The eight best media moments of 2011 - Nyan Cat

And Number One: Nyan Cat!

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

Review – The Great Train Robbery

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

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Moneyball

Number two: Moneyball

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

Review – Memphis Belle

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

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Everybody Poops

Number three: Everybody Poops

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

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Honey Badger

Number four: The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger

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

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

Number five: Guy on a Buffalo

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

The eight best media moments of 2011 - This blog

Number six: This blog

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

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Science book

Number seven: The Gary Busey science book

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

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Deadwood

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

Without further ado:

Number eight: Deadwood on Blu-ray

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

Review – Twelve o’ Clock High

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

Review – Learning Curve

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

The 12 days of do you really need that

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

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

12 Rorschach coasters

11 nerdy pencils

10 custom Muppets

9 smoking bunnies

8 walnut rockets

7 bad swear snow globes

6 candid doormats

5 hooooooooowling rings

4 squirrel games

3 Apple charts

2 airquote mittens

And an elaborate outdoor cooker

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

Review – Eye of the Killer

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

Review – 30 Seconds Over Tokyo

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

Review – Jesus Christ Superstar

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

The Scarface Café

 

A scary moment

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

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