#the horse chase scene could be motorbikes

[thegremlininmyhead]

Robin Hood (2018), features themes that span millenia, includes a scene that could have been shot in the modern Afghan war but is set in the Crusades, constantly blurs the lines between ancient and modern appearances, makes the story of Robin Hood timeless, literally has the opening line 'I would tell you what year it was, but the truth is, I can't remember', the line 'this war, all wars, everything happening is as old as time'.

Critics: oh its anachronistic and it doesn't make sense.

How can these people literally be paid for their media literacy and have precisely none 🥲

[psychopasss4]

Kogami: His return to Japan.

This analysis had long been running to my mind ever since I watched Sinners of the System 3: Beyond the Pale of Vengeance.

This might stir a lot of violent reactions for some folks out there. But bear in mind that this reflections are from SS3 era. So hold your horses and refrain from flooding my inbox with hated remarks 😅😁🙈.

💮💮💮💮

In PP the Movie (Gekijouban), we saw Akane immediately bought a plane ticket to SEAUn the moment she received the news of Kogami's whereabouts. (Our dear Akane-chan is a bit aggressive there. Chasing the man she loves respects most 🤭).

And she tried to indirectly persuade him to go back with her to Japan. But she's unsuccessful. That scene when she wants to join Kogami (before his epic motorbike stunt with Shem) showed how eager she is to stay with him until he's ready to return. But Kogami-chan shove her off while assuring her that he won't die just yet with a smirk on his face.

But then, a year after that he came back after a shared bottle with Frederica and their midnight discussion about Cigarette puff psychological context 🤗😅😁😜

I've been thinking hard what could be playing on Kogami's mind when making those choices and I believe it has something to do with his view of the two women whom he worked with.

Note: Look how old handsome he looks in here 😜😅😳

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Kogami's View of Akane

Respect and Admiration: Kogami respects Akane's strong moral compass, intelligence, and dedication to justice. Her idealism and determination to uphold her values in a corrupt system likely resonate with him deeply.

Influence: Akane has a significant influence on Kogami, helping him see different perspectives and consider the importance of lawful justice over personal vengeance.

Bond: Their bond is built on shared experiences and mutual growth. Kogami likely sees Akane as someone who understands him on a fundamental level, given their shared past and the way they've shaped each other's views.

Kogami's View of Frederica

Professionalism: Kogami likely views Frederica as a competent and resourceful colleague. Their relationship is rooted more in professional respect and shared goals.

Pragmatism: Frederica's pragmatic and strategic approach to their work might appeal to Kogami's tactical mindset, but it doesn’t necessarily imply a deeper, personal connection.

Support: Frederica provides Kogami with opportunities and resources that are beneficial for his missions, fostering a sense of mutual benefit rather than personal attachment.

Why Kogami Returned to Japan After Meeting Frederica in Sinners of the System 3 vs. Akane in the First Movie

Return to Japan After Meeting Frederica

Mission-Oriented: Kogami's return to Japan after meeting Frederica in "Sinners of the System 3" was driven by a clear mission and purpose. His focus was on addressing specific threats and working towards goals aligned with his professional objectives.

Strategic Opportunity: Frederica's proposal likely offered a strategic advantage or opportunity that aligned with Kogami's current goals and needs, making it a pragmatic choice to return to Japan.

Not Returning After Meeting Akane in the First Movie

Unresolved Conflict: After meeting Akane in the first movie, Kogami might have felt that returning to Japan would complicate their unresolved personal and professional conflicts. His presence could disrupt Akane’s work and potentially put her in difficult situations.

Self-Imposed Exile: Kogami's self-imposed exile and desire to atone for his past actions might have kept him away, feeling that his return could do more harm than good, both for Akane and for himself.

Protective Instinct: Kogami's decision could also stem from a protective instinct, wanting to keep Akane safe from the dangers associated with his return and the attention it would bring from various factions.

In summary, Kogami's interactions with Akane are deeply personal and complex, while his interactions with Frederica are more pragmatic and mission-focused. His decisions are influenced by the nature of these relationships and the strategic implications of his actions.

Postscript:

After watching PP3/PPFI on 2019, I think Kou-chan is way more comfortable in working with Frederica 🤔. Why?

They've been working for almost 2-3years after SS3 and compliments each other's skills better. Compare with Akane whom Kogami only worked with for only several months.

Yes, yes despite of that Shinkane still have more deeper bond, I know..I know.. but I'll talk about that bond and the intensity of it in the next Shinkane analysis...

🤭😘❤️

[thewidowstanton]

Andrew Burford, stuntman

Andrew Burford was born in Santiago in Chile, and for the next few years his family moved to Manchester and Argentina before settling back in the UK in 1996. He attended a contemporary music academy in Coventry and went on to tour internationally as a drummer. He also ran the entertainment agency Ents-Rep.  

Andrew has been on the British Stunt Register since 2015, and has appeared in many prestigious films and TV programmes, including Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who and Luther. His GoFundMe campaign for fellow stuntman Joe Watts – who was injured performing a complex stunt – has raised almost £47,000. Andrew appears as the stunt double for actor Ioan Gruffudd in the second season of Liar, which airs on ITV on Monday, 2 March 2020, at 9pm. He chats to Liz Arratoon.

The Widow Stanton: What is your connection to Chile? Andrew Burford: My granddad used to fly bombers during World War II and afterwards he got a job with British Airways in Chile, where my dad was born. My father is British and my mother is Chilean. Being brought up in a Latin household I was always listening to salsa and drumming music. When I was ten we had a neighbour who played drums and gave me a little lesson. He said I had good rhythm and I had more lessons and kept going. After music college I joined a covers band.

Why did you want to be a stuntman? When I lived in Coventry, where I grew up, I had some friends called Matt Cooke and Vince Lund, who have been film and TV directors ever since I’ve known them. They work as Popcorn and Co and are very successful. Between the ages of 14 and 18, we used to go to a summer school… every Saturday in the summer we’d go to this… I guess it was like a summer holiday camp, and every week we’d have to bring a new skill. So people would sing, people would juggle, people would write a poem.

We’d do a short film every week for something like eight weeks over the summer and present it like a five-minute short. I was the sportiest one out of everyone so I actually did all the silly things like falling down stairs, jumping out of a car or climbing trees. I didn’t know it was called ‘stunts’, it was just something we did. At the same time I was doing drums. So I’ve always done that sort of stuff and since that time I’ve wanted to be a stuntman. But I wanted to be a policeman as well when I was lot younger, and I was a special constable in the Met Police for a bit. I did that for four years pre the 2012 Olympics.

How do you actually become a stuntman? In essence you don’t have to do anything… if you are highly skilled, say you are an ex-Olympian and they’re looking for someone very specific to do a role, or let’s say you’re a rally driver and they’ve got a scene where there’s a big car chase and they need people who can drive to a very, very, very high standard, they may use people with specific skillsets for those sequences. But if you want to be an all-round stuntman the best way is to join the British Stunt Register and to do that you have to do six disciplines to a very high standard…

Can you choose them? They’re in categories of, for example, falling, so that would be like high-diving and trampolining, then there are vehicles… motorbikes, cars… and horse riding… martial arts…and you have to have six disciplines within the five categories. There are maybe 20 disciplines in total you can choose from. That alongside having live theatre experience or working in background on a film set as an extra. When I did my training, you had to have done that and I did extra work just so I could get on to the stunt register. You had to have 60 days behind camera as an extra. Every time you go on set, you get a piece of paper like a contract from production to prove it.

Which did you do? I did judo, cos you have to have a martial art, scuba diving, rock climbing, high diving, swimming and trampolining.

How long did it take you? It took me about three years. Basically I was training full time, doing two or three sessions a day, so I’d do martial arts, then I’d go swimming… there was always something I’d be doing every day. For example, swimming took six months of going every day.

Was there a discipline you found more difficult than the others? Swimming was probably the hardest because, for example, if you go trampolining you go twice a week and if you miss a week, you don’t fall back that much, but with swimming it’s very much a fitness and endurance test so you have to be at peak physical fitness throughout the whole period. So if you went a week without swimming…

For the swimming, you had to do an underwater test where you have to swim 25 metres under water, holding your breath, rest ten seconds and do it again. You have to do all the strokes within like, a county-level time. You couldn’t just be good at freestyle, you had to do all of them. Then you had to do more under-water tests, finishing with swimming fully clothed… shoes, socks, shirt, jacket, trousers… 100m in two minutes. It doesn’t sound that hard to do 100m fully clothed in 2 minutes, but after 45 minutes of other challenges, it’s super hard!

I remember you missing the test by a tiny margin… Yes, I did the test once and I failed it mainly because of the 100m freestyle. You have to do it in a minute and 30 seconds, and that was the first part of the test. I remember the instructor after my second 50m length was going: “Hurry up, hurry up,” so I really went for it and then I got to the end after the four lengths and said, ‘Did I make it?’ She was like: “You did it in a minute and 10.” And I was like what do you mean, 1.10, I want to do it in a minute and 29, not with 20 seconds to spare’, because obviously by then I’d exhausted myself and it had a ripple effect to all the other swims after that. 

Were there any disciplines that came more easily? I’ve always loved martial arts although it takes longer, because you have to be a brown belt or above. It’s just more fun, so I enjoyed doing that. I also learnt trampolining and gravitated to that pretty well and I love it.

Tell us about some of the stunts you’ve be asked to do… My first time on Game of Thrones – it was all filmed in Ireland, season 8, the last season – I’d never worked for that team before. I was flown over to do some pick-up shots; basically they had an episode that was something like 50 to 60 days of nights, and I came on to the tail end of that. I think they’d exhausted all the faces by then so they needed a few new ones. If it had been any other show it would have been quite an easy job, which was just to get slashed round the throat or something like that.

It was my first day on that set, first time meeting the stunt coordinator, Rowley Irlam – he’s won quite a few Emmys for the stunt work he’s created – so it was quite a big deal for me. So there’s like, 200 extras there, 60 stunt guys, a whole crew of probably 100 and it was literally a small vignette of just me and another stunt guy slashing my throat and me reacting to it. Jobs like that are your bread-and-butter easy work, but because it was Game of Thrones and it was the first thing I’d done on it and it was just me with everyone basically watching me, it was the most nerve-wracking thing I’d done to date, even though it was technically an easy stunt. But I did it and it went fine.

Then once you prove yourself a little you get trusted to do more intricate things and towards the end of that season I did a full fire burn. I was burnt by one of the ‘dragons’, which was quite a big deal for me. There’s a scene where the dragon flies through King’s Landing and there are two turrets at the gate. I was on one of them, where we had a big bow and arrow-type thing, and the dragon burns the whole turret. They put a small explosion beneath your leg and the flame ignites your whole body. Obviously you’ve got fuel accelerants on your costume and you’re just in a full blaze. That was quite cool!

Could you feel it? No. When you do a full burn, it’s very dangerous, obviously, to burn yourself alive [laughs], but if anyone was gonna do it, this team were the best team to do it, because they’ve burnt more people on that show that anyone has on a TV series ever. There’s a science of how to do it, how to be safe and you obviously rehearse it over and over before you’re actually set alight, and then…

Is there a safe word or something if anything goes wrong? There’s not but basically if you lie on the ground like a letter T that indicates to your safety team that you need to be put out. That’s kind of your safe word. You have a latex mask on and that stops your face burning, but while you’re waiting you can’t really breathe apart from through a little hole in the latex where you can insert a small tube, so you can take little sips of air. The mask is pretty much glued to your face.

How long were you on fire? For maybe like, 20 seconds…

That’s a long time if you think of someone running the 100 metres. The thing is even when you’ve been put out, you’re not supposed to take any breaths because the fumes can still be really hot and burn your lungs, so you have to be fully out and when your safety team tells you you can breathe, that’s when you breathe. You haven’t only been holding your breath, you’re moving and also expending a lot of energy. In this case before we were on fire and holding our breath, we had to hold the bow and arrow above our heads, which was heavy, a good 80kg in weight between two people.

At the same time you’re trying to regulate your breathing prior to taking your last breath before the fire ignites you and having to think about your action. So it wasn’t just about the burn itself, there were so many different aspects to think about during it, all of which affect your ability to hold your breath. That’s when you put your complete trust in your safety team to put you out as quickly as possible once they shout ‘cut’.  

You told me once about being blown up and having to land in the road without any padding to land on. I couldn’t understand that… That’s pretty much 90 per cent of our job, falling over on to concrete repeatedly… all the time.

How do you learn to do that? That’s where your training in trampolining and gymnastics or judo comes in. If costume allows it, you can put pads in strategic places to soften the blow but sometimes it’s inevitable and you are going to hurt yourself in some way, for example if you get hit by a car… it’s always going to hurt, but there are ways of falling so you minimise the risk of causing serious damage. But you’re always hitting the concrete, especially after a car knock-down, so there’s always going to be some element of pain involved.

Any other stunts you’d like to mention? Jumping out of a helicopter was a good one for a TV show called Discovery of Witches. It was from 50 feet in the air into an airbag. 50 feet in the stunt world isn’t really that high, I mean there’s people who have done 125ft falls into an airbag, and higher back in the day, but the difficulty with the helicopter is that it’s never static. So it’s always moving ever so slightly and you’ve still got to land on an area that is static, so that’s the element of danger in that stunt.

Talking about jumps from high places, have you seen the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Yes, when they jump it’s incredible. Back in the day they used to do crazy heights. There is one guy who’s done a 200ft fall on fire going out of a building, and that’s pretty incredible.

How are you chosen for stunt work? You might be a stunt double; if you’re doubling an actor, you might have the same characteristics or height and build. [Andrew pictured with Ioan Gruffudd below] Then you might have your bread-and-butter work where a lot of films might have armies… for example like 1917, you would have to have been a certain age and look for that period. Or things like Star Wars, you literally have to fit the costume that’s already been made, like a stormtrooper outfit, the height for that is 5’10 to 6’1.

You don’t have agents or anything like that, basically the film and TV companies will have a coordinator, someone who designs the action, and then it’s their job and their team’s to choose who might be right for each role and come up with concepts for what happens. For example, in a script you might see actor A and actor B have a fight in a pub, so they might need two doubles to double the actors, or pub punters, and they start building a team of people they might need for certain sequences.

A stunt coordinator is involved in all aspects of action for all sequences in the film and a fight coordinator would normally come up with all the different fights and styles of fights the actors and doubles might perform. They are also typically in charge of shooting a pre-vis, which is a pre-visualisation to show the director how they see the action taking place. If you go back to the pub scenario, the director might not know how he wants the fight to be, so it’s down to the stunt team to come up with ideas, which eventually become part of the film. 

Do you have a typical sort of stunt day? Typically, especially when you’re in costume, you’re probably in for 7am and then it’s a 12-hour day, and then any overtime that might go on. 7 ’til 7 is quite common. There can be a lot of sitting around waiting for something to happen, more on films than TV. If you’re lucky, there might be a stunt area where you can rehearse your scene or just relax. For TV, you’re typically going in to do a specific stunt, so you’ll go in and do it and then go, but on a film there might be a lot more stuff going on, so you might have to wait a couple of hours or sometimes days until your spot.

What is your training regime now? I go to the gym most days, at least five days a week; weights, crossfit, martial arts. Obviously when you’re working it’s quite physical so it can be like training. I try to keep it as broad as I can because you never stop learning.

Have you ever been hurt? Yes, there’s always injuries. You’ll never find a stuntman who hasn’t had some sort of injury, but to what degree is the thing. Your bread and butter for a guy in particular in our job is like, fights or reactions. A lot of reactions might be someone shooting you, so you’re always falling on the ground, or you’re fighting with someone so you’re going to take some bumps and bruises. Hopefully none that are on purpose but sometimes things do go wrong on set where people get injured long-term or indefinitely, and those who do work quite a lot they’ll always have some sort of injury going on because it’s inevitable with the amount of work you do and the amount of falling over.

Has stunt work lived up to your hopes? Definitely! It’s fun. I’ve been lucky that I’ve been pretty busy since I started but I really miss not being at work if I have periods off. People ask about actors we come across, and although we work alongside them all the time, we generally don’t have that much interaction with them unless they talk to us because they’re very focused on what they’re doing. You don’t want to be that person who’s trying to interrupt, just like when I’m doing my stunt I don’t want anyone to interrupt me.

Is there a stunt that’s like the holy grail of stunts that you’d like to do? I’d like to do some more car stuff like crashing a few cars or a massive car turnover. That would be a really good one to do. Ultimately you have to have complete control of a car, so you have to be entrusted with doing the easier things first, like stopping on a mark or precision driving and from there, progressing to harder things like car chases and crashes. I’ve done a fair bit of the ‘easier’ stuff, I’m just waiting for the opportunity to get involved in the harder stuff. It takes time to build up a good rapport with coordinators as being someone who can be trusted behind the wheel.

Do you see yourself as a stunt coordinator in the future? I’m still very new and the industry is changing quite rapidly with new technologies that are being used, so I’d need a lot more experience working in teams on big films – typically 20 or 30 years – before I get to the point where I might be able to become a stunt coordinator but, definitely, I’d like to do that at some point in the future.

At the same time if you’re a good stuntman it doesn’t necessarily make you a good coordinator. They’re two sort of completely different jobs. Coordinators have to be able to read a script, break it down and get across what action can be done to bring the pages to life. A lot of people don’t understand how much goes into it; you’re not only looking after actors’ safety, but everyone’s safety on set. If you’re having a big car chase, you’ve still got 100 crew members around to consider who aren’t a part of the action. Coordinators have to be aware of that but also the designing of the stunts for all sequences in a safe manner. It’s a lot of pressure and not for everyone.

Are stunt men and women recognised for their work? This is a bit of a hot topic, like, the Oscars don’t recognise stunts as a category for an award. If you take Brad Pitt, who just won Best Supporting Actor – he was playing a stuntman in the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – but at the same time you can’t get an Oscar for being an actual stuntman. They have awards for best sound design, best costume, best casting, which are all valuable and integral parts of film making, but no more valuable than the stunt department.

As a stunt community, we don’t necessarily want stunt performers to be acknowledged individually but as a department we should be recognised just like all other departments. If you look at all the major film trailers, they all typically show big stunts as part of their two-minute sequence. It’s a key selling point for the film to draw the viewers in to see the film in cinemas or to buy the DVD. Yet they currently don’t acknowledge our department, which is why people are trying to get the Academy to recognise it as a category. They’ve been debating it for 25 years with no luck.

But there are the Taurus World Stunt Awards, which are awards given by your peers. So stunt people will nominate stunts, like Best High Fall, Best Wire Work or Best Car Work. That’s like your peers acknowledging that you’ve done a good job, which is great, but it should be more widely recognised. We just want the recognition we deserve from the major players. Gone are the days where stunt guys are just a few knuckleheads on set for a couple of scenes. The stunt department pushes boundaries of what's possible within a film and without it it’s fair to say many films wouldn’t have achieved the awards and accolades they have.

Andrew appears as Ioan Gruffudd’s stunt double in the second season of Liar, which airs on ITV on Monday, 2 March 2020 at 9pm.

Andrew on Instagram

Follow @TheWidowStanton on Twitter

[writingguide003-blog]

'A total blast': our writers pick their favorite summer blockbusters ever

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/a-total-blast-our-writers-pick-their-favorite-summer-blockbusters-ever/

'A total blast': our writers pick their favorite summer blockbusters ever

As the season heats up on the big screen, Guardian writers look back on their picks from the past with killer sharks, mournful crime-fighters and time-traveling teens

Face/Off (1997)

Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/PARAMOUNT

Madman bomber Nicolas Cage stole John Travoltas dead sons life. So gloomy FBI agent Travolta steals Cages face. When Cage steals his face and his wife and freedom John Woos Face/Off becomes the biggest, wackiest and most operatic summer blockbuster in history, a gonzo combustion that flings everything from pigeons to peaches at the screen.

Hong Kong cineastes might applaud a script with roots in the ancient Sichuan opera genre Bian Lian, where performers swap masks like magic. Popcorn-munchers, of which I am front row center, are here to watch whack job Cage and soulful Travolta, two actors who love to go full-ham, play each other and go deep inside their iconographies. Call it hamception. Or just call it a crazy swing that hits a home run as Cavolta and Trage battling it out in a warehouse, a speedboat and, of course, a church. As Cage-as-Travolta gloats to Travolta-as-Cage, Isnt this religious? The eternal battle between good and evil, saint and sinners but youre still not having any fun! Maybe hes not, but we sure are. Bravo, bravo. AN

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Photograph: David James/Publicity image from film company

Theres been an increasing sense of desperation clinging to the majority of roles picked by Tom Cruise in recent years. Outside of the still shockingly entertaining Mission: Impossible series, he was miscast in the barely serviceable Jack Reacher and its maddeningly unnecessary sequel, his awards-aiming American Made was throwaway and his franchise-starting The Mummy was a franchise-killer. But four summers ago, he picked the right horse just maybe at the wrong time.

Because despite how deliriously fun Edge of Tomorrow was in the summer of 2014, audiences didnt show the requisite enthusiasm. It was a moderate success (enough to warrant a long-gestating sequel) but it should have packed them in, its combination of charm, invention and sheer thrills making it one of the most objectively successful blockbuster experiences in memory. The nifty plot device (Cruise must relive a day of dying while battling aliens over and over again) allowed for some dark gallows humor and a frenetic pace that kept us all giddily on edge while it also contained a dazzling action star turn from Emily Blunt whose fearless Full Metal Bitch wrestled the film away from Cruise. Blame its relative failure on the bland title? Cruise fatigue? Blockbuster over-saturation? Then find a digital copy to watch and rewatch and repeat. BL

Back to the Future (1985)

Photograph: Allstar/UNIVERSAL/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Back to the Future very nearly wasnt a summer blockbuster. The reshoots required after Eric Stoltz was booted off, then the fact Michael J Foxs Family Ties commitments meant he could only shoot at night all meant filming didnt wrap until late April. Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg duly pencilled in an August / September release.

But then people started seeing it. Test scores were off the scale. Said producer Frank Marshall: Id never seen a preview like that. The audience went up to the ceiling. So they bagsied the best spot the year had to offer 3 July hired a squad of sound editors to work round the clock and two print editors with instructions to get properly choppy. They did, and those big trims tightened yet further one of the tautest screenplays (by Bob Gale) cinema has ever seen. The only bit of fat they left was the Johnny B Goode scene: sure, it didnt advance the story, but the kids at those test screenings knew we were gonna love it. Back to the Future is a pure shot of summer cinema: grand, ambitious, insanely entertaining. Deadpool, Avengers, take note: a blockbuster can be smart as hell so long as it wears it lightly. In the end, by the way, the film spent 11 weeks at number 1 at the US box office. Thats essentially the whole summer. CS

Teminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Photograph: Allstar/TRISTAR/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

The first film I ever saw at the cinema was The Rocketeer. We drove into Bradford city centre, bought our tickets at the Odeon and sat through the 1991 tale which followed the fortunes of a stunt pilot, a rocket pack and a Nazi agent played by Timothy Dalton who sounded like he was from Bury rather than Berlin. The way into the multiplex there was a huge poster for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Arnie sat on a Harley with a shotgun cocked and ready. My dad was a huge fan of the original but he still couldnt swing taking a seven-year-old to see it. It wasnt until I borrowed a VHS copy that I finally got to see what was behind that image. Skynet, dipshits, T-1000s, a nuclear holocaust and a motorbike chases on the LA river.

Blockbusters dont usually have that edge: theres a more brazen mainstream appeal. But Judgment Day was and still is an exception. It did huge numbers at the box office (more than $500m), was a rare sequel that was arguably better than the original and introduced really odd bits of Spanish idiom into the Bradford schoolyard lexicon. I probably would have been scarred for life watching it as a seven-year-old, but as a teenager it gave me a story I doubt Ill ever get tired of revisiting. LB

The Dark Knight (2008)

Photograph: Allstar/WARNER BROS.

The summer of 2008 was a busy one: Barack Obama emerged from a contentious democratic primary to become the first ever black presidential nominee of a major party. The dam fortifying the entire global financial system was about to burst. China hosted its first ever Summer Olympics. But somehow, and not exactly to my credit, what I remember most from that summer is the uncanny, ridiculously over-the-top publicity blitzkrieg that preceded the release of The Dark Knight, which has since emerged as not just an all-time great summer blockbuster, but an all-time great American film, period.

There were faux-political billboards that read I believe in Harvey Dent; a weirdly nondescript website of the same name; Joker playing cards dispersed throughout comic book stores, which led fans to another website where the DA was defaced with clown makeup. Dentmobiles, Gotham City voter registration cards, a pop-up local news channel: the marketing campaign might have seemed excessive had the movie not so convincingly topped it. Ten years later, as films like Deadpool and Avengers: Infinity War try to reach those same heights of virality, The Dark Knight remains the measuring stick by which every superhero movie, and superhero villain, is measured. JN

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Photograph: Jasin Boland/AP

In many ways, Fury Road is summer: arid, scorching, bright enough to be squinted at. The driving force behind all the high-impact driving is scarcity of water, the essence of life in a desert where death practically rises up from the burning sand. Even in the air-conditioned comfort of a multiplex auditorium in Washington DCs Chinatown, watching George Millers psychotic motor opera left this critic sweaty and parched. My world is fire and blood, warns the weary Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) in the scripts opening lines. Staggering out of a theater into the oppressive rays of the sun, it sure can feel that way.

Millers masterpiece fits into the summer blockbuster canon in a less literal capacity as well, striking its ideal balance of dazzling technical spectacle and massively-scaled emotional catharsis. There was plenty of breathless praise to go around upon this films 2015 release, much of it for the feats of practical-effects daring, but the hysterical extremes of feeling cemented its status as a modern classic. I cant deny that Ive watched the polecat sequence upwards of a dozen times, but Millers film truly comes alive in Furiosas howl of desperation, and in Maxs noble disappearance into the throng. CB

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Its the music, its the giant boulder, its the Old Testament mysticism, its the whip, its the Cairo Swordsman, its Harrison Fords crooked smile, its the bad dates, its Karen Allen drinking a sherpa under the table, its the melted faces and exploding heads. Its all these things plus having the good fortune of seeing this at the cinema at a very young age, therefore watching most of it through my terrified fingers. (Indy tells Marion to keep her eyes shut during the cosmic spooky ending; way ahead of you there!)

The modern blockbuster as we know it was created by Steven Spielberg with Jaws and George Lucas with Star Wars, so the hype was unmatched when the two collaborated in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark. As a kid I had no idea this was a loving homage to cliffhanger serials from the 30s and 40s, I took it as pure adventure. The seven-and-a-half minute desert truck chase (I dont know, Im making thus up as I go) is probably the best action sequence in all of cinema (John Woos Hard Boiled does not have a horse, sorry), but watching as an adult one notices a lot of sophisticated humor, too. (Indy being too exhausted to make love to Marion, for example, is something that didnt connect when I was six.)

Its strange to think I watched these cartoon Nazis on VHS with my grandparents who had escaped the Holocaust, and no one benefits when you do the math to figure out how young Marion was when, as Indy puts it, you knew what you were doing. But for thrills, laughs and propulsive camerawork (though a little mild Orientalism), nothing tops this one. JH

Independence Day (1996)

Photograph: Everett/REX/Shutterstock

Short of actually calling their film Summer Blockbuster, rarely can a films height-of-summer release date been so central to a films raison detre. This being the mid-90s, when po-mo and self-referentiality was all the rage, brazenly hooking your tentpole film to 4 July was seen as a pretty smart idea.

Fortunately, all the ducks did line up in a row for ID4: a game-changing performance from Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum at (arguably) his funniest, a rousingly Clintoneque president in Bill Pullman and most importantly in that run-up to the millennium physical destruction on a gigantic scale. Much comment at the time was expended on the laser obliteration of the White House (an early shot from the Tea Party/Maga crowd?), but I personally cherish director Roland Emmerichs signature move of detonating cars in somersault formation. Like many other huge-budget films then and since, Independence Day was basically a tooled-up retread of cheap-as-chips format of earlier decades though who these days would roll such expensive dice on what is essentially an original script, with no comic book or toy branding as a forerunner? We shall never see its like again. AP

Aliens (1986)

Photograph: Allstar/20 CENTURY FOX/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

An Aliens summer is one for moviegoers who prefer to sit in in darkened rooms when the sun is shining; the brutal confines of the fiery power plant make an excellent subliminal ad for air conditioning. In 1986, James Cameron took Ridley Scotts elegant, iconic horror template and turned it into an all-out action blockbuster, forcing Ripley once again to face down her nemeses in a breathless fug of claustrophobia, sweat and fear. Its relentlessly stressful and unbelievably thrilling.

I first saw Aliens many years after its initial release. Owing to its sizeable and long-lasting legacy, it was at once immediately familiar, yet also brisk and brutally fresh. I understood that it was a classic, but I wasnt prepared for just how good it is, for the pitch-perfect management of tension, the pace that never really lets up, the emotional pull. The maternal undertow of Ripleys protection of Newt, and the alien mirror of that, adds a level of heart unusual in most blockbusters, and her frustration at being a woman whose authority must be earned again and again, and then proven again and again, remains grimly relevant, 30 years on. Its also a total blast. Now get away from her, you bitch. RN

Jaws (1975)

Photograph: Fotos International/Getty Images

It is the great summer blockbuster ancestor the film that in 1975 more or less invented the concept of the event movie. And unlike all those other summer blockbusters, Steven Spielbergs Jaws is actually about the summer; it is explicitly about the institution of the summer vacation, into which the movie was being sold as part of the seasonal entertainment. It is about the sun, the sand, the beach, the ocean and the entirely justified fear of being eaten alive by an enormous shark with the appetite of a serial killer and the cunning of a U-boat commander. And more than that: it is about that most contemporary of political phenomena: the coverup, the town authorities at a seaside resort putting vacationers at risk by not warning them about the shark. The Jaws mayor has become comic shorthand for the craven and pusillanimous politician.

A blockbuster nowadays means spectacular digital effects, but this film is from an analogue world. It bust the block through brilliant film-making and an inspired score from John Williams, summoning up the shark with a simple two-note theme which became the most famous musical expression of evil since Bernard Herrmanns shrieking violin stabs in Psycho took the place of actual knife-slashing. I still remember the excitement of the summer of 1975, and the queues around the block at the Empire, in Watford, round the corner from the football ground. The inspired brevity of the title meant the word was repeated over and over again to fill the marquee display: JAWS JAWS JAWS as if they were screaming it! PB

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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Actors Who Did Amazing Stunts In Bollywood

We think it is very difficult for Bollywood to compete with movies like Matrix when it comes to great stunts. No Bollywood action movie is complete without a good action sequence. There are countless stuntmen who work towards making sure that you get to see the best sequence possible. In the 80's and the 90's, we had one man beating many goons at the same time and that would not have been possible if there wasn't a great stuntman behind this. There are many movies like Baahubali which are known for spectacular stunts which leave you wanting more and here are some more movies where the stunts will leave you in awe.

Shah Rukh Khan in the Don franchise The scene where he had to jump off a 300-feet building is still something people talk about a lot. It must be some courageous Bollywood stuntman who could have pulled that off.

Aamir Khan in Ghulam Quite a daring act for an actor like Aamir Khan; Ghulam saw Khan indulging in a daredevil stunt on the railway track without using any body double

Hrithik Roshan in Dhoom 2   Hrithik has tried his hands at various stunts time and again with the most horrific being while shooting for Krrish when he luckily escaped death. We can even say that he is the best stunt actor in Bollywood.

John Abraham in Force All those muscles and biceps which make John’s female fans fall in love with him are not just for display. John shocked everyone by lifting a motorbike high in the air all with his bare hands.

Akshay Kumar in Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi The Khiladi of Bollywood is synonymous with action as most of his earlier films saw him performing breathtaking action sequences throughout. The actor also prefers doing his own stunts and is one of the best stuntman in Bollywood.

Vidyut Jamwal in Commando Not only does the actor have an enviable physique with oodles of sex quotient, but Vidyut also takes the cake when it comes to being an action hero. Be it the chase shots or the one in a 35-storey building in his film Commando, Vidyut made a lot of heads turn with his power-packed martial art stunts <https://in.bookmyshow.com/entertainment/5-action-sequences-vidyut-jammwal-must-try/87688>. If he was not an actor he could have been a Bollywood stuntman.

Ajay Devgn and his signature stunt Ajay Devgn has become famous for his signature stunt that we first watched in his debut film Phool Aur Kaante. Initially, it was done on the bikes, then cars and in Son of Sardaar, Ajay went a level higher and performed the stunt on two moving horses. We really like these real stunts in Bollywood by this actor.

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Mad max: Fury road

“Have you heard of something called the ‘Edge Arm’?”

The question is posed to TopGear.com by Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller. “It’s the coolest cinema-making instrument that was ever invented,” he says, with a mischievous smile. “We would not have been able to do this movie without it… it’s just extraordinary.”

Words: Vijay Pattni

Forget the cast of Hollywood stars, or the 150 cars hand-built specifically for the movie, or the ten-year delay in finding the budget and location to shoot, or the gruelling, desert-based 138-day shoot, or indeed finding enough matter to blow up. It’s the ‘Edge Arm’, according to Miller, that was most central to this year’s Mad Max: Fury Road.

Fury Road, you’ll doubtless recall, is a two-hour-long, exploding car chase masquerading as a movie. It’s also one of the finest action films of our times, and perhaps the most physically demanding to watch.

It’s like in those old Western movies, everyone had their favourite horse, and the Falcon is Max’s horse And all of it was possible thanks to a supercharged V8 off-road racing truck with a roof-mounted, gyrostabilised camera crane that could extend more than 20 feet in length, rotate 360 degrees and achieve full motion in any direction.

“It’s all black,” Miller smiles, “and is such a cool-looking thing. It’s got a great stunt driver, while next to him in the front seat is a crane operator working toggle switches. In the back seat there’s a camera operator, and then there’s me, the director, sitting in the middle with this screen in front of me.

“We can swoop up along the ‘War Rig’, right up into Tom Hardy’s face. We were out there in the desert, real vehicles, real people, real crashes, in the middle of it,” Miller explains. “They’re like a three-headed beast. It can be so dangerous if they get it wrong…”

The Fury Road team ended up with two ‘Edge Arm’ camera buggies, because Miller just loved them. “I got so addicted to it,” he says.

It’s certainly a far cry from the original Mad Max; the original ‘Road Warrior’ movie that arrived at the tail end of the 1970s. “The budget of the first Max was very meagre – 350,000 Australian dollars in those days – and everything was on a shoe string,” Miller recalls. “Even to the extent where we had to deliver the scripts on my motorbike.

“It was very low budget film-making.”

A beat. “A lot of the budget went on the car, and polishing and fixing it and doing it up.”

‘The car’, of course, was Max’s original Ford Falcon, an idea that came from Miller’s late producing partner Byron Kennedy, who sadly passed away in a helicopter accident three years after the first Max was finished. “He was a car freak,” Miller says. “The contours of that car, the engine… it’s like in those old Western movies, everyone had their favourite horse, and the Falcon is Max’s horse.”

Naturally, a Falcon had to be found for Fury Road, to continue Kennedy’s legacy. New for 2015, meanwhile, was that monstrous ‘War Rig’; a mix between a Czechoslovakian Tatra and Chevy Fleetmaster, merged into a six-wheel-drive, 18-wheeler with two V8s end-to-end. Yes, all of this happened, and it is excellent.

Tricky to film, too. “The most difficult stunt – in terms of pulling it off – was when the War Rig rolls at the end [of the film],” Miller says. “Initially we started off that stunt, and I said, ‘There’s no way we’re putting a human in that vehicle’.

“But CG didn’t make sense in a movie in which everything is real,” he adds. “We looked at models, but that would look hokey. Then we looked at a remote-control War Rig, but we couldn’t get it…[he makes a precise steering-wheel-gesture] on the spot. So we did it for real.”

That involved flipping a giant truck between two massive rocks, to land in front of a high-speed camera shooting 1000 frames per second… in one take. “When it worked, it was just very gratifying. We wouldn’t have an end to the movie otherwise. That was big,” says Miller.

‘Big’ doesn’t even begin to encompass the sheer scale of the Fury Road endeavour. Want some quickfire numbers? At the height of filming, there were 1,700 crew members – with an average of 1,000 people on set at any one time – as five 8x8 German military transport trucks hauled gear across three football-pitch-sized distances six times over 138 days.

The ‘Buzzard Excavator’ used 1,757 spikes - from a total of 5,000 hand–built spikes constructed for the remainder of the ‘Buzzard’ cars – alongside, of course, a stupendously modified old Benz for the head of the ‘Gas Town’.

“The ‘People Eater’ is a sort of beancounter of the ‘Immortan Joe’,” Miller says, “so we figured if he had a Mercedes stretch limousine, he might as well decorate it with about every fancy car grille he can find.”

Oh, and those men on poles? They were actual men, on actual poles, leveraged at the bottom with… engines, naturally. “Initially I thought they’d be done in CG, but one day I looked up, and they’d figured out the pendulum of the guys, using car engines as a weight at the bottom,” Miller recalls.

Only in a Mad Max film. Top Gear takes a step back. Above all the mayhem, all the explosions and the violence and the cars, we ask why. Why did Miller come back to the world of Max?

“I didn’t,” he says emphatically. “Max came back to me. I never wanted to make another Mad Max movie. The story kept popping into my mind and I kept on pushing it away.

“But in this case, it was a long flight across the Pacific one night from Los Angeles to Sydney, around 14 hours. I was in this half-awake state, and suddenly I was dreaming, and the story played out. It played out and kept playing, and by the time I landed, I told my producing partners, and said, ‘I think we’re going to make another Mad Max movie’.

“You get excited by the story,” he continues, “the chance to use new technology. I’m very curious about film language. This is a brand-new language not much more than a hundred years old, and it’s read universally.”

Miller’s theory is that most of this language started pre-sound, ‘in the Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd movies’, and in the westerns. “There were always chases,” he smiles. “The modern day equivalent is the car, and basically if you look at the Mad Max movies, it’s basically a western on wheels. I love filming those sorts of kinetic stories.”

I never wanted to make another Mad Max movie. Max came back to me With all this adrenaline and all those supercharged V8s and petrol and combustion on his CV, is Miller some kind of heavy-metal, dyed-in-the-wool petrolhead with super-unleaded pumping through his veins?

He laughs at the question. “For some weird reason, I love filming action scenes with cars – my favourite sequences in movies were always the action ones, the chariot race in Ben Hur, to Bullitt, The French Connection, Steven Spielberg’s Duel. It’s a basic use of cinema.

“So I shouldn’t really say this, but I drive a hybrid Lexus.” TG is lightly stunned.

“I’m not a huge petrolhead, but I make sure I surround myself with total freaks who are.”