That Eunuch reminds me of a few different people I've known.

That shifty MoFo who stands for nothing will be around right until the end when someone who stands for something finishes it off.

I think The Stark's have an edge over the Lanister's because they have a bastard son guarding the wall... and he knows the ins and outs of The White Riders.

The Lanister dwarf will be around till the last dog dies. He's a great charchter.

The blonde haired dragon lady is going to be an absolute menace.

The series got me to read the books- I really liked the first three, but the second two are a little long without a lot happening (in my opinion, anyway). There's a lot more background in the books, which I found made the show even better on a second viewing.

I hope you're right about Tyrion- he's one of my favorite characters, too. I'm glad to see the actress who played Anne Boleyn in The Tudors showing up in Season Two. I thought The Tudors was a crap show, when all was said and done, but the first two seasons, when she was in it, were fun.

The Eunuch reminds me of Riot and King Joffrey reminds me of Obama.

I pirated the entire first season of Game of Thrones on Utorrent...and watched it all back-to-back for like 8 or 10 straight hours when I got sick.

I admire people who have the patience to read a book from start to finish with a story that involved. I could never do it.

Honestly, I think the only reason I was able to read the book was because I'd seen the series already and understood what was going on. There are so many characters that if I went into the book not knowing anything about it, I think I'd have given up around page 30. I just don't have the focus for fiction books like I used to.

Come to think of it, Luck isn't any more complex than Game of Thrones, but I guess complexity is easier to take when there are swords and a lot of nekkid people.

looked up game of thrones-sounds like it's based on the wars of the roses.

Luck seems very simple outside of the Dustin Hoffman charachter -- where a lot of stuff is going on and some of which I'm not exactly following.

I enjoy watching Luck...but it's so badly handcuffed by the time period it's based in.

Base Luck in the late 1800's -- make the Dustin Hoffman charachter Plunger Walton... you will have so many great angles and charchters of the time to work with. It couldn't possibly fail.

You'd have much better angles at every turn. You'd lose the Escalante charchter (obviously the best one on Luck) -- but his type of role could be replaced by someone like former slave Brown Dick. Brown Dick's Wiki page: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_D._Brown )

Brown Dick won the Belmont as a jockey in 1870, he won the Kentucky Derby as a trainer in 1877, and was the leading trainer at Churchill Downs in 1871 and 1872. You'd have the whole race thing with some black jockeys and trainers.

Charchters based on people like John Morrissey, Charles Reed, Pittsburgh Phil, and the butcher Dwyer Brothers would be obvious.

The author mentions it as an inspiration, but having read the book, and knowing a bit about that period in English history, I don't think it really matches up all that closely. He pulls from a lot of historical events- he mentions using the Black Dinner of Scottish history (prior to the War of the Roses) as inspiration for an event in the third book, etc., but they're more springboards for his own world than the basis for a roman à clef.

Fun show, for sure. And has inspired a new term, "sexposition"- in which large amounts of otherwise boring background information is disseminated while attractive people are having sex.

i'd have to read the book to know for sure, but i just know the chief points i read instantly reminded me of warwick, edward, richard and the like.

You've mentioned that before, and I do think it would be a great premise for a show, not to mention make for some great costume porn, so to speak. The budget, though, I imagine, would be astronomical for a TV show.

Seriously suggest watching the show first. A huge number of characters in the book and it's hard to keep everyone straight. Plus, you get to look at this guy a lot:

i'm not a tv watcher, but i love to read. if i can keep war and peace straight, i doubt this would be a problem. :p but i'm not into fantasy type stuff, so i'm not sure i'd ever try it.

and i have no idea who that is in the picture!

I've never understood why they need to make their own racing scences.

Can't you just get a cheaper racetrack to let you film a few actual races and use them?

The racing scences are always terrible in every horse racing production. They're better in Luck than in any horse racing movie...and they're still pretty bad.

Why not just find a racetrack that will let you film races on the track. Put those cameras on the jockeys helmets and take as many flashy camera angles as you can for each race.

Hell, even film the trial races at EVD that so many soon to be first-time-starters in the state of LA compete in. If you pay the connections a few hundred bucks to wear saddle towels and silks I'm sure they'd be happy to.

After you have 100 races or so in the bank...pick the cuts from the most useful ones.

If you want to add anything to an actual racing scene ... go make the silks, go buy a similar looking horse, and add on to it.

Making an entire horse race from scratch is nuts and the end-result is always laughable.

Phar Lap scenes were pretty good.

Fantasy is not my thing, either, but I like this series. Or, the first three books, anyway. The fourth and fifth are slooooow.

The photo is of one of the actors. As usual, I can't remember his name, but I think he's pretty. Actually, the whole cast is very good-looking.

It's Dylan Mckay.

Really good question. What you're referring to is stock footage which you see in a lot of films, to better and lesser degrees of success. It's challenging for horse racing sequences:

The race sequences in a movie are staged to advance the dramatic action of the plot, and that is shaped via the number and type of shots. There's no way to determine that before a movie is storyboarded, and by that point you might as well just shoot the race as the director/art director/cinematographer envision the sequence, rather than hope that stock footage will give you what you need. Not to mention the time and cost of an editor going through thousands of hours of stock footage.

A camera in a car driving alongside actual racing horses, which you need for decent mid- and close-up shots would likely affect the outcome of a race, which would be unfair to the bettors.

Stock footage may not match the look of the film or video being used in a project, and the abrupt switch in video speed, or film type, is very jarring to a viewer and will take them right out of the story. It's very obvious in "Secretariat"- watch the film and you'll see the look of the video and film change a lot throughout the film, and not just in the racing scenes. It's really disconcerting. And even in that rather poorly made film, they felt they had to put the real footage of Secretariat's Preakness on a television, so the movie audience wouldn't notice how different the video quality was.

Trying to make continuity work from several actual races would be impossible. One of the things that I found hilarious about Jockeys was how often they cut several different races into one "race" and how obvious it was. The horse going into the winner's circle had a different saddle cloth from what was supposed to be the same one in the race, etc. I'm sure they did that to improve the look of the races- cutting together the best angles, etc., but it made for some huge continuity errors.

That said, I kind of love stock footage, because it can be hilarious. One of my favorite scenes from The A-Team (the original series) was when Murdoch landed an airplane by crashing it into an airport. The footage was obviously from Airplane. 1970's and 1980's TV shows pulled stock footage from movies all the time.

They would do this all the time in Dubai.

You would get the Jeep camera angle as well as the awesome blimp shot after a race. Only difference is that the vehicle would drive inside of the rail instead of on the track with the horses.

I don't remember all the racing scenes in Secretariat...all I remember is that the ones I remember were horrible. I'm not a suing person...but If I was Laffit Pincay Jr. --- I would sue the sh!t out of Disney for the ride he gave on Sham in (I think it was the Preakness) in the movie.

You can't make an entire race from scratch without it looking like a complete joke.

If you film a hundred races with all the riders wearing a jock cam -- you will get your share of dramatic races. A horse will break slow or flat out get left and still win. You'll get a few great head-to-head stretch duels. You'll get many instances of rough riding, inquirys, and major traffic trouble.

No one would have to sit there and watch all of the racing footage...just simply read the result chart...and in 20 seconds you'll know if anything dramatic occured that you'd want to work with in your racing scene.

Give me just 8 jockey cameras, NBC camera angles, a pan shot, and cutaways of a crowd and I'm sure I could put together way better racing scenes than anyone trying to stage a horse race from scratch.

This is what the Dubai Jeep camera angle looks like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XNuajf5Av0

This is Laffit Pincay Jr. -- one of the strongest stretch riders in racing history -- pulling Sham up for the entire final furlong of the Ky Derby. Fast forward to 4 minutes and 25 seconds in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhHfn...eature=related

It also is used in the UK on turf courses...of course, it helps immensely to have a paved road to do it.

Wow, never seen that before. Although i don't think it was as bad as that scene in Luck the other night when Gary Stevens was on the lead at the 1/4 pole and all the other jocks were pulling back there horses so much they were blowing the turn. Quite funny!

You had to select that f*c*ing race as your example. I vividly remember having Dar re me and another horse/all/Gloria de Campeo and another horse in a pick 3. Then I went back and scratched off 4 or 5 from the all trying to be cheap. The pick 3 came back 103k:mad::mad: But, yea, nice camera angle.

That's one of the noticeable things in Luck, also- how many of the horses are being held back. I don't disagree with any of your points about why the races look bad, but I think trying to use stock footage of actual races would not improve the problems.

The Jeep cam is lovely, but it's all a fairly wide shot. To get in closer, you can't just zoom in on the picture, because the focus will be off, or, in the case of video where everything is in focus, you won't have any depth of field and the shot will look very flat. In addition, all of your shots would be limited to wide-range side shots and POV if the track happens to have jockey cams. You can't have any lower straight-on shots because the fence will be in the way.

In the lead-up to the start of the race in the clip from Secretariat, there are dozens of shots- a close up of hooves in the dirt, a jockey stroking a lock of his mount's mane, two jockeys eyeballing each other. Those are all necessary to build dramatic tension, would never be shot before an actual race (would take too long) and if you shot them separately and then cut them into shots of an actual race, with other horses, etc., even if, by some fortune, all of the horses you'd cast matched the look of all the horses in the actual race, and all the jockeys' silks matched, the video quality would not match and the race would look like what it is- stock footage.

Plus, there's no way to guide the audience's eye with a wide shot. People who know how to watch races can focus on one horse's trip, but a movie-going audience is going to be totally lost as to which horse they are supposed to be watching.

Even the most complete racing result form is not going to list what the angles of the camera were, and that's what an editor needs- to know what the shot looked like, and there's no way to do that other than going through the hours and hours of video and watching it. It's not about what happens in the race; it's about what the shot looked like.

Part of the challenge is that horse races, by the nature of what they are, aren't ideal for the film medium. I sometimes think it would be cool if a fictional piece would film a race in the style of the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movie- where the camera and effects show you Holmes' thought process, since a lot of the dramatic tension of a race is a person on the back of a running horse making split-second decisions about what to do based on what is happening right then.

And I wish movies would stop with the close-ups on a horse's eye. For the audience to really experience an emotional reaction, you really need both eyes facing forward. It's the reason dogs look so expressive on camera.

Good short explanation of stock footage, along with a great trip down memory lane of examples of it in certain movies and TV shows:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StockFootage

New Republic's David Thomson: "Should Horses Be Sacrificed for Art?"
 

Strong piece that sneers at the animal-rightists..

David Thomson on Films: Should Horses Be Sacrificed For Art?

And I am sorry for the horses, and for every other animal regularly dispatched for our lifestyle and well-being, whether they like it or not. But that soft-heartedness wants to stop so much—fox-hunting, bullfighting, boxing, football, smoking, and roast lamb. Those things are all dangerous and suspect and exploitative—just like life, where such things as institutional fraud, international famine and slaughter, and ordinary human error run free.

I still think they could continue without any racing footage.They would just have to delete the four losers.

Too bad the computer rendering and CGI that is so present in movies like Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, all the recent science fiction titles, is not quite up to being able to accurately render a horse race from scratch.

One could conceivably pan the empty track and superimpose the virtual horses (with real jockey closeups and placement in shots) and make it look good. I don't think they are quite there yet with living things. Inanimate objects of all sorts can be done and look as real as anything else.

In a couple of years, this issue could be moot - there would be no potential for injury and nothing for the "animal rights" people to complain about, and yet we could depict horse racing from any angle, in any scenario onscreen.

Bravo Ray Paulick :tro:

Great story. The whole situation is a real shame! I've watched every episode and although I thought the first few episodes were a little dry, I think the show was really starting to gain momentum. But, in the end I think it really came down to ratings. If I wasn't a race fan, I'm not sure I would have watched it.

I really enjoyed Naomi going for a "ride" in the Hollywood parking lot.

I wish this show could somehow get a mulligan. They wasted so much time on some pointless storylines and lame characters. This is hbo-did we really have to wait an entire season to see a sex scene and someone getting killed?

I think what we saw in the last two episodes is what I expected to see throughout. In the end, it was too little too late.

Enjoyed tonights episode ... but two totally unrealistic racing scenes.

In Mon Gateau's win ... every other horse in the race was being stiffed in the stretch.

In the Western Derby ... Gary Stevens saved ground on both turns.

Like I was saying....

Wasn't crazy about the scene theft from Indecent Proposal. That movie is 20 years old already!

Luck
 

They definitely saved the best for last. The racing scenes and accompanying music were definitely well done in that final episode. I am hoping that we have not seen the last of some of these characters and story lines.


Ocala Mike

:tro:

I just wish when they had the close-up of Hoffman that they would start the music and then move the camera towards him and go inside his head to reveal an armless hamster on a wheel. Then the camera zooms towards the hamster and goes inside his head and you see a snake in a bulldozer making holes.

OMG that's sooooo weird. I have that very same thought at 5:33 am almost every day. :zz:

Don't be such a smartie pants. It's known that you write letters for other people's jobs first thing in the morning. Don't belittle creative people.

If you look closely you can see Bob Baffert in yesterdays episode