Picking a "trail name"

Last Friday at the 8sails staff meeting a couple of us watched a PBS program about the Appalachian Trail. For some time now I'd been curious about what it might be like to hike part (or maybe someday even all) of the trail.

I am curious no longer. I sincerely hope the show was a misrepresentation of the actual experience, because if it's accurate then the Appalachian Trail is the habitation solely of Trail Nerds, white people sufficiently well-to-do that they don't have to concern themselves with anything but hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Quick symptom of the problem: all of the interviewees had "trail names," sort of like CB radio "handles" only with a distinctly more hippified flair.

So on the off chance that I might ever lose my mind and give this a try, I'll need help picking a trail name. Here are the leading contenders:

1. Bryan Whitehead

2. Frodo Baggins (just in case I decided to give in and play along)

3. Jason Voorhees

4. Watongo (do a search on "Deadbolt Zulu Death Mask" if you want to track down the origin for this one)

Email me your fave (or another suggestion if you've got one)!

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In site news, a bout of insomnia this morning gave me the chance to finish the rest of the backlogged site updates. Though my original plan was to include more material than just movie reviews for January and February, the fixes were taking too long. Besides, I expect the world can wait until next February for the (currently incomplete) list of our eight favorite Presidents' Day movies.

Review – Medusa: Dare to Be Truthful

Julie Brown and friends produce an absolutely hysterical send-up of Madonna: Truth or Dare. Of course the big pitfall is that you have to actually sit through Madonna’s movie first so you’ll fully appreciate the jokes. However, at least at the end of the painful original you’ll have this desperately-needed comic relief waiting for you. Worth seeing

Review – Case 39

Anytime a movie goes two years between shooting and release (and a not-particularly-hyped release at that), one can't help but wonder why. Here I'm guessing the problem was editing. In particular, the protagonist (Rene Zellweger) goes from ordinary social worker to paranoid "true believer" in far too short a span. Of course maybe having a demon child move in will do that to a person. Jodelle Ferland does a fine job as the evil kid, providing most of the movie's few genuine scares. The rest is strictly middle-of-the-road horror, neither impressively good nor annoyingly bad. Mildly amusing

Review – Jonah, a VeggieTales Movie

I have no good excuse for why I find the VeggieTales so addictive. Perhaps it’s because the world view they present – no matter how skewed and limited it might be – is about as far from challenging as it’s possible to get. And at least the animation in this feature-length production is a cut above the usual low-quality stuff from the TV shows. Here the tomato, cucumber, asparagus and friends act out the eponymous story, making a few kid-friendly modifications along the way. Mildly amusing

Review – It Happened Here

This movie should be an illustration in the dictionary for the phrase "labor of love." Filmmaker Kevin Brownlow and historian Andrew Mollo started working on this when they were both just teenagers, and it took nearly a decade to finish. The result was worth the wait. The story of a nurse trying to get by in an alternate-history England conquered by the Nazis is rough around the edges, but that fits the cinema verite shooting style. I like "what if" scenarios like this, and here the concept is used to cast an unflinching look at the atrocities of Nazism. Worth seeing

Review – The Legend of Boggy Creek

I can't believe this movie scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. Maybe it was just that at the time my family lived in Southern Illinois, a place not all that different from the picture's Texarkana setting. Certainly the preponderance of rednecks was the same, and it wasn't that big a stretch to imagine that a Bigfoot might live somewhere nearby. In this case the beast is the Fouke Monster, a three-toed Southern swamp variation of the standard Sasquatch. The docu-drama style is fun in a cheap, 1970s way. But the monster's MO is pretty much limited to killing livestock, making an unpleasant noise and emitting an unpleasant odor. Mildly amusing

Review – The Book of Eli

I really loved two aspects of this movie. First, the fight scenes were impressive. Really good choreography, especially for a Hollywood production. Second, the backdrops were great. I was particularly fond of the flattened cityscapes with big nuclear bomb craters here and there. Unfortunately, the rest of the picture wasn't so hot. The hero got on my bad side from almost the very first frames by killing a cat. But far worse was the plot, a relentless parade of hah-I'll-bet-you-weren't-expecting-that moments (especially the big twist at the end). They should have just stuck to fighting. Mildly amusing

My Thor Ath

Last Thursday (aptly enough) I went to see Thor. It was the first of the new generation of 3D movies I've seen, and frankly I wasn't all that impressed. The technology still produces an image that -- except for shots deliberately set up to take maximum advantage of the effect -- mostly looks like a vaguely out-of-focus version of plain old 2D movies. Plus the new tech apparently requires slightly dark glasses, which doesn't exactly help the picture quality.

Further, this particular production didn't take particularly good advantage of the 3D effects. Yeah, there's some fun stuff early on. But for the most part this is a flat movie that isn't made less flat by fancy projection tricks. Plus a lot of the action -- particularly the scenes set on the Ice Giants' planet -- are already dark enough without the extra dimness added by the glasses.

Though I'm not saying the movie itself was absolutely awful, I did find it underwhelming. Maybe it was just the movie I chose, as several friends assured me that Avatar in 3D was quite an experience. The 3D preview of the new Captain America movie made it look a little better, so maybe I'll give it another try later this summer.

Review – Planet of the Vampires

If you’re considering joining a space force, you might want to give this one a try. Sure, they’ll set you up in a rickety ship and send you out to a desolate planet inhabited by malicious spirits trying to steal your body. Your dialogue won’t exactly be the best. And if you’re a woman, you’re going to hate the amount of time you apparently have to spend in the outer space hair salon. On the other hand, they’ll deck you out in some of the coolest Italian designer leather space suits known to humankind. General crappiness is a small price to pay for such fashion-forward duds. Oh, and to be completely fair the picture does include a genuinely spooky moment or two. Mildly amusing

Review – Inception

Some of the effects were cool in a music video sort of way. Unfortunately the rest of the picture should have been named “Insipid.” Leonardo DiCaprio plays a down-on-his-luck guy who can invade other peoples’ dreams and steal their secrets, a set-up that swiftly devolves into a big, loud, expensive, Philip-K-Dick-y reheat of Dreamscape. Further, this unconscious trespassing involves a set of rules so long and complicated it's almost bad enough to be vampires. I think we all knew that even while he was churning out popular Batman movies, this was the picture Christopher Nolan was really aching to make. See if desperate

Review – Red Planet Mars

I’m gonna go ahead and toss some serious spoilers into this review, so if that bugs you stop reading now. On the other hand, stick with it and I’ll absolve you of any need to actually sit through this stinker. A secret, Cold War science project starts picking up communications from Mars. The Martians tell us all about how wonderful their civilization is, which causes the American economy to collapse (because after all, why would anyone go to work in a coal mine when any minute now we’re going to get a magical Martian energy source?). But the Commies also find themselves undone when the Martians start transmitting Bible verses, inspiring widespread revolt behind the Iron Curtain. Turns out the original transmissions were the work of a misanthropic former-Nazi scientist, but the verses were sent directly by Jesus. How inspirational. Now we can all go to church and thank God for our collapsed economy and a rival nuclear superpower in a high state of instability. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Kaidan

Though this is a typically pretty and stylish Japanese production, the moral of the story doesn’t get much past the lyrics to a country song. A young man falls in love with a slightly older woman. Unfortunately, the two are beset by a curse stemming from an old family feud between their long-dead fathers. So when the youth’s eye starts to roam, things go wrong in a hurry. She ends up dead. He ends up with a curse (or at this point is it a double-curse?) that prevents him from ever having a relationship with a woman again. Your cheatin’ heart will put a curse on you. Mildly amusing

Review – Queen of Blood

Wow, does this one ever take its sweet time getting started. Once the astronauts from earth finally make it into space, track down the source of an alien distress signal and find the title character, we’re already more than two thirds of the way through the movie. So even though the weird alien woman with a thirst for blood is not without her charms, she’s far too little and more than a bit too late. Mildly amusing

Review – Scream, Blacula, Scream!

Snooze, audience, snooze! This is pretty much like the first one, only with extra voodoo and extra boredom. See if desperate

Review – The Ugly

A poor little abused kid grows up to be a psychotic serial killer. Or are the crimes really being committed by his facially-scarred alter-ego, The Ugly? Ultimately it doesn’t really matter. This low-budget revenge fest is designed to appeal to angst-ridden teenagers who hate getting picked on. The only thing that even temporarily caught my attention was the decision to use black ink instead of fake blood in the gore scenes. Though that might have been an attempt at art, the rest of the movie is pure crud. See if desperate

Review – Mad Monster Party

This production brings me mindful of something that must dwell in the mind of movie critics everywhere: no matter how terrible a movie happens to be, someone out there absolutely loves it. From my perspective, this was absolutely dreadful. It’s like an extended Rankin Bass animated holiday special only about a thousand times more annoying. For every plus (Boris Karloff, cool miniature set work) there’s a painfully offsetting minus (particularly the excruciating musical numbers). Overall this story of a mad scientist holding a party to announce his successor is simply too stupid for words. However, while doing a little background research to figure out where this picture fit chronologically in relation to “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” (a couple of years later, just for the record) I discovered a whole web site devoted to it. De gustibus non est disputandum. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – North Face

Picture this as Germany’s answer to Chariots of Fire. It’s a movie about two gifted athletes seeking the ultimate achievement in their sport, but rather than Olympic track medals these guys are trying to climb the eponymous side of the Eiger. That allows for considerably more angst-ridden peril and of course a more tragic ending. If nothing else, any desire to try mountain climbing – as I in my youth once aspired to do – may well be cured by this viewing experience. On the other hand, the mountain footage is pretty. It also raises some interesting points about nationalist politics in 1936. Worth seeing

Review – Naked Lunch

David Cronenberg does a serviceable job of bringing William Burroughs's particular brand of drug-addled vulgarity to the screen. This is one of those “labor of love” productions that attract actors who are fans of the author’s work and/or in search of a role that will help them establish art movie cred. Though I enjoyed the icky (and more than a little fakey) bug effects, the story and characters didn’t do much for me. Mildly amusing

Review – Premonition (2004)

Though this Japanese horror movie is more wind-up than pitch, the wind-up is still fun to watch. A man (Hideki Satomi) out for a drive in the country with his wife and daughter happens across a newspaper with his daughter’s obituary. Moments later, she dies just as the newspaper predicted. This sucks the grieving parents into a strange world of people who have premonitions about impending deaths. And when our hero tries to prevent one of the disasters he foresees … well, let’s just say it doesn’t end well. Mildly amusing

Review – The Legend of Bloody Mary

The problem with calling this childhood party game “Mary Worth” is that it reminds me of the old lady who used to be in the comics. That wouldn’t have been instantly fatal to an otherwise better production, but here it isn’t even in the top ten problems with this particular movie. The biggest failure is the absence of a coherent plot. None of the individual scenes are absolutely terrible, though none of them are exactly brilliant either. Unfortunately, they’re tossed onto the screen apparently at random. Even a trite story would have been better than such meandering, disjointed nonsense. See if desperate

Review – The Vampire’s Ghost

Not just a vampire. Not just a ghost. But a vampire’s ghost. This is one of those throwaway movies from the 40s, and “set in Africa” is probably all I need to say about the problems it has with ethnic sensitivity. At least it was short. See if desperate

Review – Green Zone

This movie dwells in an unnecessary middle ground between The Hurt Locker and The Bourne Identity. A soldier (Matt Damon) searching for WMDs in Iraq runs up against a mysterious resistance from his higher-ups. Though the “gee, there aren’t any” thing might have been interesting when the war was still new, more than half a decade later the news is more than a little old. The resulting story is thus big on explosions and gunfights and small on actual interesting intrigue. Mildly amusing

Abandoned – Red Hook

Wow. This really is a movie about a scavenger hunt. There's some serial killer nonsense stirred in, but otherwise ... well, let's just say I made it 50 minutes in just to make absolutely sure it wasn't going to turn into a twist on Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook."

Review – The Devil's Backbone

If you liked Pan’s Labyrinth then odds are you’ll like this earlier effort from director Guillermo del Toro. It lacks Pan’s elaborate fantasy world and expensive effects, but the simple ghost story – again set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War – is just as chilling. Worth seeing

Review – The Church

Though directed by Michele Soavi, this has writer/producer Dario Argento’s wooden sense of plot, dialogue and character. The story – church possessed by evil spirits – is standard stuff, and this production doesn’t add anything particularly noteworthy to the mix. See if desperate

Embedding (and not the kind that requires going to Iraq)

My desktop computer from work has now joined me at home, and the sabbatical is officially underway.

The big technical news today is that I'm in the process of creating a web page with embedded Youtube video. When I come back and read this post later I'm sure I'll think "wow, did I really think that was a big deal?" After all, everybody and their grandma can do this. The trick is that embedding involves copying HTML code from Youtube and pasting it into the code of the page I'm creating (a list of videos that are better than their songs, just for the record). The paste can't be done from the design view in DreamWeaver; you actually have to open up the code itself to plug it in.

Again, this wasn't especially hard. But I'm still new enough to this whole thing that I feel all smart and stuff whenever I learn to do something new.

Review - Fiend Without a Face

Or arms. Or legs. And yet they manage to kill people. A mad scientist living near a NORAD base in Canada taps into the Air Force’s nuclear energy in order to generate creatures bred solely by his own powers of concentration. Unlike the Id Beast from Forbidden Planet (the obvious source from which this plot line is “borrowed”), these monsters are nowhere near as scary when they aren’t invisible anymore. If only our scientist friend’s awe-inspiring mental prowess had enabled him to conjure up something other than brains with tiny eye stalks and trailing spinal columns. I added this to my DVD queue because I like movies with nuclear weapons connections and the trivia notes said this was one of the first explicitly gory movies ever made. It disappoints on both counts. Mildly amusing

Review – Kick-Ass

I’m probably the umpty-thousanth reviewer to say this, but Chloe Moretz’s performance as Hit Girl is the best part of this picture. She plays a cute 11-year-old girl who swears like a sailor and brutally butchers bad guys with martial arts moves set to rock-out covers of songs such as “The Banana Splits Theme.” The rest of it is a run-of-the-mill tale about a nerd (Aaron Johnson) who decides to don a costume and start fighting crime just like a superhero. Mildly amusing

Review – My Bloody Valentine (2009)

Apparently it’s been awhile since I saw the original, which is odd because I could have sworn I watched it only a couple of months ago. Perhaps it got lost in the notorious hard drive crash of 2011. In any event, I don’t remember the first one sucking this bad. And that’s saying something, because I remember the first one sucking. Dude in coveralls, hardhat and gas mask wanders a small mining town in search of people to kill with a pickaxe. There’s some kind of revenge motive stirred in, but it gets lost in the various contortions the plot goes through to make the not-surprising ending a little more surprising. But what the heck. Nobody who likes these things really wants good writing or a solid story. All they need is cheap gore and a sprinkling of boob shots. On that point and that point alone it satisfies. See if desperate

Abandoned – Frightworld

To the tune of "O Christmas Tree": O torture porn, o torture porn, why do they still keep filming? Six minutes (which was at least a minute longer than I told myself I was going to give it).

Review – Hoffa

They do a good job of making Jack Nicholson look like Jimmy Hoffa and a great job making Jimmy Hoffa look like an asshole. The puzzling part is whether he was supposed to be the hero, some kind of half-baked anti-hero, or the villain of his own story. I’m guessing the actual goal as expressed in the pitch meeting involved adjectives such as “gritty” and “warts and all.” The result is, well, warty. I was particularly astounded by the scene in which Hoffa’s most trusted lieutenant (played by director Danny DeVito) pulls a mob hit on a deer. That was fairly typical of the rest of the production. Mildly amusing

Review – The Host

The creature in this Korean production is the best movie monster I’ve seen in years. Every time the thing is onscreen I wanted to give this four stars. Unfortunately, the rest of the picture is a bit less consistent. After a schoolgirl is kidnapped by a beast that suddenly emerges from the local river, the kid’s ne’er-do-well father and his eccentric family defy the authorities and risk their lives to try to find her. The family is a little too goofy for my taste, and sometimes the plot twists don’t make a lot of sense even from an okay-this-is-supposed-to-be-goofy perspective. But oh, that monster. Worth seeing

Review – Popcorn

For a crappy slasher movie from the early 90s, this is an unusual bit of fun. A group of film students set up a horror movie marathon fundraiser at a local theater. The movies they select all have William-Castle-style gimmicks associated with them. Unfortunately for our youthful protagonists, a killer starts offing them one by one using tricks connected to the gimmicks. If you aren’t a fan of Castle’s milieu, you may not enjoy this as much as I did. However, if you’ve gotta have a psycho-killer, at least he ought to have an entertaining MO. This one does. Mildly amusing

Maybe it's just that Mark Zuckerberg already has enough money

Last night at the ballgame we got stuck in front of one of those Yoda-like (at least in his own head) fountains of wisdom about everything in the universe.

When the guy noticed that I was keeping score on my iPad, suddenly we had to have a conversation about computers.

"Do you know why I don't use Facebook?" he asked.

"Because you're concerned about identity theft?" was my actual reply. Right answer, as it turned out.

Other options that would have been much better:

"Because you don't have any friends?

"Because you don't cotton to those new-fangled computemy boxes?

"Because one of the terms of your parole is that you can't use social media sites?

"Tell me if I'm getting close here."

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I've made some progress on 8sails updates since last I wrote, but I've gotten snagged on the entry for April 4. It's supposed to include the March movie summary, which means I have to finish uploading all the March reviews first. Working backward has its disadvantages.

On the other hand, less than a week now before classes end and I can get down to serious work on the Survival Guide.

Review – 8213: Gacy House

So we’re going to do the Blair Witch thing only at John Wayne Gacy’s house? Oh, where to begin? For starters – as the opening text freely acknowledges – the house no longer exists. And even when it was there, it was a modest bit of suburbia rather than the rambling manse that hosts this production. Indeed, that middle-class normalcy was a big part of what made Gacy and his burial ground so creepy. Like The Blair Witch Project, this manages a reasonable bit of spookiness at the very end. But this small bit of horror kibble in no way justifies enduring the rest of the agonizing experience. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – To the Devil ... a Daughter

To the audience ... some boredom. Honestly, the only time this movie isn't painfully dull is when it's repulsively offensive. For example, for the sake of peacefully digesting your dinner, don’t look up how old Nastassja Kinski was when she did the nude scene toward the end. An excommunicated priest (Christopher Lee) is trying to put the demonic spirit of Astaroth (depicted as a spread-eagled parody of the crucifixion) into the body of a young nun (Kinski). And only a novelist (Richard Widmark) can stop him. Which he does, rather abruptly and without further explanation at the end. Though I can see why Hammer Studios might have wanted to move away from their usual chain-rattling horror fare from the 1960s, I’m certain this wasn't the right direction to move in. If nothing else, it served as a point of departure between Hammer and Lee. What a shame. See if desperate

Review – The Tomb (2009)

I don’t get movies like this. It’s sufficiently different from Poe’s “Ligeia” that it can’t bask in the glow of The Divine Edgar’s brilliance. Yet it isn’t different enough to avoid making all the key plot twists completely predictable. The filmmakers also seem sex-with-their-clothes-on squeamish about nudity and yet include completely gratuitous partial frontal in a club scene. The result is a movie that got made despite the apparent absence of anyone who knew what kind of movie they wanted to make. The lack of direction – coupled with the “don’t even imply that you’re going to show me animal snuff” shots of a rat in a cage with a snake – made this far worse than it needed to be. Wish I’d skipped it

Review - Fair Game

One thing about the Valerie Plame case that’s always puzzled me is why nobody ever seems to have anything bad to say directly about Robert Novak. Sure, Scooter Libby is the big villain (along with a handful of other folks in the Bush/Cheney White House). But if a liberal pundit had disclosed secret information that ruined the career of a CIA operative and compromised the safety of agents cooperating with her in other countries, the conservative media would be all over the serious ethics concerns raised by such an irresponsible act. And yet for Novak barely even a mention. Oh well. Overall this is a typical Hollywood telling of a reasonably interesting tale. Naomi Watts is pretty. Sean Penn is earnest. The whole thing is preachy. But as a makes-you-mad story, it does the job. Mildly amusing

Abandoned – Terror Tract

Three animals die in less than three minutes. Sure, one of them was an earthworm. But then the second one was a songbird and the third was a cat deliberately chased into the street and run over. This apparently pointless parade looked like it probably presaged the “sense of humor” the movie was going to employ.

Review – Salt

So if they make the movie fast and loud enough, nobody will notice that it doesn’t make any sense, right? An American secret agent (Angelina Jolie) turns out to be a Soviet mole, but she balks at her job because she’s fallen in love. And when they kill her husband … let the car chases commence! Perhaps if there are enough folks out there who like big, expensive video games better than they like movies, this will net the sequel so obviously set up by the ending. Mildly amusing