We all want to know what you learned today

[austin_dern]

Some more disjoint thoughts about the flight since I got in safely but don't have the energy to write back to the comments everyone posted yesterday:

• There was a huge line at security check-in, and then another, short line. Nobody seemed to know why there were two lines, so after probing carefully I went to the short line. And that would have made all the difference, since even through the short line I got to my gate exactly at the posted start-of-boarding time, except the long line was so long that the flight crew didn't get through, so things started late but somehow got out on time anyway.
• The security screener was garrulous to the point he was in danger of getting his own unfunny sitcom on ABC. Then I saw in a paper that in the Newest Cunning Scheme To Foil Them Very Bad Real Bad Bad Guys, agents are supposed to use small talk to trip Terrorists into carelessly revealing their Real Very Bad Bad Plans, like so:
  SCREENER: ``What d'ya figure you'll get to do in Chicago?''
  TERRORIST: ``See some family, visit the Art Institute, Museum of Science and Industry, detonate a nuclear device at the John Hancock Building because we thought that was the Sears Tower. Oh, and pictures of Wrigley.''
  Still, bad enough for us introverts to already view strangers attempting to make small talk as mysterious, intrusive, and occasionally pain-inducing alien creatures; now we find out they're also sizing us up to see if we should be arrested on suspicion of being suspects.
• There was a CGI theme in the in-flight movies, featuring Ice Age, The Polar Express, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I realized I'd really like CGI and CGI-assisted movies to drop the video game luge run sequences. Furthermore I learned that while I'd thought I had seen all of Ice Age in random order, scenes being played on infinite loop in TV and DVD stores, in fact there were about eight minutes I'd missed, mostly involving poop jokes, which I'd also like dropped.
• Whilst next on line at customs in Singapore, a guy came looking around, poking around as if checking something, then deposited himself in front of me. Wouldn't budge, either. Finally the family ahead of me -- which had apparently the most complicated customs issues since the Zollverin was dissolved -- got done and he jumped ahead, only to have his passport sniffed at by the inspector, and directed to go way over to another desk, and a fresh (and by that time, much longer) line.

Trivia: Congress voted Friedric von Steuben a pension of $2,500 per year in 1790. Source: The Kaiser's Merchant Ships in World War I, William Lowell Putnam.

Currently Reading: The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester.

Comments

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

I hated the boat ride sequences in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because they really added nothing. I hate to compare back and forth with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the irony in maning being that Willy Wonka... was all about Charlie, and Charlie... was all about Willy Wonka) but at least the one with Gene Wilder being a total freakin' nutjob did something for the film on the whole. The panic wasn't in that it could be a roller-coaster ride, but that they were trapped on a boat with a madman and a couple little orange people. It wasn't a thrill, it was sheer terror. Awesome!

Anyhow, ever since zooming through checkerboard-coloured tubes in all the Sonic the Hedgehog games, luge runs have been kind of passé.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Hm ... well, I certainly liked both the Charlie and the Willy Wonka versions of the movie, but yes, I'd have to say the Gene Wilder version had a scarier boat ride, partly because the effects were more disorienting and his Willie Wonka was more inscrutable for it. (I forget if Johnny Depp's Wonka had the same ``there's no Earthly way of knowing ... '' speech, too, which Wilder delivered so utterly perfectly.) Not that Depp's didn't have abundant wonderful and scary scenes on his own.

The luge run can be a great scene, certainly, particularly if it's part of character definition (see the ``Hundred Mile Dash'' in The Incredibles, as Dash discovers his powers), but too much of it is way too much of it.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well, as for the video-game luge run.. we do have Polar Express and Ice Age. These are two movies which have in their name something about cold climates, which means snow, which means there must be at least *one* sledding/skating/luge sort of thing. I can't recall if Balto had one or not, but the odds are good it did.

For the same reasons, Finding Nemo and Shark Tale had sharks as at least somewhat of villians...

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

But by the luge run I don't mean literally lugeing; I mean a prolonged sequence that's basically first-person, above-the-head view, while the surroundings rush forward, with rapid twists and turns of orientation and often direction, generally with sudden dangerous objects jumping out and needing to be dodged. Sometimes it serves the plot, but often it's to show off how they can get stuff moving fast around the character, and it often looks like a board for the video game based on the movie.

For example, there's the vine sliding sequences of Disney's Tarzan, or the hoverboard surfing in Treasure Planet (you tell me if that's a cel animated movie with CGI assists, or a CGI movie with cel animation assists), Dash's big run in The Incredibles, or so. The swimming/hopping through the jellyfish in Finding Nemo threatens to get close to this, but there's enough cutaways to different angles and enough relevance to the plot that it doesn't fit.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Ahhhh, right, I see. Yeah, that tends to be the CGI equivalent of a Car-though-breakway0glass, doesn't it?

(Haven't seen Treasure Planet.)

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Treasure Planet has its charms, particularly in space-starship design and some of the alien creatures fitted around the margins, but overall ... when you've heard the title you know the plot, and it's really baffling that it's such a generic production when by all accounts this was The Movie that the directors and writers had been trying for fifteen years to do. You'd think it'd have more personality.