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Etherdave's Replies
It's a steamed dumpling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll8wgBo7kSs
Actors typically bring a surprisingly diverse range of talents into their trade. Unlike the characters they play, most of these actors worked hard and got good marks in college.
You'll have to decide for yourself if this is a film whose narrative is dominated by any one character, or if it is an ensemble film, employing a cast of complementary and contrasting characters who each contribute something to the plot, and whose collective experiences forms the narrative of this film.
'Animal House' was already a cult film when I was in college and quotations from it were regularly heard. Toga parties were frequently thrown, rarely by the fraternities, who for the most part were working hard to present sober, academic, non-stereotyped environments for their members, usually (and pointedly) in contrast to what is seen in this film.
Comedies such as these, employing young, rebellious, happy-go-lucky characters as protagonists, and mean-spirited, older, authoritarian agelasts as antagonists, typically confound logic where the eventual triumph of the easy-to-spot protagonist(s) is expected, and even anticipated by the audience. This is as true for the comedy film 'Caddyshack' as it is for the comedy film 'Animal House', and in fact, is a principle of comic drama going back to the Roman Republic, never mind the late 20th century. Early Roman comedies featuring a contest of some sort often employed a stock character such as a God or some kind of Famous Person, who would enter the stage and simply announce the victor, often against what was actually presented (for comedic effect), but just as often according to what was presented, as a further piece of comedy to the running comedy of the audience typically having the play's plot spoon-fed to them. This type of comedy can be daunting and overly subtle for the uninitiated. You might do well to study the elements of stage comedy sometime before seeing a similar film in the future, such as 'Revenge Of The One-Legged Postmen', or 'Ernest Donates A Kidney'.
I didn't care for her much myself, and not merely because I'm tired of seeing Cate Blanchett in these roles. Hela is just another mindless Destroyer, pointlessly playing the role of a brick wall for the Real Characters to eventually punch through. At least the Destroyer didn't require an expensive British Person to play it. There was a time when a Hela would have been played by Helen Mirren, who also has/had stature... but then too much of her went South for the Winter of the Rest of her Career, and now she gets to play Grandma Spy with Bruce Willis. So much for Stature. I imagine the same will happen to Ms. Blanchett in time, but for the present she's the one who gets to be the Angry Little Princess in the Little Black Catsuit. Not the Goddess of Death, not a seductress and deceiver of both gods and mortals, just a Pissed Off Little Girl with Super Powers who's pissed because Daddy doesn't love her anymore, and had to be put away because she's a loony psycho a$$hole who just likes to kill things. Ho hum.
Whatever percentage it is, it makes her that much more Native than Nativist Donald J. Trump. How much that 1/1000th seems to torment him, and the simpletons that cheer him on!
I don't tear up when I watch this series, but I do marvel at its continuing influence on the other series that have followed it. I am, however, a little concerned at the reception of the series, especially nowadays, some 30 years after this groundbreaking, though heavily derivative story debuted.
The series clearly owes a tremendous debt to Wolfgang Peterson's 'Das Boot' (1981) and similar films depicting a conflict from 'the other side', and yet we are not shown a group of 'ordinary, everyday guys' fighting a war to which they might feel conflicted, yet still feel committed; we are shown instead a unit of ill-tempered, maladjusted commandoes who, for the most part, comport themselves as undisciplined sociopathic killers, with little regard or compassion for supposedly neutral civilians; one member has little problem with killing children and policemen if it protects his mission, while another decides to instigate a (possibly) alcohol-fuelled rampage rather than a mere diversion (what he was ordered to do), which escalates into a fracas claiming hundreds of civilian lives. Is the Earth Federation solely to be blamed for this carnage? The commandoes seem to have been immunized, since they clearly specialize in 'shock and awe' tactics that have no place in a heavy civilian population, and thus their infiltration operation on Side 6 seems ill-conceived and doomed from the start. The only truly bad person in the Zeon forces appears to be the Commander, who is simply a 2-dimensional cartoon villain lifted from the original series, and a too-easy object of hatred. This man murders his own commanding officer so he can launch a nuclear strike on a supposedly neutral space colony. Detractors of the series often call it 'fascist' and 'sadistic', but I feel the ideas watchers should be most careful with are those echoing the conflicted views many Japanese hold to this day, over their country's role in the Second World War.
It's just not to many peoples' tastes. Also, it was fixated early on (erroneously so, but there you have it) as anti-church propaganda, generally by persons thinking this was intended for child audiences.
The miracles of modern television series production. It's a good moment, albeit one most would miss the first twenty or thirty times. The whole series is filled with such details!
We can't know how many people these deranged psychopaths murdered on their way to Lago, but the scene in which they bushwhack the three range riders clearly establishes they like to murder folks to get stuff, and that they have bullets. I suggest they murdered someone for them, and we are simply not shown that particular instance.
As Frenchy explains early in the film, 'they' call them 'The Sand Pebbles'. US gunboats in Chinese waters were a painful local joke, as they were mostly over-the-hill or hopelessly obsolete harbour or river patrol boats, some, in the words of another character from the film, 'left over after the Spanish-American War'. The moniker is corrupted from 'San Pablo', but the crew have taken the name to themselves, and regard both it, as well as the thankless task to which they have been put, as a badge of honor.
I've got bad news... nobody's going anywhere.