The eight best media moments of 2011 - Nyan Cat

And Number One: Nyan Cat!

A world where a kitten/poptart hybrid can fly through outer space shooting rainbows behind it while a relentless techno-pop repetition of the Japanese version of “meow” plays in the background can’t possibly be all bad.

Review – The Great Train Robbery

Truth be told, I didn’t have much of an opinion of this early Michael Crichton movie one way or another. In Victorian England a roguish gentleman (Sean Connery) enlists the aid of some criminal types (Donald Sutherland chief among them) to steal a shipment of gold bars from a moving train. Some of the intrigue is mildly intriguing. Some of the stunt work is good. But for the most part this is one of those old movies that doesn’t do much either to impress or to offend. Mildly amusing

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Moneyball

Number two: Moneyball

Rare indeed is the movie that earns four stars upon first viewing in a theater, at least in part because when the 8sails staff ventures into a theater it’s usually in search of some escapist trash rather than a genuinely good movie. Moneyball was a rare exception, not only to the “movies in theaters are bad” rule but also the “baseball movies tend to not ‘get’ baseball” rule. I went in skeptical but came out impressed, a truly noteworthy moment.

Review – Memphis Belle

This is one of those movies that seems to have been custom-designed for nit-pickers on IMDb (coincidentally created the same year this picture was released). Reasonable audience members develop a certain measure of tolerance for historical inaccuracy. But here sticking to the facts would have made this a considerably less annoying movie. For example, actual B-17 bomber crews were supposed to use their radios and interphones only for essential communication such as warnings about incoming fighters. Here they’re used for endless inane chatter. Sadly, that’s part of a general trend of juvenile macho assholism that infects most of the script. At a couple of points these guys actually play childish pranks on each other while actively under attack from German flack and fighters. On the plus side, the airplanes are interesting to look at. Mildly amusing

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Everybody Poops

Number three: Everybody Poops

I’m genuinely in awe of the folks at Bad Lip Reading. They go over footage – most often from music videos and political ads – and figure out what other words might sync up perfectly with the onscreen mouth movements. Often the result is pure gibberish (which in the case of the Michelle Bachman video wasn’t all that big a departure). They’re all funny, but the one that had me literally in tears was a bizarre hybrid of the basic thesis from Taro Gomi’s popular children’s book synced up with the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” video.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Honey Badger

Number four: The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger

Take footage from a wildlife show about our friend the honey badger. Add some fairly random narration by some guy named Randall, and suddenly it’s a minor-league culturalphenomenon. A friend even found a honey badger T-shirt at Wal-Mart (the “Honey Badger don’t care” version rather than “Honey Badger don’t give a shit,” naturally).

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Guy on a Buffalo

Number five: Guy on a Buffalo

One of the big themes of Media 2011 was “repurposing” – taking something somebody else already did and messing with it until it turns into something new. A lot of people suck at this, but not The Possum Posse. These guys found some crazy, copyright-expired movie about a frontiersman who rides around the Wild West on the back of a hapless buffalo. Cutting it way down and putting it to music renders it absolutely hilarious.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - This blog

Number six: This blog

Because a blog this fabulous can’t go unnoted. Seriously, though, this was the first actual “blog” blog we tried, and at this point I’d describe it as reasonably successful. The goal for 2012 is to get more content in here.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Science book

Number seven: The Gary Busey science book

If the one-day fudge on the last one was a “bit of a cheat,” this one’s massive malfeasance. This article originally appeared on Cracked.com nine months before 2011 got underway. But I didn’t run across it until earlier this year. And it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, well worth bending the rules to call it to your attention.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Deadwood

In years past I’ve written up the eight best media moments of the past year as a Hoffman Lens column. But the format seems to fit well here. Plus this way I can draw it out for eight days and finish it on New Years Eve.

Without further ado:

Number eight: Deadwood on Blu-ray

Technically this one’s a bit of a cheat, because the Blu-ray box set of all three seasons was issued on Dec. 31, 2010. But we didn’t get it until months later, and we didn’t start watching it until December. Oh that we could have started earlier. The image quality is truly breathtaking, making the visuals a worthy counterpart to the writing and the acting. The experience left me longing to be back in a cabin in the Black Hills again (not that I wasn’t longing for that anyway).

Review – Twelve o’ Clock High

A good war movie is a tricky bit of timing. Pictures made while the war is still going tend to present a nervously rosy view of battlefield success. But get too much distance on the experience and gritty revisionism tends to take over. This production came out four years after the end of World War Two and seven years after the events depicted, timing that allowed it to be unusually honest about the experiences of American bomber crews flying the first daylight missions over Germany. Gregory Peck takes the lead as a wing commander plagued by the challenges of balancing the need to wage war on the Nazis with the heavy toll – physical and psychological – imposed on his men. By modern action movie standards this is a bit “talky,” but it works quite well as a portrait of the human cost of technological warfare. Worth seeing

Review – Learning Curve

A substitute teacher dropped into the bully-trashed hell of a public high school exacts elaborate revenge on the six worst kids. Needless to say, this was the Feel Good Movie of the Year. Our hero (John S. Davies) concocts a scheme to get the little monsters “internships” and then drag them off to animal cages in the middle of nowhere. With a choice between torture and education, the brats finally settle down and start learning something. Though the plot summary on Netflix made this sound like an average piece of torture porn trash, the movie was originally made before Saw started the current sadism wave. And unlike most graphic slasher pictures, this one actually has a point and does a reasonably good job of making it. The high school teacher I watched it with assures me that – aside from a few technical points – the school in the movie is all too much like actual public schools. Now that’s scary! Originally released as Detention. Mildly amusing

The 12 days of do you really need that

I originally wrote this for another blog, but I thought the 8sails audience might enjoy it as well.

On the 12th day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:

12 Rorschach coasters

11 nerdy pencils

10 custom Muppets

9 smoking bunnies

8 walnut rockets

7 bad swear snow globes

6 candid doormats

5 hooooooooowling rings

4 squirrel games

3 Apple charts

2 airquote mittens

And an elaborate outdoor cooker

Also, when exactly is the 12th day of Christmas? Is it January 5? Is it December 25 (making the first day  today)? Or given that the Christmas crap hits shelves as soon as the Halloween crap exits for the bargain table, is it November 12?

Review – Eye of the Killer

Somewhere between his dating-Julia-Roberts popularity in the early 1990s and his kicking-ass-on-24 popularity in the 2000s, Kiefer Sutherland went through a patch in which most of the jobs he could get were movies like this. He plays an alcoholic – big stretch – cop who gets a sharp rap on the head and ends up with psychic powers. Imagine the dullest, most predictable path such as set-up could take, and you've seen this picture without having to actually see it. Originally released as After Alice. See if desperate

Review – 30 Seconds Over Tokyo

Plus two hours 17 minutes 30 seconds of intensely boring movie. The parts of this movie that focus on the Doolittle raid – and training for same – are interesting enough. Some of the escaping-the-Japanese stuff is mildly interesting, though the Chinese caricature characters are wince-worthy. And one has to expect and tolerate a certain amount of handsome pilot and pretty wife romance. But they really go over the top with the gooning between aw-shucks Van Johnson and perpetually-grinning Phyllis Thaxter. And Doolittle himself ought probably to have been a bigger part of the movie, particularly as they got Spencer Tracy to play him. Mildly amusing

Review – Jesus Christ Superstar

Awhile back I found myself at a dinner theatre production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. And oddly I found myself not hating it as much as I’d expected to. With that in mind, I thought I’d give this other Andrew Lloyd Webber Biblical adaptation another chance. Mistake. In the spirit of Christian charity, I’ll note that a couple of the scenes (the spooky leper colony and the campy Herod number) weren’t too terrible. The rest of it made the Gospels into meaningless, meandering hippie hash. See if desperate

The Scarface Café

 

A scary moment

Just a couple of minutes ago, I completed the last of the structural work on the Media Survival Guide. From here I have three more chapters to finish researching, and after that it’s all writing (and web page building of course). So that’s three “feature length” chapters and five shorter “specialty” chapters to go.

For the first time The Project seems like it might actually have an end.

The annual parade rant (part three)

The holiday season is now officially upon us. Actually, it starts sometime right around the end of the World Series and runs until whenever school starts back up again. So the annual Macy’s Day Parade rant is really more of a Midholiday’s Night celebration.

This year’s experience was radically different from years past. As everyone who knows me is already oh-please-shut-up-about-it-already aware, we’re getting television exclusively from the Internet now. Thus deprived of the broadcast networks and their local affiliates, I couldn’t watch the usual parade coverage.

A quick web search uncovered a live feed from Earthcam. The site had a handful of views, most of which were breathtaking vistas of people standing on the sidewalk (must have been some kind of cell-phone-home-and-tell-everyone-I’m-on-TV thing). But one camera was perched well above street level in Times Square, and it afforded a fairly good view.

Indeed, it brought me mindful of the scene in Miracle on 34th Street in which Natalie Wood watches the parade from a neighbor’s apartment window. When I was a kid, that seemed like the bestest fun next to pie. Now watching the parade from a $10,000 per month apartment is on my bucket list (if by “bucket list” you mean “I’d rather put a metal bucket over my head and hit it repeatedly with a hammer than do that”).

The web cam was much more like actually watching the parade, so that was fun. However, it deprived me of many of my usual rant targets, such as musical numbers gaily pranced out in the street in front of Macy’s, the insanely inane commentary from network morning show hosts who lacked sufficient seniority to avoid working on a holiday, and of course celebrity float riders aging poorly or lip-syncing badly. So this year rant fans will just have to make do with the view from five or six stories up.

I tuned in right around the time the Pillsbury Doughboy balloon was drifting past. The trivia nerds at Mental Floss helpfully tweeted that the Doughboy’s actual name is “Poppin’ Fresh.” Which of course everybody knows. They then rattled off the names of his wife and children. I considered tweeting back that around the Lens household his name is The Pillsbury Dough Bastard and his wife and kids don’t have names because who gives a shit, but somehow it seemed not in keeping with the situation. So I watched it long enough to make sure Gozer the Gozerian wasn’t about to manifest.

Oh, and speaking of Mental Floss, the article they did on parade mishaps mentioned that one year it was raining and the Popeye balloon’s hat started to trap water. Eventually it got so full that the helium wouldn’t hold it up anymore, and it suddenly dumped gallons of icy water into the crowd. I couldn’t help thinking about that when the Pikachu balloon drifted by, because the view from above revealed a disturbing fontanel in the back of its head. Even more disturbing: Microsoft Word’s spell check recognizes “Pikachu” as a word.

The next thing that caught my eye was a marching band clad in matching red shirts and grass skirts. From above they looked like some kind of weird thing you might see under a microscope, an effect aided by the absence of chipper commentary on their outfits.

Also without commentary it was hard to tell if the next balloon of note was DreamWorks’s Kung Fu Panda or Renegade Animation’s Chop Kick Panda. What oh what could be drifting down Broadway, a huge corporate franchise or a thinly-disguised mockbuster? Without Katie Couric, I’ll never know for sure.

Next up, the Energizer Bunny. The Energizer Bunny? Really? At this point in our nation’s history, this thing is less about reliable batteries and more about the zombie movie advice to shoot ‘em in the head because wounds below the neckline don’t kill ‘em. Likewise the Smurfs ought probably to have been ashamed to show their blue balloony selves after the movie they put out last summer.

From my e-perch up above, a squad of what must have been Southern Belles looked like a wave of gone-over Easter Hershey’s Kisses all covered in pastel mold.

Around this time my attention strayed for a bit. As elf drill teams and the like meandered past, I started noticing things going on in the background. In particular: does Times Square really have an Olive Garden? Does it really?

The last actual parade element that caught my eye was a vehicle disguised as a giant Christmas ornament. Its dizzying gyrations from one side of the road to the other made my heart go out to the poor sap who had to drive the thing in circles all along the parade route. Were I that hapless wight, children throughout the Big Apple would forever know that particular attraction as the Big Ball That Smelled Like a Lot of Puke. In the spirit of the holiday, that made me thankful for a comfortable living far away from the East Coast (though I could be lured back to do the driving if the Big Ball was going to get to Herald Square, burst in half and reveal the Deathmobile inside).

Sadly, toward the end of the parade the cats started doing something adorable and/or annoying, and I got back to my computer just in time to watch the crowds dispersing and the cross-traffic once again flowing across Broadway. Guess I’ll just have to catch Santa next year.

Review – Death Becomes Her

Saying “This would have been a better movie if it hadn’t been a stupid comedy” is a little like saying “Bruce Willis would be a better actor if he had an ounce of talent.” Two Ladies of a Certain Age (Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn) up the ante in their battle over a man (Willis) by taking an eternal youth potion. Sadly for them, the potion keeps them going even after they’re both killed (head twisted around backward and huge shotgun hole in abdomen, respectively). Some of the effects are sorta fun, but the script relies far too heavily on silly clichés. A screwball comedy doesn’t need to be acted as intensely as something more serious, but there’s still a big difference between “employing a lighter touch” and “phoning it in.” See if desperate

Review – After.Life

This is one of the most annoying movies I’ve seen in quite some time. Is this young accident victim (Christina Ricci) dead, or is she being held captive by a psychotic funeral director (Liam Neeson)? After less than half an hour of this mess I’d thoroughly ceased to give a shit. They blew the bucks for the cast and the production values, but at heart this is a meandering piece of amateur theatre. If you’re a big fan of go-nowhere plot twists or just desperate to see Ricci with her clothes off, then this is the movie for you. Otherwise ...  see if desperate

Review – Insidious

Though this is a straightforward narrative production rather than a fakeumentary, this picture nonetheless clearly surfs the current Paranormal Activity wave. Parents employ a psychic to help figure out why their son suddenly slipped into a mysterious coma. Turns out his spirit is trapped in a spooky netherworld while back on our plane of existence a Darth-Maul-looking demon is trying to worm its way into the kid’s body. The IMDb notes said that the screenwriter stuck a list of horror movie clichés to avoid next to his computer while he was working. What a shame he forgot to add “Don’t rely on booga-booga shots to replace plot developments” and “Whatever you do, don’t ever end a scene by having a character suddenly wake up from a nightmare.” At least some of the booga-boogas kinda work. Mildly amusing

Review – Paris Is Burning

This documentary about drag queen competitions in New York is actually a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. The film focuses on the poor, black drag community, folks who live for the temporary escape afforded by balls held at clubs such as Paris Is Burning. I was a little annoyed at the organization of the story. Clips sorted according to the various sub-themes of the competitions rather than showing a single ball from start to finish. Though this helps illustrate the various “specialties,” it makes it hard to get a feel for what the overall experience is like. But the real draws of the movie are the people, ranging from the “legendary mothers” of the various houses to new kids just entering the life. I just wish the picture wasn’t forever linked in my mind with a cooking mishap that occurred while I was watching it for the first time. Worth seeing

Review – To Kill a King

When faced with a movie about a subject as morally ambiguous as the English Civil War, the easiest way to figure out who the hero’s going to be is to compare the cast list to the executive producer credits. In this case the good guy is Thomas Fairfax (Dougray Scott), a member of the nobility and rebel leader who managed to disassociate himself with both King Charles I (Rupert Everett) and his former subordinate Oliver Cromwell (Tim Roth). The production is pretty, but the story is no less dull for all the cash lavished upon it. Mildly amusing

Review – SWAT: Fire Fight

Like the first SWAT movie, the best part of the picture is the reworking of the theme music from the old TV show. Unlike the first one, this entry sports no movie stars (unless the aging guy who played the T-1000 counts as a star). And amazingly enough, the script is even worse. A mook from the LAPD is dispatched to Detroit to train the Motor City’s team in hostage rescue techniques. After an assignment gone bad, he runs afoul of a psycho who starts playing a deadly dull game of cat and mouse with the cops. If you like dramatic productions composed primarily of training exercises, they finally made a movie for you. The rest of us needn’t bother. See if desperate

Review – Game of Death (2010)

Once again Wesley Snipes pays the bills by taking the lead in an unimaginative action movie. This time around he’s an elite bodyguard trying to save his employer from money-grubbing kidnappers. Perhaps if the script had been a little better ... but then the scripts in these things seldom are. See if desperate

Review – The Shrine

Sorry, Eastern Europe. If it’s a choice between young Americans from the East Coast getting murdered for daring to venture into Poland or Romania or getting murdered for daring to venture into the Midwest, it’s a relief to see folks on the other side of the Atlantic take the hillbilly hit for a change. Reporters searching for a missing teen stumble across an eerie patch of stationary fog in the middle of nowhere. In the misty depths sits a statue of a demon. Sadly, nothing that happens afterward is either surprising or scary. If only they’d opted to stick with unexplained spookiness rather than devolving into splatter. But judging by the general quality of the script, acting and directing, making a smart horror movie wasn’t an option. See if desperate

Review – The Pit and the Pendulum (1991)

Not exactly Stuart Gordon’s finest moment. If this slasherized version of the Inquisition ever had a chance – and that’s a huge “if” – it’s completely undone by an evil combination of Torquemada’s torture chamber painted with bad airbrushed van art and Oliver Reed staggering through briefly as a cardinal with an Italian accent worthy of Chico Marx. This is the sort of picture that might count as unintentional comedy if not for the rampant misogyny. See if desperate

Review – Resident Evil: Degeneration

I like cut scenes in videogames. They provide an opportunity to rest weary fingers, stand up, stretch, maybe even pause for something to eat (or at least a bathroom break). A good set of cut scenes can even weave an interesting plot into what might otherwise be a mindless shooter. But an hour and a half of cut-scene-worthy animation passed off as a movie? Nah, doesn’t work. See if desperate

Review – Season of the Witch (2011)

Once again I found myself wondering why Hollywood would blow so much money on such a pointless production. They got stars (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman, though neither of these guys has a sterling reputation for good choice in acting jobs). They got special effects. They built large sets and shot epic battle scenes. But to what avail? A couple of deserters from the Crusades find themselves drafted for the errand-boy task of escorting a caged witch through a dense forest. Eventually the picture manages to pop out the demon effects, but by then it’s already worn out a considerable amount of welcome with extended forest-wandering, dog death and other unwelcome delays. See if desperate

Review – Shadow Puppets

A handful of people wake up trapped in a prison/asylum/somesuch wearing nothing but matching underwear and with no memory of who they are or how they got there. Though the set-up is a little too Saw for my taste, the antagonist turns out to be a shadowy monster rather than a garden-variety serial killer. The supernatural menace isn’t a vast improvement over the usual psycho, but it’s at least a baby step in the right direction. See if desperate

Review – Red State

Kevin Smith continues his quest to create the Most Perfectly Dreadful Movie Ever Made, coming damn close with this effort. Three suburban teens in search of a four-way are lured out of the city and into a trap set by a cult of religious nuts who prove to be part Westboro Baptists, part Branch Davidians and part Texas Chainsaw family. The religious nuts’ extended preaching and torture-killing their “guests” is interrupted by an ATF raid, and oddly things manage to go downhill from there. Maybe I’m just so used to Fred Phelps that I don’t get much entertainment value out of a homicidal parody of his bullshit. I don’t know if Smith was trying to make another comedy or a torture porn movie or a message piece or some combination of the three, but what he ends up making is a wasteful mess. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Paranormal Activity 2

In the wake of the Blair Witch phenomenon, Hollywood made the mistake of churning out a sequel that took the narrative horror route rather than the verité approach that made the original famous. This sequel doesn’t depart quite as radically from the first installment, but it’s still far more of a traditional horror story than its predecessor. Sadly, that means it does everything perfectly wrong. The lack of anything significantly terrifying throughout all of the first half of the production is boring without instilling a sense of foreboding. Honestly, it’s like watching home videos from somebody you don’t know. Nor do things improve once somebody finally thinks to throw the booga-booga switch. The show manages a chill or two, but nothing worth the running time or the constant menace to a child or the family dog. See if desperate

Review – The Thing (2011)

When I first read that Universal was planning to revive The Thing, naturally my first thought was that they’d make another craptacular mess out of one of the best horror movies ever made. Fortunately, the folks hired to do the job were clearly sensitive to the attachment fans have to the source material. This prequel – which tells the tale of events in the Norwegian camp prior to the start of the original – is almost too respectful. I saw this one in the company of two other people who enjoyed the first one as much as I did, and we all loved the devotion to detail that creates new chills while sticking closely to the pre-established canon. However, those without such regard for the whole Thing thing may not get as much out of the experience. Though I’m giving it a three-star rating, I admit I plan to add it to my disc collection as soon as it comes out. Worth seeing

Review – The Next Three Days

Once again Paul Haggis makes a thriller as expensive as it is ludicrous (though I’m guessing this one won’t be the multi-Oscar triumph that Crash was). A community college professor (Russell Crowe) reaches the end of his rope trying to get his wrongfully-accused wife (Elizabeth Banks) out of jail legally, so he concocts an elaborate plot (is there any other kind?) to help her escape. The story dances through a relentless parade of ridiculous twists, starting with the notion that it’s cheaper to restart your life in another country than it is to mount a successful legal defense or buy a political pardon. The cast does what it can with the script, but with writing this terrible they don’t have much to work with. See if desperate

Review – Pay It Forward

I don’t know what pained me more, sitting through such a brazen attempt to manipulate my emotions or watching it fail so miserably at even this simple task. The idea of selflessly doing good things for other people could use a good pop culture promotion, which is why it’s such a terrible shame that this production skews good impulses into a dumb scheme by a middle school kid (Hayley Joel Osment) to match his alcoholic mom (Helen Hunt) up with his civics teacher (Kevin Spacey). Wish I'd skipped it

AGF #2

Anytime a character in a horror movie goes into a medicine chest for anything, we know it’s a cheap excuse to close the chest and suddenly reveal in the mirror that the ghost/killer/whatever is standing right behind her.

But of course when she turns around there’s nothing there.

In fact, maybe mirrors in horror movies in general should be absolutely goddamn forbidden.

Review – The Ward

I was actually looking forward to seeing a new movie from John Carpenter (though after Ghosts of Mars I can’t say exactly why I was eager for another round with him). Though he can still pull off a booga-booga here and there, that doesn’t make up for the lack of script. Anytime a movie begins with the main character admitted to a psychiatric hospital, the stage is set for a fair amount of rug-yanking before the end credits roll. And in that regard this picture doesn’t disappoint. At least it had enough of a budget to produce decent image quality. The guy-with-a-camcorder productions that currently dominate the market were beginning to wear me down. Mildly amusing

The Duck Slayer

I’m doing some research for an upcoming Veterans Day list of celebrities who have surprising backgrounds as war heroes. During my digging, I ran across this interesting tidbit: when Tom Savini was serving in Vietnam, he got spooked while on guard duty by something in the underbrush triggering a warning flare. Contrary to orders, he began firing blindly into the bush, only to have a duck waddle out. Apparently the incident earned him the less-than-heroic nickname “Duck Slayer.”

And on only tangentially related lines, George Romero was inspired to make horror movies at least in part by an early experience shooting a segment for Mr. Rogers Neighborhood about the host getting a tonsillectomy.

How my attention span works

I’m beginning to get the impression that “popular science” is an oxymoron. Case in point: How the Universe Works, a series from the Discovery Channel about, well, the obvious.

To be sure, there’s some hard science here. And pretty pictures. Lots and lots of pretty pictures. So many, in fact, that they start to get in the way of any genuine understanding of the topic at hand. Stars blow up. Planets collide with one another. The universe looks like a big Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster.

Some of the graphics are unrealistic, either showing events at a greatly accelerated pace (with no note to that effect) or showing impossible scenes that look good but bear no direct connection to physical reality. And of course in true high-band cable style, they use the same animated sequences over and over again.

More troubling are the attempts by narrator Mike Rowe and many of the scientists interviewed for the series to sensationalize the science involved. For example, antiprotons are called the “arch enemies” of protons, two antagonists squaring off like gunfighters in some dirt-paved cowtown main street. Cataclysmic doom scenarios abound, as do science nerds’ stereotypically lame attempts at humor.

Sensationalism is one thing, but some of the statements play a bit too fast and loose with actual physics. The discussion of the Big Bang was particularly bewildering. Several of the scientists made statements akin to “One millionth millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was the size of a baseball.” Such claims ignore the proven physical fact that neither time nor space is a constant. Particularly under extreme conditions such as those present just after the universe blinked into existence, things like “seconds” and “baseballs” wouldn’t have had any meaning that would correspond to our current understanding.

This slipshod attempt to simplify science for public consumption left me wondering if any of these folks had any idea what they were talking about. Though I appreciate the effort to explain things in terms that can be easily understood by the average Discovery Channel audience member, there’s still such a thing as dumbing things down until they aren’t true anymore.

Review – Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning

A lot of the user reviews on Netflix complained that Ginger (Katherine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins) have somehow been relocated from the suburbs of the first couple of movies in the series to the 19th century wilderness. Yeah, that’s a twist more worthy of fan fiction than serious filmmaking. On the other hand, it’s a werewolf movie. To be honest, I thought the historical setting worked much better than the contemporary setting. The girls are stranded in a fort under siege by lycanthropes, a situation that doesn’t spawn as many interesting plot twists as one might expect. Mildly amusing

Ken Burns’s Civil War: Giving credit where it isn’t due

After all these years, I assumed my immunity would still be good. How many episodes of Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion have I been exposed to? How many pledge drive marathons of the Three Tenors and Peter, Paul and Mary have I deftly avoided? I know I’ve given up on NPR in the car and I don’t get PBS directly anymore either. But from time to time I’ve watched Nova and Frontline on Netflix as booster shots if nothing else.

Still, nothing prepared me for a virulent case of the Ken Burns series on The Civil War. This was PBS history at its PBSest, taking a difficult and painful subject and making it far worse than it had to be. If Burns was a pediatrician, he would hit you with a mess of shots and then give you a plate of liver and lima beans to cheer you up.

After sitting through his treatments of baseball and World War Two, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect aesthetically: slide after slide drifting in and out like a middle school teacher-has-a-headache lesson with the projector not planted firmly on its prop books. Celebrities reading documents from the period. And of course minor key renditions of every folksy song from the era, which must have taxed East Coast harmonicas and dobros to their considerable limits.

All of that was well within the scope of my inoculations. I was even prepared for a certain amount of gloss. Many historians tend to regard Abolitionist Abe as the Real Lincoln, so little detours such as his support for an amendment that would have made slavery a permanent part of the Constitution tend to end up omitted.

What I wasn’t ready for was the inexcusable “even-handedness” of the production. The first few episodes were bound to be painful, as they covered Southern victories early in the war. But that was supposed to be the dramatic build-up, the part of the kung fu movie when the bad guys beat up the hero, burn down his house, assault his girlfriend and kick his dog. “The good part’s coming,” I kept telling myself. “Sherman’s gonna show up any minute now, and then all will be right with the world.”

Oh but no. Sure, the Union eventually wins the war (unlike Civil War reenactments, which often seem to be won by the Confederates whether or not that’s the way the actual battle ended). But the victory isn’t Bruce Lee stomping the bad guys’ guts out for killing his sister. The last two or three installments turn all goddamn weepy, wallowing in a ridiculous mess of “gallant enemy dignified even in defeat.” Episode Eight actually gave me the impression that the North was somehow apologizing for beating the South’s racist, traitor asses.

Particularly galling was the extended homage to Nathan Bedford Forrest. Yes, the man was a talented military commander. But after the war he founded the Ku Klux Klan, strongly suggesting that his involvement in the conflict wasn’t merely a matter of misplaced patriotism. Thank heaven Burns didn’t build this sort of “balance” into his series on the Second World War. Five minutes of loving tribute to Adolph Eichmann’s organizational talent with train schedules would have been more than anyone would have tolerated.

Which raises an obvious question: why treat the largest act of treason in American history as if it had been a noble cause worth dying or killing for? Maybe Burns knows his audience well enough to know that a more honest telling of the tale would have angered a lot of people in the former traitor states.

Ah, but that in turn raises another question: who gives a crap? If Southern “outlaws” still cling to the ersatz glory of the Confederacy, shouldn’t we stand ready to rub their noses in their inglorious defeat?

Perhaps not. Nearly a century and a half after Appomattox, maybe we should all forgive and forget. Time heals all wounds, does it not?

Not if the wound is still fresh. How many blocks do you have to drive from your house before you encounter the Traitor Battle Flag flying high in someone’s yard? Do the images of traitors still mar the face of Stone Mountain, Georgia? Did ESPN just fire Hank Williams Jr. for comparing the President to Hitler?

And the bastard actually had the temerity to whine that his right to free speech had been violated. No, Bocephus. Getting fired by your boss because you’re a racist turd doesn’t transgress upon the First Amendment. If you want to know what it feels like to have your rights violated, there are plenty of countries in the world that would execute you for publicly insulting the chief executive.

Oh, and a quick aside to ESPN: if you didn’t know the ugly truth about the guy, you’ve never been to the Missouri State Fair and seen his picture proudly emblazoned on banners proclaiming that “If the South would have won we’d have it made.” Pull your head out of the sand once in awhile.

Therein lies the problem with letting Shelby Foote influence how the South is handled in a documentary. Nobility in defeat is acceptable only if the enemy is actually defeated. As an ethical and practical matter, you can’t offer a hand up to a vanquished foe if he’s going to try to stab you again the moment he regains his feet.

So let’s stick Ken Burns’ The Civil War in a vault somewhere and let it sit awhile. Put a sticker on it for the benefit of future generations that reads: “Open only when the last vestiges of slavery have been not only marginalized but completely eradicated like Smallpox.” Maybe then the message of this production will be appropriate.

But until then, no.

Review – Ironclad

Wow, did they spend a lot on this movie. The sets must have cost a ton, and on top of that they hired quite a cast (Brian Cox, Derek Jacobi and Paul Giamatti). Sadly, they squandered all that cash on a picture with a script bad enough to be a SyFy production. The result teaches a lesson or two about Medieval siege warfare but wastes the rest of the time on some nonsense about Templars helping rebels hold out against King John’s decision to rescind the Magna Carta. See if desperate

Absolutely goddamn forbidden

Sequences in horror movies in which something scary (and non-undo-able) happens to a character, but then she wakes up and oh, it was only a nightmare.

Weak.

Review – Haunting at the Beacon

Definite E for effort. The producers spent enough to put a comfortable amount of distance between this picture and guy-with-a-camcorder productions. And though it indulges heavily in ghost story clichés, it manages a fun thrill or two as well. The biggest problem with this story of grieving parents moving into a haunted hotel is that it’s ever so apparent where it’s going before it even gets underway. Mildly amusing

Our first YouTube video

Yeah, it doesn’t particularly amount to much, just 15 seconds or so of an LED circuit I built out of Elector magazine (and modified a bit). The trick here is that I shot it with my phone, uploaded it to YouTube and added it to this blog entry just to see if I could do it.

And lo and behold, I can. Fun stuff.

Review – Tron: Legacy

I’m not at all sure that the original Tron needed a sequel for any reason, but if it did then this is what it had coming. Looks like they mixed a little extra Matrix into it. And of course the effects are greatly improved, which is a good thing because they’re the obvious star of the show. Overall this is a bright, noisy movie, which I expect will make it sufficient for its intended audience. Mildly amusing

Review – Buck

I haven’t seen The Horse Whisperer, so I don’t know what the fictionalized version of Buck Brannaman’s story is like. But the real guy is unusually interesting. Coming from a childhood of abuse, he developed the notion of treating horses with kindness and respect rather than “breaking” them with indifferent cruelty. The non-intrusive documentary style of this picture does a great job of telling his touching story. Worth seeing

Review – Contagion

On the surface this is a perfectly acceptable picture – at least until the plot twists take a turn for the ridiculous – about a killer plague temporarily devastating the human race. However, the problem with making a production about paranoia is that it tends to make your viewers paranoid. The more the movie encouraged me to fret about how many times a day I touch my face, the more keenly I noticed the bizarre politics of the drama. The pro-homeopathy, anti-establishment blogger is a creep and a profiteer. But then then the medical establishment gets tarred for taking too long to approve drugs, concerning itself with profits over people, and helping itself before aiding anyone else. Thus I struggled to figure out what lesson I was supposed to learn, other than “Gwyneth Paltrow makes a disturbing corpse” and “Matt Damon coveys emotion by repeating himself.” Mildly amusing

Ah, that’s more like it

For the last couple of entries I’ve been picking on our good friends at Chasing Fireflies for offering boys’ Halloween costumes that would most likely get your son’s ass beat by a bully. In the spirit of holiday cheer, objective fairness to the retailer and parents’ need for good advice as well as bad, here are some selections from the catalog that should safeguard your kid’s ass from potential beating.

Now this is a lot more like it. Scary costume = true spirit of the holiday. Plus if your son’s class is going to do a Halloween parade at a local rest home, there’s nothing the residents like better than the Grim Specter of Death (even a miniature version). 

Anything with a gun is a fairly safe bet.

“Astronaut” is a good blend of science nerd and macho man. Plus unlike Soldier, Cop or Cowboy, Astronaut has no Village People connection (not, mind you, that most 12-year-old bullies are likely to have heard of the Village People).

If your kid insists on going as a clown, this is a more ass-beating-safe option than more traditional Bozo suits. Here we have a solid blend of “whimsical” and “Juggalo.”

They also have Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, but Gene Simmons is your best bulwark against ass beating. No Paul Stanley, so if he’s your favorite member of KISS … well that’s just sad.

 

I’d maybe leave off the Super Mario moustache, but the rest of this should work. If nothing else, a bully might not want to risk a self-defense briefcase to the jaw.

Like astronauts, most superheroes are a nice blend of nerdy and tough. This Iron Man comes with extra weaponage, making it an excellent option.

I have no idea what this even is, but it looks badass.

“Robot” doesn’t automatically say “don’t beat my ass.” But this one looks enough like metal that a bully might fear bruising his knuckles. Plus those crab claws portend danger (though good luck to your kid trying to trick or treat with them).

Bully’s thought process: “Wow, that kid’s parents dressed him as a Speed Bump. They must hate him even more than my parents hate me. Maybe I’ll cut him some slack.”

Quiz answers - Bad Halloween costumes

Yeah, so it was a bit of a trick quiz. The short answer is “all of them.” The specifics:

The snake head is an excellent start, but problems crop up below the waistline. Despite evolving public opinion about sexual orientation, at this point it’s still a bad idea to send your son out in a dress.

 I am Poseidon, Lord of the Sea, King of Getting My Ass Beat

The ghost thing is a step in the right direction, but this execution isn’t exactly a ticket out of ass-beating land.

Even Hollywood has figured out that you pretty much have to dress Robin Hood in jeans and a T-shirt in order to keep him from looking like the Sheriff of Nottingham is going to beat his ass. If you want to do the outlaw thing, try “biker” rather than this.

“Behold, I am the Thief of Ass Beat!” Seriously, that sword isn’t fooling anyone.

Harry Potter and the Painful Ass Beating

 

Octopi rock. But this one’s just a little too glittery, and for those of us who remember the 70s it’s also too Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Plus I think we already had the dress conversation.

Bully: “Quit molesting yourself! Quit molesting yourself!”

Traditional vampire = goth outsider = ass beating. However, if you have to do the vampire thing, this one is way better than …

This one actually has matching costumes for sister, Mom and Dad. So your entire family can experience the joy of getting your asses beat by a 12-year-old.

Review – Exorcismus

So is the title Latin for “exorcism,” or is this one of those cases where a word in another language sounds like something in English but actually turns out to mean something completely different, such as “stupid” or “boring”? It’s more than apparent early on that this is yet another indie exorcism movie (and why are indie producers so attracted to exorcisms all of a sudden?), but I watched it anyway because Doug “Pinhead from Hellraiser” Bradley was on the cast list. Turns out he’s in it only briefly, and the rest of it is a moody teenager who gets more and more grimy as a demon latches onto her and her Catholic priest uncle tries to drive it out. See if desperate

Quiz Time! Bad Halloween costumes

The first week of October means that the holiday season is once again upon us. And that means parents are searching for answers to the first of a long string of holiday-related questions: what are the kids going to dress as for Halloween?

Not being a parent myself (unless you count a couple of cats who would kill me if I tried to stuff them into costumes), I’m generally not much help with such issues. However, earlier this year the good folks at Chasing Fireflies were kind enough to send me an unsolicited costume catalog. And after going through it, I’ve actually come up with some input parents may find helpful.

First let me say that this company is staffed by nice people and offers a wide selection of Halloween-related merchandise that actually doesn’t suck. What concerns me, though, is the array of costumes for boys. Many of them are perfectly acceptable. But a handful … well, see if you can spot the problem.

Which of the following costumes are likely to buy your 10-year-old son an ass beating from a 12-year-old whose idea of a Halloween costume is a Knicks jersey?

Review – Highly Dangerous

A lot of espionage potboilers from the 1950s are hard to tell apart, but this one has a unique element: bugs. Oh, and a female protagonist. She’s an entomologist sent to an unspecified Iron Curtain country to spy on a secret lab for breeding dangerous insects. The story wavers between Third Man thrilling and Danny Kaye silly (especially after a brutal torture session leaves the good doctor convinced that she’s a secret agent from her nephew’s favorite radio serial). Still, it’s enough of a departure from the usual to keep it interesting most of the way through. Mildly amusing

Review – Moneyball

Every once in awhile I like a movie so much that I have trouble coming up with exactly what to say about it. But I’ve stared at the blank space for this review long enough, so let me at least give it a try. It’s entirely possible that if you don’t care for baseball that you won’t care for this movie, either. On the other hand, there’s something transcendent about the tale of Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane’s efforts to turn an underfunded team into a championship contender. Brad Pitt overplays his role in a spot or two (and he’s begun to resemble Benicio Del Toro when shot from the wrong angle), but that’s a small price to pay for such a well-scripted, well-shot and generally delightful experience. Buy the disc

Farewell, my curmudgeon

This coming Sunday Andy Rooney will do his last segment for 60 Minutes, capping off more than half a century of annoying the crap out of audiences. Now future generations will have nobody to encourage them to ponder the mysteries of why coffee cans contain less coffee than they used to, what Lady Gaga thinks she’s doing, why computers need to be replaced more frequently than typewriters, how hard the Pope’s job must be, what it feels like to be punked by Sacha Baron Cohen, and how much simpler and cheaper everything was when I was your age.

Spot the fake story in that list. Hint: none of them.

In honor of Rooney’s professional passing, I’d like to share one of my favorite quotes from the Book of Beavis:

“Why do they call it ‘taking a dump’? You aren’t taking anything. They should call it ‘leaving a dump.’

“Funk dat!”

Progress update

For some reason it takes Amazon 24 hours to put a book up on Kindle. So WWDG didn't actually make its debut until this afternoon.

When it finally showed up, it was weird. There it was on Amazon, just like everything else on the largest online retailer in the world. Disorienting, really. But in a fun way.

Progress update

This morning I figured out how to publish books on Kindle.

I started with Staban Beria’s “Witchy Women and Diamond Girls,” as it was pretty much the perfect length, neither too short to be inconsequential nor too long to be cumbersome.

What I haven’t figured out is how to make it available for free. Amazon insists that we charge at least 99 cents for the title (presumably because it isn’t a public domain work). Now, why anyone would want to pay even a buck for something that’s available for free at the site and via downloadable PDF, well, that’s another question. Maybe in the future 8sails Press will produce something that isn’t available online for nothing.

Snappy answers to stupid candy wrappers

I’ve been too long absent from my Hoffman Lens duties. Between a huge writing project and the usual ebb and flow, I just haven’t been particularly Lens-y lately. However, while I was searching for something else I ran across something I wrote some time ago and never posted. It seemed like it would make a good Lens, so here it is.

At the time I wrote this, Dove chocolates came in foil wrappers that had “inspirational” thoughts printed on the insides. I wasn’t sure if they were intended to inspire me to start a paper route or jump off a bridge, but what they actually brought me mindful of was “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” a regular feature of Mad Magazine back when I was a kid.

In “Snappy Answers,” someone would ask a stupid question – “Is it raining outside?” – and then the soaking wet party would have a choice of barbed replies: “No, I’m participating in National Walk Around Soaking Wet Day” or “Rain? Thank heavens! I thought this was something else” or “No, God is crying because He just realized that He created an idiot.”

Then at the bottom Mad always included a blank so you could come up with your own snappy answer. A friend of mine has the best solution: the direct reply. “Is it raining outside?” “Yes, it is raining outside.” Save some work.

As I’m generally not fond of the bumper-sticker wisdom approach to life, I thought perhaps I’d treat the bonbons’ bon mots to a little snappy answering. I apologize in advance for the obscure media references that crop up here and there.

 

Linger over chocolate longer

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.

Be your own valentine

Mmm, so what did you have in mind? Take myself out for a candlelit dinner? Maybe go by myself to a chick flick? Get myself drunk? Go home, dress up in lacy undergarments, have sex with myself all night long, then forget to call myself the next day? Or should I just buy myself some more chocolates?

Share a secret

John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a cabal of right-wing extremists with ties to U.S. intelligence agencies. Is that the sort of thing you had in mind?

Make someone melt today

Okay, but it’s gonna take a lot of hydrochloric acid if you want the job done right.

Chocolate always loves you back

As opposed to caramel, which never even bothers to give you a reach-around

Live your life with an attitude of gratitude

Make that one up yourself? Wait, I’ve got another for you. Taco Bell, it’s from hell.

Sleep under the stars tonight

I got this one in a bag of Valentine’s Day Dove chocolates. Perhaps this was actually intended for some Southern Hemisphere market where February isn’t the middle of the goddamn winter. Maybe I can wiggle out of this by pointing out that the stars are constantly all around us (even when we can’t see them), so really I don’t have any choice but to sleep under them (and over them and between them and so on).

Share a sunset

No, I think I’m going to keep the next sunset to myself. So this evening I’m the only one who gets to look at the setting sun. Do you hear me, everyone? Don’t you dare look at my sunset!

Watch the sun come up

But what if the sunrise belongs to someone else? We’ve already established that the sunset this evening belongs exclusively to me. What if somebody out there already claimed dibs on tomorrow morning? I’d be horning in without even knowing it.

Hug someone today

And then when you get sued for sexual harassment or arrested for assault, you can always say, “The Dove wrapper told me to do it.”

Memo to self: you’re the best!

Do the dumb things I gotta do. Touch the puppet head. (Wait, what?)

Don’t think about it so much

Fine advice from a company that manufactures little glops of grease and sugar.

Watch reruns, they replay your memories

I don’t even know what to say about this, except perhaps to point out that it’s a run-on.

Smile. People will wonder what you’ve been up to.

Particularly if you can learn to smile like Anthony Perkins at the end of Psycho.

Whisper in the dark

Didn’t H.P. Lovecraft write a horror story about this?

Flirting is mandatory

What is this, the corporate slogan at the company that holds the record for most sexual harassment complaints?

There’s a time for compromise … it’s called “later”

This must be the aforementioned company’s primary negotiation strategy

It’s definitely a bubble bath day

Looks like I picked the wrong day to give up bubble baths.

Discover yourself

Yep, there I am.

Listen to your heartbeat and dance

Me. Me and. Me and my. Me and my rhythm box. It never eats. It never shits. It is pre-programmed. So what? So what? So whaaaaaaaaaaaa (Wait, what?)

Go to your special place

Oh, I’m in my special place right now.

Too many organs

Somebody give an an answer to this question: why is creative writing almost always taught primarily through the use of group discussion?

Basically what you’ve got is a class full of people who have little or no understanding of the topic at hand, and they’re supposed to learn the ropes from each other. Other students are even worse as teachers than some random person dragged in off the street, because at least a non-student stands a chance of being a typical reader rather than someone blindly stumbling around in the early stages of learning a craft.

Imagine if other subjects were taught this way.

Physics: “I thought the part about the masses of two objects was fine, but I think the Gravitational Constant needs some work. And distances between two objects? Please! Nobody’s going to buy that.”

History: “I felt the Constitutional Convention was trite and unconvincing. I mean seriously, who would go to all the work to set up a new government? Plus the ending was an obvious set-up for a sequel. What are you going to call it, Constitutional Convention Two: The Bill of Rights? Audiences hate it when you pull tricks like that.”

Anatomy: “Why do you have both a large intestine and a small intestine? Save everyone some time by just combining them into a single intestine. And what’s with all this extra nonsense? Gall bladder? Pancreas? Nobody even knows what any of that’s doing in there. Just cut it out.”

I openly admit that my own efforts in the creative writing realm have been less than stellar. I’ve never taught creative writing, and I probably never will. So perhaps I’m in no position to criticize the earnest efforts of professional practitioners of the art.

However, in my undergrad years (when I wasn’t busy running away from the dinosaurs) I did take a Fiction Writing class from Paul Lim, one of KU’s full-time writing teachers at the time. We did a lot of the group critique stuff, most of which was useless and none of which I even remember. What I do recall was that Lim placed some limitations on the discussion (such as “Nobody is allowed to say ‘This reminds me of ...’”) that helped cut down on the “group therapy” aspect of such exercises.

I also remember his direct feedback to me. That’s what I was there for: some help from a professional who knew the craft and could tell me what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. Not a bunch of blather from frat boys and emo kids who were there mostly because they figured the class would be an easy A and didn’t read the kind of writing I was trying to do.

There’s nothing wrong with having everyone read everyone else’s writing. But the bulk of the feedback needs to come from the pro in the room, not the other students who represent neither learned expertise nor the market for the product.

Review - Farewell to the King

Lay this failure at the doorstep of writer/director John Milius. The setting – Borneo in World War Two – is an environment rich with interesting stories. The lead character is a little Colonel-Kurtz-y, but his struggles to save his adopted people from Japanese invaders and Allied "help" aren't without dramatic merit, though someone besides Nick Nolte might have done a better job in the role. The landscapes are beautiful, though the filter work could have been a little more subtle. All the gripes are minor save one: the script is really, truly dreadful. Milius seems to think he's writing a philosophical instruction manual to help 12-year-old boys live more honorable lives. This plus Red Dawn makes me wonder what kind of sadly cartoonish life this man must lead. See if desperate