Ok, sorry but I just had to say it.
I got to work with Mr. Obi-wan Kenobi himself here in Detroit last week.
Ewan McGregor is in a Michael Bay movie called 'The Island' that shot for two weeks here. Pretty cool future type movie.
Oddly enough, Detroit was doubling for LA.:freak:

My wife is still beating on me for not letting her get on an elevator with him at the end of the wrap party.

Michael Bay has a lot of gall to make another movie. After that Pearl Harbor abortion, I wouldn't think that anyone would be willing to give him lunch money, let alone finance another picture.

Sorry, Club.

I don't mean to sound so negative. I think it's great that you were able to work with Mr. McGregor and also be employed on a feature film. I just happen to know many WWII vets, including Pearl Harbor survivors and several of Jimmy Doolittle's Raiders, who are still seething over that picture.

Dad wasn't seething, but he spent a lot of time shaking his head during the P-40 flying scenes.

My grandpa wasn't at Pearl, but he was aboard a boat that saw action during several of the Pacific battles, and he was shaken when we watched the movie; a lot of it was realistic enough to disturb him, and that's hard to do. After we watched it he opened up a little about some of his more gruesome experiences in the war, and that's something he hadn't done before then.

Back on topic, very cool, Tepes! That's fun.

My father was Lt. Commander aboard an escort carrier in the South Pacific during WWII. He never talked about the war, and he disliked war movies in general -- with one notable exception: "Mr. Roberts". More than any other picture he felt "M.R." came the closest to capturing the odd mix of boredom and terror he experienced during the war.

I'm no Michael Bay fan, but Ewan McGreggor is a fantastic actor. The trades recently reported he was in negotiations to star as the next James Bond. Personally I think he'd do a swell job.

Sorry, Club.

I don't mean to sound so negative. I think it's great that you were able to work with Mr. McGregor and also be employed on a feature film. I just happen to know many WWII vets, including Pearl Harbor survivors and several of Jimmy Doolittle's Raiders, who are still seething over that picture.
Oh believe me, I'm not defending Michael Bay in any way. I too hated what he did with 'Pearl Harbor'. For me, the worst part is knowing that another shot at making a good Pearl Harbor movie won't come for another 30 to 40 years.

I got to witness a few good Michael Bay moments. He is well known for his yelling tantrums.

I so much wanted to tell him that one of my plans is to cut some of the 'good' effects shots from 'Pear Harbor' and drop them into 'Tora Tora Tora'.

Even some of his regular crew members acknowladge that he takes a decent script and wrecks it.

I can't see Ewan McGregor as James Bond. Hes a pretty small guy. He is my height 5' 7" and pretty 'dainty'. Another person I knew on the crew said he'd make a good horse jockey. The camera making someone look bigger is certainly true in this case. Those Jedi robes really make him look bigger than he really is. But don't get me wrong. He's a great guy and I was really happy to work with an actor this time with whom I enjoy their films.

I so much wanted to tell him that one of my plans is to cut some of the 'good' effects shots from 'Pearl Harbor' and drop them into 'Tora Tora Tora'.
I've thought about doing that myself! I really enjoyed some of the effects shots, despite the fact that the ships and most of the planes were the wrong color, and I don't recall modern-day guided missile cruisers being moored at Pearl in 1941, as depicted in the Michael Bay film.

I had really hoped that the film would have been Tora told with the benefit of modern filmmaking technology, but I had serious reservations even before the film's release, considering who was at the helm. I just didn't see the need for a fictionalized version of the story, when the actual history is far more compelling. While he may have brought attention of the attack to modern audiences and had some truly spectacular visuals, he did a grave disservice to those veterans by fictionalizing and altering many of the events to merely provide a backdrop to a poorly-conceived love triangle.

The only two things that really annoyed me about Pearl:

The casting of tall, muscular (asshole) Alec Baldwin as the fireplug-sized Jimmy Doolittle, and short, skinny Mako as the rather husky Admiral Yamamoto. Just completely the wrong look in both cases.

The fictionalizing of the fighter pilots who got into the air during the attack. Our film heroes were substituted for Lts Welch and Taylor, the two P-40 pilots who downd 6 Japs between them, without unbelievable low-level bewteen-building flying and coordination from a tough-guy sergeant in a tower (and btw, handy-talkies and airplanes were not on the same radio frequency).

Other than this, I'm willing to look at the film without venom. The thing is, LOTS of fictionalized WWII films have been made over the decades, and very, very few of them used real characters or represented the events perfectly. Look at John Wayne's "Flying Tigers." Not one real AVG officer mentioned in the film. Was it a disservice to the Tigers? No, it was a tribute to them. Has anyone ever mentioned being pissed that no one was mentioned by name? Not that I know of.

Same can be said for Flying Lethernecks, Back to Bataan, They Were Expendable, the Fighting Seabees, etc, etc. Pearl was no different than a fictional WWII movie made in the 40s.

Oh, and - it's also not the first film to use whatever vehicles were handy to reprsent period equipment. So they had three modern ships handy that the Navy let them put fire bombs on, so what? Watch Patton and tell me what kind of tanks everybody's driving.

For some reason, the promos made everyone think it was going to be the definitive historical piece. Maybe it was the advertizers' fault. They should have promoted it as "a love story set against the turmoil of the day of Infamy!" Then we'd just have expected a WWII love story.

One good thing I'll say about Michael Bay after watchin the extras on the Pearl DVD - he and the crew attended a USS Arizona Memorial service while on Oahu. During the ceremony, Bay arranged for the movie's real P-40s to fly a missing-man formation over the memorial. Dammit, I cry every time I see a missing man. So he gets LOTS of points from me for that thoughtful tribute to the Air Corps personnel killed during the attacks.

Isn't that funny about Patton! I have the same reaction! And it was made in the same year as Kelly's Heroes, in which there was at least an attempt to get the equipment and markings right, and in a movie that was a lot less serious, so it's not like it couldn't be done.

I liked Baldwin as Doolittle. It's not the look, it's the fiery spirit and real-world politics be damned. If we like movies, we overlook the flaws. From Here to Eternity had a few details wrong and that wasn't too long after Pearl. Or take a good, long look at the hair styles in Tora -- and where the women at?

For me, it wasn't the wrong colors and equipment nor the liberties with procedure and physicality that made the movie bad; hell, if you want to get aggravated about that, watch anything by Oliver Stone. For me, it was just that Bay took a subject rich with possibilities and made a lousy movie in the dramatic sense. It's boring.