Ace Midnight

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Hey, if you want to degenerate Christmas by associating it with violence and death, no one is stopping you.

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Well, Die Hard is about heroism, sacrifice, a fractured family healing, facing/defeating evil, etc.

In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick (brilliantly) uses Christmas decorations as a motif alongside the rainbow. In Die Hard, the entire plot of the movie happens because of Christmas. Sure, it's a framing device, but that doesn't change the nature of it as an action Christmas film.

True story - at an event recently where there was a scavenger hunt, I said, "We could ask ChatGPT?". My 9-yo grandson said without hesitation, "AI is not helpful."

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Also a loss to American filmmaking-

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Now, on the one hand, I have to say that at 78 - how many more films did he have in him? And, for that matter, other than the Albert Brooks documentary, what was the last feature he had that had any sort of impact? The Bucket List?

But, on the other hand, Meathead was a great, great film director. Not a "genius". Not an "auteur". Not revolutionary, but about as good as it gets as a conventional, modern director and he did that without getting the press/accolades of his contemporaries Stephen, Marty, Francis, Bogdanovich. To a degree, the "auteur" class of director kind of looks down on actors who start directing. The director's guild has had it out for Eastwood since Josey Wales, for example.

He is more akin to Ron Howard in that regard.

Sure, a nepobaby, but one that didn't rest on his father's laurels. His run from This is Spinal Tap through Ghosts of Mississippi can stand up to anyone's for a similar timespan and on a "picture-for-picture" basis.

(ETA: Now part of this is the "New Hollywood" directors were all a little older than Reiner, and they were directing films while he was cutting his teeth writing and acting on television - but that doesn't degrade his body of work in my opinion.)

We need, probably, 3 of those QBs and any OL who can fog a mirror.

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The Soviets did this masterfully by using the west as an existential bogeyman to distract people from the misery and brutality of the regime.

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While at the same time colonizing the other republics with Great Russian and politically reliable Byelorussian populations as a stabilizing Slavic "elite".

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When Nolan learns to have at least B movie quality sound mixing again we can talk about him being up there.

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It's worse than that - he muddies up the dialogue ON PURPOSE.

No nothing ever means that.

When you're abjectly ugly on the inside, eventually you become abjectly ugly on the outside. Rosie was just ahead of the game on this one.

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I thought the Navy had given up on the railgun concept 4 years ago.

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What is the argument for concentrating those weapons on a single hull rather than mitigating risk by spreading them across multiple cheaper and harder to detect platforms? An aircraft carrier has aircraft.

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And a gun platform has guns.

I agree with you on the broader point. We should be getting out of the "power projection from carrier task forces" business. Altogether, if we can. We can project power from the United States, easily. We can destroy any nation, remotely. And, if we really wanted to, we could destroy any Chinese, Indian or Russian fleet, remotely. Most of them could do the same to ours.

So, if it is going to be a war of economical attrition, we should be more like the U.S. or U.S.S.R. during WWII rather than Nazi Germany and their gigantism fetish.

#YouandIdonotdisagreeonpolicy

I was just talking in terms of vulnerability - a BB is NO MORE vulnerable than a CVN and an "easier to risk" asset, IMHO.

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you're making the case against large platforms.

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The poster was only arguing against BBs, not all large surface platforms. I was merely countering on the vulnerability point. And I was right.

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And if the argument is that carriers are still worth it despite that vulnerability, isn’t that because they provide a unique capability, mobile airpower, that no other platform can replace?

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If a CVN goes down with all hands and equipment, that is a MASSIVE loss to the entire nation. Resources that likely cannot be replaced in a generation. And now, with the extreme range of ground based aircraft pretty much proven now, it can be argued far more easily that a large gun platform (with expanded drone capabilities) is an "easier to risk" asset than a super carrier, more or less equally shows the flag and rattles the saber for most purposes and, ultimately, easier to replace (I'm speaking mainly about the nuclear reactor and the air wing - just massive, massive investment in resources that could, in modern times, be taken out by assets under $100k).