The Lindsay Brothers

Category: 100 Extraordinary Adventures

  • Braveheart

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    85

    I’ll give number 85 this: It’s bloody. I’ll also give it this: It’s gory. Put ‘em together and what’ve you got? Bibbidi-bobbidi-Braveheart. Blood and gore is one thing of course, but Braveheart is much more. It’s sweeping, epic, romantic and swashbuckling, romantic and bloody and gory. Braveheart may actually make a list of top 100 movies of all time and I am a little bit embarrassed that it’s so far down the adventure list. There’s just not really much about torture that screams adventure, I guess. There are so many iconic film moments from Braveheart that it’s almost impossible to list them all, but seeing as that’s my job …

    Adventuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure!!

    Number one: Blue Face paint. I’m not sure how true to history the blue face paint is, but it looks fine and dandy on a poster and really pops on film. The movie’s general color scheme is kind of a muddy Middle Ages brown-out. It’s so full of Scottish clouds that it’s striking to see even this bit of color. I’m betting that’s intentional. It’s hard to find out who deserves the credit for thinking of it. Is it the make-up artist? Surely they just carried out the directors … er … directions. Is it the director? Did he come up with it himself? Maybe the costume director? Maybe the art director. I don’t know. I just know that as silly as it could’ve been, Mel actually manages to make it look menacing, which I think was the historical basis for it. To scare one’s opponents or intimidate them or something.

    William Wallace was later used in the government's "Avatar" program to spy on the indigenous people of the planet Pandora.

    Number two: The accent. There is a clever series on BBC America called the Accent of Evil whereby it is shown that all the best villains have British accents. It’s true also in this case except that pretty much everybody has an accent of some sort, not just the villains. As far as movie accents go Braveheart has some of the best. English, Scottish, French, all of them are fantastic and fun to quote! Yvery Mahn Dyies. Not Yvery Mahn trrruly Lyives. (Translation: Every man dies, not every man truly lives. Can YOU write in a Scottish brogue?) Anyway my point is that Mel more than holds his own on the accent front especially when you consider that he was originally from Australia. British are always whining about Americans doing their accents wrong but strangely I have not heard any of them whine about Gibson in Braveheart.

    Not his real nose … just thought I'd throw that in there.

    Number Three: Revenge, Betrayal, Swordsmanship, axemanship, rocksmanship, and flaming arrowmanship. Despite all its intimate romance, let’s face it Braveheart is really about the battles. When you consider how difficult it is to shoot these battle scenes you really have to hand it to Gibson here as a director. People are shot with arrows, limbs are lost, extras are stabbed through the chest, the whole scene looks chaotic but you can still tell what’s going on. This is especially important these days when so many directors try to make us feel the chaos and kinetics of battle by what’s known in Film School as “Shaking the camera.” Not once do you see the camera soar over hordes of digital extras. I’m told that Mel based the staging of his battle scenes on the foreign film Alexander Nevsky by Sergei Eisenstein. This is perhaps the only good thing one can say about Alexander Nevsky.

    Don't let this picture fool you, Alexander Nevsky is not in any way fun or interesting.

    Next up … 84

  • Survivor

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    86

    Being a castaway is tough.  Food is scarce, the shelter is porous, and you can’t walk three feet without some dangerous predator shoving a video camera in your face.

    Welcome to the mother of all castaway scenarios, where every time-honored motif gets its due.  If Tom Hanks were in it, Wilson wouldn’t be just a volleyball, he’d be a hidden immunity idol, and Tom would go crazy from all the product placement.

    Oh wait.

    The Swiss Family Robinson might be evicted from their house to make room for treemail.  Piggy would come out of nowhere to win the million dollars and Richard Hatch would have to settle for being Lord of the Flies.

    If Robinson Crusoe had to deal with all this backstabbing, infighting, and out-and-out lying, he would probably welcome a trip to Exile Island.

    This is Survivor, and if you’re wondering how a reality show can make our list of the 100 Most Extraordinary Adventures, then you’ve obviously never had to go head to head with Colby in a battle to knock someone off a mud-slicked platform.

    Outwit Outplay Outlast
    Outwit Outplay Outlandish

    The storyline hasn’t changed in 21 seasons.  16 castaways are abandoned in the middle of a film crew and told to vote somebody out every three days.  Last man standing wins a million dollars.

    But like all reality shows, the storyline really changes every episode.  Survivor’s motto is “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast”, and these contestants are more resourceful than the Professor when it comes to finding ways off the island.

    The Professor from Gilligan's Island
    You think maybe he's intentionally sabotaging the escape, just to keep his "alliance" with Ginger and Mary Ann?

    The game is not as easy as it sounds, because in order to win the million dollars, you not only have to kick everyone else out of the game, but you also have to convince your victims to name you the winner when the game gets down to the final two.  This is sort of like playing dodgeball, then asking the kid you just creamed in the face to nominate you for class president.

    The cast changes every year, except on those rare occasions where they do some kind of All-Star show.  Survivor has had some truly incredible characters over the years.  Richard Hatch won the first show by being openly gay and openly naked for most of the series.  Johnny Fairplay was a surprising non-winner after honorably pretending his grandmother had just died in order to score one of those food-based rewards.  And Boston Rob Mariano used his understated northeastern accent to woo former winner Amanda Brkich, and even proposed marriage, to correct the vowel discrepancy in her last name.

    The one constant that doesn’t change is Survivor’s host, Jeff Probst.  He may have to delivery corny lines (“The tribe has spoken”), but there’s nobody better at refereeing a bunch of attention-starved maniacs.  Through the skillful withholding of rice and carved wooden props, as well as the facilitation of a group therapy session known as Tribal Council, Probst surgically peels back the false sense of self-righteousness of anyone stupid enough to cross his path.  You leave each show thinking there’s not a single deserving player in the game, and wondering if Probst shouldn’t just declare himself the winner.

    Jeff Probst
    Trump had already used the "You're fired" line.

    Survivor has engaged in its share of missteps over the years, such as stunt-casting former NFL coaches, disabled people, and folks who should never wear a swimsuit outside their own home, much less on national television.  But it never fails to deliver villains and heroes, harsh physical challenges, and shameless publicity-grubbing.

    The only thing that could make it better is a tribe of cannibals, but in once sense, it’s already got that.  It’s just that the meal is so unappetizing.

    Next up, #85.

    Thin Castaways
    "The Biggest Loser" would kill for these results.

  • Stagecoach

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    87

    It’s what they call a tracking shot. Not technically a zoom. The camera is mounted on a car on a track and actually moves in to get physically closer to the actor, which is the reason it goes out of focus when it happens approximately 15 or so minutes into number 87 on our countdown. The person who thought of it was a man named John Ford a journeyman director from the 20s whose specialty is/was westerns. The man it pushed in on? 32 year old John Wayne who spins his rifle midway through the shot, cooly cocking it (a move that Arnie would steal approximately 60 years later in Terminator II). This shot is about as iconic as it gets in movies, and even though The Searchers is sometimes held up as the best ford/wayne team up, my money is on Stagecoach.

    The makers of Stagecoach could not afford horses, so they told John Wayne to carry a saddle and followed him around banging two halves of a coconut together.

    It appears to be almost a mistake that John Wayne was even in it. He was already 32 years old at the time and was just now getting his breakout role. It was made at a time when Hollywood could do almost no wrong. It was not the only great movie to come out that year (1939) but it very likely could’ve been the greatest adventure movie of the year and it introduced us to both John Ford and John Wayne.

    Not to be confused with John Houston who was also a director at this time.

    Wayne’s character is named Ringo the Kid and he is an outlaw traveling through the old west. And like most outlaws traveling through the old west he is extremely useful in a fight. Still he is arrested by the marshall who is on the stagecoach in the position of  “shotgun.” Unlike the ceremonial position it is used for today, in the old west, the person riding shotgun literally had a shotgun and a lot of times he actually shot it.

    Though the position then was not the honorary position it is today, cowboys still had to “call it” if they wanted to ride shotgun.

    John Wayne has definitely called it and after this of course, he became a huge star appearing in over 5 million other westerns where he played pretty much the same role as he does here. Though he never claimed to be a great actor he was known to dispense some sage acting advice. In one case he advises “Talk low, talk slow and don’t talk too much.” His reasoning was that if you talk slow enough they can’t cut away from you. This is great practical advice the likes of which is never given to actors. Actors, as you may know, usually have to deal with people giving them advice about sense memory and emotional memory.  However the practical advice given by John Wayne is (almost) just as useless as the advice about Sense Memory. This is because the advice really only works if you are already John Wayne.

    In this movie john Wayne was not yet John Wayne and so he had to speak fast and rely on sense memory to save the day.

    Well, that and the cavalry. Which actually did save the day. Movies in those days relied a lot on conventional forms whereby the cavalry could in best Deus-ex-machina fashion come in and save the cowboys from the Indians at the last second. Today we might find that too trite or perhaps to self-aware, but back then it seemed like even justice.

    A link to the shot in question.

    Next up … #86!