D. Clarence Snyder's Blog: Clarence's Contemplations

The Little Mermaid is in the top five of movies I’ve seen more than any other. In 1990, my roommate and I hijacked a dayroom TV and showed the movie every night for a month. With that foundation, I probably had higher expectations than I should have for an unnecessary film.

The CGI — er, “live action” remake of The Little Mermaid leaves a lot to be desired for long time fans of the animated movie.

Let’s talk about the dinglehopper in the room — setting the story in the Caribbean instead of whatever-white-world fairy tale coastline. Representation on screen matters. Setting the story in a place of mixed cultures gave an opportunity to round out the cast with something other than caricatures. If you’re the sort of person who gets bent out of shape about a Caribbean Mermaid being black, just look at her sisters — each smartly cast and costumed to represent the “7 Seas”. It seems King Triton gets around. If you don’t know the name Colleen Atwood, you should. She’s brilliant.

As colorful as the cast is, the film mutes most of its brightness. As an effort to try to tell a realistic story, it fails. There are mermaids and magic potions and tortured souls, realism washed out with the tide. A lot of the screen feels empty when it shouldn’t. The several crowd scenes seem like there just weren’t enough extras on set that day.

“Under the Sea” was a vibrant production number in the animated film. In this version, it’s a flat solo number with CGI that blooms too late to save it. After losing her voice, Ariel has a solo number. She’s apparently singing in her head, because her lips don’t move, until they do and then don’t again. It just feels out of place. With lyrics by Lin Manuel Miranda, I’m sure the new songs by themselves are good, but the film editing distracts. The visual around Prince Eric’s solo is disjointed and misses the beats. It just comes off as boring. The visuals just didn’t hold up the music in a way that animation did. They cut “Le Poissons” — feeling it was too cartoony — but left in a dialog reference, which highlights the omission.

It seems like the filmmakers tried to fill the plot holes in the animated version with single lines of scattered dialog. Like all castoff dialog, these are unneeded and targeted for critics rather than the real audience. Ursula explains that the mermaid’s song is magic (sirens’ song), and she is really taking away Ariel’s mermaid powers. Ursula makes it so that Ariel cannot remember that she’s supposed to kiss Eric, a concept that is mentioned twice then mostly ignored. It is clear that Ursula is actually trying to steal King Triton’s crown, and Ariel is just her means to that end.

All in all, the movie will be enjoyed by people who don’t have the animated film as a foundation. It is in comparison to the original that most faults are found.

Though inspired by a thing that happened, Cocaine Bear is really a fictional monster movie where you hope the monster wins. Some of the human characters are just there to get eaten by the creature and others you really really want to get their [select piece of human anatomy] ripped off by a thoroughly ripped black bear.

The movie itself is almost a B-Movie script with a really good cast and an appropriate budget. It is hilarious. The characters are a bit cartoony in composition but their actions are organic and reasonable for the situations they find themselves in. Faced with the bear, the ambulance driver shoves her patient in the “bus” gets in and leaves — her teammate behind. Two kids find a brick of cocaine and know what it is, because — set in the eighties — we used to actually teach kids what drugs looked like.

Some scenes are hyperviolent and overtly bloody, but it is to a darkly comical level. Hands and heads are ripped off without being stomach turning. At the same time, proper moulage is used on an almost survivor’s backside. I mean: we don’t really want the bear to eat the kids or hurt the fancy show dog in her rather expensively groomed “show coat”, but you are rooting for the bear. (Spoiler: the dog does not get hurt.)

Director Elizabeth Banks does an excellent job assembling a weird mix of monster movie, slasher film, family acceptance story and makes it just silly fun. The music is disjointed in a way that amps up the silliness.

As Ray Liotta’s last completed film project, it serves as a great bookend for his career. We came to know him in Goodfellas where he played a basically decent but bad guy whose world comes apart because he gets involved in dealing cocaine. He goes out with an hilarious bang in Cocaine Bear as a basically decent bad guy whose world comes apart because he’s in the cocaine trade — and there’s a bear.

We’ve been playing with a new free mod for DCS World, and just love the performance envelope of the OV-10A Bronco. This aircraft was designed to operate from short, unimproved fields, so it’s slow, can land just about anywhere, and take off again.

As for the filmmaking, this was a different sort of experience. Normally, DCS World allows us to use (what’s called) a “track file” so we can re-watch a flight from any angle we choose. They are a little buggy, but when they work, we only have to fly a stunt once, then we can go back and film it as though we had a thousand cameras all filming a live event. The track files for the OV-10A are completely “horked,” so we couldn’t use one to film a short takeoff and landing. Instead we flew multiple takes (in 3rd-person point of view), filming as though we only had one camera – just like a real movie. Not every take was the same action. We edited is all together to make it look like we did the thing. There are a few points where we (knowingly) have “continuity errors” (like having the external fuel tank attached after the shot where we dropped it), but the point was using different materials and practicing different tools.

In fairness, the “after-credits scene” is a raw cockpit recording of our pilot flying into and out of 1300 feet of “hole in the jungle,” so we could demonstrate that we did, in fact, do the thing.



So this isn’t the thing we’ve been promising forever when we started being more active on YouTube, but this is a thing we did.

It’s a fully scripted and planned bit of satire. Like, we actually wrote a thing with the intent of making a video, and this is the video.



We’ve been posting more videos than other content over the last year. Most of it has been sim-aviation related, though we did recut a video of D. playing Rockband 2.

Yesterday we put up something of an “out takes” reel that we’re pretty happy with.



We put together another video in Adobe Premiere last night. This one was a technical challenge. The source material had a displayed timestamp, and I wanted it to be sync’d throughout.

It’s how “we” crushed a nosewheel on landing.

As I’ve been “flying” and re-learning old skills in a new sim, I’ve also learned that aerial refueling is tougher than simpler sims make it out to be. Please enjoy a video I captured, that also happens to show off the Flying Pirate Ships skin I’ve been toying around with.

We’ve added a new title to our stories section.

In addition to being IT professionals, comic artists, and writers, we’re also gamers. (In addition to being those three types of nerds, we’re also a fourth kind of nerd.) In particular, we’ve been long time flight simulator pilots.

During the social distancing, I’ve rediscovered my love of this hobby with a new sim. In an effort to justify the deduction on our corporate taxes, I’ve started writing a new series of micro-stories, There I Was… Pretending to Be…, about some of my harrowing and some less-glamorous sim-adventures.

The news of the day aside, we were happy to see Tidewater Comicon feature us in their exhibitor highlight this week. While that show has been postponed for one year, rest assured that we intend to use our table when it returns in 2021.

The main purpose of this post is to let you know we are still alive and continuing to suck at social media.

For those fans who are readers, an eBook distributor we know is having a sale lasting through most of this month (that link will probably break on 21 April 2020).

If you were hoping for an inspiring of thought provoking essay on the subject, just pretend we said something profound here.

If you were looking for juvenile antics to distract you, please enjoy the comics and stories we have up.

Seemingly stuck in limited release, we’ve been trying to find this one in a moderately convenient theater. As it turns out, Jojo Rabbit was not quite the movie we expected, but it was worth the wait and worth seeing in the theater. The critic taglines about the film all remark on its humor and brilliance as a satire. It earns these accolades, but it also deals somewhat seriously with the darker subjects of Germany’s last days in the Second World War.

Jojo Rabbit is not a spoof or parody – it is a satire. The film is a look at the war in Germany through the eyes of a 10 year old boy, a wannabe fanatical member of the Hitlerjugen whose imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler (played by the director Taika Waititi).

The casting is excellent. Eleven-year-old Roman Griffin Davis as the titular character did a fantastic job in a brilliant script. Scarlett Johanson as his mother and Sam Rockwell as his disgraced “scout” leader are both strong and portray a hidden plot of anti-Nazi sentiment that is subtly implied yet critical to the story. Rebel Wilson is hilarious in her disturbing role as the girl “scouts” leader. Thomasin McKenzie rounds out the cast as the Jewish girl Jojo’s mother is hiding, and she delivers a believable – if comedy-leaned – performance.

The subject matter has raised some controversy. I had some history with this when I worked on the editorial staff of a book that received similar ire – for similar reasons. As usual the angriest are people who haven’t deigned to view the actual content. “How can you make fun of Hitler?”  Jojo Rabbit answers: “How can you not?”

Locked into Jojo’s point of view, our understanding of the events expands as he gains a better understanding of the world – the real world – around him. Jojo’s fanaticism would be frightening in an adult, but Jojo is a child who just wants to be part of the club. Even his imaginary friend takes on proportions and mannerisms that are more like how a 10 year old would imagine his supreme leader rather than being historically accurate. Hitler was famously a religious, non-smoking, vegetarian teetotaler. Jojo’s friend routinely offers him cigarettes to calm down and holds personal banquets where he dines on Unicorn. (Jojo never partakes of the cigarettes. Eventually getting annoyed at the offering, he screams, “Stop offering me cigarettes. I’m ten!”)

The dialog is terrific; the film is packed with lines that had us chuckling later. The heavier moments, though, are delivered in near silence, letting the visuals do the talking, and it bears mentioning that the screen work is at the same level as the other aspects – excellent. Being PG-13 it has the traditional single F-Bomb, which it uses in probably the most appropriate way ever.

I cannot say enough about this masterful piece of cinema. At the same time I need only say that you should see it. Jojo Rabbit deserves to be enjoyed in the theater.

tschüß.