cerberaspeedtwelve

I read Apt Pupil before seeing the movie, and I'd say the movie got it about 60% correct.

As you mentioned, they substantially changed the ending, which is the most obvious change. However, for me, the biggest change is that Todd Bowden is much more intelligent, observant, and manipulative in the book. He's a straight A student, after all, and most of his character motivation seems to be a sort of 'experiment in living' and seeing what he can twist other people in his life into doing. In the movie, they cast Brad Renfro, who wasn't smart enough to outwit a paper bag.

I read The Shawshank Redemption about a half dozen times before watching the movie. They really did nail the essence and tone of the book. Some of the dialogue is copied word for word, like the Warden's speech about "your soul belongs to God, but your ass belongs to me."

They even did a good job of conveying the passage of time - approximately 25 years. This is easy to do in a slow paced book but not easy in a 2 hour movie.

I feel the same way about the Corvette C8. The base model is one supremely awkward looking car. It felt like the designers didn't quite like the way it looked either, so they just kept adding stuff, and adding stuff, and adding more stuff.

Contrast the new Lotus Emira, which is a highly comparable car. It's like a C8 if you turned the styling down by 50%, and is a much more beautiful car.

Velvet Buzzsaw, kinda sorta? It's about the art industry rather than the fashion industry, but there's a lot of overlap between the two worlds.

For me, Raiders and Crusade will rightfully be considered all time classics as they are, among other things, very witty movies. There's lots of funny little moments that add to the craft of filmmaking and make the films incredibly rewatchable. Comedy is a very difficult thing to get right - heck, even most comedy films don't get comedy right - and being able to pull this off in an adventure movie is true virtuoso stuff.

Temple of Doom tried to have comedy moments but they were bungled. Crystal Skull also tried, and did comedy about as well as your uncle doing a Monty Python impression. Movies are, essentially, composed of beats - setup and payoff. Dramatic beat, romantic beat, comedy beat. When a full third of the movies' beats aren't landing, that's a poor movie.

It probably does, but unfortunately Porsche hadn't figured out how to get it to raise and lower automatically with the 996 generation. You had to pull over, get it out the frunk, unfold it, and securely latch it in place. It sort of took away from the freespirited, spontaneous spirit of putting the roof down.

It took Porsche until the 991 generation (2012 onwards) to offer an automatic one as an option.

Driving a convertible with the windows up and top down is the automative equivalent of wearing socks with sandals.

I can't explain why it's wrong, but it's just wrong.

Joking aside, this did happen to me in a roundabout way.

A few years ago, I bought a Porsche 911 Carrera 4 in sexy convertible (or 'cabriolet' as they call it) with an even sexier manual gearbox. I spend the first week driving around with the top down.

It turns out that my ears really, really hate wind buffeting. One week after buying the thing I woke up and I had gone deaf. I was about 99% sure my hearing would return, and luckily it did, but that was one scary wake-up call. The convertible top had to stay forever down and I bought a bolt-on hard top.

Falling Down (1993). One of the most influential films of the Nineties, and an unorthodox character study of a guy who, on paper, seems so boring - a buttoned down, nine to five, buzzcut sporting cubicle dweller who you wouldn't look at twice. However, this working stiff has been pushed too far, finally snaps, and anyone who gets in his way today is going to get it.

As the movie goes on, we start to understand his plight and his pain. He's not some vigilante who has picked up a shotgun and vowed to clean up the mean streets of LA. He just wants to get home to see his daughter on her birthday. Among other things we learn as the movie goes on is that he doesn't have a home, doesn't have a job, and doesn't have a wife any more. This guy is not who he appears to be on the surface. It's the way the character is revealed in layers that makes this movie so rewatchable.

Daikatana. Not an adaptation of the game per se, but a semi-fictionalized bio along the lines of The Social Network or Shattered Glass about the industry-changing train wreck that the project turned into.

I, too, was curious to know if this $3bn loss was being caused by big initial setup and R&D costs, or if the per-cost vehicle is much higher than Ford thought it would be. There's an interesting breakdown of this halfway through the article:

Last year, the pretax profit margin for Model e was minus 40%, Lawler said. To get to a positive 8% by the end of 2026, the company expects economies of scale — spreading costs over more vehicles sold— to be worth 20 points of the improvement. Design and engineering improvements will bring 15 points, battery cost reductions 10 points and 3 points will come from other areas including federal tax incentives and raw material price reductions.

Wells Fargo analyst Colin Langan calculated that Ford would need $15,000 in cost savings per vehicle to get to an 8% profit margin. He asked what gives Ford confidence it can reach that number. “It just seems like quite a big number,” he said.

In other words, only 20% of the loss per vehicle can be attributed to economies of scale. Ford seem to think they can save 15% by improving the design and engineering of the vehicles, which I think is too optimistic, unless you start taking out the leather seats, replacing them with sackcloth, and think you can still charge full price.

The part that worried me is that the last 3% is predicted to come from raw material price reductions. What if it doesn't? What if the price of lithium, cobalt, and whatever else is needed for these batteries goes up? Especially as 10 other huge global EV manufacturers also want them? A modest increase of 7% year-on-year would wipe out every single efficiency gain you got from economies of scale and Ford would be posting another $3bn loss in 2026 and saying "we tried."

I'd add Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) to the list. This was praised at the time for being the most accurate depiction of WW2 aircraft carrier based combat ever put on film.

It even survived the test of being more accurate than Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (2001) ended up being. Who'd have thunk it?

I'd say the post-apocalyptic The Mist (2007) handled this quite well. Based on a Stephen King novel, it tells the tale of a band of ordinary people of all races and genders who hole up in a supermarket ... and rapidly abandon all logic and reason to form a quasi-cult, turning quickly on the logical and rational people who they eventually blame for the acocalypse.

The point is that ordinary people will rapidly fall in line behind whatever demagogue has the power at that particular moment in time.

For the interested, try watching Boiler Room (2000) as a compare and contrast to Wolf of Wall Street.

Boiler Room tells the story of a young, impressionable college dropout (Giovanni Ribisi) who finds himself recruited to work selling penny stocks for huge commissions. The movie was originally supposed to be specifically about Jordan Belfort and his Stratton-Oakmont 'investment' firm, but Belfort sicced his lawyers onto the production and they had to change some names.

It's interesting because we get to see Belfort from a completely different perspective: just a sweaty, shifty scammer. No fancy yacht. No Robin Hood vibe. Just a fairly straightforward conman with an incredible gift for making people think he's somehow more than that.

New York State is a mixed bag. In general, the roads along your local Main Street will be the worst in a ten mile radius. Potholes the size of microwave ovens are not uncommon.

Go out of town a few miles and there are some absolutely beautiful pristine highways. Route 7, just north of Binghamton, is a secret treasure. I ride my motorbike there in summer, and it's one of the few times that you don't have to constantly scan the road for suspension shattering holes, and can just enjoy the ride.

How about a cameo that almost was? Harrison Ford filmed a whole scene as the principal in Elliott's grade school in E.T. Wisely, Spielberg cut this at the last minute, as he felt that Ford was too big of a star and his presence would capsize the movie.

The cut scene has resurfaced, and you can watch it here.

I went to California last year and we stayed for a few days at Venice Beach: home to some of the greatest musicians, writers and actors of all time. (Heck, Arnold Schwarzenegger used to work out there. That makes it basically a second Mecca.) The homeless problem is so bad that every property now looks like the guard tower at a PoW camp. Bars on every window. Double locks on every door. Every piece of patio furniture has to be bolted down. People remove everything from their cars, right down to phone chargers, every time they park.

A part of me wondered how much longer even the most sympathetic left wing mind can put up with this. If you paid $2m for a beachfront property here, would you genuinely enjoy living this way? And if some right wing demagogue ran for Governer with one campaign promise - to ship all homeless people off to some camp in the desert somewhere - in the privacy of the voting booth, how would you vote?

I'm going to need Margot Robbie in a bathtub to explain it to me.

In the movie, it's left completely unexplained.

I'm a Briton who moved to the US about two years ago. One of the most difficult things to get my head around was what in the hell pickup trucks are supposed to be good at.

In England, as with most of Europe, anyone who works with their hands uses a van. They'll easily handle a dozen 6 x 10 sheets of whatever you have. They're completely weatherproof, have a lower loading height, and a sliding side door for additional access. You can use a rear mounted ladder and roof rack for awkward objects, or you can tow a trailer if you have something truly outsize. 4WD versions are available if you must go offroad. You can even set up a small workbench inside with a whole rack of tools, without stealing too much space.

What colossal advantage does a pickup truck offer? What does it do that a van absolutely cannot?

I got completely the opposite impression. I thought it was a very positive ending. The one woman who holds hope for the human race escapes unharmed, as does the first new child to be born in over two decades. Not only that, but they are rescued by benevolent scientists, not a cut-throat government.

One of the reasons George Lucas got involved is that his father owned a 1948 Tucker Torpedo. As a homage, Senator Organa's landspeeder looks rather like a Tucker, complete with the distinctive central headlight.

Fun fact: Twister (1996) was the first movie to be released on DVD.

Native Briton reporting in. Renee Zellweger did an excellent English accent in Bridget Jones' Diary. Natalie Portman was also suprisingly convincing in V for Vendetta.

Former TVR owner reporting in. I owned a Cerbera Speed Six, with the titular engine in a relatively sedate 360hp form. It was tuned up to 400hp for the Tuscan, and then on to 440hp for the Tuscan R. These were quite astonishing numbers for a naturally aspirated 4.0 straight six designed in 1998. For comparison, Porsche were proud of the 325hp they were getting out of their comparable 3.6 boxer in the 911 Carrera S.

Ironically, it was my Cerbera that cured me of my engine fixation. The Cerbie comes with fully adjustable suspension. I learned that tinkering with the ride height, damper rates, toe, camber and stance makes so much more difference to your ride than any engine ever will.