Making original films for young men isn’t that hard, but you have to quit pushing gay race communism and appeal to masculine virtue. //

If you understand that this is what appeals to young men, then the movie scripts pretty much write themselves. Make movies with masculine heroes — not necessarily muscle-bound meatheads or ridiculous superheroes, but real men who are heroes because they’re willing to suffer and deny themselves for a greater good, detach from their own desires to pursue justice, and lay down their lives to protect those under their charge.

Smart filmmakers understand this intuitively. Christopher Nolan is reportedly working on an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, due out next summer. It’s probably going to be a blockbuster. Mel Gibson is now finally filming “The Resurrection of the Christ,” a two-part follow-up to his 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” which grossed nearly $610 million worldwide. Gibson is also working on a limited TV series about the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, when a small contingent of knights and Maltese citizens repelled a vastly superior Ottoman force.

These are the kinds of films and TV shows young men want to see. If Disney, or any other production company, wants to appeal to young men and not just lecture at them, then make films that are unapologetically American and Christian.

Make films about crusaders in which the crusaders are the heroes (unlike Ridley Scott’s botched effort in 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven). Make films about the American Revolution (there are precious few good ones). Make sympathetic films and TV series about the great European explorers and conquistadors, the pioneers who settled the American continent, and the soldiers who fought in the Civil War — on both sides. Revive the great tradition of the American western that gave us the catalogues of Sam Peckinpah and John Ford. Make a TV series based on the Hardy Boys — one that actually resembles the original books. Make sci-fi action films about America competing against China to colonize the moon or Mars — in which China is the villain, just like in real life.

And don’t worry about the Chinese market at all, or any international markets. Just make films for American audiences that are pro-American. One of the reason’s Tom Cruise’s 2022 film Maverick was so successful is that it wasn’t preaching woke nonsense. It was just a fun, patriotic action film with awesome stunts, a great cast, and a compelling storyline. Just do that.

If Disney wanted to — and it doesn’t, not really — it could make countless films and TV shows that deeply appeal to young men. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do. But to do that, Disney would have to repudiate its woke ideology and quit trying to lecture young men about how masculinity is toxic, America is bad, Christianity is oppressive, and everything should be gay. And let’s be honest: Disney is incapable of doing that.

But beneath the onslaught of celebrity cameos — including the Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce, pop singer Bad Bunny (Gilmore’s caddy!), and many PGA golfers — a plot line that asks audiences to expel rather than merely suspend their disbelief, and the gratuitously silly scenes that populate the film from start to finish, the movie is shockingly profound and profoundly conservative.

The movie’s core messages are the importance of family, the meaninglessness of hedonism, marriage’s eternal nature, the defense of tradition, the reality of gender roles, and the integrity of the human body. These are provocative and courageous messages to bring audiences (and leftist movie critics) in 2025.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the most pro-life Hollywood blockbuster in a long time, and maybe ever.

The great movies, directors, actors, and writers of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s produced what has since been called the Golden Era of Hollywood. Technological advances, especially sound and color, also contributed. Scripts came from great novels and works of history, and from compelling stories serialized in magazines. One of those who contributed mightily to the Golden Era, in particular to the movies of John Ford, was the writer James Warner Bellah. His stories were powerful, poignant, and filled with men of character and courage. He himself was a veteran of not only World War I but also World War II. //

From the late 1940s through the 1960s, Bellah published eight books and three dozen short stories and articles. He also wrote or co-wrote nine screenplays. He will probably be best remembered for his work with the legendary director John Ford. The two first met, not in Hollywood, but in India during World War II. Ford’s famous cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), came from the pen of James Warner Bellah. //

Probably the best of these films is The Sea Chase (1954), starring John Wayne and Lana Turner.

THE BOURNE IDENTITY

                               by

                          Tony Gilroy

                       Based on the novel

                               by

                         ROBERT LUDLUM

                                              Paris Draft
                                                  9/20/00

The characters in these movies have no philosophical or thematic weight. Many serve no narrative function beyond dying to a dinosaur's jaws. I can remember feeling at least a little sympathy for Gennaro when he was eaten by the T-Rex, because he was a man so focused on doing his job (making the board money) that he failed to grasp the power they were working with until it grasped him in its jaws.

All of Jurassic Park's deaths had some sort of meaning. Nedry tried to control his destiny by betraying everyone and fleeing with dino DNA, but lost control during a storm, winding up in the jaws of a dilophasaurus. Arnold, responsible for controlling the systems across the park, lost control when the hurricane hit and died to raptors while he was trying to restore it. Muldoon, the man responsible for controlling the animals, died by them even though he knew them better than everyone else.

"You never had control. That's the illusion."

These deaths give weight to Sattler's line. Now? When a person dies to a dino... I don't care. They serve no purpose other than being a shallow reinforcement of a lesson we learned back in 1993. Today, we're still being told the same thing, but in a way that's shallow, tedious, and misses the mark entirely.

Jurassic Park was a movie with depth and philosophical importance, delivered with master-class acting and a focused narrative that included stunning visuals and thrilling moments.

Every subsequent one was a monster movie.

Hollywood should take its cues from the original. They should just leave the dinosaurs alone.

Ron Howard's 1995 love letter to NASA's Apollo program takes a few historical liberties but it still inspires awe. //

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, director Ron Howard's masterful love letter to NASA's Apollo program in general and the eponymous space mission in particular. So we're taking the opportunity to revisit this riveting homage to American science, ingenuity, and daring. //

Howard ultimately shot most of the weightless scenes aboard the KC-135 since recreating those conditions on a soundstage and with CGI would have been prohibitively expensive.

In fact, Howard didn't rely on archival mission footage at all, insisting on shooting his own footage. That meant constructing realistic spacecraft interiors—incorporating some original Apollo materials—and reproducing exactly the pressure suits worn by astronauts. (The actors, once locked in, breathed air pumped into the suits just like the original Apollo astronauts.) The Mission Control set at Universal Studios was so realistic that one NASA consultant kept looking for the elevator when he left each day, only to remember he was on a movie set. //

Is every button pressed in the right way? No. Does it bug the crap out of me every time Kevin Bacon answers Tom Hanks' "How's the alignment?" question by nonsensically saying "GDC align" and pressing the GDC align button, which is neither what Lovell was asking nor the proper procedure to get the answer Lovell was looking for? Yes. But's also pure competence porn—an amazing love letter to the space program and the 400,000 men and women who put humans on the Moon.

And like Lovell says: "It's not a miracle. We just decided to go." //

Purpleivan
For anyone wanting a more extensive Apollo 13 experience, then have a look at LunarModule5's YouTube channel.

They've created an end to end (from a few hours before launch, to a few after splashdown) series of videos. These use the entire recorded audio for the mission, both for the crew and controllers on the ground. Long periods of silence have been edited our, but enough silence/static gaps between audio, for the cuts not to feel strange. They've also included some backroom discussion recordings, to fill some of the empty sections audio.

The videos show a simulation (I don't know the software used) to visualise the events of the mission, as well as a huge collection of photos from the mission.

I've watched a few of the videos and plan at some point to watch them all (something like) end to end. However, as the set of mission videos comes in 19 parts, with many 10 hours long, for a total of about 120 hours, it's a serious commitment of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4gb6Eb_Mes&list=PLC1yaZz2qeGrj_-TCMeupfzRUmf6CysdF
June 29, 2025 at 7:15 pm //

postpar Ars Centurion
6y
221
Subscriptor
FWIW, and this is a throwaway here, Chrysler never really got the credit they deserved for their stellar work on those rockets, or on the electronic communication and diagnosis devices, which were quite advanced and reliable under tough circumstances. When Apollo ended, a lot of those guys went back to Detroit. Some of them worked on the racing program, doing aero and diagnostic work; others worked on electronic ignition and on-board automotive computers. They did all this for relatively small profits.
https://www.motales.com/chrysler-corp/aerospace-defense/rockets-by-chrysler.php //

Those Mission Control consoles were built by Ford (Philco division.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XbEIMcxl04)

Most fittingly, the Lunar Roving Vehicle was built in part by General Motors.

And with all that fresh space-age engineering experience under their belts, the American auto industry...basically fell apart at the seams for the next decade. //

JoHBE Ars Tribunus Militum
14y
2,881
Subscriptor++
The movie is now older than the mission was at [the movie's] release.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster horror movie based on the bestselling novel by Peter Benchley. We're marking the occasion with a tribute to this classic film and its enduring impact on the popular perception of sharks, shark conservation efforts, and our culture at large. //

A lot of folks in both the marine science world and the ocean conservation communities have reported that Jaws in a lot of ways changed our world. It's not that people used to think that sharks were cute, cuddly, adorable animals, and then after Jaws, they thought that they were bloodthirsty killing machines. They just weren't on people's minds. Fishermen knew about them, surfers thought about them, but that was about it. Most people who went to the beach didn't pay much mind to what could be there. Jaws absolutely shattered that. My parents both reported that the summer that Jaws came out, they were afraid to go swimming in their community swimming pools. //

The movie also was the first time that a scientist was the hero. People half a generation above me have reported that seeing Richard Dreyfuss' Hooper on the big screen as the one who saves the day changed their career trajectory. "You can be a scientist who studies fish. Cool. I want to do that." In the time since Jaws came out, a lot of major changes have happened. One is that shark populations have declined globally by about 50 percent, and many species are now critically endangered. //

And then, from a cultural standpoint, we now have a whole genre of bad shark movies.

Ars Technica: Sharknado!

David Shiffman: Yes! Sharknado is one of the better of the bunch. Sitting on my desk here, we've got Sharkenstein, Raiders of the Lost Shark, and, of course, Shark Exorcist, all from the 2010s. I've been quoted as saying there's two types of shark movie: There's Jaws and there's bad shark movies. //

Ars Technica: People have a tendency to think that sharks are simply brutal killing machines. Why are they so important to the ecosystem?

David Shiffman: The title of my book is Why Sharks Matter because sharks do matter and people don't think about them that way. These are food chains that provide billions of humans with food, including some of the poorest humans on Earth. They provide tens of millions of humans with jobs. When those food chains are disrupted, that's bad for coastal communities, bad for food security and livelihoods. If we want to have healthy ocean food chains, we need a healthy top of the food chain, because when you lose the top of the food chain, the whole thing can unravel in unpredictable, but often quite devastating ways.

So sharks play important ecological roles by holding the food chain that we all depend on in place. They're also not a significant threat to you and your family. More people in a typical year die from flower pots falling on their head when they walk down the street. More people in a typical year die falling off a cliff when they're trying to take a selfie of the scenery behind them, than are killed by sharks. Any human death or injury is a tragedy, and I don't want to minimize that. But when we're talking about global-scale policy responses, the relative risk versus reward needs to be considered. //

In all of recorded human history, there is proof that exactly one shark bit more than one human. That was the Sharm el-Sheikh attacks around Christmas in Egypt a few years ago. Generally speaking, a lot of times it's hard to predict why wild animals do or don't do anything. But if this was a behavior that was real, there would be evidence that it happens and there isn't any, despite a lot of people looking. //

One of my favorite professional experiences is the American Alasdair Rank Society conference. One year it was in Austin, Texas, near the original Alamo Drafthouse. Coincidentally, while we were there, the cinema held a "Jaws on the Water" event. They had a giant projector screen, and we were sitting in a lake in inner tubes while there were scuba divers in the water messing with us from below. I did that with 75 professional shark scientists. It was absolutely amazing. It helped knowing that it was a lake.

Ars Technica: If you wanted to make another really good shark movie, what would that look like today?

David Shiffman: I often say that there are now three main movie plots: a man goes on a quest, a stranger comes to town, or there's a shark somewhere you would not expect a shark to be. It depends if you want to make a movie that's actually good, or one of the more fun "bad" movies like Sharknado or Sharktopus or Avalanche Sharks—the tagline of which is "snow is just frozen water." These movies are just off the rails and absolutely incredible. The ones that don't take themselves too seriously and are in on the joke tend to be very fun.

Tom Cruise has broken an insane Guinness World Record, and it's because of one of the many crazy stunts he did for "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning," and we are all here for it.

During production of the final movie in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, the 62-year-old actor was awarded the Guinness World Records title, and it was for doing 16 burning parachute jumps, The Wrap reported. It all happened while filming the unbelievable plane sequence for M:I 8 that can be seen below.

It's like Disney is trying to push the message that love isn't worth sacrificing for, and that women should pursue their own interests instead of fighting for something far more worthy than a degree. Abandon your charges. If your family is broken, leave the responsibility to someone else and go get yours, girl.

Disney really had the opportunity to show its fans it learned from its mistakes after repeated massive failures, including "Snow White," but it would appear that it's still high on woke. //

Gandalf
3 hours ago
'It's like Disney is trying to push.....'
You do not need the first two words .. Disney knows exactly what it's pushing, and it's what all progressives are committed to push for: the destruction of the family. //

7againstthebes
3 hours ago
Seems to me that Disney doesn't understand their own story. That about sums up the malfunction of the left. Failure to understand the moral, the morality, the decency, the necessity of all things of good report.

Everything the left touches they defile.

Istandforfreedom 7againstthebes
2 hours ago
Oh, they understand it perfectly well and the DESPISE it and as a result they are tirelessly working to destroy that message. It reveals a deep level of narcissism - selfishness - that is utterly contrary to love. This would be hatred towards everyone who is not them.

Command and Control, Goldsboro 1961
Clip | 2m 6s

Sometimes all that stands between the world and nuclear disaster is the flip of a switch.

Aired 01/10/2017 | Rating NR

Command and Control, Chapter 1
Clip | 9m 21s

A chilling nightmare at a Titan II missile complex in Arkansas in September, 1980.

Aired 01/10/2017 | Rating NR

Command and Control, Accident Report
Clip: Season 29 Episode 1 | 1m 8s

The Accident Report

Aired 01/10/2017 | Rating NR

Command and Control trailer
Preview | 2m 18s

A routine check at a Titan II missile complex in Arkansas leads to a chilling nightmare.

Aired 01/10/2017 | Rating NR

Command and Control The Socket
Clip | 3m 26s

Director Robert Kenner breaks down the scene for The Socket.

Aired 01/10/2017 | Rating NR

A powerful story of the most destructive invention in human history, outlining how America developed the nuclear bomb, how it changed the world and how it continues to loom large in our lives. Witness the raw power and strangely compelling beauty of rare views of above-ground nuclear tests.

I find most war movies a bit trite and overly sentimental. Sometimes, war has a higher purpose than mere coercion, but I'd consider those occasions rare. Whenever you come away from a war movie feeling uplifted, I'd submit that you have been sold a product. To me, the story is the bonding of men facing death, the shared suffering and sacrifice endured when we ask men barely (and maybe not) out of their teens to take incredible risks and responsibility. I've always held "Black Hawk Down" to be the gold standard because it hit the sociology of an infantry unit pitch-perfect and hammers home the fact that young men take these risks and pay this price, now and in the future, for each other, not to make the world safe for democracy or any other slogan the political class uses to sanitize what is at once both the most brutal and transcendent of human activities. Former Navy SEAL and one of the main characters in this film, Ray Mendoza, and English screenwriter and director Alex Garland team up to turn Mendoza's autobiographical script into a masterpiece of what wars do to the young men we send to fight them. //

This is not a war movie; it is a movie about men at war. If you think anything militarily significant happened here, the ending will disabuse you of that notion. The short documentary segment after the fade-to-black for the movie really ties everything together.

"Warfare" is minimalist, but the emotions it conjures up are raw, and you feel them as much as you watch them. Go see it. It is a great film, and we need to support smaller indie studios, such as Angel Studios, if we want to change what movies look like.

The Boeing E-4B, known as the “Doomsday Plane,” is the airborne command center for the United States government during national emergencies meant to ensure continuity of government command after nuclear attack, major natural disasters, or terrorism. And it’s a fleet of old Boeing 747-200s that’s difficult to find parts for. //

The E-4 was developed in the early 1970s as the National Emergency Airborne Command Post. The first was delivered in 1973 (“E-4A”) and three of the planes were upgraded to higher specs (“E-4B”) in 1985. Four E-4Bs are currently in operation, maintained by the 1st Airborne Command out of Offutt Air Force Base outside of Omaha. //

Since the planes are now 50 years old, they’ve become incredibly costly to maintain. The Government Accountability Office estimates a cost of $372,496 per flight hour, and spare parts procurement is difficult as there’s no longer an active world fleet of similar aircraft.

Last April, the Air Force awarded a $13 billion contract to Sierra Nevada Corporation for developing the next-gen Doomsday Plane” called the Survivable Airborne Operations Center. These will be ex-Korean Air Boeing 747-8s. The first of these aircraft arrived at Sierra Nevada facilities late last year to start conversion. The fleet will grow to 10 “E-4C” aircraft by 2036. //

David says:
March 30, 2025 at 2:49 pm
The little-known HBO’s “By dawn’s early lights”, with Powers Boothe and James Earl Jones, almost takes place entirely in a Doomsday plane during WW3. Highly recommended.

Napoleon is master of Europe. Only the British fleet stands before him. Oceans are now battlefields. And a moderate box office success from 2003 has become an unlikely streaming favorite, a poster child for the kind of movies Hollywood doesn’t make anymore, and a beacon of positive masculinity.

That would be Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, director Peter Weir’s adaptation of the historical seafaring novels by writer Patrick O’Brian. Set inside the hermetically sealed world of the HMS Surprise, an early 19th-century British Royal Navy frigate, the movie stars Russell Crowe—fresh off Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind—as Jack Aubrey, the bold, daring, and conspicuously ponytailed captain. Paul Bettany plays Dr. Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon, an erudite naturalist, and Captain Aubrey’s BFF.

If you kidnapped a hundred of Hollywood’s top minds and forced them to work around the clock, they could not engineer a more exquisite Dad Movie. Though Master and Commander is ostensibly about the Surprise sailing to intercept a French enemy warship, the battle scenes, exhilarating as they may be, are few and far in between. The bulk of the film—and the heart of its charm—is instead a meticulous rendering of daily life at sea: the monotony of hard labor, the palpable threat of scurvy, the dirty-faced sailors who sleep in close quarters and grin through yellowed teeth. (You know it smells crazy in there.) Even better? All the screen time devoted to close conversations between Aubrey and Maturin, and their two-dude violin and cello jam sessions. You come away with a sense of satisfaction at their accomplishments and camaraderie, and just a bit of longing over a bygone way of life.

But that low-key intimacy was confounding to audiences expecting the next Gladiator, and the film’s enduring popularity was not obvious when it was first released. Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind each won Best Picture, and Crowe nabbed a Best Actor Oscar for the former. Though Master and Commander was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King swept the show. Master and Commander ended up as the 33rd highest-grossing movie of 2003, three spots behind Legally Blonde 2: Red White & Blonde.

Twenty years after it was released in theaters, Master and Commander has found a new life on the internet, simultaneously the subject of memes and sincerely beloved by a certain type of guy (gender neutral). So why does the movie, which is streaming on HBO Max, suddenly have such a grip on the public imagination? One might initially think that it’s a matter of ironic distance—after all, this is a movie about the stodgy British navy, where every single character is a man. “The hot new bachelor party activity is napoleonic era naval gunnery exercises. The boys hooting and hollering as they drink grog firing three broadsides in two minutes,” reads one tweet. Another imagines a scenario in which several more Master and Commander films are announced to the world, Marvel and DC style.

It’s also just fun to argue about online. Even Russell Crowe got into the mix, responding to someone who called the film boring. But while posting about Master and Commander is popular with an irony-adjacent crowd, the love for it is all sincere. Many of the film’s most vocal fans are in their thirties. If they originally saw it in their tween or teen years, their relationship with the movie only deepened as they grew older. //

Any nostalgia stirred up by Master and Commander is also nostalgia for a different era of Hollywood. This sort of richly detailed, big-budget historical epic rarely gets a chance in today’s movie landscape. And even if the action isn’t the point, the battles absolutely kick ass, using practical effects that would probably be weightless CGI these days. (They bought a ship in Rhode Island and sailed it through the Panama Canal and a hurricane to a six-acre filming tank in Mexico!)

Nando Vila, the head of studio at Exile Content Studio, told me, “I think why a lot of guys are liking it now is because Aubrey is so charming and swashbuckling and swaggery. You believe that all those sailors are into Lucky Jack and they'll follow him to the far side of the world. You don't see that kind of brawny, ‘We're just going to go to the far side of the world. Who's with me?’—that’s not a movie that gets made anymore.”

Tom Rothman, the current chairman of Sony’s Motion Picture Group, was the chairman and CEO at Fox when Master and Commander was released. The film was his personal project: a longtime fan of the books, he had been attempting the project for 15 years. “I had to become the chairman of a major motion picture studio before I could get it made,” he told me.

“Why the books, I believe, endure is because they combine the epic and the intimate. They have epic action and daring in them,” Rothman said. “And I'm like any guy. I love that shit. ‘Oh man, they're going to take that ship’ and all that stuff. That's great. Right? But they're also very intimate and personal. They combine the epic and the intimate, and that's what great historical movies do.”

And though Master and Commander may be a film set in 1805 and made in 2003, its themes are eternal.

“It's about how men (and boys) behaved in that time and circumstance,” director Peter Weir told me in an email. “How they understood concepts like 'duty' and 'courage'. Perhaps that has some relevance today. Times change, and with them fashions, but some things remain imperishable. This film touches on those imperishables.”

DVDs, if taken care of properly, should last for 30 to up to 100 years. It turned out that the problems that Bumbray had weren't due to a DVD player or poor DVD maintenance. In a statement to JoBlo shared on Tuesday, WBD confirmed widespread complaints about DVDs manufactured between 2006 and 2008. The statement said:

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is aware of potential issues affecting select DVD titles manufactured between 2006 – 2008, and the company has been actively working with consumers to replace defective discs.

Where possible, the defective discs have been replaced with the same title. However, as some of the affected titles are no longer in print or the rights have expired, consumers have been offered an exchange for a title of like-value. //

Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader noted that owners of WB DVDs can check to see if their discs were manufactured by the maligned plant by looking at the inner ring codes on the DVDs' undersides. //

evanTO Ars Scholae Palatinae
7y
839
DRM makes it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for people to make legitimate backups of their own media. Not being able to legally do this, particularly as examples like this article abound, is just one more example of how US Copyright Law is broken.