g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
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As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
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Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est




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Sunday, January 21, 2007
02:47 - Cable got a Netflix account

(top)
I have a nomination for the Most Predictable Movie Line Ever™.

It's the one at the end of this exchange in Windtalkers, the WWII movie about the Navajo code-talkers who provided communication encryption in the Pacific theater. There's this one scene where the unit led by Nicholas Cage is moving from one spot on Saipan to another, following a battle in which the Dumb Racist Southern Guy who'd been ripping on the Navajo guys had had his life saved by one of them.

Dumb Racist Southern Guy: "It kinda makes you think... I remember by grandpa sittin' on his porch talkin' about huntin' Injuns, how he'd get three dollars a head for 'em, like they was gophers or somethin'... and now one of 'em saves my life. Kinda makes you think, how maybe fifty years from now, maybe we'll be sittin' down next to some Japs, lookin' for someone else's ass to kick."

Nicholas Cage: "You think too much."

(DRSG stops in his tracks, looks distant and bemused; camera trucks in on him)

DRSG: "Now that's somethin' I ain't never been accused of before."

I swear, I was saying that line to myself, almost in that exact wording, as it came hovering in like a helicopter and settled slowly and noisily on the film's script. This scene was so cheesily tacked-on, it felt like it had been written by someone completely different from whoever did the rest of the film.

Note well: movie made in 2002.

Anyway—quite a decent movie in most other respects, except for the really bad foley of the flute being played by Charlie, with the notes having not the slightest bearing on what his fingers were doing. Geez—I'd seen better attempts at audio sync in anime dubs from the 80s.

Anyway, this brings up another semi-related thing: is it just me, or have the cable channels suddenly gotten access to a whole bunch of actual good, watchable movies in the last three or four weeks? Between Spike TV, AMC, TBS, and a couple of others, I find myself flipping to movie after movie that I've never seen before but had always meant to, or that I'd seen but am always in the mood to see again—instead of endless reruns of Van Wilder and PCU, it's stuff like Taxi Driver, Something's Gotta Give, Crimson Tide, both Rambo: First Blood movies, all the Back to the Futures, Kill Bill vols. 1 and 2, Gangs of New York, The Beach, Groundhog Day, Drowning Mona, Caddyshack, Fargo, both Ghostbusterses, and now Windtalkers—the list just goes on. What suddenly happened? Did someone's catalog suddenly get all discounted?

Whatever—I'm not complaining. But it's made it moot for me to have stuck a lot of these things on my Netflix queue...

UPDATE: Oh, and the "Saipan is Japanese territory. This is their home... but we're gonna take it away from them!" line was also cute, I guess.

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