Saw "Railroad Tigers" all the way through for the first time on Netflix this weekend (with subtitles).
What can I say?: It's like "The Train" meets "Pirates of the Carribean" with a dose of karate and what appear to be two real steam locomotives set in WWII occupied China. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4687848/
I was suprised by the amount of violence — literal blood letting — next to comic scenes that still made me laugh in spite of the violence.
If I missed this movie, what other foreign train/rail films am I missing out on?
Steve SweeneyDigital Editor, Hobby
That's a good question Steve. The problem with foreign films is typically the only way they make it over here is if an American distributor thinks a market for them exists and he (she?) can make money off of it.
If not, they never get here. Just the way it is.
Considering how popular Jackie Chan is I'm surprised it never made it here.
I watched the trailer on that IMDB link. Wow, I feel sorry for those Japanese. See what happens when you PO Jackie?
Wayne
Steve SweeneyIf I missed this movie, what other foreign train/rail films am I missing out on?
For the sake of completeness, have you seen 'Snowpiercer'?
(Technically this is about as much a 'railroad' thing as Supertrain! was, but it's interesting if you like the 'speculative fiction' sort of thing...)
MEANWHILE there is a cognate subject here: railroad references that didn't make it into American movies despite being important in context. An example is the coal trains that figure prominently in the Hunger Games books, and that would have provided considerable 'color' to the dystopian society in the movie (especially to any moviegoers repeatedly held up by coal trains IRL).
Not seen it, but just checked the trailer. More post-apocolyptic filmography? Real life is scary enough.
Steve SweeneyMore post-apocalyptic filmography?
Yeah. You know how modern authors love dystopias, sometimes the more outlandish and politicized-topic-connected they are -- this is one of those 'if this goes on...' presumptions that if you've read E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" you can already largely predict.
Some pretty good special-effects scenes in it, though: Europeans sometimes have seemingly-strange priorities about things they budget 'significant money' to produce.
OvermodYou know how modern authors love dystopias, sometimes the more outlandish and politicized-topic-connected they are -- this is one of those 'if this goes on...'
zardozGeorge Orwell wrote a rather popular novel back in 1948 (modern?); it was even made in to a movie.
Actually it was made into several movies -- the one in the '80s being directly relevant to this thread. It contained a very, very interesting implicit consideration of how technology and life would actually have developed from the time of Orwell's writing, had the Stalinist- and Stalinist-reactive systems of government he described actually come to be. One of those, very prominently displayed, was the continued use of steam trains on the railway system...
If you want to watch this: there is an original color scheme and a revised (imho vastly inferior) one. There was also a revision of the soundtrack. Strangely only one version gives you the choice of 'both' and as I recall that one was on the expensive side. What you want is the original cinematography and the better score together... you might read some contemporary views to see what's available or what compromises you might have to make that would affect your perception of the film.
FWIW Orwell's "1984" was meant to point out the terrible consequences of embracing either the Soviet-style far left or the Nazi/Fascist far right. "Big Brother" was meant to be kind of a mix of Stalin and Hitler, showing that both extremes were bad, not just one.
Old Joe had a higher death tally than the Schicklegruber
Re: And thus here we are.
Unfortunately, most social systems seem to get bigger in order to consume resources more efficiently AND direct the benefits of the system to the "most fit" members of the system.
The population always gets bigger, corporations always get bigger, governments always get bigger, the "miracle" of compound interest means debt-servicing must always increase at an increasing rate, even the most popular economic models require continuous growth in order to "explain the future".
On the bright side, I'll be dead before it all collapses.
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