Sunday!
Steven Amell does his own stunts.
I don’t know if this is freaking awesome or a surefire way to have a career that is only half as long as would have been possible otherwise but it has a handful of small upsides.
One, of course, is that this allows the star of Arrow to do things like “Have the best wrestling match involving a celebrity, like, *EVER*”.
Another is that it allows him to get on the American Ninja Warrior course and, holy cow, do really well.
He’s certainly done a good job of taking care of himself, but he really ought to do a better job, you know, protecting himself.
In the short amount of time that we have before we wince and say “ooooh, I guess that was inevitable”, it’s pretty awesome that Steven Amell does his own stunts.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
Reading bits and pieces of E. C. Tubb’s Dumarest Saga. Tubb was one of the more prolific writers of pulp science fiction (and a bit of other things): over 140 novels and 230 novellas/short stories. James K’s recent piece critiquing economics in sci-fi got me to thinking, and then looking, at how common it used to be to superimpose high technology — eg, FTL travel cheap enough to support interstellar trade — with wide-spread slavery, gladitorial combat, assassins guilds, and always the very worst of political structures. (Not politics, this is literary criticism.)Report
@michael-cain
That is an interesting thought – just what has to happen to an FTL-capable civilisation for them to reintroduce monarchy and blood sports?Report
Michael,
Easy structures are easy to write about. And some people like Big Heroes.Report
I read the charming dual memoir Girl Code by the young women who designed the game Tampon Run. Now a chapter or so into Doctorow’s Walkaway.
Watching mostly Clone Wars.Report
Was tampon run actually available to play?
The English STD game that won BAFTAs got banned from nintendo…Report
I’ve been reading this blog on the internet I go to time to time, mostly when avoiding my studies.Report
The Riverview Manor Murder Kingsly Amis. Boy, was he obsessed with sex! (its a ’70’s pastiche of a ’30’s crime novel, writen by one the Angry Young Men of postwar Britain. So it works in some ways, but doesn’t in others.)Report
He sure was. Ever read One Fat Englishman?Report
Partway through The Hydrogen Sonata, which is the last of the Culture novels. Quite good, as they all are, but definitely not up to Player of Games or Use of Weapons.Report
Damn, that’s been sitting on my shelf forever and I still haven’t gotten around to reading it. As far as I can tell having read most of them now, Player of Games and Use of Weapons are clearly the best of the series…though I do have a huge soft spot for Excession.Report
Haven’t been reading books much lately…I’ve been slowly working my way through Infernal Devices but I haven’t made much progress. Over the last couple nights I’ve been reading through the fluff sections of the Numenera RPG core book, concurrent with my playing of Torment. I really do love that setting, the idea of a medieval civilization amidst the ruins of eight civilizations worth of clarketech appeals to me in a way that straightforward fantasy rarely does.Report
Doctor Who (now with Capaldi)– now with the jokes added back in.
They killed the “O! The Humanity!” joke, and of course all the mutton-related scottish humor. They left in the “referential to the writer” humor about laughing way too much at things that really aren’t funny except to him.
And then my friend and I watched the Moon episode. Utter drek, wrapped in more drek. Should have been canned.
And that “Like a Virgin” filk got put on the Gotham writers’ answering machine. Because my friend? He does stuff like that. (I should be thankful he’s not talking about airlifting more houses).Report
Flatline was an absolutely awesome episode of Doctor Who.
The next one? Ehhhh… Joke Scripts are Not For Television.
Seriously, nothing better folks???Report
Steven Amell is capable of doing *some* of his own stunts. And is fit enough I’m sure he could do more, except they wouldn’t let him.
Yes, they let him do the pullup thing (Which is apparently called the Salmon Ladder) on the show, but I’m certain that all the shots of him doing it are with a giant piece of padding below in case he falls. Or perhaps wires to catch him.
Interesting fact: He goes much slower on that Salmon Ladder than we’ve seen him do on Arrow. Either the show is sometimes using stunt doubles for that, or speeding up the footage, or perhaps at that speed he screws up four out of five takes. (Honestly, it really is a neat trick to slide the pole in place *while falling* because the pole was what was supporting you. I can imagine a lot of people would be strong enough to do that trick but not *coordinated* enough to pull the thing backwards and up and then jam it into place while they start dropping, or at least not coordinated enough to do it rapidly and get it every single time.)
Anyway, the insurers aren’t going to let him do any fighting. Or anything that, if he screws it up, he can’t immediately recover from. Nothing *dangerous*.
But the TV industry is pretty good at making things that look dangerous not dangerous. They’ll zip-line him down from a building with him apparently only holding the zip-line with his glove, and edit out the wiring that was actually holding him up.
And, of course, all combat is stunt doubles, or closeups of him attacking at stunt performer, or two of the real actors carefully interacting at half-speed for ten seconds and sped up. (It’s amazing how small the amount of ‘I can really see their face’ is needed to convince you that the actor is in the *entire* fight.)
Steven Amell is just in good enough shape to do the stunts that *aren’t* dangerous, but *are* extreme strenuous. Which, I mean, good for him. And I don’t doubt he *could* do some of the other ones.
But there’s never been any action star who ever did *all* his own stunts, so ‘Does his own stunts’ should always be taken with a grain of salt.
As for him being on wrestling…well, the contracts don’t really say much about what performers can do outside of the show. Action actors breaking themselves *off-set* is sorta a standard of the TV industry…Lucy Lawless, at the height of Xena, broke her pelvis, not while filming *Xena*, but while filming a horse-riding stunt for David Letterman.(1) Because the producers of Xena *wouldn’t* let her dangerously leap onto the back of a horse, but the producers of Letterman had no such qualms.
1) In the most absurd production luck ever, this happened immediately after a body swapping episode had just been filmed, so they just refilmed that ending to make it where Xena remained stuck in the wrong body. For several episodes, until the mid-season filming break happened.Report