Mar 012019
 

Hollywood’s Stunt Industry Grapples With Issues of Race and Skin Color

The latest notion for the offendatarians to ulcerate and hyperventilate over is “black stunt people lightening or darkening their skin to more closely approximate the appearance of the black actor they are standing in for.”  Because if a light-skinned black stunt man darkens his skin to look like a dark-skinned black actor, that’s “black face,” and people lose their careers over that sort of thing.

So, there is an obvious solution: when the actor is a “person of color” and a stunt is called for, replace the stunt people with stunt robots. Nobody, at least so far, has complained of a painting, photograph, wax statue, action figure, etc. of a black person being “black face.” I’m sure it’s coming, of course, but at least not quite yet.

Let’s face it, robots are getting real close to being able to do that sort of thing.

This could be one thing to say in favor of Social Justice Warriors: by raising a stink over stupid stuff, they spur innovation. Robots to replace POC stunt performers, robots and kiosks to replace no-skill burger flippers demanding excessively high minimum wages, etc. And there are already the fembots. Soon there will be true mechanical NPCs taking the place of protestors, marching around, holding signs, repetitively shouting ill-conceived and barely relevant chants, etc.

Soon everyone whose cause is championed by the SJW’s will find themselves to be permanently unemployable.

 Posted by at 9:54 pm
Mar 012019
 

I put a few hundred miles on the ol’ odometer today for one specific purpose: to see “Apollo 11” on an Imax screen.

Short review: if it opens on a good Imax screen near-ish you… run, don’t walk. More likely, drive, don’t run. I recommend it on about the same level I recommended “2001” on Imax.

There is no narration. The story of Apollo 11 is allowed to play out using film footage and audio recorded at the time, with some modern animation inserted to explain trajectories and whatnot. The animation, perhaps surprisingly, is not whiz-bang CGI, but simple line schematics showing simplified Apollo CSM and LM “icons” doing their thing.

Most of the movies features film which is really well short of Imax quality… it’s not like they had a 70mm camera in the capsule. But the first two minutes of the movie are worth the price of admission: it starts out with the crawler slooooowly making it’s way to the pad. It’s FREAKIN’ AWESOME.

I don’t have a 4K TV, nor a 4K player, but when this comes out on home media I’m getting the 4K version in the hopes that someday I’ll upgrade. It will sit on a small shelf along with my “2001” 4K set and gather dust until that day comes.

 Posted by at 7:06 pm