory is based on (at least spiritually). But it pretty much has nothing to do with time travel or anything else. In my very simplified understanding of quantum mechanics, the Pauli Exclusion Principle states that no two electrons (or other elementary particles) can occupy the same energy state (i.e. the same orbital and spin number). The significance of this to QM and how it relates to classical mechanics is incredibly complicated. However, the basic idea is that Pauli Exclusion reconciles something that we already know as our physical reality -- two forms of matter cannot occupy the same space -- with the seemingly counterintuitive laws of QM. Long story short, Timecop Theory is bullshit.

Related to the robbery that started the movie, are we supposed to feel bad about it? I mean, it sucks that people were killed, but the Confederacy existed for the purpose of continuing the practice of slavery. Stealing their gold, thus shortening the duration of the Civil War and hastening the end of slavery in the United States, sounds like a pretty good thing to do!

I had this exact same thought. But let’s assume that the Confederacy minted crappy gold bullion loaded with carbon impurities. To expand on what you mentioned, carbon dating operates on the principle of radioactive decay. You can therefore estimate the age of something based on the relative abundance of carbon isotopes. If that bullion was transported through a time machine, it will only appear as old as the time it took to travel through the time machine. So what are they verifying with the radiocarbon dating? That the gold is actually ~130 years old or that it appears suspiciously new? The former is basically impossible since the gold is not actually that old, while the latter would need further validation. Any idiot could mint his own fake Confederate bullion, right?

"one hippo all alone... calls two hippos on the phone"

We do keep some cells more or less forever: stem cells, eggs (until ovulation), and terminally differentiated cells (some neurons, some muscle cells, the eye lens).

Yes, someone who travels into the past is now in the past -- their "present" is the unlived future. Therefore they should not be able to return to their own time. It pretty much unravels the entire premise.

Zouks is on WTF this morning (6-29-17) (In case anyone missed the earlier ones, Paul was on episode 124).

I won't be available for any sort of live movie watching -- I get my HDTGM movies in short bursts throughout the week -- but I'll look forward to you all discussing them.

Big, big, big fan of this movie. Going to be hard to watch in present context.

Freak Scene (with my son!) by Dinosaur Jr.

I'll go against the grain here and declare that I'm not really a big fan of most of the Coens' output in the last ~15 years. Raising Arizona has always been and remains my favorite Coen brothers movie. They nailed the characters so precisely (I particularly agree with nakedbrunch's point about Glen) . This is an easy yes vote for me.