smithcorp

Hi Mark. Looking good again this week.

Was a good session with one of ChrisReb's scenarios

Apologies for my last minute trip last week - I should be good for this week.

Have looked at a couple of YT videos - no-one who knows how to use tanks seems to have posted anything. Looks nice though.

@Captain_Colossus I get where you're coming from I think - there's plenty of war movie tropes that are cliched and overused but I suspect they are helpful to get across emotion, scale or the horror of war to a varied audience, so that's why they are overused. It must be hard for a director to avoid them because the producers want to minimise risk and they use test audiences that are so used to movie story structure that they demand these tropes be used so they don't have to think too much. And when a movie like SPR introduces new tropes - handheld shaky cam and extreme closeups to communicate the chaos of the beach landing for instance - other movies grab the effective ones. It annoys me sometimes too, like people in movies hanging up phones and not saying goodbye, lazy jump scares in horror flicks and people staring at themselves in bathroom mirrors. The Thin Red Line's spiritual, poetical voiceover i thought worked really well in that film to show a sensitive soldier's torment, but it pisses me off when other movies have used it, because I think its insincere and lazy. That said, Long Tan is a real-world struggle of a small force against a much larger one using human wave attacks, with liberal artillery keeping the enemy off, so there's not much room for the director to move if he wants to remain true to the story (and that will be very important to Australians and Kiwis). If you want to see a Vietnam war movie that is pretty free of tropes I can recommend The Odd Angry Shot (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079652/). Others here may disagree but I like it a lot.

Grenny - website says 8 August 2019

Hi Mark - I'll be in Adelaide travelling for work now unfortunately and unable to attend this week.

Ooh.

See you next week Mark.

Wife's birthday, so apologies

See you there. Last week was great.

Wood splinters maybe? I was watching in F8 when you were dueling with the BMPs and some of the shots going both ways were bursting in treetops.

Thanks Rotar! Just cleared a bunch off mine - they big!

Late reply but I'm in

Hey all, sick 5-year-old may throw a spanner in the works.