Mater's tall tales is pretty good with the random cultural/literary references to satisfy parents. From what I understand that's where the money is in kids' movies.
Our very good friends with whom we started a semi-regular thing of going to a Sunday matinee and dinner while one sitter watches our 4 kids invited us to join them to see 12 Years, and we declined. Boy howdy.
Actually, I'm not sure I've ever seen that kind of heavy movie. Schindler's List, nope, Sophie's Choice, nope. Haven't watched The Wire or Breaking Bad (not the same category, but rather grim) either.
I've also not seen any of the Cars saga. Maybe I should go visit a different thread.
Or work.
Riley is apparently a total and complete asshole. He was basically the only prominent writer to scab in the WGA strike a few years back and writes trolling I am a black conservative type stuff.
What an asshole indeed.
If you read through to the comments there's an early (well, long before I knew about him) response from Jelani Cobb.
Cui bono?
Not the Southern white guys, I don't think. There's that Magic Canadian I guess. (Which is apparently what really happened.)
I take it most people have seen at least references to the wingnut who argued the movie sucks becuase it does not depict the softer side of slavery. Slaves getting along with their masters, masters being all paternal and concerned for the slaves wellbeing and all that. It's a remarkable bit of racist stupidity.
6: Spoiler alert: it actually does show that, so they should STFU in general and in this particular instance.
The last movie Lee and I saw together was Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I think means we're contractually obligated to see Annie now just to stay Quvenzhane Wallis completists.
Not the Southern white guys
Even the Southern white guy who looked comparatively good, Dixie Sherlock, was horrible. My guess is that it strengthens the narrative of slavery being an all-encompassing dehumanization institution. There was no hope for Northrup Northup (why do I keep on doing that?), and that he was saved at all was totally due to his Magic Canadian (and legacy of being freed), and there aren't that many of those to go around. I saw the movie as a reminder, something that at least white America needs periodically, that slavery in an unimaginably awful evil.
I should find Northup's memoir and read it -- I'm with JRoth in assiduously avoiding heavy movies, but I do feel bad about skipping this one. Reading the book counts, right?
5: I more meant in terms of why the movie is written that way, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Not positive, obviously, but also even fewer white people would have gone to see it if they didn't get to see Brad Pitt and so on. It must have been a deliberate choice and I'm obviously a little conflicted about it.
I have to admit that something that vaguely attracted me to the sort of movie I generally wouldn't dream of going to see was finding out if Dixie Sherlock (this cracked me up) could handle the accent adequately.
But I suppose if I were actually interested I could find clips on youtube, and I haven't, so I must not be.
The book is very readable, and the movie followed it pretty closely. It even has that detail of the Washington slave pen being in view of the Capitol, which comes across exactly like added color.
Although, of course, what's socially important about the movie at this point isn't so much the nineteenth century text, but what a twenty-first century director did with it. So I should watch it anyway.
I thought The Lego Movie was pretty bad. Mr. Peabody and Sherman was better. I enjoyed The Nut Job. Frozen was good.
16: Would the adoption subplot in Peabody and Sherman be as upsetting to adoptees as hysterical adoptive parents online think it is? (Annie is going to raise similar questions, but with my girls there's no way I can avoid that one, while Peabody & Sherman is not their favorite part of Rocky & Bullwinkle and so I'm probably safe there in terms of whining to go.)
Spike: what the fuck is wrong with you. The Lego Movie was great.
Come to think, I think the last several movies I've seen (at the rate of about one and a half a year) have all been Marvel Comics related. Oh, except the Hobbit, which I still resent not having had the initiative to leave halfway through.
Would the adoption subplot in Peabody and Sherman be as upsetting to adoptees as hysterical adoptive parents online think it is?
Gosh, I am so unqualified to answer that. Probably not? It seemed innocuous and sweet to me, but I don't know what the triggers are.
The Lego Movie was tedious. A "world building" movie is all well and good, but its got to have more of a draw than, "hey, look at this cool world we built!" Like an intriguing plot, or characters I don't hate, for example.
But at least it got my kid to pay attention to his legos for half a week. He usually doesn't give them the time of day, mostly because his small motor skills are terrible, and that stuff is just overly difficult for him.
Thanks, Spike. I'd guess the point where a dog adopts a child would be enough to give them distance, but it's not something I want to pre-screen by myself. If they want to see it, we can talk through any uncertainty it might bring up. Apparently there's a threat that the adoption can be overturned (and not just because the adoptive parent is a dog!) and this is supposed to be upsetting kids and/or their parents, but I'm pretty sure mine understand the nature of fiction even if there are arguments about whether, say, unicorns qualify.
I haven't yet watched or read 12 Years a Slave, but if you're going to read just one escape from slavery narrative, I recommend Harriet Jacobs'.
11 --I'm probably wrong about this, but I imagine that the number of white people who went to this movie because Brad Pitt is in it is pretty small. Especially so since the awards shows/nominations.
24: I don't mean Brad Pitt specifically, but if it had had an even more black cast, would it have done as well? I have no idea and I suspect neither did the people financing it. I don't think anyone was going for frivolous eyecandy reasons.
Oh, I don't know about that. Or at least, I think probably most of the white people who went to go see it went because it's social important on racial issues and so on and so forth. But that they were more likely to actually get off the couch and buy the movie ticket because there were a number of white stars in the movie so they felt more comfortable seeing it.
and not just because the adoptive parent is a dog!
Actually, the interspecies adoption angle was played up heavily. But I can see (now that you mention it) where folks would be uncomfortable with this. A central plot point - really THE central plot point - is about the adoption of Sherman being in danger of being reversed. But that's also true of Annie, isn't it?
Anyway, Peabody and Sherman comes down squarely pro-interspecies adoption, and (SPOILER ALERT!) Mr. Peabody gets to keep Sherman in the end.
25 -- An even more black cast means a very different movie. One that doesn't feature a bunch individual white people sucking, hard, which was necessary for the slave system to function, but has them sucking, off-screen, as some kind of force of nature.
Apparently there's a threat that the adoption can be overturned (and not just because the adoptive parent is a dog!)
See, that's the kind of trigger that totally didn't occur to me. Yeah, there might be an undercurrent of "if I misbehave in school, some mean lady will try to take me away from my adoptive family."
I was pleased to see this week's box-office results so that I could observe that son-of-dog overcame Son of God.
The white stars probably helped in getting white people there--I won't deny that Cumberbatch helped for me--but in the movie they mostly seemed like distractions. Cumberbatch was too Sherlocky, Brad Pitt was an unwanted surprise, and while he was fine I couldn't see Sal from Mad Men as anything but Sal from Mad Men. Giamatti and the guy playing the younger overseer were good and Fassbender was amazing.
On the other hand, Ejiofor being the lead was also a benefit and I was glad to see him again. I thought he was excellent as the villains in Serenity (ok, not the deepest role) and Children of Men, and fine (as best I can remember, been a while) in Love Actually. While I will miss him being a sci fi villain, he deserves more high profile roles.
But cosign 26. It seemed like it would be a serious film about a historically and socially important topic (that it was so close to the history was an unexpected bonus). And it was.
I enjoyed Django Unchained. Every single white person ended up dead.
A "world building" movie is all well and good, but its got to have more of a draw than, "hey, look at this cool world we built!"
As a general principle, I'm inclined to agree with this, and I was surprised to like the Lego Movie as much as I did.
But in this case, if the world is cool enough, it turns out that it doesn't really have to make much sense otherwise.
The world-building logic revealed at the end was very successful in explaining the plot shortcomings up to that point, and it was the weakest part of the movie.
29: Yeah, Annie has not just that but fake(?) parents coming out of the woodwork to try for reunification, not to mention the update making it about an evil foster parent who's just in it for the money, which will be the first time they've run across that trope. Good times!
30: Okay, good point. You're actually making a good case for why it was set up the way it was.
33 -- OK, I see 3, but really the number of people who went to this movie because of Giamatti or Cumberbatch, and would not have gone if these roles were filled with no names, has just got to be vanishingly small.
Idiots like "world building" and the like. Non idiots like things that are funny. Or maybe it's the other way around. Anyhow, who gives a shit, the Lego movie was funny.
12 YAS was not made to make money beyond recouping its costs and getting some prestige. To the extent that it had white actors in it, it was not for that reason or to draw an audience. Brad Pitt financed it so presumably they were anxious to give him a role.
OT: Sally has introduced me to the thing where people make up names that sound like Benedict Cumberbatch, and I find it disproportionately amusing. Bandicoot Butterscotch. Cumbersome Bandersnatch.
We all watched Despicable Me 2 together on Friday night in an attempt to revive an old tradition of Family Move Night. Not the greatest movie ever perhaps, but those minions are pretty hilarious.
Now I realize that it was mainstream Hollywood's response to 12 Years a Slave, showing that slavery isn't really that bad after all.
There's an interesting historical question of how much an enslaved person's life was spent in the company of white people - which is obviously going to depend on many factors - but this lunch break is to short to contain it. Also, I don't know the particulars of Northup's situation.
I'm glad that the discourse around The Lego Movie has established, once and for all, that it is NORMAL for people to refer to lego bricks as "legos". You can call them "lego" if you want, but they are objects, not some sort of amorphous substance.
11 et seq.: It also felt like a deliberate choice to me, and that was driven home by the proportion of the white men who were played by prominent actors. I was distracted during the movie by trying to identify Paul Giamatti, and since then I've been trying to figure out what he was doing there - it seems nearly certain that an anonymous actor could have played that bit part at least as effectively. (And that's true to a degree of the Paul Dano and Benedict Cumberbatch parts as well.)
But in this case, if the world is cool enough, it turns out that it doesn't really have to make much sense otherwise.
Yeah, I guess I fell on the side of "world not cool enough to carry the rest of the film." I suspect Lego Movie 2 is going to have this problem in spades, as the "we built this cool lego world" thing has already been done, and I can't see that the characters in Lego Movie are strong enough or interesting enough to support the quality of writing that would be needed to crank out some decent movies in this franchise.
By comparison, Toy Story was a great world building movie that also had strong characters to carry it. Toy Story 2 was a lesser movie than the first, because the world had already been built and the characters, though still good, were getting stale. Toy Story 3 overcame that problem on the strength of its writing, and the emotional connection it was able to build with its audience. There is no way that a Lego Movie can pull that off.
46 -- Really? Giamatti plays one of the worst human beings in the movie. An anonymous actor allows viewers to "other" the bad people, in a way that using a familiar face does not.
I thought having Pitt in that role was a mistake, but an understandable one since he's writing the checks. The movie isn't about him, though, or really any of the other white people.
Anyhow, who gives a shit, the Lego movie was funny.
I guess I didn't find it that funny. It had nothing on the Minions.
A snatch of dialog between Giamatti & Cumberbatch:
Ford: [Ford is attempting to buy Eliza, who begs to allow her daughter to come too. Her son having just been sold] How much for the little girl? You have no need for her. One so young will bring you no profit.
Freeman: I will not sell the girl. There's heaps 'n piles of money to be made off her. She is a beauty. One of the regular bloods. None of your thick-lipped, bullet headed, cotton picking niggers.
Ford: Her child, man. For God's sake, are you not sentimental in the least?
Freeman: My sentimentality stretches the length of a coin. Do you want the lot, Mr. Ford, or do you pass on them all?
Ford: I will take the ones Platt and Eliza.
I have toyed with the notion that casting semi-famous men in the white roles was McQueen's way of driving home the advantages/privileges of being white - "their position in their milieu is like celebrities' in ours!" - but I presume that's nonsense, and it would have meant spending a lot of resources on sending one of the movie's more obvious messages.
It seems overwhelmingly likely instead that the white actors in parts smaller than Fassbender's were participating because they wanted to - or their agency wanted them to, or the producers wanted them to - and I thought the end result was a less-effective film. Wouldn't be the first time that's happened.
52 not in response to 49. I haven't been previewing.
The movie isn't about him, though, or really any of the other white people.
But the black people were even more anonymous in ways I didn't like. I'm not sure what movie I would have liked better since it would have been unwatchably brutal and 12 years long, but the balance just felt off.
48: Are there firm plans for a sequel? You'd have to guess they'll do it, because money. But I share your skepticism on that score.
unwatchably brutal and 12 years long
One of the strangest parts of my experience of the movie - and I'm curious about whether this is utter idiosyncrasy on my part - was that I couldn't sense the passage of time at all. It seemed to me as though no one aged, except in the trivial case of Patsy's daughter, and that the movie, with 12 Years there in the title, didn't communicate for me the grueling length of Solomon's ordeal (as opposed to its grueling character).
56 is absolutely true for me. Like, maybe they tried to make Northup suddenly grayer at the temples when he went home and his children were grown, but there was no sense of time at all, which seems counter to how unrelenting it should have felt.
56 -- I think that was a real weakness in the adaptation. The book surely makes clear how time passed. I wonder if the thinking was that spreading the violence over the time period would blunt its impact.
I thought Northup being passed between slave owners, in particular the seasonal work at Sal's plantation, was effective for making time pass. Same with opening with him working in the fields and taking the first third or half of the movie to get back to that point. Finishing up the long flashback brought into focus how much had changed.
But there was also a timelessness to it, as if he was in stasis in an unchanging world and when he returned everything was different, the passing of time suddenly drastically sped up. (I realize these are contradictory.)
48: Are there firm plans for a sequel? You'd have to guess they'll do it, because money. But I share your skepticism on that score.
I didn't even have to check to know there were. We live in an age where every movie franchise is milked for as many sequels as it can possibly support. Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Harry Potter 7.5, Madagascar 3, Star Wars numbers 7 - 12.
In the case of Lego Movie 2, the release is planned for 2017.
Neither our kids nor we saw Peabody & Sherman so have nothing for Thorn on the interspecies adoption angle, other than to report that when they were pre-teens, the kids were in a PetSmart on a "dog adoption day." They went to the nice woman running it and said "How can you adopt a dog? We're adopted!" She was embarassed but recovered, sort of, and said that just like a "real" adoption, a pet adoption means that the pets get a safe and loving home.
On the drive home, I thought this might be a teachable moment but it devolved into yet another "can we get a dog?" back-and-forth.
60: When 12 More Years a Slave comes out, we'll know sequelitis is out of control.
59.1 is correct as far as it goes - there were helpful bits of ordered time - but part of the oddity for me was that while narrative time was passing, "personal" time didn't seem to be. (And neither type seemed clearly to cover twelve years.)
And while I do think a sense of the South as a timeless trap in which Solomon Northup was caught was appropriate - and not radically contradictory since you were citing a timeline governed by repetition - I'm not sure that calls for avoidance of bodily aging, etc.
It's been years since I studied the book; I remember mainly being struck by just how strange (and yet not strange) his experience was, as a free man then enslaved. I really want to see the movie but have to be in the right frame of mind --- and, well, just haven't been.
I was curious on your take, Thorn, so thanks for writing in!
On the subject of Chiwetel Ejiofor's other roles, we just watched Kinky Boots, which I found amusing. (Especially as it takes place in Northampton, a town that I have no love for.) I also loved at the time Dirty Pretty Things, though I haven't seen it since it came out.
64.last We watched it a few nights before, because it's streaming on Netflix and Lee had never seen it and didn't really know who he was. I didn't think it held up very well, though the parts of it that are not about the plot are superb and everyone in it is great.
(This is the part that's totally about me, but I remember how physically unsettling the sex abuse was when I first watched it, 22 and getting out of an abusive relationship etc., and this time I knew it was going to happen and was watching on a small screen while drinking bourbon and all of that may have made it less viscerally awful, but it was much less viscerally awful and I think that means I've grown or something.)
The dialogue in 51 is more than enough to confirm my desire to not see the movie. I prefer to keep my knowledge that slavery was evil on a less visceral level.
Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Harry Potter 7.5, Madagascar 3, Star Wars numbers 7 - 12.
13 Years a Slave
12 Years A Slave: The Legend of Curly's Gold
12 Years A Slave: Slaves In Paradise
12 Years A Slave And A Little Lady
I really like Toy Story 2. It really is the best movie trilogy.
Friday the 12th: Jason Takes the Plantation
12 Years a Slave: Electric Boogaloo
Actually, a dramatization of Northup's attempt to bring his various kidnappers to justice could be interesting - it was in the book too, and it happened just when he was getting famous and giving speeches and so forth. He was greatly hindered by blacks not being able to testify in their own defense in DC. Unfortunately he dropped out of the record after that.
It's silly, but I liked that they chose to use the numeral in the title. It establishes the film as a work of art derived from, but independent of, the original narrative. Or maybe they wanted it to show up first on Netflix, whatever
76 -- Another different movie, but just as devastating an indictment of "civilized" society. Two separate criminal prosecutions -- the one in DC fell apart when SN couldn't testify to refute the slave trader's ridiculous story. The one in NYC against the con men seems to have fallen apart when a new DA quit fighting on venue, while it seems clear that the deceit took place in NYC.
12 Years A Slave: The Venue Arguments
12 Years A Slave: Through The Portal of Time
In a sequel that took 9 years to make and had 1/9 the budget, Solomon Northup travels to present-day Los Angeles to stop Stonewall Jackson (Kevin Kline) from getting some sort of laser cannon.
76, 78: On a similar note, I (sort of) recommend Rose, a Free Woman of Color, about an enslaved woman's efforts to be legally recognized as non-black and thus illegally enslaved and all the wrangling that takes place in the courts to make this happen.
By the way, you know what's a pretty fucking brutal narrative of slavery? American Girl Doll Books "Meet Addy." Not really that level of intensity from the American Girl Doll series.
expected intensity from American Girl Doll books
12 Years a Slave: Look Who's Talking Too!
Slaves weren't required to be mute, Heebs.
Just imagine the sassy repartee that you could've heard if their thoughts were on voiceover.
I also loved at the time Dirty Pretty Things, though I haven't seen it since it came out.
In retrospect DPT was one of the first of the worrying trend of films that are very well produced and have great actors but utterly incoherent plots. There was a human heart down the toilet at the start of the film and there was never any reason given for why it was there.
70 genuinely made me laugh out loud.
Read the book last night -- good lord was Northup a calm, calm person. I mean, this must have been an intentional choice, but while he reports being terribly upset at significant moments, the general tone of his reaction to being enslaved for ten years is just that he coped with it. These were the interesting bits, this is how I managed when some maniac tried to kill me with an axe, this is how a sugar mill works. Incredibly low emotional temperature.
Also, for sheer horror: Ford, the first guy who 'owns' Northup is a prince among men, the nicest guy ever. Northup doesn't say a bad thing about him, and says an awful lot of good things: basically, the verdict is, accepting slavery is bad, but that's understandable considering where he was from, and other than that, he's just really very decent. But of course, remarkably decent as Ford was, Northup still couldn't rely on him to have been willing to let Northup prove that he was a free man who had been kidnapped. The nicest, decentest slaveowner ever, and there was still a real risk that Northup's claiming to have legal rights would have meant that he'd be beaten to death. That point isn't hammered on explicitly, but wow is it chilling.
Incredibly low emotional temperature.
Very different circumstances, but I get a similar feeling from the diary of a forefather involved in a failed Revolutionary War expedition down the Ohio River. It is all "walked to here, built a raft, slept there" including the day when over half of them got killed.
Aug. 24. Col. Lochery ordered the boats to land on the Indiana shore, about ten miles below the mouth of the Great Meyamee River, to cook provisions and cut grass for the horses when we were fired on by a party of Indians from the bank. We took to our boats expecting to cross the river, and were fired on by another party in a number of canoes in the river, and soon we became a prey to them. They killed the Col. and a number more after they were prisoners. The number of our killed was about forty. They marched us that night about eight miles up the river and encamped.And he later moved to the area* from Western PA based on his memory of how good the land was along the Miami River.
*And ran tavern for a while located in what I think is now a parking lot for the baseball stadium.
A little different. I recognize the tone of the thing you quote -- a lot of documents from around that time sound kind of like that -- and it sounds like purposefully minimalist reportage, where there's no emotional detail because there's intentionally no detail. The Northup thing is chatty and detailed, just astonishingly cool inbetween the emotional high points.
You know what it kind of reminded me of? Two Years Before The Mast: here I am in a sort of socially inappropriate manual labor position including a certain amount of injustice, some of which is pretty extreme, but there's also lots of it that's just interesting. Except that Dana was a rich kid taking a job as a sailor to rest his eyes from studying, and Northup was kidnapped into slavery.
91.1: Right , a diary in the moment is going to be minimalist. But still not sure I could have written that entry that evening.
In retrospect DPT was one of the first of the worrying trend of films that are very well produced and have great actors but utterly incoherent plots.
Yep. As soon as I saw the title I thought, "Hey, I liked that!" and then tried to recall anything and thought ... oh dear, I bet that hasn't aged well. As, it seems, it has not.
70 genuinely made me laugh out loud.
Ditto.
Is this short story by Twain and example of a white guy appropriating the narrative of a black woman? I'm sympathetic to Twain, so I'll describe it instead as a white guy slyly mocking his own privilege.
"Aunt Rachel, how is it that you've lived sixty years and never had any trouble?"
But yes, for this kind of a thing I tend to be a lumper rather than a splitter.
It happens that my family was talking about Two Years Before the Mast at dinner last night. The context was by-and-large disappearance of jobs where college students-young men especially--experienced the lives of lower classes, hard physical labor, and maybe some danger. I had them, and they've been very important to me, in my development and sense of who I am and what I can do.
Nowadays to get the experience of the lower classes, hard physical labor, and danger, college students just work as strippers. "Two Years Before The Pole."
PT was one of the first of the worrying trend of films that are very well produced and have great actors but utterly incoherent plots.
Kids these days think they invented everything.
There was a human heart down the toilet at the start of the film and there was never any reason given for why it was there.
98 Tell me about it.
But still not sure I could have written that entry that evening.
Don't know about that diary, but it was not uncommon to write diary entries some time after the fact but date them on the days when the things recounted happened.
I vaguely remember in Two Years Before the Mast Dana gets somewhat emotional when he finds out that he might be on the hook for more than two years if he can't find someone to take his place. A far cry from being kidnapped into slavery, of course.
100.1: Have had that thought. Did get to look at the diary itself briefly, but we spent most of the time trying to decode obscured words. A more careful look might be able to deduce some of that.
The context was by-and-large disappearance of jobs where college students-young men especially--experienced the lives of lower classes, hard physical labor, and maybe some danger.
BRING BACK THE DRAFT.
My 19 year old son took the fall semester off, and worked construction. (Including a project on Jus/in Timber/ake's vacation house.) It turned out to be a better learning experience that I'd expected: he got the flu and missed 3 days, which, with two other days missed that pay period on account of weather, made him short of rent (so he had to ask ol dad to bail him out). Got hurt, and has been learning about dealing with workers comp.
The ice is pretty thin.
102: I go back and forth on the value of mandatory national service of some kind. On the one hand it's a leveling experience that binds people together despite differing backgrounds. On the other it's forcing people to do things and I'm generally against that when it can be avoided.
Botswana has a weird little system where high school graduates are conscripted to do development work in poorer areas of the country for a year. Sort of a draft Peace Corps. It seems to work well enough, though I haven't really looked at results or talked to anyone who's done it recently. My knowledge of the details mostly comes from my classmates who did it. They seemed to think they were doing some good.
I'm in favor of reinstituting the draft largely because military service seems to be an excellent source of funny stories, and this is a resource that should be more broadly spread among the population.
Nowadays to get the experience of the lower classes, hard physical labor, and danger, college students just work as strippers. "Two Years Before The Pole."
Hey! Or maybe that would be what we could sentence Putin to - two years of work on the stage in some rowdy Upper Silesian strip club. We could sell special travel packages to Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh fans.
"I know of no finer cure for neurosis than the inescapable 'must' of military life" -- Sigmund Freud, former officer in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry.
"There is only one antidote to mental suffering, and that is physical pain." Karl Marx
Apparently an ideologically pristine saying beloved by drill instructors in the armies of the soviet sphere of influence.
Further to 101*, a place where my genealogical/family history interpretations have at times put me at significant odds with other family numbers is in the level of credence to put in some of the tales of the ancestors. Some people get a bit hostile even when I confront them incontrovertible evidence like one great-great-great grandmother and her unmarried daughter who both apparently aged at less than 10 years a pop between the last few censuses for which we have records**.
*In this case he is talking about a well-attested historical event. But of course his version is one of the main primary sources...
**And in that event, it delayed recognition that she was in fact the right person since when my mother did the original research she only had the last census in the chain which would have had the g-g-g gm being too young to be the mother of her son who we had identified as our putative g-g gf (decent evidence that it was a marriage of convenience to cover an out-of-wedlock).
The "must" I'll give you, and having been through military training made holding those other jobs easier--taught me how to relate, how to measure effort, how not to stick out.
But the construction/truck driving/factory jobs were much more dangerous than my military experience, because there the danger was closely controlled. The worst Army moment was when a mentally unstable soldier on the firing range right in front of me became disoriented and swung around, pointing his loaded M16 right at me. I hit the deck and shouted, and he was promptly tackled by sergeants from both sides.
But on the other hand I was handling heavy equipment without training every day on the job, and sometimes it showed.