Review – It! The Terror from Beyond Space

Usually when I start writing a review of a movie about a monster that sneaks onto a spaceship and starts massacring the crew, the first thing I type is something about “another Alien rip-off.” But this one came out 21 years before Alien. Further, it actually does a reasonably good job – at least by 50s B movie standards – of establishing character and spinning an interesting story. The sole survivor of a mission to Mars is arrested by the rescue party, accused of killing his crewmates. But on the trip back to Earth the real culprit – a monster in the best “guy in a rubber suit” tradition – reveals itself. It bogs down a bit after that as the humans try some really stupid stuff to slay the beast. Overall, however, this was more fun than most movies of its ilk. Mildly amusing

Review – Sucker Punch

Okay, Zack Snyder. We get it. You love to make big, flashy action movies in which art direction vastly overshadows plot and character. As a video game this would be killer stuff. As a movie, it’s a video game. The woebegone heroine (Emily Browning) pops back and forth between three different realities while trying to break herself and a handful of her fellow prisoners out of an insane asylum. Some of the fight sequences are fun, but others are a drag. In particular, I admit to a preference for dragons over riot grrls, which made one of the fantasy bits a real bummer. Overall this is brain dead fun, but the emphasis is on “brain dead.” Mildly amusing

Breaking down and paying for goat balls

Today marks a mini-milestone in my media consumption habits: for the first time I actually spent money for a Kindle book.

Amy bought an actual Kindle some time back, but the first rule of Kindle turned out to be "Bryan doesn't get to use the Kindle." Can't say as I blame her. A few years ago I bought her a Nintendo DS and then promptly expropriated it so I could waste obscene amounts of time "improving" myself by playing Brain Age. Still, the restriction did serve to postpone my entry into the world of e-books.

When we got smart phones last summer, I noted that a Kindle reader was one of the available apps. Though the type was predictably tiny on the phone, it proved to be a better time-killer in waiting rooms than solitaire. And then when I splurged after Christmas and bought an iPad, e-reading reached a new level. Suddenly it was comfortable, easy, and sufficiently dead-tree-esque to make it a pleasant experience. Not to mention that the iPad case I got props itself up on my nightstand, and of course the tablet doesn't require a cumbersome book light.

What I didn't do was rush off to Amazon and buy a bunch of stuff. Instead, everything I downloaded was public domain, free-of-charge, mostly classics from Project Gutenberg. As long as I'm marking milestones, I should note that a couple of days ago I finished The Iliad, the first e-book I read from beginning to end.

For some time now I've been meaning to buy a copy of Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock. As a John R. Brinkley-abilia fan, I couldn't resist. If nothing else, I'm always looking for new info to improve the lesson I teach my Mass Media students about Brinkley. When I looked into ordering a copy, I noticed that Buns and Noodles had it available for the Nook. And if it had been Nooked, surely it must also be Kindled.

Thus I'm now the proud owner of my first ever actually-paid-money-for-it e-book. O brave new world.

In MSG news, I spent a chunk of time this morning clearing out the email I've been sending myself (and other people have been sending me) full of links to articles that need to be included in the text. Not for the first time -- and probably not for the last -- I'm impressed by the sheer enormity of the task before me.

Review – Proteus

Alien on an oil rig. A group of criminals on the run from the law end up stranded on the aforementioned location, and of course it’s their dumb luck that it’s inhabited by a crew-killing monster. Honestly, this avoided the abandoned movie list by the narrowest of margins. It wasn’t that it was actively offensive (or at least no more so than any other production of its ilk). It just wasn’t particularly interesting. I had to back it up three or four times because my attention waned and I lost track of what was going on. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Lost Boys: The Thirst

The producers of this thing assume that their audience is composed of 12-year-old boys who’ve seen the 20-year-old original. I wonder how big the intersection on that Venn diagram really is. The sequel is a typical 21st century reheat: it features more sex and better gore but at the expense of worse acting and an inferior script. Overall it wasn’t the worst vampire movie I’ve ever seen (heck, it wasn’t even the worst vampire movie I saw the day I watched it). Mildly amusing

Review – Damned by Dawn

They start with a nemesis as awesome as the Banshee and this is what they come up with? Just because the zombies can fly doesn’t make this anything but another dumb zombie movie. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Dark Floors

This is billed as the most expensive movie ever made in Finland (at least at the time). It’s also billed as the brainchild of Lordi, who appear to be Finland’s answer to Gwar. A small cadre of people from different walks of life find themselves trapped in a hospital that’s been magically transported into another dimension where everyone is dead (not that their deaths prevent them from walking around and trying to kill the protagonists). Overall this isn’t the worst example of this particular sub-genre, but the guys in the heavy metal monster suits really didn’t help. See if desperate

Review – Lost Tribe

Oh, if only it had been Lost Movie. Once again annoying 20-somethings find themselves stranded on an island inhabited by annoying-20-something-eating creatures that time forgot. Judging by the IMDb and Wikipedia entries on this thing, it went through a handful of re-shoots, re-edits and title changes before settling into this. Let’s hope after this iteration that they decide to cut their losses and admit that it just isn’t ever going to be a good movie. See if desperate

Review – House of Fears

Fear of suffocation. Fear of knives. Fear of clowns (really). Fear of the people who made this ever getting their hands on a camera again. Yep, we’ve got the whole phobia set covered. Six young people sneak into a Halloween haunted house only to find that it’s actually … well, you can write the rest on your own. See if desperate

Review – Eyes of Laura Mars

Poor Laura. She’s trying to make a living as an eerie fashion photographer, but suddenly she finds herself plagued by visions during which all she can see is what a serial killer is seeing. Things get really mind-bending when the killer starts chasing her and she ends up watching herself run away from him. The movie is a little dated and might have been better if it didn’t bank so heavily on 70s era star power (particularly Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones, who were probably more impressive back then than they are now). Dial it down a notch and it would have been a fun little horror picture. Mildly amusing

Eight music videos that are way better than their songs

From the early days of MTV it was obvious that music videos weren’t a radical new art form as much as they were a new way to sell music. At best they were slick ads for the artists and their songs, and more often than not they were cheap parades of images – or worse, concert footage – to occupy the visual part of what was otherwise a radio broadcast.

But as the medium developed a bit, some specimens started to emerge from the pack. Michael Jackson in particular went from star to mega-star based at least in part on the strength of the videos spawned by some of the tracks from Thriller. Overall, however, it was still more about the music than about the pictures.

Inevitably in some cases an intersection would crop up between a visually-innovative video and a mediocre – if not downright dreadful – song. Take these eight for example.

 

Lenny Kravitz – “Are You Gonna Go My Way?”
Kravitz’s breakout single is a fine piece of music. It didn’t exactly end war, poverty and famine, but it was nowhere near as annoying as most of the rest of popular culture (then or now). However, the coolness of the tune was vastly overshadowed by the coolness of the video. The background dancers up on the balconies were okay. The band was fun to look at. But oh, that giant light display on the ceiling. If I was a millionaire, nobody would ever come over to my house because I’d have one of these things on the ceiling in every room in the place.

The Wallets – “Totally Nude”
Though I couldn’t immediately track it down on Lexis, I’m pretty sure there’s a law on the books somewhere that requires anybody who pontificates about music to include at least one reference to a band or work that nobody’s ever heard of. You know, just to establish one’s know-it-all cred. Well, I don’t want to break the law, so … The Wallets were just like thousands of other garage bands that never really went much of anywhere. I think a couple of the guys went on to start an ad agency or something. But before they split up, they made this one really good video. Though it isn’t a masterpiece of narrative filmmaking, it does feature some interesting animation and a clever reference to Marcel Duchamp. And if nothing else, it must have taken a little chutzpah for the lead singer to put a mouse in his mouth. I don’t know why that strikes me as gutsy. It isn’t like they’re poisonous or anything. Still, I wouldn’t have done it.

Peter Gabriel – “Sledgehammer”
Gabriel’s music on the whole is quite good. Even this particular song is fun to listen to even though it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The video, on the other hand, should come up in any Google search for “labor of love.” I can just imagine the patience the singer must have needed to sit around for hours as animators arranged everything from claymation to dead fish around him.

Michael Jackson – “Leave Me Alone”
Speaking of animators, Jim Blashfield directed several well-known videos with a similar look and feel for artists as diverse as Gabriel, Paul Simon and The Talking Heads. Usually his work ended up paired with music as good as the visuals he created to accompany it. Oddly enough, the one time the animation was far-and-away better than the song was for music video legend Michael Jackson’s “Leave Me Alone.” The lyrics are a vague expression of dissatisfaction about nothing in particular, but the unending-pan animation pokes fun at many of the crazy rumors circulating about the star’s eccentric behavior. For example, one shot finds Jackson performing some signature dance moves with the animated bones of the Elephant Man (which he once supposedly tried to purchase).

REM – “Losing My Religion”
Though I wouldn’t classify myself as a fan of these gods of complaint rock, a couple of their tunes are a guilty pleasure. On the less guilty side, I openly admit a love for Northern Renaissance painting. The two combine nicely in the video for Michael Stipe’s paean to coming out of the closet.

Madonna – “Express Yourself”
Like Michael Jackson, Madonna’s name became synonymous with video success in the early-to-mid 80s. Some of her better work included visual references to other bits of pop culture, such as the homage in “Material Girl” to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. My favorite is the copious use of elements from Metropolis in “Express Yourself.” Sure, it’s like the Fritz Lang classic reshot as an ad for Calvin Klein. But the picture is still way better than the naïve silliness in the lyrics about how women should force their menfolk to communicate about their feelings.

MC 900 Foot Jesus – “If I Only Had a Brain”
Every time I hear this song, I get it stuck in my head. Or to be more precise, the version I get wedged between my ears isn’t the song itself but Beavis witlessly wuw-wuw-ing along with it. The video, on the other hand, plays like the Velvet Underground’s “The Gift”only with a happier ending. Fun stuff.

Basement Jaxx – “Where’s Your Head At?”
If I was stuck on a desert island and could play only one music video for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to pick this one. The song has all the lyrical depth of any other piece of club techno noise. But the pictures … well, you just have to see it for yourself.

BONUS TRACK: Tool - “Sober”
After a reader suggestion and a discussion among the staff, we decided to add this video to the list. It's a good call. I really like the song, but the video is so much awesome that it truly does outshine the music.

Review – 21 Hours at Munich

This would make a good double feature with Raid on Entebbe. Watch this one first, and then cheer yourself up with the story of a hostage rescue attempt that doesn’t get colossally screwed up. My big disappointment was that this docudrama seems to dwell on some of the less interesting aspects of the infamous terrorism incident at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Mildly amusing

Review – Harlan County, USA

Anti-union folks should be forced to watch this movie. On the one hand, it partially vindicates critics who claim that unions are corrupt cabals. On the other hand, it does an excellent job of showing the desperation of the barely-getting-by folks who mine coal for a living (or depend on miners’ meager incomes) as well as some of the thuggish, underhanded conduct mine companies employ to keep their workers from banding together to force improvements in their working conditions. Oh, and don’t get lulled by the whole “that was the 70s but things must be better now” because no, not really. Worth seeing

Review – The Andersonville Trial

George C. Scott helms this video recording of a stage play about the eponymous legal proceeding. This must have been one of those “prestige projects” that attracts big-name actors (even the characters in the background are played by people who were famous at the time or have become famous since) to a small-budget production. And of course given the era that spawned it, a lot of the hand-wringing about morality in war tasted more like My Lai than the Civil War. However, for the most part it was an interesting dramatization of one of the world’s first war crimes trials. Mildly amusing

Review – The War Game

If you're watching this in the 21st century and you've never seen it before, you need to be prepared to cut it a little slack. This Peter Watkins "mocumentary" about a nuclear strike on England is intensely preachy and more than a little rough around the edges. But it's important to remember that when he made this movie Watkins was inventing this method of storytelling. Further, the grim details of nuclear war weren't as widely known or officially acknowledged as they are now. Thus the folks who made this deserve to have their work appreciated in context, and if you can accept it for what it was originally designed to be then you'll walk away with a much more favorable impression. Worth seeing

Review – Swamp Devil

I could have sworn I watched and reviewed this thing years ago. And yet when I check the review list, I see it isn't there. If the fates removed the first review in order to lure me into sitting through it again, then they are indeed cruel. A woman gets tricked into coming back to her old home town, where she encounters not only the title monster but also a lot of redneck skullduggery. I'm pretty sure the first time I saw it was on SyFy, which really is where it belongs. See if desperate

Review – Piranha (2010)

If you thought the original had too good a script and not nearly enough boob shots (and if you're an average American male moviegoer, for all I know you might well have that opinion), then thank goodness Hollywood finally cranked out the remake you've been waiting for. The effects are a little better this time around, but they're still just a big mess of bitty fish, not apocalyptic landscapes or sinking luxury liners. And title icthyoids aside, the only entertaining moment in the whole picture is the brief, lead-off cameo by Ricahrd Dreyfus muttering "Show Me the Way to Go Home" before becoming fish food. See if desperate

Review – The Original Left Behind

I started out kinda liking this production. It led off with a fake news broadcast about events around the world resulting from the Rapture. However much I might disbelieve in this interpretation of the Bible, I at least enjoy it as a variation on the mega-disaster sci fi theme. But gradually it started to wear out its welcome. They started using footage from actual disasters (explosions, plane crashes and the like), which struck me as a crass exploitation of real suffering. Alas, this is all too typical of the level of sanctimony that justifies any lapse in good taste and morality in the name of "spreading the Word of God." And then of course the preachers showed up. The theme was addressing people in the post-Rapture future in order to share some pre-tribulation self-righteousness with them. They should have just stuck to the fake news. Wish I'd skipped it

Review – Crossing the Line

Here we have the story of deserter James Dresnok, a man who got tired of being bossed around by his superiors in the Army and decided life might be better if he defected to North Korea. The surprising thing is that it seemed to have worked out better for him than one might think, though certainly his life wasn’t a bed of roses either before or after he snuck across the border. If nothing else, the camera crew appears to be having an easier time of shooting their movie than some other productions that have ventured into the realm of Kim Jong Il. Mildly amusing

Review – The Skull

This isn’t anybody’s finest hour. A collector of outré objects (Peter Cushing) acquires the skull of the Marquis de Sade only to discover that it still possesses the existential evil of its original owner. Though the cast includes many of the usual suspects (including longtime Cushing collaborator Christopher Lee), everyone seems to be phoning it in. Some sequences are done as long tracking shots from inside the skull, which is presumably floating in space. These bits have the odd feel of a 3-D production, though I was able to find no indication that the movie was shot in 3-D. Other than a handful of odd moments, this is a thoroughly unremarkable effort. Mildly amusing

Review - The Fighter

Mark Wahlberg, I’ll make you a deal. If you promise to never make another movie where I’m expected to take you seriously, I’ll stop reminding you of your proper place in the bigger picture by calling you Marky Mark. This production starts out as a cookie-cutter bit of grit about a boxer from a poor Boston neighborhood who beats the odds and makes it big. But even the relatively modest expectations for such a picture swiftly fall afoul of production flaws. For example, Christian Bale is obviously trying to do the Robert DeNiro serious actor weight gain/loss thing, but here because the scenes were obviously shot out of sequence Bale’s character shows up junkie thin in parts where he shouldn’t have been. Perhaps if I had more of a weakness for hard luck boxing movies I would have enjoyed this more. Mildly amusing

Review – The Chosen One

One can almost hear Rob Schneider’s internal dialogue: “I’ve gotta get away from playing morons in Happy Madison productions. Sandler did it in Punch Drunk Love, and people took him seriously for however brief a time. Surely I can do it too.” Perhaps. But Rob, you have to make a clean break. The movie you produce can’t be half serious contemplation of what it would be like for an average guy to be declared messianic by a South American tribe if the other half is the same old lowbrow shtick. I should admit I came in a few minutes late, so if something brilliant happened early on I didn’t see it. But that doesn’t affect the uneven mix in the rest of the picture. See if desperate

Review – Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality

I watched this not too long after the death of a family member, which was perhaps a mistake. I got frustrated with this early on when it turned out to be an extended pondering of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s theory that all human behavior can ultimately be traced to a fear of death. As a psychological theory it’s just too simple, and the evidence cited doesn’t necessarily make the case. In particular, my interest started to wane when they got into subliminal messages about mortality. If you’re a Becker fan or just generally buy into New Age theories about prime motivators, perhaps you’ll find this fascinating. Personally, I was hoping for something a little less limited. See if desperate

Review – 7 Days in September

This reminded me – probably not accidentally – of Four Days in November, an award-winning documentary about the JFK assassination. I’m not quite old enough to remember Dallas, but of course I recall Sept. 11 quite well. So I’d like to come back to this in a couple of decades and show it to people who aren’t old enough to have experienced the World Trade Center attacks as they happened. Until then, suffice it to say that the majority of this documentary is long-familiar coverage of what must be the most widely photographed event in human history. However, it does offer some new perspectives. For example, I was thoroughly creeped out by the footage of the dust clouds rolling down New York City’s avenues straight at the cameras. And of course in the span of a week many New Yorkers shucked off their fellow-feeling and went back to being their stereotypical selves. Still, if you’ve a hankering to relive the experience this production will help you out. Mildly amusing

Starting an interplanetary war

Suddenly the Onion is smearing every available spot on its site with promos for the movie Paul, which as near as I can tell from the ads is a feature-length posit that loserdom isn't confined to our planet. Honestly, just looking at this alien makes me want to punch him. And wouldn't that start our relations with his planet off on the wrong foot (or tentacle or whatever).

On the other hand, maybe if the inhabitants of his planet are as tired of slackers with attitude as I am, perhaps it would help establish some common ground. So you punched the little bastard? Congratulations. We've been wanting to punch him for years, but we're too peaceful to give in to our baser urges. That's why we sent him to Earth and specifically targeted the United States. We figured if anyone would punch him, it would be an American.

In all fairness, I have no idea whether this is a good movie or not (though "Seth Rogen" doesn't bode well). It's just that the alien has that George-W.-Bush-idiot-reveling-in-his-own-idiocy smirk on his face.

A small bit of MSG progress this morning, mostly organizational. I started a list of the photos and illustrations I need to create, hoping to get at least a start on it during the break.

Backward Two

So now I'm stuck on the backward movie thing.

First a quick note to my friends and confidants: I promise not to get as exasperating with this as I was with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (though I still think going from The Electric Company to Bacon and back with no repeats was a genuinely impressive feat).

If you watch a Godzilla movie backward, giant monsters help out with massive urban renewal projects.

If you watch Psycho backward, the hero puts on gender-appropriate clothing, saves a woman from a swamp, helps her shower off and sends her on her way. Grateful for her good fortune, she gives an envelope of money to her boss.

If you watch The Shining backward, Jack Nicholson gets progressively saner and saner until eventually he gets fired from his job as crazy caretaker of a haunted hotel.

If you watch Armageddon backward, Bruce Willis heads a team of rock-building experts who waste millions of dollars putting together a giant meteor just to fling it into deep space.

Someone else already did The Godfather, so I'll do Part Two: Michael's family returns, and decades earlier his dad gives up a life of crime to pursue a career as a grocery clerk.

If you watch Lethal Weapon backward, it's a movie about a couple of cops who start the picture as buddies but gradually come to loathe each other. In the end one goes crazy, the other plans retirement, and a semi-nude woman makes an impressive jump from a broken car all the way up to a penthouse balcony.

If you watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom backward, the "hero" steals a magic stone from some villagers and drags all their children off to work as slaves in a mine. But at least if you're watching the whole series backward the next one will be much better.

And if you watch Frankenstein backward, it's about a doctor who kills his only patient (apparently by electrocuting him), cuts him up, sticks his parts onto other corpses and then buries them.

Review – Tigerland

As if Vietnam didn’t suck enough. Apparently just going through training before being shipped off to Vietnam was also no bed of roses. Colin Farrell stars as a hapless wight who try as he might just can’t seem to be insubordinate enough to get himself kicked out of boot camp. The production seems to be trying for that godawful 60s sense of playful goofiness, so it’s unfortunate that it wasn’t produced until 25 years after the war ended. The mix of 60s charmless and 21st century cynical is a genuinely unpalatable blend. See if desperate

Backward

Apparently the latest meme is to speculate about what famous movies would be like if you played them backward. My favorite so far is "Jaws played backward would be a movie about a giant shark that keeps throwing up people until they open the beach."

Who am I to blow against the wind?

If you watch Do the Right Thing backward, race relations in Bedford Stuy gradually improve.

If you watch The Thing backward, monsters turn into people and the show ends with a helicopter flying away from a dog.

If you watch The Lost Weekend backward, Ray Milland works hard to develop a drinking problem.

If you watch Heaven's Gate backward, you're bored to tears for two and a half hours but at least Michael Cimino gets his career back.

If you watch a James Bond movie backward, the hero lets the villain go and then spends the rest of the movie rebuilding cars and running away from women.

If you watch A Clockwork Orange backward, sinister government scientists kidnap a nice young man, brainwash him and turn him into a violent gang member.

While we're on Kubrick sci fi movies: if you watch 2001: A Space Odyssey backward, an astronaut returns from infinity and flies back to Earth, where eventually a slab turns everyone into apes.

And just so we finish with an even eight, if you watch Alien backward, a giant bug brings people back to life. To repay it, they shrink it down, cram it in an egg and leave it stranded on a desolate, lifeless planet.

Chloe, get me the sat image

Lately I've taken to spying on myself.

Or to be more precise, I've been using easily-available satellite image sources (such as MapQuest and Google Maps) to call up images of my house taken from space. Though they fascinate me on general principles, I find it particularly fun to try to guess when the satellite was passing over the house.

Morning appears to be a popular time (based on the shadows), but beyond that I'm not noticing any patterns. Some shots are taken during the winter, while others are spring or summer (no autumn leaves and no snow, though).

It's also fun to see who's home. One of the services offers multiple view angles. In the first, nobody's parked on the street out in front of the house. In the second my car is there, and in the third and fourth views Amy and I are both home.

I also find it interesting that the images, particularly StreetView, are so old that they show a car we got rid of more than a year ago.

It makes me want to paint something on the roof, like maybe a big "Hi there!" sign. Or maybe an 8sails octopus.

Speaking of 8sails, obviously I've fallen tragically behind on everything. I'm not sweating the Survival Guide at this point, but I'm mad at myself for not doing a better job keeping up with movie reviews, lists, Hoffman Lenses and the like. At least on Saturday I did manage to get some reviews written. I'm still behind, just not as far behind as I was.

Review – Nightwish

An eccentric professor takes a group of grad students to an abandoned mansion where they hope to conduct a séance that will … ah, jeez. Do I really have to type the rest of this? Honestly, the guy who deliberately hits animals in the road was enough to seal the rating early on. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Hideaway

An antiques dealer (Jeff Goldblum, who manages to suck a little less than usual) nearly dies in a car accident. His NDE brings his soul into contact with a serial killer (Jeremy Sisto). The scenes of transition into the afterlife – not to mention the killer’s nasty suicide – get this off to a solid start. Unfortunately the pitch is nowhere near as impressive as the wind-up. Indeed, it rapidly starts to play out as Eyes of Laura Mars relocated to the suburbs. The production is slick, and the cast sports some familiar faces (Christine Lahti, Alfred Molina, Rae Dawn Chong). But the script simply isn’t equal to the task, which was a bit of a surprise considering the source novel was written by popular horror author Dean R. Koontz. Mildly amusing

Review – Dead Like Me: Life After Death

Fans of the series will probably like this. I say “probably” because a couple of the actors (most notably Mandy Patinkin) didn’t come back for the movie. It also doesn’t really resolve any of the unresolved questions left by the show’s untimely cancellation. Indeed, it plays a lot more like a double-long episode of the show rather than a stand-alone movie (so those of you who didn’t watch the show, be prepared to spend some time at sea). On the other hand, it was nice to have a revival – however brief – of a program I enjoyed. Mildly amusing

Review – The End of America

Naomi Wolf spends an hour and a half Chicken Little-ing the hell out of the Bush administration just in time for it to count as nothing more than the doorknob hitting him in the ass on the way out. Though she’s passionate about her points – many of which are perfectly pertinent – she ends up submerging her argument under a giant pile of false analogy and political ad rhetoric. In particular it was just ridiculous to compare Bush and his cohort to Hitler. Any government is going to suffer from some unpleasant parallels to Nazi Germany, but such similarities don’t automatically mean that the sky is falling. Mildly amusing

Review – Grown Ups

I don’t see why critics hated this movie as much as they did. All these guys have done wretchedly dreadful work in the past. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (Adam Sandler). Paul Blart Mall Cop (Kevin James). Pootie Tang (Chris Rock). Black Sheep (David Spade). Everything he ever made (Rob Schneider). Sure, except for Schneider they’re all capable of better work. And sure, this is little more than the usual, vulgar, sadly-extremely-profitable crap we’ve come to expect from Happy Madison. On the other hand, it’s the same crap, neither better nor worse. And at least the plot shies away from several opportunities to stoop to dumb comedy clichés. Even though the running time is devoted primarily to the lead characters insulting each other, it’s still more clever than any of the aforementioned crapfests. See if desperate

Getting back into the swing

I've been so swamped the last couple of days that I've had little time to work on the site and no time to come up with anything funny to say here. Even the MLB stuff I posted yesterday was technically a carry-over from Saturday.

This morning in my Reporting class we had a couple of excellent guest professionals: Alan Mattingly and Roy Teicher. They're the co-authors of The Salt Beat, a play about the death of a small town newspaper. Alan is an editor for the New York Times and Roy used to be the editor of the Kansas City Kansan (not to mention a writer for such diverse employers as Bill Clinton and The Tonight Show). So this was a great opportunity for the students to meet a couple of guys who've succeeded in the business they're considering joining.

Work on the MSG has been minimal, but I've gotten an item or two added. In particular, Mental Floss tweeted a factoid asserting that there's more content posted on YouTube in 60 days than the original big three networks have aired in the last 60 years. Of course I'll need to track down a source for that.

Take this sport and love it

Oh Major League Baseball. I wish I could quit you.

Spring training is underway, and our season tickets arrived on Friday. All fired up about the new season -- not to mention our newly-Internet-connected television -- I splurged and signed up for the MLB.TV 2011 subscription.

Initial reactions:

1. It's great to have baseball back

2. The picture quality is terrible. MLB, don't you dare blame this on my bad throughput. Movies from Netflix look great on my set. Even during peak usage, content from other parts of the Internet don't look quite so much like YouTube postings shot with a cell phone. So the problem is on your end. Take some of your billions of dollars and spring for better servers or whatever it takes to deliver a professional quality product.

3. I can't tell which games I can watch and which I can't. Would it really be so hard to add a "this game is available" icon to the team names and stats in the listings?

4. Different channels have a different understanding of what "HD" means. I've watched three games so far. The first was on the Mets' network. It was fine (other than #2 above). The second was a Cubs game on WGN, a superstation that apparently thinks HD is the old 3x4 aspect ratio plus gray bars on the sides. That would have been less galling if they hadn't kept flashing a "WGN in HD" graphic, which obviously it wasn't. Then the Angels game took the cake with the new aspect ratio letterboxed and then crammed between gray bars. I shudder to think what Fox Sports Kansas City will come up with.

5. It's great to have baseball back.

In other words, MLB's implementation of 21st century video technology is infected by the same careless arrogance that infests every other aspect of the sport's interaction with its fans. For six months of the year it keeps me mindful of the definition and nature of a "love-hate relationship."

And apparently here we go again.

By the way, for those of you reading this blog for stuff more directly related to the 8sails mission (destroying popular culture as we know it), rest assured that the extended baseball gripes will be few and far between. I mention it here only within the context of new media technology.

For when the doll heads come for you. And they will.

I recently discovered something unpleasant about myself: when I'm laughing my ass off but at the same time trying not to make any noise so I won't wake up my wife in the room across the hall, the sound that comes out is an awful, high-pitched squeaking.

The subject of my early-morning-bout-of-insomnia mirth was speculation about what a grade school science textbook written by Gary Busey might look like.

This raises an important question: in light of the good chance that his bizarre behavior is due to mental illness brought on by massive head trauma, is it wrong to make fun of Gary Busey?

A. Yes. Gary Busey is a human being with feelings, and it's wrong to make fun of him regardless of the source of his problem.

B. Yes. Under most circumstances celebrities are legitimate mocking targets, but not when they're genuinely mentally ill.

C. No. In general it's wrong to make fun of the mentally differently abled, but Busey's celebrity status (combined with the likelihood that his problems originate from an injury suffered when he decided to ride a motorcycle without a helmet) makes him fair game.

D. Nah, fuck him. In a world full of famine, pestilence and genocide, who gives a crap about Gary Busey?

In 8sails site news, not much progress to report. I'm way behind on site work and didn't even manage to accomplish much on the Survival Guide. But I had a lot of housework to deal with this weekend. Or at least that's my excuse.

Abandoned – Terrorvision

I don’t know exactly when I stopped watching this one, because it put me fairly directly to sleep. I think it was somewhere around ten minutes in.

Review – The Lost Fleet of Guadalcanal

After enjoying the documentary about oceanographer Robert Ballard’s search for the sunken remains of the Bismarck, I was hoping for a picture of similar quality devoted to the U.S. Navy’s wrecks off Guadalcanal. Though the spirit may have been willing – it follows a structure strongly similar to the previous success – the footage is weak. For starters, a lot of the production dwells on the land battle, fascinating stuff but not directly related to the wrecks. And far worse, a lot of the talking heads involve poking a camera in the faces of Navy vets and recording them until they break down and cry over tragedies long past. As shipwreck documentaries go, I’ve seen worse. But I’ve seen better, too. Mildly amusing

Gloom, despair and agony on me

Lately I've been watching an alarming number of documentaries about awful stuff. Nuclear proliferation. The Zimbardo experiment. Rwandan genocide. And of course Nazis and the Holocaust. Rewatching Blood in the Face left me particularly curious about how such obvious marginal stupidity could ever have ensnared an entire nation. Surely the German version in the 1930s must somehow have been more appealing than the Michigan version from the 1980s.

To test the question, I sat through Triumph of the Will. And no. It has more polish on it. The choreography is better. It's considerably larger. But otherwise it's painfully obviously the exact same blend of overdeveloped ability to hate and underdeveloped ability to think.

And worse, as a hideous side effect I now have the Horst Wessel Song stuck in my head. Thank goodness I don't actually know the lyrics. So it goes something like

Lift up the flag
And rotten Nazi bullshit
Don't know the words
So yakka blabba blah

On a happier note, last night at dinner I got a fortune cookie fortune that said "Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film." Normally I like fortunes to be fortunes, something more like "You will make a journey over water." But this one was actually fine with me.

Buck: I'm a pickin'

Roy: And I'm a grinnin'

All: Nyah ya ya nyah nyah, nyah ya ya nyah nyah nyah

Roy: Hey Buck, did you know I've got a photographic memory?

Buck: Yeah, Roy. Too bad you forgot to buy film for it.

All: Nyah ya ya nyah nyah, nyah ya ya nyah nyah nyah

And for those of you fortunate enough to have no idea what that last bit just was, feast on the bygone video horror that was Hee Haw.

Review – Triumph of the Will

After recently watching a string of documentaries about racism, genocide and the like, I started to seriously wonder exactly why Nazism ever seemed attractive to the Germans. After watching this documentary by legendary propaganda artist Leni Riefenstahl – the Nazis’ best ever sales pitch – I don’t consider myself much the wiser. Some of the big party rally sequences are impressively choreographed. But then a lot of the movie is given over to what I like to think of as Fuhreryakkenblabben sequences, extended shots of nothing but Hitler and his henchmen rattling on about their stupid nonsense. That and parades. Oh my lord the endless parades. So I found myself searching the backgrounds for any possible distraction from the sad spectacle upon which the picture focuses. Occasionally one gets a particularly Manson-google-eyed follower or an army general struggling to stifle a yawn. But for the most part this is just relentlessly dull. Oh, and fair warning: if you do decide to take this on, prepare to have the Horst Wessel Song stuck in your head for a day or two. See if desperate

Review – Dracula's Widow

If you’re married to someone who’s been killed as often as this guy, you must spend a lot of time wearing black (which at least shouldn’t be a big problem for a vampire). The undead body of Dracula’s wife Vanessa gets shipped to a run-down Hollywood wax museum. She wakes up hungry. Crap proceeds from there. See if desperate

The Media Survival Guide is now officially underway

Okay, truth be told I've been working on this project for awhile now. A lot of the initial planning took place last fall, and of course I had to have at least some idea of what I planned to do in time for my sabbatical proposal two months ago.

Perhaps I shouldn't get ahead of myself. The 8sails Media Survival Guide is a replacement for the textbooks I've been using in my JOUR 175 Intro to Mass Comm class. Books published via the traditional route tend to be boring, expensive, inflexible and slow to update, all ills I think I can cure by rolling my own.

So that's what I'm working on. Though the serious labor won't begin until after the end of the spring semester, I'm trying to get a lot of the groundwork (outlines, design, etc.) done before the start of the summer. Even though I have between the middle of May and early January to do nothing but work on the MSG, it's going to be a ton of work. Thus my antsy nature prompts me to do as much as I can as early as I can.

When I first started thinking about the project, I organized my thoughts in outline form in a Word file. Since then I've created a wiki to keep my notes in one place where I can get at them easily no matter where I happen to be. This morning's task was to transfer notes from the Word file to the wiki. Mission accomplished.

Oh, and I started this blog.

Review – Mr. Klein

I’ve found that when I watch a movie recommended to me by my father that it’s often possible to pinpoint the exact “ah, that’s why he liked this” trigger. In this one it’s the spot late in the show when the title character and a friend accidentally plunk out “The International” on a piano in the presence of the police. The bigger picture is about an unscrupulous art collector who profits from Jewish people who have to sell their possessions on the cheap in order to escape Nazi-occupied France. But the tables turn on him when someone frames him as a member of the group he’s been callously exploiting. The foreground story is as boring as watching paint dry, but the background – the slow, meticulous run-up to the implementation of the Final Solution in France – is fascinating stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – Martin Luther

At least this PBS production was a little better than the one bankrolled by Thrivent. Though it significantly underplays the less savory parts of Luther’s story, it at least acknowledges his questionable responses to issues such as the Peasant Rebellion. On the other hand, it still fails to draw the ultimate connection between his theological stance and his political fortunes. Overall this was about what one would expect from a public television attempt to cover a man who all these centuries later remains controversial. Mildly amusing

Review – Forgiving Dr. Mengele

How could anyone – particularly a direct victim of his vile “experiments” – ever possibly forgive Josef Mengele? For the answer to that we must turn to Eva Mozes Kor, the subject of this documentary. Kor and her twin sister somehow managed to survive Auschwitz, but unlike many other survivors she somehow found it in her heart many years later to heal some of the pain by forgiving the Angel of Death and his fellow mass murderers. The resulting consideration of the issues raises – without fully resolving – some fascinating questions about the nature of forgiveness. Worth seeing