S4E35.5: Ice Cold in Alex

When you do Fury, I want you to do The Beast soon after. It is a movie about a Soviet tank crew in the Afghanistan war, and the tank commander is a kind of Ahab 'tough captain on a ship of the line losing his fucking mind' guy. It also paints Islam and the native people of Afghanistan in a surprisingly decent light for a movie of its time

If you read German war memoirs, especially from officers, the amount of myth making is palpable. In Panzer General, the author constantly talks about seeking to mitigate damage, makes up chivalry stories, and shakes his head at the Gestapo so you know he disagrees with them. In Tigers in the Mud, the author talks about the smoke of burning villages on the horizon with no real comment about who might be doing it- just that it is unfortunate. It sucks how much Allies officers and post war publication had a hand in rehabilitating their images.

It's May and I just realized why November named herself November instead of keeping her original new name

this episode appears to not be showing up on the rss feed? not sure what's going on there

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I wonder if part of the reason the Brits were so eager to portray the Nazis as “just soldiers doing their job” is because it allowed them to stretch the definition of “good” soldiering to include things like shooting unarmed women in ambulances. Sort of like how pro-Biden liberals weren’t very loud about Trump making himself immune to prosecution because deep down, they think the president *should* have that power.

Do Sorcerer please please pleeeeeease

Can this episode get tagged with the KJB Secure Communications Feed collection? Otherwise I'm not sure how to get it to show up in my rss feed

Tobruk mention! one of the enduring Australian military legends is about the Rats of Tobruk. the garrison of mainly Australian soldiers who tried to hold Tobruk during the siege. unfortunately any of my relatives involved in ww2 were on the Italian side so. one great uncle did get sent to a German POW camp late in the war. he escaped and walked basically from Germany to the bottom of Italy. wild things you find out at people's funerals, hey?

Nova calling Fitzcaraldo as her next pick makes me want to strongly recommend the book "Conquest of the Useless" which is the English translation of Herzog's personal journal entries from the making of that movie.

I feel like a good film to put in conversation with Fury would be T-34 (2019), in that where Fury tries to broil down the spirit of fascism for the viewer via the more or less perfunctory expositonial device of "a WW2 tank crew", T-34 deliberately strips almost all politics (modern or 1940s or even Russian at all) or, like, your routine grit and war is hell and camaraderie in violence and so on out of itself. This to try and bare a quintessential Truth ; which is that tanks are really cool, man. Russian tanks, Nazi tanks, doesn't matter they're all so SO COOL, duuude. That's it. That's the thesis of the movie, which thus reaches fascism through a completely opposite route.

Trouble with the Dambusters is it was cast with actors in their 30s that removed the impact they were very young men 18-25. Guy Gibson was considered old at 25.

I think our dear hosts have exaggerated the extent to which the score is similar to the Star Wars score, it's similar but not to the level of plagiarism that was implied. Also, I do have to give the movie a cinemasins ding for continuity with the beer scene; I'll allow some variation there (it's hard to do the exact same pour for every take) but you can't give me a shot where all the beers have 1 cm of head and then cut to another shot where they have 1.5-2 inches of head

whenever you see stories like "we used to be on different sides of ww2 and many years later we met and had a nice time" it's always like an american or brit and not a pole or a russian being chummy with the nazi i wonder why's that

26:50 Not to say categorically that this is wrong, but it's not *reliable*. There are a lot of land mines still in use, sadly, and they have a lot of fuzes. Some will detonate under simple pressure, some need steady pressure, some are trip-wires, some incorporate a pressure-release fuze as an anti-handling device. Life isn't movies or TV, and it's not conducive to this sort of drama.

Hot drinks in the dry heat helps cool one down by hydrating & inducing sweating

British Adeptus Mechanicum Techpriest’s prayer to the Machine Spirit is just a slap and saying “fantastic piece of kit”? Beautiful.

Really appreciate the extremely strenuous reference to NL playing game of Sisyphus crashing and burning. Felt appropriate on all levels, a real gesamtkunstwerk of a failed joke

My dad told me that they used to watch these movies and his mother would say "that's not right, it didn't happen like that" and his father would say "what are you talking about, I fought in the war, I know all about it". Then 50 years later we found out what she'd been doing during the war.

Are trains considered an apex predator destroying both cars and trucks? Or are they are force of nature, but restricted in their destruction

This made me want to look up what my grandparents were doing, and honestly pretty wild. My grandmother was doing guns of navarone shit in the aegean while my grandfather was fucking around with tanks in northern france.

Surely truck season as to have the seminal truck movie "convoy" in it and finish with the ultimate Car man and truck man working together movie "smokey and the bandit" showing that we are all better when we come together.

John Williams, like most film score computers, to heavy influence from the late Romantic and early 20th century composers. If you listen to Holst's Planet Suite, Greig's Pier Gint Suite, and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, you'll hear Starwars throughout. I suspect because they were common choices for temp tracks, and directors are notorious for getting to attached to the temp tracks and wanting the composers to basically file the serial numbers off. Infamously in 2001 a Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick died the composers and just got the rights for the temp tracks. EDIT: Speaking of the Bluesmobile, does the Blues Brothers count as a reverse heist for the purposes of robbery season? They break into the tax office to pay tax, lol. (If not it works as a Carsmen vs Trucks bonus episode due to the Good Old Boys pursuing then in a caravan, plus there are plenty of Nazis to vehicular manslaughter!)

I hope Mad Max Fury Road will count as a truckman movie. One truck in the desert beset continuously by many varied factions of carmen

I mean, these were white british people during ww2. They were probably perfectly fine with the nazis opinions. I feel like unfortunately most people hate and hated the same people as the nazis but just thought the nazis went a bit too far

Putting this out there as a curiosity more than anything, but there's a 1957 British film noir called Hell Drivers that is very much A Truck Film. Notably the director, Cy Endfield, was blacklisted in the USA for 'unamerican activities'. He would go on to direct Zulu. Yes, that Zulu, with the singing.

Some examples of positive masculinity that I've encountered recently have been in A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms with Dunk, Baelor, and even Ser Arlyn the Long.

This movie would have been a lot more palatable if they weren't fighting Nazis.

That’s my name, don’t wear it out!

the train (1963) the train (1963) the train (1963)!!!!!!

No grandpas in northern Africa in WWII here, but had a couple of great great uncles there in WWI.

Sure he's a Nazi, and he's been radioing intel that probably helped the fall of Tobruk, but have you considered the terrible children's books he wrote that people are still oddly nostalgic about?

"austin k2 am" autofills to "austin k2 ambulance for sale" ... it's a beautiful vehicle 🚑

"Kill James Bond, 1940s" just has me picturing the three of you constantly trying to hunt down Ian Fleming

Another idea for War-Truck Season: Red Ball Express. WWII American truck convoys through Europe, B-grade, very (unintentionally) funny death scene.

Merry Christmas mr Lawrence for war season

My grandfather was in Tabruk with the Royal Artillary. He refused to talk about it - only gentle tales of swimming in Aden and peacekeeping in Palestine in 1946. I was told he once dashed out of the room whilst others were watching the Stuka dive bombing scene in the Battle of Britain film. I guess the sound triggered something.

It sucks that the Red Ball Express film is such crap when the real WW2 Red Ball Express was such an interesting intersection of race, politics, war, TRUCKS and dudes rocking

Also, the relationship of South African generally and the Afrikaners to WW2 is *fascinating*.

Something to keep in mind is that the Holocaust also affected the Jewish population of North Africa, and that Rommel let the the Eizetgruppen operate in the areas in which he operated.

If you ever go back to religion season you MUST watch uncle boonmee who can recall his past lives

"No Voke shit, only Volk shit"

my great uncle Harry was in the North African campaign and did such a good job killing Nazis that the Australian War Memorial now has five (5) full size Nazi flags with Harry's name scrawled all over them lol

Man... I can't believe Nova's dead name was Heliopolis!

I renew my urging to include Sidney Lumet's 1965 film "The Hill" in War Season. Great cast, including Sean Connery attempting to escape his Bondage.

I was on holiday in Corfu around the turn of the millennium as young unruly fools were wont to do. One morning I walked from the hotel into town with a buddy of mine. That day was hot. It was hot as an oven. I don't know what the thermometer would have said, but every surface was baking in the sun, blistering. You could hear those big crickets giving it the 'this joke failed' chirp from the sides of the road, and what we thought was an easy walk was actually maybe an hour. Scuttling from shade to shade all the way, and when there's no shade we're just eating shit, the sun's working us over like a Martian tripod heat beam, we're cooked. But we make it. First bar we find, we go in, it's basically empty, there's a bootleg handycam rip of Gladiator playing on a projector, and the only beer they've got is Heineken, which I'm sure everybody reading this knows is usually bubbly water from the bottom of a wheelie bin. But in this instance, the glasses are kept in this big trough of ice, and the beer itself is coming through a seriously heavy duty cooling setup. We order two beers, and they are served so cold that there are little bits of ice forming in the beer, for all I know it's below freezing. And it was >so fucking good<. Genuinely. Properly communing with the lizard brain, satisfying to a cellular level. Hit like a health potion. For that reason I obviously related pretty hard to this movie. Because going on holiday to Kavos when you're twenty for two weeks is a lot like fighting in a war. Harder in a lot of ways because back then Greece didn't have the Euro so you had to change your currency to Draculas which was a pain.

You should try to get Joe Kassabian for when you do Fury he's talked about it several times on his podcast

If this is a preview for war season, it's going to be fantastic. Great episode!

Apropos of having seen Project Hail Mary in theaters, what films would people want to see in a hypothetical Science Season?

I cry for ghost in the shell for the next kjb anime night

Great artists steal, which is why John Williams might be the greatest artist of all time.

Something something something fun fact… … something something something real Carlsberg

Especially as armor modelers have been invoked, I must give in to being a pedant. The half-tracks in the movie are American M5s standing in for the 250/251. If we want to be generous we can call them captured, but I don't recall if the US supplied Britain with those before we got involved ourselves.

I went and listened to the film theme and yeah that really is just like. Nascent Imperial March. They‘re not kidding

Again I cry out for Kelly's Heroes to appear as the trifecta between car season/heist season/war season.