Bruce Willis as Korben Dallas in The Fifth Element
Cleaning out old files today and I came across a business reply mail card with a bunch of notes scrawled all over that completely filled the available white space. It looks like I used it for a bookmark and made notes as I went along, but I will be durned if I can remember what book I was reading. Whatever it is, it's a big book, given the page numbers that I wrote down. And it's fairly recent, as in the last 20 years, given the reference to The Fifth Element, unless there was another use for the term before the movie came out. I'm gonna go look on my bookshelf and see if anything jumps out at me.
762Guanajuato I found it! The only books I have that are long enough are Neal Stephenson's. I looked at a couple with no luck, but I finally picked up The Confusion, which is set in the late 1600's. So what's the deal with The Fifth Element? Here's the passage:
The Fifth Element is one of my all time favorite movies, hi-camp, sci-fi, comic book story line. And it even purports to define the fifth element. Now we have a video that explains it. This girl is very confusing. I don't think I've ever seen education packaged like this.
Update December 2025 replaced with missing video with something that might be similar, hard to say since I don't remember what the original was like. Also replaced a dead link with a live one.
Gary Oldman improvised a lot in Leon: The Professional
Featurama
When I saw this clip I thought the Everyone scene was fromThe Fifth Element, but I was evidently confused. Gary Oldman had a memorable role inThe Fifth Element, but his appearance was different, to say the least.
Now the way all these props have been hidden away makes me think that someone thinks they are still valuable, so I check the finances. The movie cost $90 million when it was made 17 years ago. Wikipedia tells us that the movie has grossed over $250 million dollars, so presumably it paid. However, it didn't reach that total until 2012. Looking back at the first six months it only grossed some 60-odd million, so I suspect that it has been a generating a small but constant stream of revenue, small being a relative term, like a million dollars a month.
Turned on the TV just is time to see this well choreographed fight scene from the movie Columbiana, directed by Oliver Megaton. Megaton? What kind of name is that? A made up one. Megaton takes his name from his birthday : the 6th of August 1965 is the 20th anniversary of the dropping of the Hiroshima A-bomb.Zoe Saldana is my new virtual black-ninja-assassin girlfriend. She's 35 now. She's been in a bunch of films like Avatar and the new Star Trek movie Into Darkness (I had the hots for Uhura since before I knew what the hots were). She's the perfect black actress. If you've seen a movie in the last ten years with a hot black actress in it, it was probably her. The credits are rolling by and Luc Besson's name pops up. Where have I heard that name before? Oh, like Zoe, just about everywhere, starting with The Fifth Element.
Update March 2022 replaced missing video with one that isn't age restricted.
There are a bunch of these videos up on YouTube. They are AI generated trailers for old, famous movies. Very entertaining, though I am a little disturbed by how attractive the AI generated women are. Panavision Paradise isn't the only one making them. Panavision seems to be the key search term.
I came across this on Greenfield Park & Marty North. It looks very cool, perhaps a little impractical, but then there are still a lot of people with more money than sense running around, so conceivably there is a market for this sort of thing. I found these pictures on several web sites. I picked what I thought were the best ones.
The Hotelicopter is based on the giant Russian Mil V-12 Helicopter from the late 1960's.
You know, I thought the pictures of the hotelicopter were a little too good to be true, and they are. The whole thing was dreamed up by an advertising agency. They did manage to fool some people. The thing that clinched it for me was the video. Notice the contra-rotating blades in the video of the original Russian machine. Now go back and look at the video of the Hotelicopter. The blades are rotating in the same direction. You would think that with all the effort that went into this project they would get a little detail like that right.
I should have been more suspicious. The first time I saw this photo it reminded me of nothing so much as the luxury space liner from the movie "The Fifth Element".
Update January 2017 replaced inoperative slide show with photo and link.
Stu left a comment on my post about the Kobayashi Maru which got me thinking about lifeboats on spaceships. The idea of lifeboats on spaceships has been around as long as people have been imagining giant spaceships. The Fhloston Paradise from The Fifth Element is a 'recent' example.
Lifeboats on spaceships in deep space are only useful if there is any hope of another ship being able to reach them in time before their life support gives out. In the days of sailing ships, any boat carried on a ship would be equipped with a mast and sails and would be able to sail on to a distant shore.
I'm imagining any ship capable of a deep space voyage would have a massive propulsion system. Any lifeboats it could carry could not. If a lifeboat had a propulsion system big enough to enable it to reach a safe haven, it would be as big as the original ship. Perhaps when we start sending manned ships into deep space, we should send them in groups, kind of like the Nina, Pinta and the Santa Maria. That way if disaster befalls one, the other ships in the convoy could be a safe haven for the survivors.
Zorg Being Iconic for 10 Minutes | The Fifth Element | Creature Features
Creature Features
Near as I can tell, there are two reasons we are supporting the regime in Ukraine. The first is that by sending them armaments, we are boosting the American Military Industrial Complex by giving them zillions of dollars of business. The other is so the Biden's can continue to collect their commission on the natural gas transits fees, fees being paid Western Europe for Russian natural gas. The commission looks pretty paltry compared to the amount of money being spent on armament, but it's cash in the pocket. All that money going to military industrial complex is going to giant corporations where it gets divvied up into a multitude of pots. The big shots get a commission that is a small fraction of the total, so it probably amounts to about the same. Never underestimate the power of naked avarice.
Like some wag said, we're willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. That stand off at the Azov steel plant in Mariupol is a little puzzling. The only explanation that's made sense is that the Ukranians are afraid that if they surrender they will be executed or sent to a Gulag, never to return. Given how nasty that part of the world seems to be, remember the Balkans from, what - 20 years ago? I guess I can't blame them. Better to starve to death in a concrete bunker.
Meanwhile we keep poking the bear. We've been doing it for like ten years, and now we act all surprised when the bear takes a swipe at us ('us' being the US and our pet puppet Zelensky). And now, instead of trying to resolve the situation, we continue to poke the bear. It's almost like you want him to take big swing at you so you can - what? Get on TV and say - look at what the big bad Russian is doing? Swing back with big effing hammer? I wouldn't be surprised if the idiots in charge weren't war gaming a nuclear war right now, trying to figure out how they can come out on top of whatever is left.
But maybe they are content just to milk the situation for as long as they can without pushing it over the brink. As long as the war goes on they have a built in excuse for spending boatloads of money on missiles, bombs and guns. They are paying for this with money from their infinite printing press. What this is doing is impoverishing everyone who isn't part of the wolf pack. All members of the pack are getting a share of the moola being spent on guns. Everyone else is just seeing the value of their money shrinking.
It's like you have two groups. Each group has one zillion dollars, put together that's a total of two zillion dollars. The first group prints themselves another zillion so now they have two zillion dollars and we have a total of three zillion dollars. However, we don't have any more land or any more stuff because we sent all the armaments to Ukraine. So the first group now holds 2/3 of the wealth of the country and the second group only holds 1/3 of the wealth. That is how the military industrial complex and deficit spending are screwing over everyone who isn't a member of the pack.
What is the pack? The pack is all the people who work for the government, those who work for a defense contractors and all those who have substantial investment holdings in those defense contractors. The first rule of being a person is look out for number one. Once you have taken care of number one, you can think about taking care of other people. All those people who aren't part of the pack, they can look out for themselves.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Official Trailer - Teaser (2017) - Movie
I watched it on Amazon Prime. It's available on YouTube for $5.
It's about equal parts silly, amazing, and fantastic. You get dragged through a zillion different worlds (ok, maybe only a couple of dozen, not a zillion), but you only get to spend a few seconds there and then you get drug off to someplace new. And some of these places are fantastic. The giant tank of water that is home to a bunch of dinosaur-size creatures. They're pretty ugly. Reminded me of fleas for some reason. Dinosaur-size fleas, put that in your pipe and smoke it.
It's silly because we've got the whole boy-girl relationship thing front and center. It's silly because they only get a few seconds to work on that relationship before another dinosaur-sized flea interrupts their deliberations. To sum it up, the boy is a typical male expecting to score with any female he sets his sights on. The girl is a monument to civilization, holding out for marriage and commitment.
It's amazing because of the technology that the movie makers imagined. One is the scale of things. Since there is no gravity in orbit, it should be very easy to build enormous structures. There might be a problem with getting the materials you need, but once you have a factory that can turn an asteroid into girders it ought to be a piece of cake.
It's silly because it's got all your standard tropes. It's got your corrupt government autocrat committing genocide against the graceful, peaceful natives of a primitive planet, who never-the-less manage to not only master our technology but better it. It's even got the infamous garbage chute scene.
It's fantastic because they make an attempt to imagine what technology might be able to accomplish in the next few hundred years. They are using some high-tech gadgets that are like something straight out of science fiction. Kind of like of some the gadgets we use now (like cell phones and GPS) that were totally science fiction not all that long ago.
It's amazing because Luc Besson let his imagination run wild. Luc also did The Fifth Element.
Slow Horses — Official Trailer | Apple TV
Apple TV
Everybody's a villain here, except for the MI5 employees known as Slow Horses who have been exiled to Slough House, a small, seedy, three floor walk-up office building in a crummy part of London. All the action is at a higher level. On one side we have the Sons of Albion, a right-wing nationalist group. Over at Regent's Park we have Miss Stinky Pants Kristin Scott Thomas (Taverner). She's Deputy-Director of MI5, so she's got the power of the government behind her, in particular a tactical unit called the Dogs.
Pretty great show. MI5 - British version of the CIA, I guess - Gary Oldman (known by me as Zorg in The Fifth Element) is the disgustingly crusty old man running Slough House. First desk, AKA MI5 Director, is off on some diplomatic bullshit mission and while she's away Second Desk decides to cook up a false flag operation that will get blamed on the right-wing nationalists. She thinks this will give her an excuse to, in her words, "roll them all up". Her agent provocateur gets some white boys (three stooges) to kidnap a brown Briton who happens to be the nephew of some big shot in Pakistan, the idea being that when MI5 rescues him, it will help the Uncle feel more favorably toward Britain. Seems like a long shot to me, but you know you just can't trust those power hungry, liberal, white women with short blond hair like Hillary. Anyway, the plan goes awry and one of the white boys takes exception to Miss Stinky Pants' agent and lops off his head, so now when Miss Stinky Pants' dogs show up to rescue the hostage and kill the kidnappers, there's nobody there, well, except for the dead guy.
Menawhile, a very nervous reporter who has gotten wind of this fiasco, but since he has apparently fallen from grace he can't get anybody to listen to him. But somebody is interested in him, which gets our boy River interested, and since all he does at Slough House is busy work, he starts following the reporter around. Up till now, nothing very much is happening. But then River sees someone break into the reporter's house and now everything dissolves into chaos.
I question whether Sid is 'our girl' because she gets shot early on and we only see her once more in hospital and at the end Roddy and Jack find that all of the digital records of her have been erased, it's like she never existed, which is weird, but it kind of paves the way for her to return in later seasons. Or not, I dunno.
Note that the character names of the three stooges are in the fact the names of the Three Stooges. Ok Moe was actually an MI5 Agent sent in to stir up shit and Zeppo is technically a Marx Brother, but you get the idea.
The fact check of the Meet the Press segment with Bill Nye and Blackburn brought out a key issue we are facing.
The equilibrium state of our oceans is projected to be 60-80 rise [feet] at the current levels of CO2.
So, if this is an accurate assessment, how quickly would this happen if
levels of CO2 stayed the same (they will not) and more importantly at
what cost and how fast could we pull out of our the atmosphere the CO2
we have put into it? Surely 60 foot rise is not an acceptable out come.
These processes are magnitudes slower that the Titanic changing course.
Blackburn tries to downplay the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere by talking about the amounts in very, very small decimals.
Which they are: If I took $400 versus $320 out of your million dollars,
you wouldn't be terribly upset.
But that's intentionally misleading. The difference between the two
is an increase of 25 percent over the past 50 years — after thousands
and thousands of years of it being lower. Last year, The New York Timesexplained
that the level of carbon dioxide now in our atmosphere is a
"concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years." And at that
point, "the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have
been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher."
Why hasn't that happened now? Because "it takes a long time to melt ice," as one scientist told the Times. But we're getting there.
OK, suppose global warming is happening. Or this rise in
temperature triggers another ice-age through some as yet unexplained
mechanism.
What can be done? Are we doing any of those things? Are they having a measurable impact? Will they ever?
Would
getting rid of the Republicans and their obstructionist ways help? How
about the Democrats and their politically correct Fascism?
I'm beginning to think that The Fifth Element was a prophetic vision, not just a comic book fantasy.
I'm reading The Cobwebby Stephen Bury (aka Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George, aka George Jewsbury), which portrays our political process in horrifically realist manner.
Recently I noticed that several people I know have kids who joined a military service. Some people are what you might call "blue collar" workers and one might expect this kind of behavior there. But several people are "white collar professionals" and now that we have an all volunteer army, one might expect their kids to avoid the military and pursue a college education and a career. This is not always the case.
One of things I have heard (filtered by the media) from soldiers who have served in Iraq is that when they are over there, they can't wait to get home, but once they get home all they want is to go back to Iraq. I think I understand. Iraqis are crazy. Their way of thinking is completely alien to an American. Different things matter, things we take for granted in the U.S. are unheard of over there. Trying to deal with crazy people trying to kill you on a daily basis would be stressful, to say the least. Sure you would want to get out of there.
On the other hand, life in an American suburb is just a little too insular. Everything is safe, everyone is protected. It's kind of like Chris Tucker in "The Fifth Element" when they find a bomb on board the luxury liner: he is a surprised that there is a bomb on board and the bomb detector has not detected it, yet.
What's this thing with all these numbah's?
You come out of a very stressful environment and come back to the U.S. and all the concerns people have are going to seem so petty and inconsequential, no wonder they want to go back. Iraqis may be crazy, but at least it is real crazy, and not the silly crazy we have here.
There is something about being young that makes people (men especially) want a challenge, be it strength, skill, wit, or simply endurance, something where they can excel, where they can beat somebody at something. Failing that, if they can at least be useful they might be content. I suspect this is one reason people join the military, they want a challenge, they want adventure, they want to escape from our too safe American dream.
