The Letter for the King

The Letter for the King | Official Trailer | Netflix
Entertaining little sword & sorcery adventure about a group of teenagers on their way to becoming knights and the misadventures that befall them. One of the group is a girl because this is the 21st Century and we can't have the guys going off on an adventure all by their lonesome. In my neanderthalish mind I seriously doubt any girl ever took take up arms. But the world is full of strange and wondrous things, so I suppose it's possible that it did happen on occasion.

Then again, police dramas on TV inevitably include a high speed car chase. I thought the TV people probably heard about one such incident and based all their car chase scenes on that one incident. Then I moved to Phoenix and I discovered that there was one every day.

So I suppose it's possible that tough girls went to war more often than you or I might suppose. Because between the skimpy records from dark ages and our cosmic insight, supposition is all we've got.

There's a scene of a horse and rider jumping off of a cliff and another of the same horse and a different rider jumping off of a sailing ship. That was pretty cool. All land in the water.

There are a few fight scenes, lots of scenes of people galloping their horses across the landscape, and lots of wisecracks from our wanna be knights.

The Plagues of Breslau

The Plagues of Breslau - Trailer
Tu Brother TV
It's 8:15PM, we've finished watching our movie for the night and it's still light out. Tonight's movie is a Polish Crime Thriller. We listened to it in the original language, presumably Polish, and read the English subtitles. There was a scene at a horse race and another at a motorcycle race, which was pretty cool. There were a couple of scenes that involved people jumping out of the way of a runaway thing and they were pretty bad. Or maybe people are just really bad at detecting approaching danger. They get bowled over left and right. Maybe they got a discount for the large number of falls.

The murders are bizarre and grisly, but nothing worse than what we saw in Game of Thrones.

The movie trots out a bit of history to fit in with current events, but it's fake history, as Diksha Sundriyal at Cinemaholic explains:

Is The Plagues of Breslau Based on a True Story? 

No, ‘The Plagues of Breslau’ is not based on a true story. It is a crime drama, written by Patryk Vega and Sylwia Koperska-Mrozinska. In the film, Magda uses the Week of Plague as the historical reference for the serial killings happening in Wroclaw. She tells the story of Frederick the Great. After taking over Breslau in 1941, he wanted it to become a great city. For this, he needed to weed out all the bad things that would hold back its peace and prosperity. He considered six human fallacies to be the plagues that would never let them grow. 

They were degeneracy, pillaging, corruption, slandering, oppression, and treachery. To show everyone how serious he was considering his plans, he devised the Week of Plagues. Every day, apart from Sunday, one person, who had committed any of these crimes, would be publically executed. Apparently, Magda reads about it in a book of local history. In reality, there is no account of any such practice in the reign of Frederick the Great.

I think Diksha means 1741, not 1941. Frederick the Great died in 1786. He went to war against Austria in 1741. Nine months later they signed the Treaty of Breslau. Breslau is the German name for Wroclaw.

Update May 2023 replaced missing video.

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Sisters of War

Sisters of War | Telemovie | 8.35pm Sunday 14th November, ABC1
Sisters of War is a right horror story. It follows a small group of Australian women trapped by the Japanese Army on the island of Rabaul (near New Guinea) during WW2. Just in case you had any doubt's about how awful war can be, this movie shows it to you in excruciating detail. And it's not just the physical difficulties (like torture), but the mental strain of knowing horrible things are happening and there is nothing you can do about it. And then there's not knowing what is going to happen, or if the information you are given is correct or meant to deceive you. No wonder people bitch about war. Of course you could eliminate all this mental anguish by getting yourself killed, but there is no guarantee that your death would be quick or painless. So unless you have got a sure way out, you don't even want to consider it. However, if you decide to stick it out, and you survive (always a dubious proposition) without too much brain damage, you should be well equipped to deal with the kind of everyday bullshit makes the evening news cycle, i.e. turn it off.

Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino

Picture Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino taking his WW2 battle rifle and telling those kids to get off of his lawn.

P.S. We have a picture of the Gran Torino because when I first wrote about this movie eleven years ago I couldn't find a decent picture of the car, and even now this is the only one of the movie car I could find.

P.P.S. According to my post about the New Guinea rescue operation, we never attacked Rabaul. I'm going to reconcile that with this story by saying even a little scouting mission could easily result in significant damage. I mean, here we are sending our headstrong boys, mounted on fire breathing dragons, to go take a look at the enemy, and hey, if you happen to see any 'targets of opportunity', give 'em a lickin'. Now a clot of white clothed nurses might not be the most likely looking target, but coming in at 300 knots and 300 feet of altitude, it might be a little difficult to positively identify an enemy target.

The Velocity of Honey

Amazing Honey Coiling High Speed Video! - Smarter Every Day 53
I just finished The Velocity of Honey by Jay Ingram. I wanted a picture to headline this post and then I thought 'let's go see what YouTube has', and bingo!

Each chapter in the book is about some everyday thing that confounds people. Some are physical, like the honey (above). Several have to do with the way people perceive time and those had a couple of unique perspectives. One he didn't touch on, and one that bedevils me is why sometimes when I am driving on the freeway I am in a big stinking hurry and other times I am content to just motor along.

The book will give you something to think about besides your everyday concerns, so it's kind of like taking your mind to the park. Does anyone go to parks anymore? I suppose they must. I don't. I used to every once in a while, usually because of some kind of event. I think it's because I never felt like I could really relax, which is probably because of this train I'm driving.

A while back we were watching Season 3 of Ozark and our hero gets kidnapped by his employer who wants to know "what do you want?". Marty replied: "I don't understand the question". Several weeks later I think I finally know what Marty is talking about.

When I was younger, I was at loose ends for several years. I worked various construction jobs, usually as a mechanic, that usually made me enough to keep me in beer and gasoline, which was good enough for me. But as I got older, I started focusing and I picked out a goal. I don't know what it was exactly, just that it consumed more of my attention than anything else. The older I got, the more focused I became. I think it finally reached a peak when my kids were about ten years old. After that is was kind of steady state until a few years ago and then it started broadening again.

So Marty is in that totally focused phase. What he wants is irrelevant, he has a goal in mind, that is where he is headed. What he wants doesn't even enter the picture. He has chosen his path and that's where he's going. The question of what he wants doesn't even exist in his universe. Oh maybe, if you put him under hypnosis, you might get him to drag up a memory from when he was a kid of wanting something, but that's as close as you are going to get.

Dangerous Lies

Dangerous Lies starring Camila Mendes | Official Trailer | Netflix
A fairly lightweight mystery. Nice change of pace after all the heavy stuff we've been watching. There are a couple of good twists in the plot, but mostly there is a little current of unease running through the whole show. We have a young married couple devoted to each other. Little things keep cropping up that make you wonder if the husband is going to flake out, but they are devoted to each other, so if he does flake out, the writer's are just jerking us around. Elliot Gould is here. Apparently he's still alive.

Raise the Kursk

Raising the Kursk - SMIT Salvage
I am amazed. This video is a little longer than the ones I usually post, but it's Sunday, so I had the time to spend watching it. This size and complexity of this project is like something out of an epic science fiction thriller. It must have cost a pretty penny. I wouldn't be surprised if it cost $100 million (I wasn't far off. The salvage operation cost $65 million). I do remember hearing about the Kursk disaster, but I don't really remember hearing anything about raising it. I did a post that mentioned the disaster.

P.S. Using Blogger's search function for Kursk doesn't find the relevant post. Even with the post pulled up, the browser's search function (Ctrl-F) can't find it either because it's in an embedded spreadsheet. However, if you click on the spreadsheet, then the browser can find it. Not much help at this point, I just wanted to point out the limitations of these programs.