Review – Special Ops

These ops aren’t very special. We got on a Stephen Bauer kick and decided to watch some of his movies, which is a shame because apparently a lot of them look a lot like this one. And to add insult to injury, Bauer’s barely in it. Most of the screen time is devoted to the martial arts styling and random macho posturing of star / writer / producer A. J. Draven, who looks too much like Ben Stiller on steroids to be taken seriously. Fortunately, his appearance doesn’t exactly ruin the movie. Taking anything this bad seriously was never in the cards. See if desperate

Review – Sword of Gideon

Munich 19 years before Munich. This long, made-for-Canadian-TV production tells the tale of an Israeli hit team assembled to exact revenge on some of the terrorists responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. Though this isn’t as slick or expensive as the Spielberg version, it does do a better job of capturing some of the human emotion involved in such a morally difficult and physically dangerous task. Mildly amusing

Review – Four Days in November

For a documentary from 1964 about the JFK assassination, this is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. The production combines news footage, interviews and reenactments to re-create the events leading up to and following the shooting in Dealey Plaza. The part I found most interesting was the stuff from the day before. There were Jack and Jackie, playing their normal roles as President and First Lady in San Antonio and Houston, never suspecting what awaited them in Dallas. Though the historical footage was fun, most of the information presented is too basic to interest anyone who already knows the story. Conspiracy buffs will also be put off by the uncritical recreation of the Warren Commission version of the facts. Mildly amusing

Review – Apocalypse

Once again the convoluted End Times story gets dragged onto the big screen (or in this case the straight-to-video screen). Ostensibly this is the story of two journalists who find themselves confronted by the Rapture and subsequent Tribulation, discovering their personal relationships with Jesus along the way. However, the “foreground” story turns out to be window dressing for sermonizing by Jack and Rexella Van Impe and extended sequences that amount to little more than Christian music video. I was hoping for a fresh take on the whole “Left Behind” thing. What I got was less of a story and more of a show from one of those high-band cable networks owned by specific churches. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Last Exorcism

After Blair Witch, horror fakeumentaries typically aren’t my cup of tea. However, this one started out on my good side. A documentary crew follows a charlatan exorcist (Patrick Fabian) who runs up against a real demon, a premise with potential. Some of the spooky stuff early on is highly effective, particularly actor Ashley Bell’s ability to twist her body into seriously unnatural positions. But then they kill a cat. And haul a bunch of icky sexuality into it. And finally dive off the deep end (which is about all I can say without spoiling the last twist). Though the let-down didn’t exactly break my heart, it did chap my hide a bit. See if desperate

Review – Strange Days

Strange days indeed. In the future world of 1999, a lively trade has sprung up in other people’s experiences, which can now be experienced directly thanks to a stupid looking doodad you stick on your head. Though the devices and recordings are illegal – as one might suspect for any “medium” so heavily devoted to porn – an underground trade naturally springs up. Enter our hero (Ralph Fiennes), a small-time hustler who gets caught up in a cover-up of murder, sex and a lot of other intrigue that should probably be more interesting than it is. If this had been director Kathryn Bigalow’s first big break, one could understand it being unevenly paced, over-long and otherwise rough around the edges. But by 1995 she’d already done Point Break and at least a couple of other feature-length pictures that are better than this one. Juliette Lewis is as hot in this as she’s ever likely to get, so if you number yourself among her fans you’ll want to add this to your queue. Otherwise … See if desperate

Review – Herb & Dorothy

The title subjects – Herb and Dorothy Vogel – have to be the two most charming people in the entire realm of postmodern art. The Vogels – a postal clerk and a librarian, both now retired – amassed a collection by buying what they liked rather than what they thought would be a good investment. The result was a small New York apartment packed with millions of dollars’ worth of minimalist art. Then they donated the whole thing to the National Gallery (and associated non-de-accessioning collections) and started all over again. Though I admit that some of the stuff they love doesn’t exactly float my boat, it’s hard not to love them for loving it. Worth seeing

Review – Bug (1975)

I should have bailed on this one right after they burned the cat to death. Either they really did it or the effects used for that sequence (and the subsequent cat corpse) greatly exceeded the quality of the rest of the movie. Further, this represented the most dramatic volume ramps I’ve ever had to do between the whispered dialogue and the nerve-grating racket of the monster attack scenes. And yet I stuck with it based on a faulty memory from childhood that assured me this was a lot better than it was. Maybe watching roaches set stuff on fire with their butts was more entertaining back when I was nine years old. Bradford Dillman plays an entomologist who goes off the deep end after subterranean fire bugs incinerate his wife. He eventually captures one of the critters and forces it to breed (despite the fact that we’ve already been told they don’t have sex organs) with a common cockroach. The resulting spawn turn out to be super smart and psychically connected, swiftly learning to arrange themselves into words on the wall. He should have crossed them with the screenwriters. That would have provided them with much more limited intellect. This is director Jeannot Szwarc’s worst movie ever, and in a catalog that includes Santa Claus The Motion Picture that’s really saying something. It’s also the last movie William Castle ever produced. What a sad end to an illustrious career. Avoid at all costs

Review – The Colour from the Dark

Once again a movie adaptation of a Lovecraft story scores a serious “close but no cigar.” This time the source is “The Colour Out of Space,” one of my favorites. So perhaps I’m being a little too hard on this production. In its defense, when it strays somewhere near the neighborhood of the source story it’s actually reasonably good. The strange, amorphous “monster” is particularly well suited to a production that doesn’t have the money for effects more graphic than some lighting tricks and simple CGI. Ah but that’s only part of it. The rest for some reason is a heavy dose of The Exorcist mixed with Nazis, zombies and the usual batch of low-budget standby nudity and gore. See if desperate

Review – The Ritchie Boys

Like most audience members, I already knew that the 1930s saw a massive exodus of Jewish people from Europe to America. Many people who could afford to flee Hitler’s expanding domain did so, and even those who couldn’t afford to take the whole family at least scraped together the cash for a kid or two. What never occurred to me – though in retrospect it should have been completely obvious – is that many of the young men who emmigrated to the United States enlisted in the Army and got sent right back to Europe, where their skills as native speakers of German made them excellent interrogators. Called “Ritchie Boys” after the fort where they did their intelligence training, these guys had a heck of a time during the war, not to mention a heck of a time recalling their experiences for this documentary. My particular favorite were the pair who exploited the captured Germans’ fear of the Soviets by dressing one of the two of them as a Russian officer (complete with a picture of Stalin in his tent) and threatening their captives with deportation. The technical quality is run-of-the-mill, but the subjects are fascinating. Worth seeing

Review – A Matter of Life and Death

This German series about the history of medicine is, well, very German. For example, the tales of medical breakthroughs are bracketed by scenes from a family picnic, vignettes with a sense of humor that’s subtly different than what one would expect from an American production. Oddness (and occasional bad sound mixing on the overdubbed translation) aside, much of the information presented is fascinating stuff. To be sure, the set seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on prenatal and early childhood problems, which one would expect from the first episode but should probably not have been as big a deal in the second. But overall this is a solid treatment of the topic at hand. Mildly amusing

Review – Restrepo

It’s hard not to be impressed by the guts of soldiers who go into combat, not to mention the unarmed journalists who go in with them. To be sure, this production’s a bit rough around the edges. In particular, the music selection is nothing short of bizarre. But the compelling subject matter largely overcomes the less-than-stellar production values. How sad it was to watch these guys get dropped into an apparently irrelevant valley in Afghanistan and risk – and in some cases give – their lives just to piss off the locals and hold ground that the Army subsequently abandoned. I hope there’s a bigger point to all of it than was apparent in the movie. Mildly amusing

Review – The Astro Zombies

Did this thing really spawn sequels? Did it really? Sigh. This is one of those movies that’s so terrible it’s hard to follow. For example, for awhile I struggled to figure out if the monster was intended to be a psychopath disguising his identity with a cheap rubber mask or if we were really being asked to buy the thing as a zombie. John Carradine stumbles around for awhile as a mad scientist in scenes that have only the most tangential connection to the rest of the movie. But honestly, couldn’t I have just started by typing “Tura Satana” and skipped the rest of the review? See if desperate

Review – Azorian: The Raising of the K-129

Usually if there’s no IMDb listing for a production I won’t review it as a movie. However, this PBS special was long enough to meet the running time requirement, and I felt the need to say a word or two about it. Honestly, how the hell can they take a deep sea recovery mission with strong intrigue and espionage elements and turn it into a watching-grass-grow lecture on mechanical engineering? The U.S. attempt to extract the wreckage of Soviet submarine K-129 is a tale packed with high level government high jinks, submarine story thrills and the world’s most expensive game of Claw Machine. Though some of the more interesting elements (such as what may have sunk the sub to begin with) get a brief mention, the vast vast vast majority of the production is an endless consideration of the various pipes, gears, winches and whatnot that went into the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a multi-gazillion-dollar vessel built for one failed purpose. If you’re way into nautical engineering, PBS finally made the special you’ve been waiting for. Everyone else can skip with impunity. See if desperate

Review – Sea of Dust

This was billed as an homage to the legendary Hammer horror movies, and to be fair it did feature period costumes and a brief appearance by Ingrid Pitt. Beyond that the closest the production comes to a hammer is the one that must have fallen on the director’s head. Tom Savini turns in a typical performance as Prester John, mythical Christian king somehow turned into an evil semi-vampire. Beyond the cameos, this is a relentless parade of boring occasionally punctuated with cheap gore. See if desperate

What the what?

Right about a year ago the family went to Paradise India, a restaurant in southern JoCo. The food was fine, but the service was a touch over-solicitous. I got a kick out of being greeted with "namaste" at the door, but then I was watching a lot of Lost at the time so that might have had something to do with the entertainment value. On a more negative note, the waiter / maitre d' / maybe the owner hovered over us for much of the meal, providing a running commentary about the food. It was interesting but at the same time sort of unwelcome.

At the end of the meal he asked us to fill out comment cards, and the cards featured a blank for an email address. I have an address that I use specifically in cases where I might be giving it to someone who wants to send me something useful (such as coupons) or might just be lining up to spam me. So I jotted it on the form and didn't think anything more about it.

Then yesterday I get an email from Paradise India. It had some info on the restaurant's recent appearance on KCPT's restaurant show. It had some general chatty stuff. It had a coupon (good move there). But it also included the "Joke of the Day."

I reproduce it here in its entirety and defy anyone to decipher it. About the only part that gave me a snicker was "heads off to a great meal."

---

An Indian Businessman landed into an association with American Company & his counterpart is scheduled to visit India. He never had American food. To be more oriental he decides he should try American Food. A small city populated by only around 6-7 million people had two boastful American Restaurants. 

He had heard of Steaks a lot so when he finds them listed on the menu at his first stop he ecstatically orders a Steak. He is really overwhelmed by the eclectic taste of "Chicken Scampi" he is served; Roasted Chicken with a dusty cover of black pepper, no noodles, a side of mashed potatoes & boiled tomatoes.  Extremely happy the next day he visits the other restaurant called "Statue of Liberty". Again he ordered Steak. A Hot Dog with a spread of mayonnaise, mustard, shredded red onions and side of Aloo Pakora. "Heads off to the great meal but you should check how "The Gateway Arch" makes theirs "he recommends.

A week later he sits boasting of the great Steak places in town after a busy day with his associate. His friend who had devoured tons of Indian food & read volumes of the Indian traditions before making his first trip to India is a little thoughtful. With a sense of compunction he asks "Sir Is it not true that in India they do not serve Beef or Pork?"  "Absolutely True" comes the reply.

The long march

Today I began in earnest to get the site caught up. I decided to start with the most recent updates and make my way back to the middle of January (which was where I was before the crash). Though I only got a week's worth of reviews loaded, at least it was a start.

Review – Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State

Six hours of the Holocaust, but at least it’s more interesting than Shoah. Actually, this is a really solid introduction to the subject, well paced with a good combination of interviews, recreations, location shots, computer simulations and historical footage. I wouldn’t tackle this on a cheerful, sunny summer day. But if you’re ready to face an honest portrayal of one of the most disgraceful chapters in human history, this six-part miniseries is an excellent experience. Worth seeing

Abandoned – Tam Lin

So they never let Roddy McDowall direct another movie after this? Maybe it's because this is dull and pointless even beyond the liberal standards for such things back in the hippie days. 37 minutes

More cows

Okay, actually not more cows. Just more boxes. I figured if I built some blank spaces in, later I could come back and add some text, something that might make initial navigation a little easier. So now the design parallels the splash page I put together for the Mass Comm Notebook web site I worked on a few years ago (and which I fear fell victim to the laptop crash). However, that notebook was in turn based on the Photographer's Notebook, which still exists (and someday will be added to 8sails College once I've had the chance to add content and remove some copyrighted images from it).

That said, I promised myself I wasn't going to spend the whole day tinkering with the MSG. Other work is piling up.

I've been good, but I can't last. So hurry, sabbatical. Hurry fast.

Abandoned – Le6ion of the Dead (2001)

Ooh, vampires delivering dialogue reminiscent of undergraduate playwriting students speculating about theology. The numeral in the title should probably have been a good clue. Is that 6 supposed to be a G or an S? 14 minutes

Review – Day of Wrath

Okay, I'm forced to admit that if you asked me to make a movie out of the anti-Semitism of the Spanish Inquisition but also make it a Christopher Lambert action movie, I probably wouldn't have done any better than this. Some of the action sequences are okay, and some of the intrigue borders on fascinating. Unfortunately, they work together in a peanut-butter-on-fried-chicken sort of way. Mildly amusing

Review – Cube 2: Hypercube

At least the lighting is a little better this time around than it was in the first one. But that’s the only improvement. Once again a set of unrelated (or are they?) characters are crammed in a maze of interconnected cubes. However, in this installment the rooms are actually “hypercubes,” portals to other dimensions where any plot-rending twist is possible. So if you like the dizzy feeling of having a rug yanked out from under you time and time again, they’ve made an endless parade of pleasure just for you. Everyone else can give it a miss. See if desperate

The site is born

http://8sails.com/MSG

Not much there at the moment. Just 16 Survival Cows in a four-by-four grid. For now I'm focusing on keeping the "active" part of the page set up as a 1024 x 768 box in order to keep things simple if/when I convert this to an iPad app. So I'm sure I'll have a lot more adjustment work to do.

But at least now it officially exists.

Review – Nightmares in Red, White and Blue

If you know much about the history of the horror genre, you aren’t going to learn much from this somewhat scattershot treatment of the subject. On the other hand, if you enjoy parades of talking heads (some of whom actually have some idea what they’re talking about), you’ve come the right place. Mildly amusing

Enter the cow

Yesterday Amy downloaded some copyright-free, derivative-work-ready photo clip art of cows and gas masks. After producing five or six variations, I came up with one that I'm happy with. So the next mission will be to clean it up and then get to work on the variations. I need 16 of them, one for each section of the MSG. For example, I'm going to create a version filtered with a really chunky half toning patter for the newspaper section. The movies section will probably have fancy sunglasses and a beret. The radio section will be sepia-toned with an old-timey microphone and maybe a fedora.

It's a relief not only to be making some progress on the site but also to have taken a bite out of such a key element of the design.

In the spirit of the occasion, now would be a good time to tell the story of how the Survival Cow came to be (for anyone who doesn't already know it). Many years ago I worked for Academic Computing at the University of Kansas. One of my duties was to work at the Engineering CAE Facility, a computer lab with a couple of Harris mainframes over at the School of Engineering.

Most of the work was fairly boring, but once we got the chance to do something fun. We got permission from the powers that be to come up with an instruction book covering basic computer use, some of the more common applications, just about anything a new user might need to know. The book was to be patterned after a similar book -- a First Aid Kit -- from one of the state schools out in Nevada. We didn't want ours to be an exact copy either in word or in spirit. And of course back then I was somewhat heavily into the whole survivalist thing. So a Survival Guide was only natural.

In keeping with the light spirit we intended for the project, I came up with some offbeat illustrations. One that was prominently featured early in the book was "Survival Cow." This was a stippled ink drawing I made based on a photo from the cover of Soldier of Fortune (or perhaps it was SOF's survivalist-oriented offshoot, which I think was called Survive). The photo was of a cow wearing a gas mask, supposedly a graphic illustration of the Soviets' commitment to surviving a nuclear war with even their livestock industry intact. All I really cared about was that it was a weird image, that it fit with the survival guide theme, and that the cow thing had a nice tie-in to Kansas.

Of course the project died a premature death. Some jackass in the Chemical Engineering department got wind of what we were working on, called our boss and told him that in his opinion computers weren't funny. The truly strange part -- and a good illustration of the insane bureaucracy that is KU -- is that they pulled out all the funny text but left most of the illustrations (including Survival Cow) intact.

Thus it's a genuine pleasure to return a new generation of Survival Cows to the stage in a production over which I have absolute creative control.

Review – From Paris with Love

Even when he just phones it in, John Travolta still manages to suck quality out of everyone and everything around him. Without him, this would have been an entertaining little foreign intrigue action movie about an intelligence community newbie trying to thwart a terrorist plot he doesn’t completely understand. But then we get the off-the-wall intel pro (played by guess who) who wackys his way through the twists and turns. The “wow, foreigners actually are all out to get us” story didn’t help matters either. Overall this will be a treat for more Travolta-tolerant folk than I in search of a loud action movie. Mildly amusing

Review – The House on Garibaldi Street

In both documentary and fictionalized narrative, the trial of Adolph Eichmann has been thoroughly movie-ized. This production, on the other hand, presents a Raid on Entebbe-esque recounting of the plot to seize Eichmann from his post-war hideout in Buenos Aires and drag him off to Israel for trial. The plot bogs down in the second half, particularly after the commandos seize him but can’t get him out of the country immediately (leading to a lot of over-wrought interrogation sessions). Overall, however, it’s a nice exploration of an under-explored part of a well-known story. Mildly amusing

Review – The Dead Pool

The Dirty Harry thing had played out by 1988; honestly, it had been revived only briefly by the Reagan mantra “make my day” line in Sudden Impact five years earlier. Here Clint Eastwood awkwardly marches through the usual clichés as if he knows full well how cynical it is to make a violent movie about the media’s fascination with violence. Guns n Roses fans will want to keep an eye out for band member cameos, though be warned: you’re going to have to sit through Jim Carrey mugging through a lip sync of “Welcome to the Jungle” first. Beyond the little touches, this is merely the tail end of a series that had a much more auspicious beginning. See if desperate

Review – The September Issue

Anyone who’s seen The Devil Wears Prada might be pardoned for wondering if Anna Wintour is really like that. I’m not sure this documentary really answers the question. She seems stiff and egotistical, but that could have been an observational bias problem. Of much greater interest is the movie’s title subject: the largest issue of Vogue in 2007. The people actually doing the work – particularly long-suffering Grace Coddington – are much more fascinating than the editor in chief. This is also a rewarding viewing experience for anyone interested in fashion or in how a big-budget magazine gets put together. Mildly amusing

Review – Walt & El Grupo

Apparently all the slick production values Disney Studios can bring to bear don’t make the home movies from your grandparents’ vacation any more interesting. The subject at hand is a tour of South America arranged by the government for Walt Disney and some of his artists in 1941. Their mission was to build goodwill and help reduce the growing Nazi influence in the southern half of the Western Hemisphere. The “countering the Nazis” angle was interesting, but it’s a teeny tiny part of a long, tedious travelogue. Further, it gets a little disingenuous when it covers topics such as the animators’ strike going on at the studio at the time. Overall this is a pretty picture. It just isn’t particularly entertaining. Some of the online notes indicate that the DVD version comes with some extras, including at least one of the animations produced as a result of the trip. However, I instant-viewed it and thus didn’t get the additional stuff. Mildly amusing

Not the "fix" I had in mind

The laptop is dead. Or to be more precise, the laptop is fine but the hard drive has been completely erased.

Jesus. All that data gone. Photos. Stories. Diaries. Financial records. And more to the point for the purposes of this blog, the last three months of 8sails. Plus all the notes and drafts for upcoming postings.

On the one hand, that's what I get for falling behind on 8sails stuff, not to mention what I get for not regularly backing up the computer.

On the other hand, damn.

Review – The Manitou

This is more sensitive to American Indian culture than the average John Wayne movie, but not by much. A woman (Susan Strasberg) goes to the hospital to have a growth removed only to discover that the thing is a rapidly-growing fetus. And to make matters worse, the thing is possessed by the spirit of an evil Indian shaman who will destroy the Earth as soon as he’s fully reincarnated. And to make matters worse, before the unsuccessful removal surgery the doctors hit it with a mess of X-ray radiation, so it’s going to come out mutated. And to make matters worse, the poor woman’s only hopes for rescue are a fake psychic (Tony Curtis) and a reluctant medicine man (Michael Ansara, who just for the record is of Syrian descent). And to make matters worse, the evil can only be defeated by channeling the “manitous” of all the computers in the hospital. And to make matters worse, I actually watched the whole thing from beginning to end. See if desperate

Review – Memory

I liked this better than I like most horror movies I randomly add to my Netflix queue. That said, however, it isn’t a particularly good movie. Billy Zane plays a doctor who gets zapped with some Indigenous People Magic Juice and develops the unwelcome ability to see someone else’s memories. “Unwelcome” because the person he’s sharing memories with turns out to be a child killer. The picture swiftly gets bogged down in its own uninteresting mystery twists and turns. At least they spent some money making it. I’d gotten to the point where I absolutely couldn’t sit through another guy-with-a-camcorder movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Night of the Demons (2009)

The façade of the mansion where they shot the exteriors is the most interesting thing in the whole movie. The rest is standard crud about 20-somethings who have a rave in a haunted house and end up beset by demons trying to worm their way back into our dimension. If you have an overdeveloped appreciation for latex demon makeup, low level soft-core porn or the bloated corpse of Edward Furlong, you may be in the right place. Otherwise feel free to spend the next hour and a half on something else. Wish I’d skipped it

I need a fix. Now.

I've already griped about the laptop being out of commission, right? Well, apparently griping angers the Computer Gods, because now my desktop computer is out as well. I'm typing this blog entry from my iPad, which I hereby humbly beseech the Computer Gods to spare as it's the only private computer I have left.

Needless to say, this hasn't been a big step forward in the getting-8sails-caught-up effort.

And it's weird just how addicted I've become to the computer. Or to be more precise, what I really need is a fix of connectedness (assuming that's a word). I feel like I've been cut off from the rest of 21st century America, relegated to peering in from a tablet-sized hole in the wall. This is also seriously messing with my work routines.

So I guess until tech support does something about the problem, I'll just go sit in the corner and read The Odyssey on the iPad.

Review – The Onion Field

Every once in awhile I get hit by the desire to watch a really depressing true crime story. Because there’s only so many times I can sit through In Cold Blood, this picture makes a nice back-up. A couple of small-time criminals (James Woods and Franklyn Seales) enter the big time when they kidnap a couple of cops. Though they shoot one (Ted Danson in his feature film debut) in the title location, the other (John Savage) escapes and later identifies the criminals. The rest of the movie is devoted to the sad outcomes for all involved, particularly the ineffective operation of the justice system and the psychological problems faced by the surviving cop. Though this isn’t a watershed moment in crime movie history, it does a good job of telling the story it sets out to tell. Mildly amusing

Review – Allegro Non Troppo

Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto puts together a parody of / homage to Fantasia. It follows the same general animation-inspired-by-well-known-pieces-of-classical-music format, but this stuff is not necessarily for the kids. The production has its weak points. The live action bits between the animations unfortunately re-enforce the stereotype that Italian filmmakers do physical comedy like old people climb obstacles. And a lot of the gender relations stuff is more than a little dated. However, the animation is clever and well matched with the music. This is a must-see for anyone who liked the Disney version but thought it perhaps a bit too self-important. Worth seeing

Review – Crucible of Horror

Is it just me, or does the word "dreary" automatically bring English crime dramas to mind? Movies like this help cement the association. Michael Gough plays a family patriarch who derives pleasure from browbeating his wife and literally beating his daughter (complete with some really gross Freudian nudity). The Netflix description promised that after the womenfolk tire of his crap and kill him that he would return from the dead to seek revenge. Naturally this conjured images of vengeful zombies a la the "Happy Father's Day" sequence from Creepshow, but what we get here is more "oh, there he is. I guess he isn't dead after all." The resulting production should more aptly have been dubbed Crucible of Boredom. See if desperate

Review – Seven Days to Live

Evil force tells a woman she has a week to live. Though this might sound familiar, the tale gets an interesting tweak or two. There’s a haunted house angle. There’s a dead kid angle. They spent some money on it (though it isn’t a big budget production). They got Amanda Plummer for the lead. The dead dog thing pissed me off a little, but at least the protagonist reacted with grief rather than the usual “bummer about the dog” brush-off pet death usually receives. Mildly amusing

Review – The Incredible Melting Man

Astronaut gets cooked by radiation and returns to Earth looking like a Fudgsicle on a hot July afternoon. This would have been an "unfortunate accident" movie rather than a horror movie if not for the guy's attempts to stave off his gooey demise by eating people. The production looks like Rick Baker probably had some fun putting together the melting dude effects, but none of the pleasure in the creation process translates into fun for the audience. In particular, the pacing is dreadful and the script's feeble attempts at humor were almost enough to make me feel sorry for this stinker. Almost. See if desperate

Review – Dead Sleep

Poor Linda Blair. She’s having trouble finding a job as a nurse. Her junkie ex-boyfriend steals her rent money. And then when she does land steady work, it turns out her new boss is placing mental patients in comas and then killing them because … well, other than the fact that he’s a creep, his motive isn’t entirely clear. The result is a low-end-of-medium-budget Australian reheat of Coma. See if desperate

Review – Paranormal Entity

In the fine Asylum tradition, this is a cheap knock-off of someone else's popular movie. And given that Paranormal Activity wasn't exactly a lavish Hollywood blockbuster, the word "cheap" here takes on whole new dimensions. There's more gore and nudity in this one, but of course that just robs the production of the subtle chills that were the only reason to watch the original to begin with. Wish I'd skipped it

Review – The Executioner's Song

This is another movie that I could have sworn I already reviewed some time ago. What a drag it is getting old. Sigh. In any event, this is a made-for-TV-but-still-strangely-full-of-nude-scenes docudrama based on Norman Mailer's "true story novel" of the same name. Ne'er-do-well Gary Gilmore (Tommy Lee Jones) bumbles through a series of menial jobs, petty crime and tempestuous episodes with his girlfriend (Rosanna Arquette). But once he adds murder to his robbery routine, it's a fast track from arrest to conviction to Utah's firing squad (indeed, the real Gilmore made himself famous by demanding to be executed rather than cooperating with the lawyers trying to appeal his sentence). The story itself isn't all that interesting – certainly not significantly different from hundreds of other hard luck death row biographies – but I did appreciate the guts it must have taken to seek financing for a movie without a single heroic character. Mildly amusing

Review – Invaders from Mars (1953)

This is Invasion of the Body Snatchers Cold War paranoia, only on a much more cartoonish level. After a boy sees what looks like a meteor hit the ground not far from the family farm, he goes to investigate. In short order his parents, the chief of police and many of the other local grown-ups start behaving like mindless robots. Fortunately the Army and its scientist allies are able to locate the Martians’ space ship and put a stop to the invasion before it gets out of hand. The Martian shock troops look a little like oversized Muppets, but their lack of scariness is more than made up for by the spooky Tiny Guy with a Big Head Who Rides Around in a Bubble. Mildly amusing

Review - Fantasia

This is worth watching for the sheer shock value of watching a Hollywood studio actually attempt to make a movie with artistic integrity. Of course they can’t resist the temptation to plug Mickey Mouse into it, but fortunately that sequence is offset by some of the more innovative work elsewhere in the collection. Personally I’m fond of the abstract, Oskar-Fischinger-inspired animation that accompanies the Bach toccata, though most of the rest of it is quite good as well. If nothing else, it’s astounding that a movie like this could be made back in 1940, when a lot of the rest of the animation world was making silly cartoons. Worth seeing

And the Moon turned to blood

Last week I watched a documentary (for want of a better word) about the Rapture and the End Times. It brought me mindful of the self-defeating nature of the whole Rapture thing. These guys always ascend to their pulpits (figuratively if not literally) and proceed to assure us that we need to give our hearts to Jesus right away because the end is near.

If the end is so near, wouldn't it be smarter to just wait for it? I mean, if the Rapture snatches away all the fundies, the Sun turns black, the Moon turns to blood, the temple gets rebuilt, the plagues hit and the whole Book of Revelation nine yards, I'm absolutely willing to believe in the literal truth of the whole thing. So when the Rapture-ready squad absolutely assures me that the End Times are imminent, all they do is give me a strong incentive to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. If I end up Tribulated, I've every reason in the world to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. But until what they say is going to happen actually happens, skeptics are entitled to our skepticism.

I will say this for the show I watched: they're the only Rapture-ready pundits who ever tried to address this. "You can wait," they warn, "but if you do, then God will cloud your mind so you still won't believe in Jesus." Nice try. However, this ignores two major problems. First, it violates the scripture they're preaching, which specifically says that people will come to Christ after the Rapture (not to mention that the "clouding your mind" thing is an extremely strained interpretation of the verses they cite).

Second -- and more important -- it turns God into a deceptive jerk and the End Times into a big practical joke on the human race with eternal damnation rather than a jock strap full of itching powder as the ultimate consequence. Perhaps it's just natural for people who are themselves deceptive jerks to want to remake God in their own image.

And of course all of this as usual side-steps the actual important value of the Christian faith in favor of stupid, pseudo-theological parlor tricks.

Sorry about the religious rant. That isn't really the function of this blog.

Speaking of which ...

After my flurry of MSG activity yesterday I have nothing new to report. Still waiting on news one way or another about the hard drive in the laptop I've been using for years to work on 8sails. Fingers still firmly crossed.

In the meantime, I'm waffling back and forth about the current background art for this blog. I can't decide if it looks like an extreme close-up of Turner's "Sunrise with Sea Monsters" or an extreme close-up of Serrano's "Piss Christ." So if you're looking at it and it doesn't look like either one, that means the Serrano impression won out and prompted me to change it to something else.