If you’ve seen One Battle After Another, I wonder if the car chase toward the end had an impact on you. I’m going to add a snippet of it here and hope I don’t get in trouble for hosting it. Why tempt trouble? I’m glad you asked.

You can picture many (most? all?) Hollywood car chases: speeding through urban settings, dangerous intersection crossings, careening around corners, weaving through traffic. And then there are the explosions, crashes, pedestrians diving out of the way, and the invincibility through all this by the protagonist driver. It’s mayhem. Oh, let’s not forget that if it’s a police chase scene, the eluding car always gets away. How in our modern era of cameras everywhere, helicopter flyovers, and police traps does this happen?

Then comes along One Battle After Another. Still some Hollywood thrown in, but much less so. The chase doesn’t seem overly fast. No corners to take at an unsafe speed. No sideswiping cars dueling for position. Just cars on a lightly travelled, hilly backwater highway. It’s the landscape that makes the chase so good. It’s as much an actor as the actual actors. It’s the hills, and in particular how they’re filmed, that’s so good.

The clip is super short (again, trying to stay out of trouble), but pay attention to how the camera work bobs us up and down. Not merely because we’ve cruising up and over hills, but because the camera exaggerates that feeling of up and down by dipping close to the pavement as the hill rises. It accentuates the cat and mouse-ness of the scene—we see the car ahead (or behind), then we don’t, then we do again. Will something change when the car is out of sight? Will we be closer, further away, will the car have made an erratic move? We’re forced to climb the next hill to find out. So good. Here’s an extra long clip (if it lasts) for more of the effect.

p.s. The cinematographer goes deep on the chase scene.

As a bonus, here’s the hand burned door our old Sonoma County CA house sported as well as our newly painted door at our current Denver home.

And here are the amounts in late 2024.

Anything stand out?

The newest appearance of Rush for me was on YouTube. It’s a data visualization of live songs the band played over the course of their decades of touring. It’s limited to the top 20 songs even though their total song count tops 150. Songs written early in their career have more time to be performed, obviously. That keeps their early classics like Working Man high on the list for years on end, even decades on end. Their heyday came around the time of Moving Pictures, but that album was released nearly 20 years after they formed. For songs of that era to ultimately find themselves among the most played is a testament to their deep connection with fans (myself included, hence the lyrics noted above which come from Moving Pictures). Anyway, it was interesting to view the trend although it would have been icing on the cake to pair it with a Rush song. At nearly 11 minutes, they had a decent choice of songs long enough to use. Indeed, 2112 is nearly twice as long as needed.

The Wayback Machine has snapshots of the blog even after I deleted the database back in 2009 or something??? I don’t remember exactly, but at the time I felt I had said everything I felt I needed to say or do online. I wanted a clean break from what came before to what would come next. The next thing didn’t materialize for awhile, from what I remember. I believe I wanted to have a more professional presence or something to that effect. I can see why as I read some of the old stuff. Holy crap. Talk about cringe worthy. Can’t hide from the past when it comes to the web though, even if you deliberately delete shit. Let that be a lesson to all you youngsters out there.