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I feel like over time I'm gradually realizing how John Milius's script is a lot more layered and clever than I originally gave it credit for... and I've probably seen this movie dozens of times.
I've tried writing just enough to realize how insanely hard it is. So much to mentally keep track of, but when things work and the narrative circles around to close a theme (like a good call-back in a comedy routine) it's a brilliant confluence of intellect and creativity.
That certainly tracks because it was around 2013 that he very nearly mindlessly ran me over with his car (a silver Dodge Caliber) on Lincoln Blvd in Santa Monica when I was crossing the street walking away from Whole Foods. I only got a glimpse of him driving but he was pretty unmistakable. Something was clearly wrong with him as he was just staring straight ahead and not paying attention to his surroundings.
I think Thulsa kinda spelled it out when he spoke to Conan before sending him to the Tree of Woe. I gleaned that he had shifted tactics somewhat from steel to flesh, ie. Conqueror to Cult Leader. It made me think he was gradually phasing out taking land by force and enslaving people (such as Conan's village) and opting instead to infiltrating with his snake cult and building towers, influence, and subterfuge in city after city. This explains why Conan ended up being the final slave at the wheel as I think that whole side of Thulsa's business was just left to rot on the vine over time. I imagine that Red Beard character who was Conan's handler left with Conan because he noticed his paychecks diminishing over time or he was disenchanted with the new cult-like direction Thulsa's empire was moving in.
Ad hominem attacks on Trump don't do much to convince anyone and serve little purpose than to give yourself a cheap emotional thrill, papering over the underlying anger that the values you espouse don't work and aren't particularly rational or popular.
It's amusing to see liberals (or anyone who irrationally hates Trump and calls him names) suddenly concerned with inflation when, for the last 5 inflationary years, they've said we have the best economy ever. It is more of statement on partisanship than it is on economic fundamentals. I think it's pretty rational to think though that 3 weeks is not long enough for a government, even if it had the power to, to reverse inflation (not like EITHER political party really wants what you and I as consumers want, which is DE-Flation ie decreasing prices, because then we'd be more likely to save rather than spend spend spend like good little debt-slaves).
I encourage you to either try starting/running a business in a red state vs. a blue state and discovering for yourself what works better for you, or to read some books such as "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. It's actually a very fascinating read and helps dispel a lot of oversimplified statements like "corporate greed".
But I agree any inflation at this point is deadly but sadly inevitable - the US economy has been so mismanaged and abused for decades that there's pretty much no room for Trump to maneuver which doesn't cause severe financial pain. At the same time, the status quo of government deficit spending by the last administration will only dig the financial hole even deeper, kicking the can down the road to an even more inflationary economy for future generations to deal with - either with even worse inflation or worse unemployment, but likely lots of both. And this isn't Trump or Biden's fault, but the FED as well as every president (to varying degrees) since Woodrow Wilson.
You guys speak as though Kamala or Biden would be a more adept and able statesman.
Tariffs are not good at all for the economy (at least not short term) because they do lead to price hikes which negatively affects anyone wanting to buy anything. However they do give domestic competition a little boost so there's that (which allows more companies like American Apparel to exist). Ideally tariffs could replace the income tax (as they did before 1915) but it'd essentially mean increasing all prices by about 100% to actually balance the budget with them, and that'd be devastating to poor people. The best thing about tariffs is that other countries are actually buckling and responding to their use as a threat. Since other countries tariff American imports to their countries, why can't we do the same back at them? I know they hurt our own buying power, but it's not like we're just troglodyte cavemen for using them (almost all countries in "the garden" of Europe use them).
And it's not like tariffs are a new thing or unique to Trump. You could argue that the only reason that we have had any domestic electric car industry is due to tariffs on Chinese imports. The Chinese can make electric cars for like 1/3 the price, so there's no way Teslas could compete with that.
The cheesy practical effects added significantly to both the charm and the creepiness of the show. I liked how the DVD releases let you choose between new and old effects but now all the streaming versions just default to the CGI, which sucks.
About 7 years ago I wrote a screenplay about a militia hunting illegal immigrants (intentionally written so that people both for and against immigration would think it's on their side) and put it on Blacklist to try to get it picked up... then within a couple years a bunch of movies came out that were suspiciously similar but just different enough that I can't do much about it. I hate Hollywood.
I pretty much agree with everything you said but I'd say the "best" of the sequels is Force Awakens. It didn't close the narrative but at least made you think that the rest of the sequels would (and they didn't). It had some cool scenes and opened especially with a lot of promise (which it undid pretty quickly as it went along).
Last Jedi to me felt like a giant troll on the audience. A few of the fake-out laughs like the ship landing that turned out to be an iron steaming clothes confirmed that to me. The pointless addition of Laura Dern's character (who was awful) and Rose really sank things, plus the awful politicking over weapons sales on the gambling planet which was rolled into politicking over animal cruelty felt to me like it had no place in a Star Wars movie.
RISE I think was just glorious trash. It was entertaining in the theater but also just a throwaway experience that made no sense at all. All together the sequel trilogy turned out to be a giant mess.
The prequels were all utterly incompetent on a technical and story level, and baffling too because Lucas had so much control and all his resources poured into them. I look at them now as some giant "tech demo" for CGI in its relative infancy rather than actual movies, because they're all addle-brained and hard to follow. However, he was at least somewhat creative with them which the sequels failed to be. Unfortunately he disrespected his own characters to the point where it hurts the original trilogy (hard to take evil Darth Vader so seriously when we've seen him as a scrappy blond boy with a backpack, who ludicrously invented C3PO at age 8).
I spoke to him very briefly over the phone once (around 2010 or so) and he seemed perfectly normal and decent to me. I was also at a small party at his LA house (he wasn't home; just other members of his family) and there was no bad energy around the place and it wasn't some giant gated mansion or anything. The most surprising thing I saw was that he had a boxed set of the Vacation movies lying around on his table as though he'd actually recently watched it.
I guess there's also this:
6) They were in too many films in a row which lost money.
There was one director I worked for in LA where this was absolutely the case. He had two big opportunities to direct big studio films. Both film bombed pretty bad (especially the second) and he got no more chances to direct studio films.
It's funny how unforgiving the movie business is for starring actors and directors, but pretty much nobody else. Like, nobody blames the make-up department or the cinematographer for why a movie bombed. There's even very little blame given to writers for a bad movie (or credit for when a movie is good) that loses money. Same with supporting cast - nobody seems to care about them having been in bombs. I suppose it's because the stars are seen as a marketing device which either does or does not work, and the director is seen as the person who was supposed to make a movie make money, even if a lot of things (like how the movie is marketed and released... sometimes even the script, editing, casting, etc) are not in their control.
My guess is that we'll be on the ticket with Vance that year, assuming he does well in the next few years. However that doesn't necessarily bode well as sitting VPs running for Potus have a pretty low batting average (never worked since George H.W., and before him, the last time was Martin Van Buren). So by the logic of odds, I would put her as the favorite for the 2028 comeback.
I was wondering "what happened to her?" as she was all over the place back in, like, 2005. It's as though a lot of A-list celebrities just vaporize overnight, or only were A-list for 3-4 movies and then disappear back into acting in either nothing or a bunch of low-budget arthouse stuff that gets no attention.
With actresses it's a mixed bag, but I wonder what is the main killer of their career of the following:
1) Having kids and taking a few years off to focus on family.
2) Becoming unattractive in some way, be it weight gain (Kirstie Alley), extreme weight loss (Christina Ricci), aging (pretty much everyone at some point), doing and saying a lot of weird things (Sean Young, Anne Heche), or bad cosmetic surgery (Rene Zellweger).
3) Merely hitting some arbitrary age, be it 35 or 40 or 45. Somewhere in there it just isn't believable to have them as a romantic foil to the hunky hero. Every now and then there's someone like Monica Bellucci or Salma Hayek who can keep it going even longer than that though.
4) Making enemies with too many powerful people (Ashley Judd).
5) The public just plain getting tired of them, either via over-exposure (Reese Witherspoon) or too many "antics" (like Paris Hilton or Bri Larson).
You could practically make a movie out of her. She first gets widespread fame in destroying the presidential aspiration of Kamala Harris in the 2019 primaries... and then does it again, switches parties, and finds herself as Intelligence Director! Just watch - she is at this point the most likely first female president in American history... probably in 2032 (assuming the world lasts that long).
The film is extremely impressive for what it is and was a large part of why I decided to start making my own films. Consider that Van Bebber made a FILM (as in shot-on-film) with a shoestring budget and 80's technology and directed it, starred in it, did all the martial arts choreography AND bloody special effects (which are mostly pretty good) by himself! Usually when a filmmaker wears that many hats, the film falls flat on its face, but in this case it works very well. The film is energetic all the way through and there's not a single scene in it that feels auto-pilot like they just got the bare minimum coverage to move the plot along (as most low budget movies are prone to do). I know it's super rough around the edges and hard for regular film watchers to like, but the older I get and the more I know about filmmaking, the more amazed by this movie I become.
For the longest time, this movie was the "edgy" "sophisticated" answer heard after asking unsophisticated people what their favorite movie was. Jacob's Ladder and Shawshank Redemption hold similar titles.
That would be hilarious in some movie where someone hires Michael Myers to be a private detective. He'd just put a hat and trenchcoat on over his regular costume and mask and then just silently follow whoever he was assigned to. However he'd be terrible at conveying any information since he doesn't talk much and would leave a lot of bodies behind.
When betraying your friends to an army of serial killers, it's not a good idea to stand out in the open and obviously point out to them several times where your friends are/were sleeping. This makes it impossible to infiltrate your former friends later and also gives them reasons to not like you and call you names behind your back.
I've tried The Mexican Carry several times and it's never worked out too well. The 1911 can fall out way too easily if you do any more than just stand in place. Even going to sit down with it causes problems.
Well supposedly the murder rate is about 80% of what it was in 1986, so that's at least somewhat of an improvement, especially when factoring in population growth and that the economy is far more inflationary than it was back then. I think it's a lot easier to catch serial killers with forensic evidence now than it was back then, so that sort of crime is far reduced. However I think inner city gang violence is just as bad, or worse, than it was back then.
I am bumping this 17 year old thread because I STILL demand answers. That map scene is a pretty easy scene to be thrown-off by for anyone who lives (or has lived) in the White Sands area.
Incidentally I did visit the Blainey Ranch (outside of Palmdale, California where they actually filmed THEM) while location scouting for a movie that never got made about 12 years ago and it still looks exactly like the movie. There's even a slight crater in the ground where they originally dug the ants' nest opening. An odd choice to stand in for New Mexico though because there's cool Joshua Trees all over the place, whereas the White Sands area (Tularosa Basin) has none (mainly Mesquite Bushes and various cacti). For whatever reason, the presence of Joshua Trees did not throw me off as much as a kid because I figured there must be a hidden grove of them out in the desert somewhere.
It's also odd that the film makes no mention, nor takes into account any consideration, of the several large military bases nearby (namely Holloman AFB, Fort Bliss, and the smaller White Sands Missile Range, all of which I believe existed in 1954). I don't think you could ever really drive out in the desert and set up a trailer as depicted in the movie in the region they show (according to the map James Arness has)... maybe outside of around southeast of White Sands in the Orogrande/Dog Canyon area. My dad took my boyscout group camping north of Holloman once or twice back in the 80's when he was in the military and there are a couple cool oases hidden in there on Wsmr Rt 6 just west of Tulie Gate (complete with crayfish and lots of large trees - great places to set up a trailer), but there's no access to civilians.