Daigoro

Haha... I've been flying several times a year for just over a decade between Canada and East and SE Asia, and I was just about to jump on you for being a lying sack because of all the bogus details in your story about Air China -- rattling planes, "Chinese Army" instead of PSB, AK-47s -- and then I got to "Sony Discman". Okay, assuming you weren't wearing one for retro appeal but were using Discmans back when they were actually popular, that probably explains everything! I'd say most of the Asian airlines I've tried are great -- Korean Air, JAL, Singapore Airlines, and China's private-owned Hainan Airlines in particular, with great service and -- in the case of KA and Hainan, nice electronic entertainment systems in even the economy-class seatbacks. Cathay Pacific and Hong Kong Express are also good but didn't have the nice entertainment systems. Lower on the scale are the state-owned Chinese giants -- Air China, China Eastern, and China Southern -- but they are still decent to average. Below them all I would rate all the American airlines I've flown, in particular United and Delta. Poorly-equipped Economy cabins, terrible service, getting squished between obese passengers, no free food -- flying in the US is a nightmare compared to Asia. The rundown airports and security theatre don't help the experience either, though those have nothing to do with the airlines. Oh, and the flight attendants... All the Asian airlines have young and attractive flight attendants (both male and female) who are well-coiffed, slim, and move with grace and poise. On Korean Air the women are downright gorgeous. The American ones (and Air Canada) generally have no FAs left under 40, often seem on the verge of burnout, and one Air Canada attendant was so wide that she couldn't walk down the aisle without her hips brushing all the seatbacks...

I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned this, but I recall that Rick lent his revolver to Otis before they set out. After Shane shot Otis he wrestled the revolver away from him, and later returns it to Rick! I haven't read the comics, but I thought this should have been a clear tip off that something was fishy about Shane's story. If Otis died holding off the zombies so that Shane could escape, how could Shane have gotten the revolver back? Did Shane expect everyone to believe that Otis willingly handed the revolver over to him _before_ making a last stand? I thought at the time that perhaps this would be the slip up that would ultimately prevent Shane from getting away with sacrificing Otis, but Dale doesn't mention any of this, he just says he knows what kind of man Shane is...

Hmm, good news if true, but I too would rather see another CFS than another general aviation sim. Way, way back at the 8-bit dawn of personal computing, I would have been thrilled to have a realistic GA sim on my computer, but once sophisticated combat sims started coming out like European Air War or CFS II, I was just too LAZY to ever get into GA sims.

Thailand, not Taiwan. As soon as I read an article about the flooding affecting HD prices a few weeks ago I went out and bought an external 2TB drive, but prices had already gone up.

If you've got a powerful PC, you can run your PS2 games using the PCSX2 emulator. Unfortunately, my i5-equipped laptop isn't quite powerful enough to run the Macross PS2 game without the occasional slowdown, but a lot of PS2 games run fantastically on it, like Resident Evil 4 or the Zeta Gundam game. As a matter of fact, they can look much better on the PC than they do on the PS2 because you can run them at higher resolutions and with anti-aliasing. So long as your computer has a half-decent display card, your CPU is more likely to be the limiting factor. I hook my laptop up via HDMI to my plasma TV and use a wireless Logitech controller to play from the sofa. Good times!

Have seen The Battle of Britain? Or Blue Thunder? The radio-controlled models in both look so convincing you might not have realized they weren't real planes or helicopters. For example, look at the shots of Heinkels crashing into the Channel in BoB. All done with RC models. Note that I'm NOT talking about models in front of bluescreen (like in Firefox or Star Wars), or models hanging from wires in front of a backdrop, but models filmed flying against real backgrounds. I would agree about flying replicas dumping airshow smoke, but I never said that you couldn't use ANY CGI shots. You do realize that CGI can be added to footage of real-life objects, don't you? You could always add CGI flames/smoke to footage of real planes, or use CGI planes only for those shots where they take damage. The Czech film Dark Blue World is a good example of how they used leftover footage from BoB of real planes and modified it by computer to good effect. Also, a mix of effects should be used, depending on what looks best or is practical in a given scene. All of the movies I've mentioned used a combination of methods -- some shots had real planes, others models; some used practical effects like smoke generators, others optical effects or, in the case of Dark Blue World, CGI.

Yep, that is why I said I hoped it wouldn't be _entirely_ CGI. There are probably enough later model P-40s still flying that they could use real planes, but the Japanese planes would either have to be things like Texan trainers or radio-controlled models. (I thought the Heinkel RC-models in BoB that they used for crashing into the sea looked great.) If the budget permitted they could even build flying replicas with real pilots inside. Unfortunately, CGI would most likely be both CHEAPER and SAFER. They had actually built flying replica planes for the movie Flyboys, but a fatal accident early on meant that they switched over to CGI -- which I thought looked terrible. As for the flying, most directors don't seem to have a feel for the real mechanics of flight. Few of them are pilots or flight simulator enthusiasts. And usually the tactics aren't realistic for dramatic purposes. For example, the Mustang looping to get behind a German plane in the trailer is positively ridiculous -- but I suppose it is the sort of tactic that a non-flying movie audience could understand.

I feel the same way too. Not only have I read about them, I've had great fun flying their missions in the IL-2 Sturmovik campaign "White Sun, Blue Sky." It was just electrifying tearing into Japanese bomber formations with only a handful of P-40s. And we're all in luck -- John Woo is directing a film about them! There was talk he was trying to get Liam Neeson to play Chennault, and the film will be shot in IMAX. I think it is currently in production in China, but there doesn't seem to be much news about it. From comments Woo has made, it sounds like it will focus more on the China Air Composite Wing than on the original American Volunteer Group, but that's fine by me -- the CACW probably has fascinating stories too. I'm hoping it won't be entirely a CGI fest though. Looking at the Red Tails trailer, I think it looks cool but also phony as poo. Nothing compares to real footage of real planes like in Battle of Britain. Nonetheless I'm also hoping that Red Tails does well commercially. If it bombs, it could put this Flying Tigers project in jeopardy, as well as other projects like The Dambusters.

Huh? They may be rearming -- like the rest of Asia -- but their current frontline fighter types are the same ones they've been using since the start of that lost decade -- the F-15J and the F-2. I don't get your analogy. EDIT: My mistake -- the F-2 didn't actually enter service until 2000 -- well after the bubble burst, so basically Japan managed to introduce one new type during that time. (Also I didn't know that the F-4 Phantom II is STILL in service with them, though I wonder if that could be called a frontline fighter for them...) The Japanese also drastically reduced their order for the F-2 from 141 planes to 98... Anyway, there is no way the U.S. could emulate the deficit spending of Japan -- 90% of their government bonds are bought by Japanese, while the U.S. relies on foreigners to buy around half of theirs. Not that Americans should want to emulate the Japanese -- with their debt approaching 200% of GDP and their credit rating downrated, some economists are worried Japan might have the next sovereign debt crisis...

August 1 refers to August 1, 1927 -- the founding of the PLA. Nice graphic. But if the U.S. experiences a "Lost Decade" (or Decades) like Japan, you can throw all those dates out the window...

Unfortunately I think CGI will become prevalent for the same reason it has become so dominant in live-action movies -- to save money! For the Spiderman movies, they even used CGI for the alley fight against human thugs. I read about one of the stuntmen complaining that they were set to do the fight scene the old fashion way, but the director or the producer decided to animate Spider-man with CGI instead of using a stunt double -- not because it looked better, but because it was actually CHEAPER than doing it with wire work. As for the Pailsen Files, I too thought that -- in spite of the awesomely depressing opening "Saving Private Ryan" sequence, the series was pretty mediocre dramatically. The exception was the final episode. - FINAL EPISODE SPOILERS BELOW - For some reason, the members of the Perfect Soldier -- er, "Abnormal Survivor" unit -- discovering that they were, in fact, mortal was very moving to me. Normally death in VOTOMS doesn't really register with me because troopers get slaughtered by the dozen, and in this OVA series the death toll seems to run into the thousands. But in the final episode, the deaths of Chirico's squad members seemed much more horrible to me because they had convinced themselves they were immortal. One continuity thing bothers me though. I seem to remember in the original TV series that in the beginning, Chirico doesn't know he is a PS. After what happens in Pailsen Files, how could he NOT realize that he is a freak? Did he lose his memory again? It was so long ago that I watched it that I can't remember.

Yeah, that was bothering me too -- it sounds so familiar, but I just can't place it! The orchestrations sound very similar David Arnold's Independence Day, but the melody isn't the same. There is one part around the 1:05 mark where the melody reminds me of Disney's Beauty and the Beast (the "tales as old as time, songs as old as rhyme" part), but it isn't really a ripoff or homage. Dang, just can't place it... As for the use of The Right Stuff theme, I earlier classified that in ripoff territory... Thanks, that is a great find -- though the two tracks I just downloaded from it were both 128 k rips. Probably not representative. As for everybody else's recommendation, I'll have to try and get Brain Powerd's OST then -- I thought Escaflowne was her greatest ever, but never watched Brain Powerd.

That wouldn't be the least bit surprising if you'd read "The Forever War." Think about it. Starship Troopers presents an "ideal" right-wing society of volunteer soldiers, fighting a righteous war with a well-run army. It's written by a former Naval Academy graduate who was discharged due to medical reasons before he could see any action in WW2. In "The Forever War," the protagonist gets drafted by a lying government into a nightmarish war with virtually no chance of survival. It's written by a former combat engineer in Vietnam who, like his protagonist, was severely wounded in action and spent time recovering in an army hospital. Hmm, now which book is a US military academy going to pick? But seriously, it wouldn't surprise me if they picked Starship Troopers not for ideological reasons but because it is the earlier, more "seminal" work. The fact that "The Forever War" won both the Hugo and Nebula awards was probably irrelevant to them... For me, I didn't find Starship Troopers particularly enjoyable as a story, but as a teenager it had a profound intellectual effect on me. I was already pretty libertarian, so I liked a lot of the ideas in the book, though I think Heinlein's ideal society couldn't possibly work as well as he imagines. (Flogging people for drunkenness?) But after reading The Forever War, I'd have to say it just blew Starship Troopers away as both entertainment and as a literary work. Mandela is a much more interesting character than Johnny Rico (who hardly seems to have any personality at all), and the situations he finds himself in were so much more memorable. I can hardly remember any of the "plot" in Starship Troopers, but many years later I can still vividly remember many parts of The Forever War.

I think the trailer is SUPPOSED to be goofy. The original movie was very tongue-in-cheek. As the other posters have noted, it really is a parody of fascism. I think the director, Verhoeven, was playing a nasty joke on Americans with the first movie. He was trying to show American audiences could get excited at watching a propaganda film just as the Germans were manipulated by Nazi films. Unfortunately, the film sorta flopped, so I guess the joke was on him! The Nazi imagery in this trailer was over-the-top, though... In the book they were actually supposed to be Filipino. Rico states at the end of the book that his native language is Tagalog. I think they changed their country to Argentina because Verhoeven wanted to use Aryan -- err, white people for the film. I think characterization was always a Heinlein weak point. Starship Troopers is really a big polemic for right-wing libertarianism. I think he would have been deeply offended that Verhoeven made it into a Nazi propaganda film... While I'd love to see a more faithful Starship Troopers movie with powered armour, I'd like even more to see an adaptation of Joe Haldeman's "Forever War". That also has combat with powered armour, but because Haldeman was an actual Vietnam vet (Heinlein never saw combat), it is both grittier and more anti-war than Starship Troopers. It wouldn't need any parody to make it interesting.

WTF? Kanno's "Dogfight" track for that scene in the Japanese version has to be greatest orchestral BGM in all Macross... It not only sounds great in its own right, it complements the sequence PERFECTLY, both the tongue-in-cheek humour and the incredible action. I bought the "Macross Plus -- For Fans Only" album JUST for that one track! At the time, it was not available on any of the other Macross Plus CDs. As for OVA vs. movie, while I thought the third OAV volume was incredibly boring, I thought the pacing of the final volume was just phenomenal; the movie climax actually seemed too drawn out to me.