Is it weird that I thought the pyramid that turns out to be the Luxor Casino was the Bass Pro pyramid in Memphis at first?
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I don’t believe that Tennessee is known for its palm trees.
Welcome back!
IDK, have you ever seen the Luxor Casino and the Bass Pro pyramid in Memphis in the same room? 
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Wheeew, delayed observation time! I’ve been so tired lately.
I thought the Surgical Enhancement looked all right. An improvement but not a revelation. There may have been some slight de-noising done in places, as some flesh-tones seemed a bit waxy. But overall I thought it looked fine. I’m thankful we have the option to watch it this way and I give credit to the crew for going the extra mile.
I loved the new short! But unless I missed something, I really miss the post-show discussion. I fell asleep near the end of Pumaman and might have missed any intro segment because I woke up halfway through the interview.
I really missed the Pumaman theme music and the score in general. There’s some sort of warm, fuzzy nostalgia there that I can’t really explain. It’s like walking into a supermarket that hasn’t been renovated since the early 90’s.
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There was no post-show discussion. Just the interview, which… eh. It was okay, but there was nothing exactly revelatory except maybe that the guy who played Vadinho could barely speak English, which makes his performance pretty impressive.
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I only learned recently that neither Chow Yun Fat nor Michelle Yeoh spoke much Mandarin, the language of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and therefore learned their lines phonetically:
Which is AMAZING
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Holy hell… now THAT’S some dedication…
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I don’t remember the film, but Marcello Mastroianni did the same thing for his first American film because he didn’t speak any English.
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A similar deal applies to Gert Frobe as the title character in Goldfinger. He spoke very little English, so he had to do the phonetic thing, too.
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Oh here’s an impressive one- Not only did Ron Pearlman have to learn French phonetically for City of Lost Children, he had to learn to speak it with a Russian accent!
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Oh, wow!
But they absolutely did NOT go that route for his first collaboration with Guillermo del Toro in the latter’s debut film, Cronos. Perlman’s character was supposed to speak Spanish fluently. However, del Toro found his attempts unusable, so they basically turned his inability to speak fluent Spanish into a character trait.
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And even then they still hired Michael Collins to come in and re-dub all his lines.
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Interesting—I’ll need to find & read more about that. Guessing they just found a French-speaking Russian to coach him … it always throws me for a minute when I hear a Chinese guy speaking English with an Australian accent, until I remember that would a completely reasonable option proximity-wise.
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I’m pretty sure he talks about it in the DVD commentary for the film, but it’s been literally decades since I saw it.
Oh, snap, that’s right!
To their credit, it worked rather well…
Hey, Inner London’s very multicultural. Mind you, they’re mostly not Americans, but still…
No idea why they couldn’t find an Englishman to dub Benito Stefanelli, etc.
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It is days later and I’m still not over the fact that the movie didn’t have “Pumaman learns to fly better” as a story arc. He just kept looking like a hoser the whole time. Why?
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The astronaut?! 
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They weren’t very good at that effect.
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They didn’t have much of a budget to do better.
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According to the interview we saw at the end of the stream, the director barely spoke English. The best he could do was tell the actor to move his arms and legs like he was swimming through the air. According to the actor, they wanted something visually distinct from Superman, who holds his body stiff while in flight.
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But… The dialog makes it clear that he’s not flying at all. He has cat powers. Over and over, the verb used to describe what Tony is doing is “jump.” Going by the dialog alone, what’s happening is that Tony is making great leaps, jumping high in the air, rebounding off walls, and moving rapidly in different directions as he pushes off from one surface to another. I’m convinced that that is what we’re supposed to be seeing. That’s why we have the odd camera angles, the lateral or diagonal motion, and the odd body position. He’s got his butt in the air because he’s moving like a cat, jumping with all four limbs. That’s why instead of just grabbing the crook off the roof, we see Tony land on a narrow ledge (like a cat) and walk across it to the roof, where he grabs the guy and jumps.
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