Conference bookie::movies

    I think this is the movie that they blew up an ocean liner in Boston Harbor 
    for about a year ago.  It did a bit more damage to downtown then they 
    expected.  What a sight.
    
    Steve

I saw a "The Making of Blown Away" special on Showtime the other day.
It was hosted by Lloyd Bridges, who I didn't realize was in the movie
(I did know that Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones were the Big Names).

Yes, this is the movie for which a boat was blown up in East Boston 
last summer.  They also did some filming for it at the 4th of July
Boston Pops concert on the Esplanade, though no major scenes from that 
appeared in the "Making of..." special (they did show the fireworks briefly).

Jeff Bridges is on the Boston Police bomb squad.  Tommy Lee Jones is an
Irish terrorist who escapes from a British prison and goes after Jeff
Bridges for revenge (presumably Bridges was responsible for Jones being
in prison or something).

They showed a scene on the special about how they flipped over a Boston
Police van in Copley Square.  They used a crane to hoist and flip the
van while a fireball went off underneath it, and edited out the crane
cable.  They couldn't use an actual explosion to flip the van for fear
of damaging nearby buildings (Trinity Church, the Hancock Tower, the
Boston Public Library, etc.).

Looks like a pretty explosive film... :-)

		-- Nina

    
    
    I can't wait to see this just for the fact to see if my brother-in-law
    made it to the screen or the editing room floor.  He was an extra in
    the movie.  He met Jeff and was very impressed at how nice he was.  He
    said that Jeff didn't act arrogant and was just a "normal" nice guy.
    
    The previews look great.
    
    

    
    This movie wasn't bad but I think Speed and True Lives were much better
    action flicks than this was although this plot had more realism than
    the other two. Tommy Lee Jones was good (as usual).
    
    There was one major fatal flaw though: in the first big bomb scene at
    MIT it was the Boston Police who responded to the bomb. For those who
    aren't familiar with the area, MIT is in Cambridge, _not_ Boston. And
    there wasn't a Cambridge cop in sight.
    
    -Joe
    

I saw "Blown Away" with a few friends of mine and we all thought it was so-so.
The main reason we went to see it was to see whether any of them got into the
movie (they are in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which sings with the Boston
Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops, and they performed in last summer's
July 3 & 4 Esplanade concerts, which were filmed for this movie, as I mentioned
in .2).  Disappointingly (but not surprisingly), there were no chorus shots.
It was interesting to note the Incredible Changing Conductor, though, as in
one scene the conductor was clearly John Williams, and in others it was some
random actor - they weren't even wearing the same clothes! (John Williams was
in a black jacket and the other guy was in a white one.)

I was interested to see the "shoot the reflection in the puddle then move up
to the real thing" shot when they first showed the concert in the Hatch Shell.
I watched them do about 5 takes on that when they were filming the July 3
concert last year, and I wondered whether it would show up.

RE .4 - Maybe the Cambridge police don't have their own bomb squad. :-)

			-- Nina

  I saw this on video last weekend. I wasn't quick enough to see it in the
theaters, and I don't own a VCR, so I had to wait until I could view it at a
friend's house.
  I usually don't like this kind of movie, and rarely watch them. So I don't
have much to compare it to. I watched it mainly to see the Boston locations.
I thought it was pretty good; good acting, well composed, and never boring.
It also was quite scary; a look into a truly demented mind, similar to some of
the bomb-planting terrorists we have seen in real life over the last 20 years,
but with some further wrinkles. And the idea of this happening right here in
Boston is even scarier.
  Some nits:
1. The bomber escaped from prison in Northern Ireland, not Britain.
2. It is, in fact, realistic for the Boston Police to respond to a bomb case
in Cambridge. However, I too noticed that there were no Cambridge police
cruisers in sight. Maybe the Cambridge police refused to have their cruisers
appear in the movie. Or the writers thought most of the public was too dumb to
know that MIT is in Cambridge.
  Lots of recognizable Boston scenes, and a few that are clearly Boston but
that I couldn't attach to a specific place.

    RE -1
    
    Nit on nit,
    
    In .2 the noter said the Irish terrorist escaped from a British prison,
    not from a prison in Britain. Since Northern Ireland is part of the
    United Kingdom, referring to a British prison is appropriate. 
    
    Marilyn