Dogfight

The Thing Called Love (Director's Cut)
$12.98
I was happy to watch The Thing Called Love , River Phoenix's last completed film work. It was not his absolute best work as many of his other 12 feature films had been, but a few scenes in the film caught the beauty of River external and internal, he seemed to be struggling very hard to focus and his physical appearance had taken a drastic change , but those of us who followed his career could see in this film the actor was and had been the very best of our Generation X . His last role of James Wright allowed him to be a musician ,play and sing as was a great love for River, the human being. He was above all a human being living in this world , he left very early , left us with a small body of work for old and new followers to discover his beautiful talent from his 1st feature film Explorers to his last theatrical release Silent Tongue and everything River Phoenix had done in his lifetime. Discover or rediscover River Phoenix's work again , let's not focus so much on how he died, but how he lived and the film work he left for us to view, past, present, and future followers of his great work. He has been gone exactly 16 years today , October 31, 2009. Let us who enjoyed his completed work watch it again and remember the talented work of River Phoenix forever.

Dogfights: The Complete Series
$69.95
This is the most amazing show on the history channel. It shows kids the importance of fighting for your freedom and makes history interesting. I don't think this is propaganda. If you believe in Healthcare reform this is probably not the series for you.

Dogfights -The Complete Season 2 (History Channel)
$49.95
This five dvd set has some really beautiful highlights. The CGI is fabulous. The resulting episodes are visually arresting - much more lifelike than actual combat footage, which tends to be grainy or washed out. The CGI is so accurate that even the reflections on the fuselage of each aircraft follow the sun as the pilots maintain an orbit above or around a target, or pursue their enemy. The sequences of aerial combat are very fluid and very close to the sort of dogfight scenarios that one might visualize without having had the actual experience of air combat.

"The Luftwaffe's Deadliest Mission" depicts the unique mission of the SonderKommando Elbe, and elite group of German pilots mustered together in a last ditch effort to stop the allies from entering Deutchland: Using stripped down ME109's, the mission of each pilot was to seek out and ram Allied B-17 and B-24's in Kamikaze fashion. The CGI is great, but the interviews with two of the surviving pilots is especially interesting.

Also noteworthy is "The Tuskegee Airmen" which goes into specific detail about the heroic exploits of the Brave African-Americans who flew P-51 Mustangs in covering missions for the B-24's and B-17's that flew combat missions in the skies over Romania and southern Europe.

Other Highlights: "Death of the Luftwaffe" chronicles Operation Bodenplatte, which took place on New Year's day, 1945 against a forawrd American airbase in Europe; And "Secret Weapons" which are accurate depictions of the ME-262, the Kamikaze, and remotely controlled airplanes.

The air war in Korea is included in the episodes, "Supersonic" and "Jet vs. Jet". Again, great CGI. Ace Pilots Frederick "Boots" Blesse, Robbie Risner and Ralph Parr give great commentary. The leap in jet technology and the effect it had on aerial combat and the resulting high speed problems each pilot faced are explained in surprising detail.

Of particular interest is the inclusion of about a half-dozen episodes that depict the F4 Phantom and the various missions assigned to their Pilots and Radar Intercept Officers.
I'm a huge fan of the F4 Phantom and the pilots that flew them, so these episodes are truly amazing to me. It's difficult for me to imagine to be at the top front of all that raw power.

Some noteworthy F4 Phantom sequences: "The Bloodiest Day" which depicts the May 10, 1972 bombing mission of the Hai Dong Railyards, and "Gun Kills of Vietnam," which shows how effective the addition of a gun pod on the F4 was.

"Dogfights of Desert Storm" is also covered extensively in one episode, and on another disc, an episode covering the exploits of the Israeli Air Defense Force is also included.

"The First Dogfighters" feautres a segment devoted to the techniques of aerial combat that Eddie Rickenbacker and other notables such as Manfred Von Richtoffen helped to develop and are still studied by combat pilots today.

To its credit, the History Channel also put together a CGI series that dealt more with ground combat in World War II, but the CGI didn't work all that well. Even though the historical information was accurately depicted, the CGI wasn't nearly what it should have been mostly by virtue of the complicated nature of recreating computer-generated human beings. In other words, the soldiers didn't look real.

This is a great set.

Dogfight
$14.97
when they started on the second date they walked by a movie theatre and the billboard read The Trouble With Mimi. I never could find any reference to this. Does anyone know about this