Aerial Shots Quotes

Some politicians have a gift for language. Trump is not one of those politicians. His sentences call to mind an aerial shot of a burning, derailed freight train. The syntax is mangled. The grammar is gone. “Donald Trump isn’t a simpleton, he just talks like one,” reads a Politico article from last August.

In the act of watching the television news, audiences cross the globe, one moment viewing a scene in a wide aerial shot, the next moment seeing an emotional close up of a victim’s face. By extending the physical senses to impossible dimensions, media provide audiences a near metaphysical adventure.

Jimi on the box, thirty stories up, everything immediate, yet distanced. Jimi's chords locked in aerial dogfights, gliding, riding, sliding, hiding, belligerent bursts, hallucinogenic, a head-warping face-wiping mind melt, chords live dive bombers screaming in for the kill, scintillating, serrated chords shot through with arc-light shrieks of staccato mayhem, as immediate and horrific as the firefight racketing away this very second below our red and puffy eyes; chords that hang in the air like the retinal reflection of an eerie afterburn, the stars displaced and the smell of a world that burned. Overhead, night birds flying, Huey, Apache, Chinook, whooshing with murderous potential. And over everything - every apocalyptic bang, boom, and rattle - Jimi, bleating like Braxton and bonding with the bombast.

All my films are about Hong Kong." Wong Kar Wai once told me, "even if they're set in Argentina." While many in the West saw Happy Together primarily as a love story, his compatriots saw it something more timely and relevant: Wong grappling with the meaning of the handover to China. They knew it wasn't coincidental that the film should open in Hong Kong one month before that historical transfer of power. Nor was it coincidental that it should begin with a shot of Hong kong passports and end with Tony Leung's Lai on a train in Taipei, not Hong Kong, heading into an indeterminate future as the soundtrack plays Danny Chung's cover of the pop song "Happy Together" --a title that could be read as predicting a successful union, or as a slash of bitter irony. Even the movie's defining image, the aerial shot of water rushing down Iguazu Falls, is layered with political intimations that cut in different directions. At once thrillingly spectacular and patently dangerous--Chris Doyle, who's terrified of heights, shot it while hanging out of a chopper--the roaring waters that combine in these falls are an expression of the inexorably rushing power of reunion that can be seen as both a symbol of great strength or the downward pull of destruction.

I suspect, Austin, that the Americans you’ve met in the banking world aren’t the high-school drop-outs from Nebraska whose best friend got shot by a smiley Iraqi teenager holding bug of apples. A teenager whose dad shredded by a gunner on a passing Humvee last week while he fixed the TV aerial. A gunner whose best friend took a dum dum bullet through the neck from a sniper on the roof only yesterday. A sniper whose sister was in a car that stalled at an intersection as a military attaché’ convoy drove up, prompting the bodyguards to pepper the vehicle with automatic fire, knowing they’d save the convoy from a suicide bomber if they were right , but that the Iraqi law wouldn’t apply to them if they were wrong. Ultimately , wars escalate by eating their own shit...

Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes—an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan—the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa—and stunt fliers were used for the more dangerous scenes. Wellman asked a lot of his airmen. One pilot was killed, another broke his neck, and several more sustained other serious injuries. Wellman did some of the more dangerous stunt flying himself. All this gave the movie’s aerial scenes a realism and immediacy that many found almost literally breathtaking. Wellman captured features of flight that had never been caught on film before—the shadows of planes moving across the earth, the sensation of flying through drifting smoke, the stately fall of bombs, and the destructive puffs of impact that follow. Even the land-bound scenes were filmed with a thoughtfulness and originality that set Wings apart. To bring the viewer into a Parisian nightclub, Wellman used a boom shot in which the camera traveled through the room just above table height, skimming over drinks and between revelers, before arriving at the table of Arlen and Rogers. It is an entrancing shot even now, but it was rivetingly novel in 1927. “Wings,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt simply in The New Yorker in 1971, “is truly beautiful.” Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman, however, wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.

The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes. On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. Fear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different. The trees seemed to obstruct her with deliberate malice. All her life she had thought of herself as a foredoomed victim, and now the forest had become the malign force that would destroy her. In desperation she tried to run, but a hidden root tripped her, she almost fell. Branches caught in her hair, tugged her back, lashed out viciously when they were disentangled. The silver hairs torn from her head glittered among black needles; they were the clues her pursuers would follow, leading them to their victim. She escaped from the forest at length only to see the fjord waiting for her. An evil effluence rose from the water, something primitive, savage, demanding victims, hungry for a human victim. It had been night overhead all along, but below it was still daylight. There were no clouds. I saw islands scattered over the sea, a normal aerial view. Then something extraordinary, out of this world: a wall of rainbow ice jutting up from the sea, cutting right across, pushing a ridge of water ahead of it as it moved, as if the flat pale surface of sea was a carpet being rolled up. It was a sinister, fascinating sight, which did not seem intended for human eyes. I stared down at it, seeing other things at the same time. The ice world spreading over our world. Mountainous walls of ice surrounding the girl. Her moonwhite skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world.

Some politicians have a gift for language. Trump is not one of those politicians. His sentences call to mind an aerial shot of a burning, derailed freight train. The syntax is mangled. The grammar is gone. 'Donald Trump isn't a simpleton, he just talks like one,' reads a Politico article from last August. 'If you were to market Donald Trump's vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small box of Lincoln Logs.' Every fourth word seems to be very, great, beautiful, or tremendous. He loves the word winning. In fact we're going to have so much of it, Trump says we'll get sick of it. His insults are even simpler. Our leaders are 'dumb,' 'stupid,' or 'weak.' Our deals are 'terrible.' His critics are 'losers' and 'haters.' The press is 'scum.' Women he doesn't find attractive are 'disgusting.

In Honolulu, Lieutenant Commander Suzuki spent a busy week. From occasional visitors to his ship he learned that the fleet wasn’t now assembling at Lahaina Anchorage as it used to. He confirmed that the weekend was a universally observed American institution. He picked up some choice titbits — structural data on the Hickam Field hangars, interesting aerial shots of Pearl Harbor taken October 21. These were made from a private plane that took up sightseers at nearby John Rogers Airport. Anybody could do it.

Franz tipped his wing and looked down on the P-38 he had wounded. It was circling downward, its engine coughing black smoke. Suddenly the hood of its canopy tumbled away in the slipstream. The pilot stood in the cockpit then dove toward the rear of the wing. The draft sucked his body under the forked tail. He free-fell from twelve thousand feet, passing through the clouds. “Pull it!” Franz shouted at the American, urging him to open his chute. When the pilot’s parachute finally popped full of air, Franz felt relief. The pilot drifted lazily downward while his P-38 splashed into the sea. Franz flew lower and saw the P-38 pilot climb into a tiny yellow raft against the whitecaps. Franz radioed Olympus to tell them to relay the American’s position to the Italians. He guessed they were seventy kilometers west of Marettimo and asked if the island could send a boat to pick up the man. For a second, Franz considered hovering over the man in the raft like an aerial beacon to steer a boat to the spot, but he shook the thought from his mind. It would put him at risk. If a prowling flight of enemy fighters found him, Franz knew he, too, could be shot into the sea. Franz and Willi departed the scene, leaving the pilot in his raft to fate. As they flew away, Franz wished the man a strong westerly wind. The American who looked up from the raft was Second Lieutenant Conrad Bentzlin, a young man from a large Swedish-American family in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He was quiet and hardworking, having taught himself English in high school. He had paid his way through the University of Minnesota by working for the government’s Civilian Conservation Corps program, cutting firebreaks in the forests of northern Minnesota. Among his buddies of the 82nd Fighter Group, Bentzlin was known as “the smartest guy in the unit.” Far from shore Bentzlin floated alone. A day later, another flight of P-38s flew over him and, through a hole in the clouds, saw him waving his arms from a raft. But he was in the middle of the sea and they could do nothing. Bentzlin would never be seen again.*

A shortwave aerial on the left side was broken off. Robert Frazier guessed it might have happened when Clint Hill made a dash

micro second, I could see Mishy and I doing an aerial somersault and being pinged like a sling shot off the bike, landing ungracefully  in the gutter, probably head first into a steaming pile of dog poo. Miraculously, (well not really, because I used my witch craft) Mishy was able to steer the bike to safety as her tyres magically ploughed through the bike on the ground. She kept saying over and over, “What just happened, what just happened? I thought we were dead!” I said to her, “Its ok Mish, you saved our lives.” “Sorry guys,” a timid voice popped out from behind the tree. “It was kind of lying against the tree when I left it. It must have fallen down. I hope you’re both ok.” As soon as I saw Kaitlyn sheepishly step out from behind the tree, it suddenly clicked as to what had been missing back at Koolbar. It was Kaitlyn. She wasn’t there and she was always dutifully there with Tiffany. Kaitlyn Ramsay was part of the princess gang, though she wasn’t as fake as the rest of them. Every Friday the four of them always sat in a corner of Koolbar, slurping on their shakes and getting guys to slurp on their every word. I don’t think I’ve ever been there on a Friday when the four of them weren’t huddled up together batting eyelids and preening themselves, whispering and fussing. Which is why it seemed so strange when I didn’t see her. As she stood under the branches, the sun sprinkling filtered light onto her face, I could see that her normally creamy colored complexion was blotchy, and her eyes were red and hazy. Her makeup was streaky under her eye’s with smudges of black casting shadows. She looked a little bit like Dracula’s daughter meets prom queen Barbie, but she put on this big phony smile as though nothing was wrong. As if! Did she think we were born under a rock? “So what’s happening guys?” She tried to sound cheery. “Nothing much, we’re just on the way home from Koolbar,” Mishy replied. “What about you? What are you doing hanging around a tree?” “Yeah Kaitlyn, we didn’t see you at Koolbar. What’s the deal? You’re always there on a Friday with the others.” Kaitlyn’s face crumpled momentarily when I questioned her, then just as quickly went a fake shade of happy again. “Agh, I didn’t really want to go today. I have aghh ….some other things I want to do,” she stuttered, searching for words. “Like bird watching?” Mishy giggled. “You didn’t want to go? That’s not like you Kaitlyn.” I added. “So are you two going straight home now?” Obvious change of subject from Kaitlyn. “Yeah I have to babysit my kid brother while my mom and dad go out on their date night. “Aren’t your parents married?” “Yes, they just like to have a date night once a week where they don’t have to be bothered by us kids. Apparently

There are several aerial films of the incoming tsunami, but the one that plays and replays in my imagination was shot above the town of Natori, south of the city of Sendai. It begins over land rather than sea, with a view of dun winter paddy fields. Something is moving across the landscape as if it is alive, a brown-snouted animal hungrily bounding over the earth. Its head is a scum of splintered debris; entire cars bob along on its back. It seems to steam and smoke as it moves; its body looks less like water or mud than a kind of solid vapor. And then a large boat can be seen riding it inland, hundreds of yards from the sea, and—unbelievably—blue-tiled houses, still structurally intact, spinning across the inundated fields with orange flames dancing on their roofs. The creature turns a road into a river, then swallows it whole, and then it is raging over more fields and roads towards a village and a highway thick with cars. One driver is accelerating ahead of it, racing to escape—before the car and its occupants are gobbled up by the wave.

Some politicians have a gift for language. Trump is not one of those politicians. His sentences call to mind an aerial shot of a burning, derailed freight train. The syntax is mangled. The grammar is gone. “Donald Trump isn’t a simpleton, he just talks like one,” reads a Politico article from last August. “If you were to market Donald Trump’s vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small box of Lincoln Logs.

Fellers had studied the Allied intelligence and countless aerial shots and concluded that Company A was being sent to face certain slaughter. Fellers and Nance both looked out to sea. "We stood there awhile," recalled Nance. "We didn't say a word, not a single word to each other. I guess we'd said it all. An anti-aircraft gun broke the silence, tracer bullets spitting through the sky, and then a searchlight caught the blaze of an exploding plane. "That brought it home to me," recalled Nance. "This thing is real. It's not an exercise.