Trains

IdleRich

IdleRich
Green Room does that well. in the end two indestructible good guys are revealed, but thats after 4 of the 6 original good guys die very sudden deaths and keeps you on yr toes.
What the one with the neo-nazis and that crazy killer dog?
Sure. But that's fine cos if one of those two did get hit by a bullet they would die... but in that Spiderman sequence is there anything going on there that could do more than momentarily inconvenience them? They get smashed off buildings, hit by bricks... it's soft play for them.
 

version

Well-known member
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Leo

Well-known member
Or more reasonably... in all films of a certain type there are battles between the good guy and the bad guy (in fact let's say goodie and baddie) and the final one normally has the moment where the hero at his lowest ebb somehow finds the key to defeating his hitherto invincible nemesis. Fine I understand that. But I think that good action films disguise this formula well. Often when it's superheroes and they hit each other for ages they just slam into buildings or whatever and it feels like it's just a minor slap to us. There is one blow better than another and they get really pounded and for a second you think "is that it?" but it can't be cos basically they need some special secret weapon or trick to undo them. Tell me when any super hero or super villain has ever been beaten just by being punched harder? I can't think of one example (I'm not saying there isn't one but I can't name one) and that's why I find it hard to care about these fights.

yeah, fights in superhero films are so boring, like a version of professional wrestling. currently watching season 4 of "the bureau" (highly recommended), scenes in current and previous seasons of characters being interrogated in Iran, held hostage by ISIS and time in a Russian prison. the beatings in each are harrowing, because they're so realistic. Marvel Universe battles are bullshit.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
It was girlfriend's birthday the other day. Among other things I bought her the record The Russians are Coming by Berlin Express, a mid-range post-punker in the same vein as Der Mussolini or something but not as good. Turns out - luckily - the b-side is really cool though. And, as it's about a train, and by a band named after a train (in a way), I felt it should go in this thread.

 

borzoi

Well-known member
pynchon uses trains a lot as a method of imposing order onto the wilderness and merging the mapped representation of something with its actual form. you could say it's the map itself in mason & dixon, the train in against the day, and the v2 rocket in GR. GR also begins with a train ofc.

from against the day:

Lew had too much trouble even locating jackets on individual cases to be able to stand back and put any of it together, but what he could begin to see was that both sides in this were organized, it wasn’t just unconnected skirmishing, a dynamite blast here and there, a few shots from ambush—it was a war between two fullscale armies, each with its chain of command and longterm strategic aims—civil war again, with the difference now being the railroads, which ran out over all the old boundaries, redefining the nation into exactly the shape and size of the rail network, wherever it might run to.

He had felt it as early as the Pullman strike back in Chicago, federal troops patrolling the streets, the city at the center of twenty or thirty railway lines, radiating with their interconnections out to the rest of the continent. In crazier moments it seemed to Lew that the steel webwork was a living organism, growing by the hour, answering some invisible command. He found himself out lying at suburban tracksides in the deep nighttime hours, between trains, with his ear to the rails, listening for stirrings, quickening, like some anxious fathertobe with his ear to the abdomen of a beloved wife. Since then American geography had gone all peculiar, and what was he supposed to be doing stuck out here in Colorado, between the invisible forces, half the time not knowing who hired him or who might be fixing to do him up. . . .
 
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