May 28 2008
Iron Eagle
Last night I was watching the great, “Iron Eagle”, a classic 80’s movie, when I came across a familiar face. I noticed that Doug’s highs school sweetheart girlfriend was none other than Melora Hardin, Michael Scott’s girlfriend in the hit t.v. show, “The Office.” Take a look at this clip of Doug racing “The Snake” route in his Cessna. She’s at the end of the runway in a letter jacket. http://youtube.com/watch?v=Nrq31J6RbgU
Funny how you think that a movie is just awesome when you’re a kid and then you watch it 15 years later and it’s not so awesome anymore. I think a lot of the movies today will stand up to the scrutiny better than some of the stuff they put out 20 years ago. At one point, Doug and Chappy were flying into Iran and they obviously had Chappy in an F16 cockpit with a green screen. While he’s talking, they literally switched reels and started showing a different B-Roll of the sky. It was so stunningly bad that it got my attention and I rewound it. Sure enough he went from, middle of the clouds to a few hundred feet off the ground in 1 second.
In my opinion, that’s just sloppy. How could the editor and director see that and go, ‘aww, no one will notice”. But honestly I didn’t see that thing the first 25 times I watched that movie as a kid. I think we just sort of glossed over that thing because we hadn’t seen movies like Jurrasic Park or The Matrix, yet. We were still living under the glow of “The Last Starfighter”, which coincidentally was one of the greatest movies ever. But, I bet you that if I saw it again now, I’d turn my back in shame at what it had become through the passage of time. So, I think I’m just going to have to keep a list of my all time favorite movies from the 70’s and 80’s and not watch them. I’m sure that I’ll be nostalgic one day and see a glimpse of one of them and think, “man, I’d really love to see “Mannequin” or “Space Camp” right now”, but I want to have fond memories of them, so I’ll just turn the channel to “Bones” or “Men in Trees” for my wife, I’ll shut my eyes and I’ll think back to the time when I was 8 years old and I wondered what it would be like to be chosen to save the universe by piloting a starjet. Greetana!
Tags: ironeagle, the office
