Saw the movie Mountain Patrol last night, a Chinese movie. If you are into foreign language films, you should check it out. It is based on a true story of men trying to protect the Tibetan Antelope from poachers. Here is the trailer:
----------------------------------------- "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. -Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Posts: 902 | Location: Tanzania | Registered: 07 December 2007
Yes...it was an excellent film. For me the scenes with the quicksand, and also the vehicle breakdowns were particularly powerful. It illustrated the magnitude of hopelessness in their situation, and what they were up against both in turns of nature as well as man.
Posts: 319 | Location: SW Idaho, USA | Registered: 18 January 2005
Do you call BS on the way it was filmed i.e. it looked fake? Or do you call BS on the fact that it exists i.e. it was fake? I wondered the latter option myself so I had to look it up. As always Google is your and my friend, and it turns out that desert or dry quicksand conditions actually can exist. I will leave it to the soil scientists and civil engineers to explain the phenomena though. I do agree with you that it looked a little silly the way they filmed it though.
Not to get all Ebert and Roeper on it, I think the scene was meant not only to kill off another good guy. I think it was some sort of metaphor that even the land was against them in their pursuit too. We see that the land itself was literally eating them up. Yeah I know, really blunt, but hell I didn't write the movie. I knew I shouldn't have taken those film studies classes back in college. There were cute girls in then though and there really weren't any girls at all in Statics and Dynamics. Sometimes a bad scene is just a bad scene and that is all there is to it. With that the balcony is now closed, and it is back to hunting.
Posts: 319 | Location: SW Idaho, USA | Registered: 18 January 2005