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With heat waves, and the inevitable extinction of humanity practically around the corner, why not talk about what’s happening in the cool, comfortable theaters that we’re told are also doomed? To help us keep things light and pleasant, we’ve recruited film critic Sonny Bunch to chat about the elegiac Top Gun: Maverick, the rockin’ biopic Elvis, and the not-so-buzzy Lightyear.
The trio also get into the President’s positive Covid test – which isn’t a big deal all of a sudden. They discuss the calls for “executive beast mode,” and ponder one of the biggest existential questions of all: what’s up with a moose in the wild?
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A friend of mine uses his VPN to skirt taxes. He bought his airline tickets in another country and was able to save 400 bucks. That is the type of thing they should be advertising. I suggest looking into ways to use VPNs online.
Also I fully suspect most VPN’s are owned and advertised by the NSA, because thats what I would do.
Yes but they’re not piloted. And not saying that piloted Mach 10 jets would be impossible. But even if there were piloted Mach 10 “fighter jets” or whatever, “punching out” would probably be fatal.
They don’t actually show him punching out. For all the audience knows, he crashlanded. Or the cockpit ejected as an escape capsule: astronauts returning from the ISS are traveling at Mach 23, after all.
Rob (about 8:15): “It’s easier for the Republican Party to become nuts and to be filled with weirdos and crackpots because it’s smaller.”
Well, no, not really. The Republican Party is more conservative than the Democratic Party. That means something. It means the people who are championing every weird and radical departure from the norms are, with very few exceptions, on the left — and affiliated with the Democratic Party or, occasionally, points left of that.
Does anyone who has familiarity with middle America and typical American conservatism actually believe that the vast difference in the typical membership of the two parties is overwhelmed by the numerical difference in membership?
I can trot out quite a few fruitcakes in the Democratic Party. It’s easy, because a lot of them hold high elected office or cabinet positions. Even at its worst the GOP doesn’t come close.
A capsule isn’t new. The XB-70 had one and I think the FB-111 did too.
Okay, I finished listening to the podcast. At the risk of subverting my dumping-on-Rob theme: I think he’s got it exactly right about Top Gun, about why people like it, and about what it says about what America was and what people believe it should be.
I would like to hear more about that; range, accuracy, defense mechanisms, numbers, expense etc. Can you do a post?
Nico Robinson, fledgling media critic and soon to be Dr. Robinson, has some thoughts about James Lileks’ South Dakota windmills segue on this week’s show:
The first Top Gun was full of Hollywood hokey scenes. No, you don’t fly upside down, cockpit to cockpit at 500 knots with a hostile aircraft (Not without extensively briefing it, anyway, using hands motions or aircraft models on sticks, and you’re probably going to need a UN level translator!). So they faked it for laughs. It works!
I will eventually see the new TG for the real flying thrills if not for the pumped up Hollywood story. I really like the death dream theory, though. Or maybe Maverick has dreamed the entire mission, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Maverick does seem to have a lot of serious mishaps, which is not good for aviators. If he didn’t die in this crash, some day he’ll get whacked while speeding on his motorcycle.
Rob is correct that “Movie stars can do what they want.” In The Longest Day, 55 year old John Wayne plays the part of a 27 year old paratrooper battalion commander. Not only was Wayne twice as old as the real Lieutenant Colonel he was playing, he was even older than his boss, Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower! Almost no one cares. Just enjoy the action and the romance and don’t look too closely. Why, look at Rob in the funny picture above! He’s not even playing a seasoned middle aged fly boy. He’s dressed as a flight student in a training squadron who has yet to earn his Wings of Gold. It works for me.
As for Naval Aviation, not only is all the flying done by young people, the organization exists within a steep “up or out” career pyramid. Even if Old Man Maverick could pass his annual flight physical (surely he has the eye charts memorized by now), to be promotable he would have been under pressure to take non-flying assignments (Aircraft Carrier Navigator or Safety Officer. Air Boss, if you’re lucky.), to spend years at staff college and war college (better get that Masters, too, while you’re home with family and not flying the dawn patrol!), or carrying some senior officer’s bag around the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.
So, outside of Hollywood, senior citizen Maverick wouldn’t be flying top secret missions in LaLa Land. He would be logging 100 hours a month flying T-shirts and ball caps from Asia in a FedEx 777. And now that I think of it, Hollywood can make a fine, hit movie out of even that if they’d just get their heads out of the boring woke writers room.
Tom Hanks already did it.
Or, you know, rubber dog s**t.