TV/Movies Megathread

[Liep]

I'm starting to think Oxford is on to something making an emoticon word of the year, all I can say about that graph is.

[Josquius]

I've been watching Jessica Jones.  It's rather good. Like the Daemon Headmaster for adults.

[Malthus]

I meant the Tokugawa-era gun control - not present day.  The Tokugawa Shogunate won the wars of the 16th-17th centuries with armies armed largely with guns

The Tokugawa shogunate won because Kobayakawa Hideaki and his 15,000 soldiers, holding the higher ground on Mount Matsuo and Ishida Mitsunari's right flank, changed sides and rolled down into Otani Yoshitsugu's flank at Sekigahara, with swords and spears.

Unless you are thinking about Nagashino and the image of Takeda cavalrymen and infantry being mowed down by rolling volleys like it was the Somme. This is a myth. At most the Oda-Tokugawa had 3,000 gunners (and even that number is under question), protected behind fences and moats aiming to break and funnel advances, but they still needed to be supported by spears. The use of the guns at Nagashino was to keep a rotating fire to break the cohesion of advancing Takeda units, not to mow them down with volleys like machine-gunners. The battle lasted several hours, and Takeda numerical inferiority, bad intelligence, and terrain perpared to counter charges played as much (if not more) in the defeat than gun volleys.

Even the reality of the 'famed' Takeda cavalry is also contested. We now know that horses bred and used during the Sengoku era were in fact too small to support fully-armored humans during charge; they were really oversized ponies. Theory is that cavalry was used more as dragoons than shock units.

then deliberately got rid of them and had them mostly outlawed (except for a small number of hunting pieces)

The sword hunt (and the four-class hierarchy that came with it) was proclaimed under Hideyoshi's rule way before Sekigahara. It was the social basis of the bakuhan system that Ieyasu founded his shogunate on, but that didn't in itself ban guns from being used in warfare. It banned peasants (and priests) from being armed for war, and from being warriors altogether. Hence why no more guns for either of them.

In fact, the biggest contribution from Hideyoshi's sword hunt was not disarming the peasantry and closing next-to-all chances of social mobility, but pulling the samurai off their land properties (and local power bases) and cantoning them into castle towns where they were retributed in stipends based not on their land's rice output but estimations of the total economic yield of their assigned fiefs (in koku).

and reintroduced the samurai sword as the main weapon (commoners were also forbidden swords). 

The sword never stopped been the main weapon of a samurai. Not before, not during, not after. The gun never was the main weapon of the samurai, shooting guns was left to year-round paid and trained ashigaru. Those either had to choose between returning as peasants and be disarmed, or becoming bottom-feeder samurai with (very low) stipends.

Most samurai after the immediate generations who had experience fighting either in the late Azuchi-Momoyama era or the war in Korea barely knew how to use a sword, let alone a gun. Many of them didn't even know how to fight with a sword at all. They were bureaucrats, courtiers, magistrates, and servants wearing swords as indicator of social status, not unlike the noblesse d'épée of the French Ancien régime.

In short, men wielding swords enforced gun a gun ban ... but as far as I know, that is the only case.

This is all so wrong.

The Edo bakufu never gave up the gun. That assertion is pseudohistory, based on a single book, published 35 years ago by a romantic Westerner English teacher, with no basis in fact nor credible Japanese sources (since he couldn't read them anyway) to create a narrative frame through which we could "give up the nuke" like the Japanese "gave up the gun".

http://www.sengokufieldmanual.com/2013/02/giving-up-myths-part-i.html

http://www.sengokufieldmanual.com/2013/02/giving-up-myths-part-ii.html

I'll just quote this nugget :

It would be easy to ignore it, as most of the Japanese history community has done. In Japan, for instance, the Japanese edition of the book was published with a disclaimer in it, stating that the book was "not based on historical events." The book is an anti-nuclear weapons manifesto, masquerading as a history book. The author himself admits he isn't an expert on Japanese history, and can't even read Japanese. And yet, somehow, people not only read this, but I've seen academic presentations where allegedly intelligent individuals are citing his book as a source in their research. This should not be, yet it is.

For various reasons, both political, military, and social, gun production was limited and was severely controled (because, obviously, no more war and no willingness to arm potential rebels with rifles), but stockpiles of both guns and gunpowder were kept, maintained, and stored in armories (and yes, even in tozama daimyo armories, especially the Shimazu who were the first to enter in contact with western guns in 1543).

Japanese were no fools; they knew the Russians and the Dutch (and by extension Westerners like the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the English) all had guns, and lots of guns at that. They also knew that guns were deadly used in mass volleys. While they didn't need guns to wildly circulate, since people who weren't samurai retainers had no business owning a gun or a sword or a spear or a bow anyway, they needed to defend themselves against both foreign and internal threats, so they kept stockpiles of guns in reserve.

What they ignored is the extent and the pace firearms would suddenly improve in the West after the 19th century, and so they found themselves outgunned both quantitatively and qualitatively when the Black Ships came knocking on their door.

We should probably take this to another thread ... 

http://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,13548.0.html

[Syt]

Star Wars Identities is coming to Vienna in time with the launch of the new movie.

http://www.starwarsidentities.com/

Anyone been to one of those?

[Barrister]

It was in Edmonton and I remember hearing someone say it was good, but I didn't go myself.

[Grey Fox]

It is a must if you are a big Star Wars fan.

[MadImmortalMan]

Aziz Ansari's "Master of None" on nf.

The bald guy with the beard who keeps giving him advice was bugging the hell out of me because the voice was so familiar but out of place.

It was about the third episode he's in that I placed it. He's Sterling Archer. 

[mongers]

'Cartel Land' - a documentary, the story of the Mexican vigilantes who take on the Knights Templar cartel and what a group of American militia get upto on the American-Mexican border. The Mexican story is obviously the more compelling but the American part is a worth viewing.

An astonishing piece of film making, it's as like an 'Apocalypse Now' set in Mexico, but instead of a work of fiction it's a documentary.



I think it's an American documentary, which I've just seen as part of the BBCs storyville series, I'll see if I can find a link.

BBC Iplayer link, probably no use to most of you outside the UK:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06q7csp/storyville-20152016-9-cartel-land

There's quite a few links on youtube to it, trialers, edited down versions. Here's a link to the longest one, seems to be just over the length of the documentary, but I can't view it as it's not available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkLlO-nY6G8

In this Sundance award-winning film, Director Matthew Heineman and Executive Producer Kathryn Bigelow ("The Hurt Locker", "Zero Dark Thirty") gain unprecedented, on-the-ground access to the riveting stories of two modern-day vigilante groups and their shared enemy— the murderous Mexican drug cartels. In the Mexican state of Michoacán, Dr. Jose Mireles, a small-town physician known as "El Doctor," leads the Autodefensas, a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel. Meanwhile, in Arizona's Altar Valley – a narrow, 52-mile-long desert corridor known as Cocaine Alley – Tim "Nailer" Foley, an American veteran, heads a small paramilitary group called Arizona Border Recon, whose goal is to stop Mexico's drug wars from seeping across our border. Heineman embeds himself in the heart of darkness as Nailer, El Doctor, and the cartel each vie to bring their own brand of justice to a society where institutions have failed. The film is a chilling, visceral meditation on the breakdown of order and the blurry line between good and evil.

    Release date
        2015
    Running time
        1:40:11
    Language
        English
    Actors
        Dr. Jose Mireles Tim Foley
    Director
        Matthew Heineman
    Producers
        Tom Yellin Molly Thompson Matthew Heineman Kathryn Bigelow
    Category
        Documentary

[jimmy olsen]

I'm starting to think Oxford is on to something making an emoticon word of the year, all I can say about that graph is.

It means he should adapt a war hammer 40k novel. One of the Ciaphis Cain novels maybe. He's got everything Bay needs, humor, a hot girlfriend and explosions in the thousands.

[celedhring]

The Conjuring - decent flick. Doesn't do anything new, hits a bunch of genre cliches, but goes about it pretty competently and with a refreshing sense of reality to the proceedings. No hot screaming idiot teenagers, no zombies.

All in all, one of the best horror flicks of the past years, which is probably a bit sad since it's not a great film or anything, just a competent one.

I really need to pick up It Follows.

[Malthus]

The Conjuring - decent flick. Doesn't do anything new, hits a bunch of genre cliches, but goes about it pretty competently and with a refreshing sense of reality to the proceedings. No hot screaming idiot teenagers, no zombies.

All in all, one of the best horror flicks of the past years, which is probably a bit sad.

I really need to pick up It Follows.

I would love to watch good horror movies sometimes - but my wife forbids me accessing them in the house.  She hates, hates, hates horror movies, even classic ghost stories. She saw one once and it gave her nightmares, so she's now positively allergic to them.

[mongers]

'Terminator Genisys' - Meh, Arnie was the best thing in it.

Any point to watching the 25 minute long credits?

[Eddie Teach]

I would love to watch good horror movies sometimes - but my wife forbids me accessing them in the house.  She hates, hates, hates horror movies, even classic ghost stories. She saw one once and it gave her nightmares, so she's now positively allergic to them.

You should set up one room as your "man cave" where you can watch whatever you want.

[celedhring]

Finished "Show me a hero". It's good. My only issue is that the two main storylines - the mayor's and the black people that ultimately move to the new houses, are too disconnected from each other.

[Admiral Yi]

Watched a bit of The Exorcist last night.  Last three or so viewings it has not freaked me out like it used to.  I used to not be able to watch it by myself late at night.

Pleasant nostalgia trip seeing the GU campus and environs.

Whenever I had out of town visitors to DC, I always took them to see the Exorcist stairs and the Exorcist house.  Do other people do this too, either when visiting DC or showing people around?