BTW is Doc Christie about?  been a couple weeks from the look of it.  he on a vacation?

 the player  made an OOC post in my football game..they have just come back from a very bad  holiday.

 i assume  the posting will come once   the player has shook off  the bad taste.

https://www.bing.com/news/sear...cruise&FORM=EWRE

i read up on some of it... sound like  or  pipes breaking on chritmas eve was a whole lot better!

In reply to Zobaich (msg # 959):

There are only so many places in my life where I can get away with being a dick...*grin*

On a different note--sat down and watched Devotion tonight.  It hasn't gotten a lot of publicity...based on true events, about a pair of naval aviators just prior to and going into the Korean War.  I know a few people have seen the posters or trailers and said to themselves, "Oh, it's basically Top Gun, but with F4U Corsairs instead of Tomcats or Hornets," but it REALLY isn't.  It's very much more a drama about a couple of men who happen to fly, as opposed to a flying action movie.  And while one of the leading men is the guy who played Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick, his character in this is COMPLETELY different (Hangman was a dick, this character is the kind of guy you'd want in your corner in any situation.)

I really enjoyed it...and I was wiping my eyes by the end of it.  If you get the chance to see it, SEE IT.  It was a solid movie (although I found some of the aerial footage a little distracting...after seeing Black Sheep Squadron as I was growing up, the behavior of the Corsairs in Devotion just felt a little 'off', somehow...and I know they used real Corsairs for Black Sheep Squadron.  I suspect a lot of the footage they used was a CGI plane around a mock-up of a Corsair cockpit.  But considering that's the first negative thing I have to say about the movie, and it's more a movie about the pilots than the planes, I'd call it an easily livable problem.)

I'l have to look for that.

when it comes to action stuff..i wince watching  some WWI  films , knowing that  most og tht stuff   would have left wings flying off....as You said the Black Sheep, those  were pretty good  scenes, but it didn't take long to realize, alot of them, where the same  shot from other angles.

 sailing ship battels   are hard..but alot of the movies did  try to catch the  effects of a Ball Hit the wood  and sending splinters  every where.

BUT...after saying all this.I really don't care that much..it bothers me a little..but..if the movie  is 'serious' enugh, then i can over look it...if it gets campy or  comic..then i can walk away.

Yeah, that shouldn't be a problem.  Part of the reason I even noticed it is because I remember hearing that they were practically beating the bushes, internationally, to come up with enough flyable Corsairs for Black Sheep Squadron.  It's four decades and change later, coming up with six functional planes would be tricky, and there are a few shots that leave me quite certain they weren't actually flying (because the actors are NOT pilots, but the shot is a long, slow push in from a wide shot of the plane to a closeup of the pilot, through the cockpit canopy...and unlike the F-14/F-18, there wasn't a two-seater version of the Corsair, so anything that involves the 'pilot' being recognizable in the cockpit involves either some CGI work of the plane around them (or, I suppose, building a mockup of the fuselage...which they had to do for a few shots, as well), or shooting the plane and then digitally mapping the actor over the actual pilot (which is also relatively easily doable with today's technology).

But there are a few shots that had me questioning, "Okay...I'm not a fighter plane expert, but I've never seen footage of a plane flying quite like that...seen a lot of motion-control VFX shots of them, but this doesn't seem like the kind of production to go that route...maybe CGI?  But if it's CGI, it's high-end stuff...the kinematics feel a little off but the visuals of the plane itself are incredible..."  But that's just me being a plane nerd with a handful of knowledge about how they'd do visual effects like that.

I mean, the shots where they're filming from the bottom of the plane, as it approaches the carrier?  and the tailhook catches the wire?  I suppose you COULD fake that with CGI, but it looked pretty crisp, for that kind of footage, it could probably have been easier to find an old Corsair (there ARE still a few in the air, for air shows and the like) and hired them to do a few 'carrier landings' on a fake carrier deck (which was how they shot the decktop sequences for Hot Shots...)

When this comes out, I really hope the DVD/Blu-Ray has some 'making of' extra content on it.  I'd love to hear how they did it all.

  those  tail hook grabs   could be CGI, or make   just  cleaned up   vids from Docs  and other  movies.

  back in the day , all war movie s would have   a Voice over part, showing  War  films as the voice  described what was happening, then ""poof""  you're   seeing the pilots and ground crews as the  have a scene  with them getting ready, or arguing   with the  crew chief because they 'need that part'

if you ever  watched  'flyboys' there's alot of CGI  in that, and its  damn good ( from my perspective )

 The Blue Max   made me  have to 'look the other way" when there were supposed to be Bristol Fighters, or SE-5s...but they where  Olive drab Tiger Moths..they didn't fly until a could years after the  war.

 I get ,'Historic  aviation " a new Calander every year..i have saved them the last 5.. very big  calendar  yeah Moth  has    planes on and they are  all  either  refitted, build 'new' by hobbyists, or Mock ups.. i like those...

 My brother and  I put together  a bunch of planes, and made  some obscure planes  from a book i got at the  library using parts  from   other   kits.

 so? i know a tiger  moth  from a DH-4  or Bristol fighter.  anyway... i like the Movie..i hated   after i read the book, that the ending was different... damn ending  would have been what in would have written!..don't know why the movie guys screwed it up!!

 anyway.. CGI is our friend. Movies  i have always  wanted to be made, are now made and that's  ok with me!

You'll see that same sort of thing with tanks in a lot of war movies...by the time they got around to making the movie, it was nigh impossible to come up with an authentic Panzer tank from WWII, so they'd repaint American tanks in WWII German colors and send it out there.  Ironically, most of the German tanks you seen in 'Patton' are repainted M60 Patton tanks.

It's nice when they can use the real thing...but that's not always practical, especially if you need a bunch of them.  And it's always tricky to use CGI next to a practical one...the practical one can give you a super-accurate model, but it's still hard to get CGI to look completely real when it's side-by-side with the real thing...if it's JUST CGI, it's not as noticeable, but when you see them side by side, something just seems a little wonky, in some way...otherwise unnoticeable details are too sharp, the shadows are just a little bit off, reflections aren't quite right...they're getting better all the time, but it's still almost impossible to make a digital copy that has just the right amount of 'imperfect' to feel real, and it's REALLY expensive to do the high-end stuff.

I don't mind it, any more than I minded motion-control shots of models (as long as the models were moved in realistic ways...one of the (several) gripes I had with the movie 'Iron Eagle' was that the combat sequences looked like they were dogfighting two RC planes and filming it...it was very definitely NOT the real thing), as there's no good way to do stuff like that, especially when you start talking about 80-year-old airplanes, and other vintage stuff that's super-difficult to get on camera effectively (I'm pretty sure all their shots of the carrier at sea were also CGI, since the US hasn't had a carrier that didn't have an angled flight deck for about fifty years or so, now...)  It's when they start doing needless CGI, really bad CGI, or CGI whose only justification is "Look at this cool thing we can do now!" (looking at you, Star Wars prequels and Special Editions!) that it starts to bug me.  Like any other kind of FX work, it should be there in support of the story, rather than the story becoming a reason to show off what you can do (which is one of my gripes about a bunch of stuff in the Transformers movies...)

::chuckles::  I remember  watching  Patton with my Dad. I said.. 'That's  Noyt a pazer!, that's an American  tank..."

 he didn;'t want to believe  and i got my Panzer  and  Patton tank out of  my army guy box and showed him, explaining   the  turret  differences  and the 88 as compared to the  American barrel.

 Dad  was an Navy  guy, i thing i ruined the movie for  him though.  His buddy in the mine was a Tanker in WWII, I guess my Dad told him and the guy laughed and said i was right.

 a sad but odd thing  about that guy and  my Dad.. they were good  buddies, he went  fishing  with us alot, and  he and his  wife  played 'pitch and Putt' gold with my Mom and Dad. it was the olny dport they ever  did ( well,,Dad was a biker  and  did hill climbing, i wasn't supposed to know that, but i found a plaque in the  wood shed)

 Anyway... when Dad  died, it was Just like when mom died, i did all the  hsutlign and talking to the  undertakers..  i let my brother   have a big say in the caskets, but i talked  him into  'battleship  grey' for my dad.

many way, i asked  about the files  at the cemetery  and made sure  Navy stuff  was in the Obit...

 In Comes   the VFW guys to have thier  ceremony and i was shocked.. 'wow!, My brother  did something after all!"...nope, they made a  hard left into the other section of the Building.. I scurried  after them , to see if they  would do a service for Dad too..., then in looked at thebother Casket...it was My Da's buddy, they died the same day, and  none of us knew.

 suddenly people were going back and forth  to pay respects..very odd way to find out...sort of  Errie , two buddies dies  at the same time.

Comes bouncing in, wagging tail.

I'M BACK!!!!

Someone posted links about Arvia so I need not have a moan... it was worse than the news stories. Wi-Fi so bad they gave me my money back (had paid for the 'ultimate' package) but couldn't do much online.

Now in Southampton visiting with offspring who lives there.

Getting caught up with RPoL now...

welcome back!... we are crsing to our  nest destination..there is down time and  duty stuff going on..you have a  Bear -thing, on your lap.

I decided to bite the bullet and pay to go see a movie at another theater (since it was pretty certain that we wouldn't be getting it...)

Violent Night was darkly humorous...but it had a lot more heart to it than I expected.  If you don't mind a lot of gratuitous violence, it's worth checking out.  It would have been nice if they had done a little more about how Santa became Santa (they presented an extremely minimal amount of backstory for him, mostly to justify him knowing how to fight), and some of the characters were very definitely crossing the line into caricature...but it worked for me.  And it gets a little schmaltzy in places, predictably so...but, again, it worked for me.

I mused, as I was driving away from the theater, that they could very easily do a comic book adaptation of it and it would work really well...kind of the inverse of what they did with RED (which was a comic book before they made the movie, and if you know that, you can see where they framed up shots in the movie that would have been individual frames in a comic.)

But, yeah...the local theater would pretty much never show it.  We rarely show R-rated movies to start with, and usually when we do, it's something that's likely Oscar fodder (although sometimes they throw curveballs in there...like Tropic Thunder and Deadpool 2).  But this didn't make enough money and doesn't have the critical buzz that would justify it coming here.  Plus, some of those scenes were pretty graphic.

But I don't regret going to see it.  It was a lot of fun, and David Harbour makes a really good disenchanted Santa Claus who finds a reason to fight for someone's Christmas.  The supporting cast was pretty good...cartoonish, but enjoyably so (even the sociopaths that were the bad guys.)

my son and i talked about going to see it.he likes Harbour. from stranger things. I liked  him from  Black widow .

 thus  far  we haven't, the trailers  i saw lok pretty good. I like the Bad  guy too, he played in John Wick movies.

It's worth taking the time to go see.  Harbour's brilliant, John Leguizamo is in fine form, there are a pleasantly diverse array of memorable scenes that fly in the face of the typical image of Santa Claus in a way that appeals to a warped sense of humor (and some of them weren't even used in the trailers!)  It's one that I'll get when the DVD comes out and will likely watch around Christmas for years to come...

I love Santa kicking ass.
still remember a fake clip used in one Christmas film (think Earnest saves Christmas, but it's been a bit).  Santa is held hostage in a movie called 'Santa Slay'.  winds up getting rescued by Lee Majors.

I think you're getting a couple of 'em confused...or else they used the Lee Majors bit more than once.  It was a promo spot, early in 'Scrooged', for a Christmas special called, "The Night The Reindeer Died".  (Scrooged is my one gotta-see-it-every-year Christmas movie.)  And, yeah, when I first saw the trailer for Violent Night, I couldn't help but think someone had seen that and thought, "So, what if we make Santa the badass, instead of having someone come rescue him?"

 Watching   football around the holiday, there was a Commerical for a exercise bike. showed  Sant   drop a buralp bag of cookies into the thrash, he takes off his   coat , and he has a pillow  under it,  then he   gets on the bike  and he is ripped. and he  ho ho hos while placing his hand on his  6 pack to make sure you notice he is ripped.

 I laughed  and told  the guys  at football, that  so really  smart  Ad  guy put that together   because of   the new  movie.

https://www.bing.com/news/sear...e+City&FORM=EWRE

 Roy?  read the first one from the 'independant'...looks like GArrat landed   in salt lake!

 people can move along, i know some seemed stalled.

 Garrat is ok, since he  isn't  on the ship or with the fleet  right now.

Hey, it’s a good place to install Receivers.  There’s less atmosphere at that high up, and the Mormons have never been friends of the EDT

Hard to hide a ship from satellite surveillance, though.  Depends on whether the on-going drought reverses itself...panic-mongers are speculating that the Great Salt Lake could be completely dried up in five years, but that's based on the current drought cycle sustaining itself.  Utah had another major drought when I was a kid...and just a couple of years later, we had so much snow one year that they had to divert a river to run down part of Main Street in Salt Lake City because the river had risen to a level where it was starting to degrade the canals dug for it to get through town, and the spring runoff was still weeks away from hitting its peak.  And GSL rose so high that the governor installed a group of massive pumps that could pump water out of the lake and onto the salt flats (the pumps have never been used, the lake's level normalized the next year and stayed pretty constant for a couple of decades).

So, if the lake makes a comeback, great place to hide (not very good access to anything Viking-related, though).  If not...there's really no good place to land any sizable ship that wouldn't be easily apparent to decent orbital surveillance.

On an entirely different note, I found a new takeout place tonight...I saw it last month, but it wasn't open yet...driving home tonight, I thought I should check and see if they were open yet...

S'ghetti to Go--that's pretty much all they do.  Spaghetti.  You can get it with marinara, al fredo, or a mixed sauce (which tastes really good but is a disturbing shade of dark pink).  You can get meat on top of that.  Every order comes with garlic bread.  I think they've also got a meatball sub sandwich.  And that's about it.

But man, it hit the spot tonight...

That's pretty cool,  we have to admire   someone who  took that as a standard bearer  for their business.

 maybe they will widen their selections to  all manner  of  pasta, as they see if  Bus8ness  is good.

Maybe, but if the town is big enough, doing one thing really really well is important.  Me? I drop by and get garlic bread as a snack. And some simple alterations on that could greatly increase their income. Garlic breadsticks could be eaten while driving.