Auld acquaintance 2012

The Grim Reapster was a busy boy this year. Notables from Neil Armstrong to Rodney King gave us pause to recall where we were when humanity first landed on the Moon or ran short in Los Angeles. The entertainment world lost a few elder statespersons, such as Andy Griffith, Ernest Borgnine and Phyllis Diller.

But the theme for 2012 appeared to be premature passing. Actors from Michael Clarke Duncan to Robert “Epstein” Hegyes sent me off to IMDb to check a feeling that the recently departed weren’t all that old. Even a life as controversy-filled as Whitney Houston’s didn’t seem like it got to run its full course. Indeed, Tony Scott almost made the official list not by virtue of his contributions to Hollywood decades ago but because his brain-cancer-prompted bridge-plummet suicide was dramatic enough that it could have been the end to one of his movies.

With due deference to the many folks who didn’t make the list, the following eight people were remarkable even in a field of respected media masters.

Ray Bradbury – You are now reading words written by me thanks in no small part to Ray Bradbury. The Halloween Tree and The Martian Chronicles were great personal favorites way back in my early years when I first began to develop the notion that writing might be a fun thing to do. As I got older I lost some of my appreciation for his sweetly sentimental view of life (not that all his stuff was sweet; “Fever Dream” still creeps me out). But I always respected his skill as a writer and his contributions to the worlds of novels, short stories, television and movies. Were I the black-arm-band-wearing sort, I would have worn one to mark his passing.

Don Cornelius – As a kid I hated Soul Train. I had no particular animosity for the music or the show’s host. But the long wail of “It’s the Sooooooooooooooooul Train!” signaled that Saturday morning cartoons were over. Though running a show in such a dreadful time slot wasn’t the height of respect from station owners, Cornelius’s creation nonetheless became one of the most successful shows in first-run syndicated TV history. Sadly, in the end Cornelius joined Scott on the list of suicides prompted by declining health.

Nora Ephron – For better or worse, Ephron’s work reshaped romantic comedy in the late 80s and early 90s. When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail helped establish genre conventions still in use today.

Donna Summer – Being known as the Queen of Disco might not seem like much of an honor now, but back in the 70s it was a big deal. Summer’s songs were the sound of an era. Without “Hot Stuff,” disco wouldn’t have been the same (and that one actually hit somewhat late in the game). Even if her music had never gone anywhere, she would still have been worth it just for her album covers.

Helen Gurley Brown – Hard to imagine a time when Cosmopolitan was at the forefront of sexual freedom for women. Lists of ways to drive your man wild in bed seem outmoded now, but in the 1960s Cosmo represented an acknowledgement that sex might actually be fun rather than just an ugly duty performed for the sake of maintaining a marriage. As the magazine’s editor and a successful book author on the side, Brown helped usher in big changes in publishing and society.

Gore Vidal – Gifted essayist. Prolific novelist. Forget all that. The man wrote the screenplay for Caligula and once came ever-so-close to getting into a fistfight with William F. Buckley on national television. What more could anyone do to make the list?

Kodak – Corporations don’t really die. But in January this former mainstay of the photography world filed for Chapter 11 protection. In February it pulled out of the digital camera business, and in August it announced that it would sell several of its remaining operations, most notably the lion’s share of its film manufacturing division. This isn’t just the passing of a company. It’s the official acknowledgment of the end of an era. Kodak dominated the photographic film business for more than 100 years, starting with George Eastman’s invention of roll film. Now Kodak’s bread and butter has joined open-air cooking and horseback riding on the list of things we might do for fun every once in awhile but don’t rely on as part of our everyday lives.

Maurice Sendak – For the second year in a row the list ends with the heartbreaking loss of a beloved children’s book author. Sendak would have been a great loss to the world even if Where the Wild Things Are had been his sole creation. But then there was Higglety Pigglety Pop! And then there was The Nutshell Library. And then there was Really Rosie. And then there was ... well, everything else he ever did. And he was actively creating new work up until right around his death. So his passing really did deprive the world of a good opportunity to be less terrible. He will be missed.

My eight favorite Thanksgiving movies

Thanksgiving lacks movies. Halloween? Plenty. Christmas? Oh please. But the holiday in between doesn’t have a clear cinema tradition other than the common practice of fleeing family gatherings for the relative peace of the movie theater. So let’s remedy this injustice. The holiday is about three things: gratitude, togetherness and eating. So at this festive time of year let’s get together and be grateful for movies about eating.

Specifically, movies about people eating people. I’m not trying to do the whole vegetarian “imagine the turkey was you” thing (though it is at least something to think about). It’s just that movies about cannibals tend to be more fun than movies about gourmets. To keep things simple, this list excludes people-eating zombies (after all, as Dr. Millard Rausch pointed out in Dawn of the Dead, “They don’t eat each other”). I don’t care for Italian shock movies from the 1970s, so the list also omits that particular sub-set of the cannibal sub-genre.

Still, that leaves us with a lot of movies to pick from. Especially these eight:

Texas Chainsaw Massacre – Rough as it is, this is still the ultimate “country folk will eat you” picture. Loosely based on the crimes of Wisconsin cannibal Ed Gein, this movie will leave you with at least a scrap of doubt the next time you eat a hot dog, sausage or any other kind of mystery meat.

Something from the Ed Gein list – Speaking of the Butcher of Plainfield, Gein has served as the inspiration for many a movie, some better than others. In keeping with the theme, I suggest one of the productions that sticks closer to the true story (Deranged or Ed Gein) rather than the looser, classier adaptations (Psycho and Silence of the Lambs).

The Hills Have Eyes – The Web tells me someone made a movie directly based on the exploits of Sawney Beane and his cave-dwelling, cannibal family. However, IMDb doesn’t have a listing for it, which suggests that it hasn’t been released yet. While we’re waiting, we’ll just have to be content with The Hills Have Eyes, a Beane-inspired desert romp directed by Wes Craven.

Motel Hell – It does indeed take all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters. You’ll be a huge hit at the family dinner table if you volunteer to say grace and then offer up “meat’s meat and a man's gotta eat!”

Parents – Most of the rest of the movies on this list assume that cannibalism is something you encounter only if you’re foolish enough to venture outside the safety of the suburbs. This entry brings the threat right into the wholesome family kitchen. And of course Thanksgiving leftovers can’t help but bring one mindful of the “leftovers to be” line from this movie.

Sweeney Todd – I didn’t want to go the whole list without one big budget production. And what would the holidays be like without musicals? Needless to say, the list of big-budget musicals about cannibalism is fairly short.

Ravenous – In honor of the Thanksgiving myth about the Wampanoag generously (if foolishly) sharing food with the Pilgrims, the last two entries feature the Wendigo. According to Algonquian legend, anyone who eats human flesh risks becoming possessed by an evil spirit that brings with it a horrible hunger that can never be satisfied. This picture pits the monster against a small band of soldiers on the 19th century frontier.

“Skin and Bones” – If you’re watching this whole set as a Thanksgiving Day marathon, then by now you’re probably ready for something shorter and lighter. This episode from Fear Itself meets the short requirement, but it’s by far the creepiest entry on the list.

The Dumbass Manifesto

 or The Gospel According to Product Liability Lawyers

I really want to know what silica packing gel tastes like.

Hot coffee is hot? Really? I had no idea.

The filling of hot apple pies is hot too? Will wonders never cease?

Finding the plastic baby in king cake is even better luck if you eat it.

I am startled to learn that rat poison is poisonous.

I could easily shave five minutes off my morning if only I could take a bath and use an electric hair dryer to dry my hair at the same time.

Somebody told me once that the best way to clean lawnmower blades is to start the engine, turn the mower over and reach in with my hands.

This also works with garbage disposals.

Kids love to play with plastic bags. Suffocation, smuffocation.

I fully intend to use the commentary tracks on DVDs for a purpose other than entertainment as soon as I can figure out what that other purpose might possibly be.

Further, I plan to infer resemblances between characters in the movie and actual persons living or dead.

I need to keep my engine running while I’m pumping gas. What if I have to make a quick getaway or something?

And why is it that it’s okay for me to talk on my cell phone while I’m in distracted control of a potentially accident-causing vehicle but not while I’m pumping my gas?

I have an allergy to fish. Tell me, o wonderous sign on the Long John Silver’s drive-thru window, is seafood prepared at this location?

One from a reader: a cell phone that came with this admonition, “Do not place in microwave, clothes dryer or pressure cooker.” Now, I can see the deal with microwaves and dryers, which come with their own timers. But when using a pressure cooker, it would be really handy to toss a phone in so the chicken can call you when it’s done.

My eight favorite Martin Luther King Day movies

We just managed to survive a month largely dedicated to one specific holiday. Every year Hollywood cranks out still more Christmas-themed movies, further adding to the hype and hysteria. Nobody in their right mind wants to see Martin Luther King Day receive similar treatment.

For starters, by now we’re all sick of holiday craziness. One of the beauties of MLK Day is that it automatically comes with built-in dignity, a welcome antidote to the month of December. Further, many suggest that we treat King’s celebration as a “day on” rather than a day off. The idea is to get out into the community and do something good for someone rather than sitting around the house watching holiday-themed movies.

However, there are at least a handful of films out there that celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dedication to social justice, racial equality and nonviolence. Enough at least to allow you to devote some TV time to something more than mindless entertainment.

In a way this list wrote itself after I set one simple standard: each movie had to be primarily about somebody who wasn’t white. It’s amazing how frequently movies about civil rights struggles turn out to be about a white person’s experience of the problem. Cry Freedom and Mississippi Burning come immediately to mind. Fortunately, I was able to come up with eight exceptions (even if half the pictures on the list were directed by Spike Lee).


Gandhi – Both Dr. King and this movie were inspired by Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution in India. Ben Kingsley does a great job in the title role, helping audiences truly appreciate the man and his importance not only in his homeland but in the world as a whole.

Malcolm X – Dr. King and Malcolm X are often inaccurately treated as the carrot and the stick of the civil rights movement. And of course as the stick part of the equation Malcolm X often gets cast as a white-people-hating demon. This movie does an outstanding job of considering its subject as a multi-dimensional person rather than a cardboard boogeyman. What a shame nobody (to my knowledge) ever made a movie this good about Dr. King.

Catch a Fire – For the next three entries we cross the Atlantic to Africa, where many places have racial problems that make America’s still pretty bad situation look like a birthday present. This movie about an anti-Apartheid rebel does an excellent job of examining not only institutionalized racism but also the root causes of violence and the true value of pacifism.

Hotel Rwanda – And then sometimes the violence gets completely out of control. How can anyone keep a peaceful spirit in the middle of a world given over to mass slaughter? This tale of a hotel manager trying to rescue people from genocide demonstrates the value of nonviolence even in the most extreme conditions.

Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony – This documentary about protest music in South Africa is an excellent portrait of a brutally oppressed people finding subtle ways to fight back. Though I don’t think Dr. King would have thought much about the violent content of some of the lyrics, at least singing about violence is a step removed from actually committing it.

When the Levees Broke – Back home now. In the United States we have a genuinely astounding ability to pretend that problems aren’t actually happening. This epic documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina reminds us that no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that we’ve erased race and class lines (or at least rendered them irrelevant), they’re still very real and have very real consequences.

Bamboozled – The mainstream media really don’t take criticism well, not even when they richly deserve it. Thus it came as no surprise when this movie got buried in initial release (I’d never even heard of it until I happened to notice the disc in the video store). The production paints with a broad brush, satirizing racial ignorance by suggesting that a TV show designed to be as racist as possible could turn out to be a smash hit. Oh to live in a world where such a thing seemed less possible.

Do the Right Thing – And finally, here’s the “if you see only one” moment. More than two decades have passed since this movie’s theatrical release, and in that time the film industry (even Lee himself) has seldom if ever had anything this honest to say about the uncomfortable subject of race.

Auld acquaintance

I thought I’d take a page from the Academy Awards’ book and do a parade of dead people (always the highlight of the Oscars ceremony, at least when they don’t screw it up). This year we lost some real notables, such as Harry Morgan and Anne Francis. And some assholes, such as Kim Jong Il and Osama Bin Laden. And some folks who were genuinely important to the world, such as these:

Steve Jobs – This would have been a big media moment based solely on the amount of coverage it got. But we should also pause to remember the contributions made by the Willy Wonka of the Computer Industry. Sure, some of Apple’s innovations were genuine breakthroughs in computing and media. But for every wow-that’s-brilliant Everlasting Gobstopper, the company hatched at least two or three whimwormulous chocolate-churning rivers (the Lisa) or giant candy bars turned into regular-sized candy bars (releasing new products less functional than their old products). Anyone who’s ever installed the first release of a new Apple operating system has some idea what it feels like to turn into a giant blueberry. [Credit where credit is due: the term “whimwormulous” comes from a Saturday Night Live skit in which Al Gore played Willy Wonka’s accountant brother.]

Elizabeth Taylor – Normally “Hollywood royalty” wouldn’t be eligible for the list because that’s pretty much everything we’re against. But I’m making an exception for Liz Taylor for two reasons. First, she actually did a few good roles over the years. But more importantly, she left her massive jewelry collection to charity, instructing in her will that her jewels be auctioned off and the proceeds used to fight AIDS and help animals. The auction ended up bringing in five or six times more than experts predicted, a $130 million gift to some genuinely worthy folks. Hopefully everyone who mocked her for her weight gain and her divorces is at least a little sorry now.

Vann Nath – It’s a miracle that anyone caught up in the killing fields of Cambodia survived the 1970s, let alone making it all the way to 2011. Despite being targeted as an intellectual, Nath placated the Khmer Rouge by painting pictures for the government, including portraits of Pol Pot. One of only seven inmates to survive the notorious S-21 prison, he devoted the rest of his life to painting brutally frank pictures of his experiences and working as a human rights activist.

Kate Swift – One of my obsessive tics as a writer is the careful alternation between “she” and “he” (just went back and changed the order) for generic third person singular examples. It’s one of the few pause-and-think-about-it distractions I actually appreciate, because it helps make the message more inclusive. Kate Swift and her partner Casey Miller pioneered this sort of scrutiny of passive sexism in language. Though some of her suggested corrections never caught on – such as “genkind” in place of “mankind” (I find “people” works as a reasonable substitution in most cases) – she at least got us all thinking about what we say and how we say it.

Sherwood Schwartz – Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a story of a lovely lady. Sherwood Schwartz brought us both Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, forever cementing his spot in the Postmodern Ironic Revival Hall of Fame. Though The Bunch never did much for me, I admit to faithfully following Gilligan reruns when I was a kid. To this day I can’t hear “March of the Toreadors” without thinking of Polonius.

Don Harman – If you don’t live in the Kansas City metro area, just go ahead and skip to the next entry. Many of us within the WDAF broadcast radius managed to have at least a little affection for weatherman Don Harman. As is typical with members of his profession, on air he came across as a goof. But he was a pleasant goof, the kind of guy you’d laugh at politely rather than shoo out of your cubicle at work. Clearly there was some darkness behind the scenes, as he killed himself late this year. Turns out he was the sort of person you don’t realize you miss until he’s permanently gone.

Borders Books – Speaking of things I didn’t think I’d miss. When it was still around, Borders struck me as the Wal-Mart of bookstores. It was a huge chain that tended to run small, independent stores out of business. But then it turned out it wasn’t the biggest fish in the pond, driven to bankruptcy largely by competition from Amazon. Though I figured I wouldn’t particularly care about its demise, I found I actually missed having a big bookstore to wander around in, especially when I needed to kill some time between an afternoon event and dinner.

Russell Hoban – When I was growing up, society’s gender stupidity held that boys were supposed to like stories about boys and girls were supposed to like stories about girls. At least in my life, Frances the Badger put a stop to that. Frances is – in words intended to describe a different badger – “really pretty badass.” She deals with common childhood challenges – new sibling, finicky eating, jerk friend – with an earnest cleverness that’s impossible not to love. And as if that wasn’t enough, Russell Hoban also gave us The Little Brute Family, who were wonderfully entertaining aside from being a little more treacly than Frances. Wonderful illustrations from Garth Williams and his then-wife Lillian didn’t exactly hurt. Plus he enjoyed a separate career writing novels for adults. The world is a poorer place when such people pass.

Eight movie characters’ jobs I’d love to have

Here's a question that often surfaces whenever the topic of discussion is "the movies" and someone needs an ice breaker question. If you could be any character in any movie, whom would you be? An action hero like Indiana Jones? A romantic lead like Ilsa or Rick from Casablanca? Someone noble like Atticus Finch?

Not me. I want to be a Honky Horn Guy.

You've seen these musicians in every historical epic ever made. They stand there in the background, looking snappy in their ornate uniforms and big, snazzy hats (they always get the best hats). They have the ultimate in job security. Archdukes and senators can get their heads lopped off left and right, but even the maddest monarch never bothers with the Honky Horn Guys. And best of all, their job is about as easy as it gets. These things aren't trumpets or saxophones or something that takes actual talent to play. As near as I can tell, it's strictly a case of "put your lips on it and blow." Caesar approaches! Do do do do do WAAAAAA! His majesty will now pronounce his verdict! Do do do do do WAAAAAA! So let it be written, so let it be done! Do do do do do WAAAAAA!

I can do that.

If there aren't any openings in the Honky Horn Corps (and that's gotta be a job in high demand), then I'm willing to settle for Palace Mumbler. These folks never seem to have anything to say right out loud until the trend of current events becomes clear. Then ever-so-softly they speak the collective mind. Moses is being dragged away in chains to be exiled to Sinai? Someone has to stand there muttering "Do not look upon him" or "Traitor to Pharaoh" while he slowly makes his exit. Cecil B. DeMille was especially fond of these folks. So fond, indeed, that every once in awhile he'd give such a person an actual line to deliver.

If I could be just one of these one-line wonders, it would have to be the Captain of the Guard from The Ten Commandments. When they're evicting Dathan The Chief Hebrew Overseer (Edward G. Robinson) from his house, Dathan naturally wants to know where he and the rest of the Israelites are going. "To hell, I hope!" is the guard's only reply. Oh to have le mot juste come so trippingly to my tongue and be able to utter it without fear of consequences!

On a related career path, one of the cushiest jobs in moviedom is Castle Guard for the Wicked Witch of the West. Sharp-looking uniform. Bad-ass halberd. And the job description apparently consists of "march up and down chanting oo-ee-oo-ee-oo-oo." I mean, their employer is a witch for crying out loud. It's not like she needs any actual guarding. Maybe throw yourself between her and a bucket of water every once in awhile. But that's it.

Working for a witch naturally raises a more general question about the benefits and drawbacks of playing for the wrong team. For example, the easiest job in the Star Wars series is the Imperial henchman who follows Darth Vader around and cleans up the bodies of the dudes he mind-strangles. Someone pisses Vader off, he Forces them to death, and out come the guys in black uniforms to cart off the corpse. Talk about a cushy detail. The only trick is to make sure to store up your leave and take it right before the rebels blow up the Death Star.

Another good way to avoid heavy duty is to be a character in a crowd scene directed by someone who can't do crowd scenes. The next time you're watching Scarface, keep an eye on the "energetic" participants in the riot scene in the beginning. My personal favorite – my movie job role model – is the one who lackadaisically waves his arms like a member of order Mustelidae and then quits entirely once the actors with lines make it past him.

Perhaps I could combine the pursuit of lassitude with my childhood ambition to be a spy. Obviously being James Bond or Jack Ryan isn't in the cards, but heroes like them have a need for people like me. As the bad stuff goes down and the protagonist is out in the field battling the forces of evil, back at HQ the head of Central Intelligence / MI-6 / Mossad / whatever stands around nervously monitoring the mission's progress. And in the background they always have a hearty compliment of men and women in suits who do nothing but look intense and mumble things to one another.

Given the circumstances, one could be forgiven for assuming that whatever they're saying must be of great importance. But then I used to think the same thing about mound conferences in baseball. When the manager walks slowly to the center of the field to have a brief palaver with a struggling pitcher, I always figured that out there where the fans can't hear he's drawing some brilliant parallel between the Athenian victory over Xerxes at Salamis and the importance of keeping the runner close at first. But after actually hearing audio recorded during some of these mound trips, I note that they tend to be more like "Hey, Mike. Everything going okay?" "Yeah sure, Ed." "Okay then, go get 'em."

I'll bet the Spy Movie HQ Mumblers are doing the same thing. Sure, they look like they're hashing out the details of bringing NATO's nuclear arsenal to bear in the event of mission failure. But if the boom mic accidentally drifted in their direction, all we'd learn is where they're going for pizza after work.

Every once in a rare while I wake up on the right side of the bed and sally forth into the world looking to actually accomplish something. And when such a rare mood strikes me, the movie job I want is Prosecuting Attorney in a Tense Courtroom Drama. For starters, these folks are almost always smart and almost always cynical. On a good day I can a mange that. But the real attraction of the job is the moral stance. After years of watching the Royals play the Yankees, I've become thoroughly convinced that being right is more important than winning.

And that's the prosecutor's job description in a nutshell. No matter haw talented or intelligent she is, the DA is going to lose to the wily defense lawyer. Ah, but the final twist more often than not is that the defendant really was a vicious psychopath whose acquittal places innocent lives at risk. If only that stupid jury had listened to me ...

However, if I could really be one movie character, one guy who would be cool and fun rather than merely easy, I'd pick Kyuzo the master swordsman from The Seven Samurai. This guy is the ultimate Feudal Japanese badass. He's the best at what he does – which just happens to be killing bad guys – and he never loses his total sense of calm and control. Never draws his sword unless he has to, but when he does things are usually over quickly. If a mad scientist somehow gene-spliced Bruce Lee and Mr. Spock and then endlessly drilled his creation in kenjitsu, Kyuzo is what you'd get.

For that I'd even be willing to give up my dream of joining the Honky Horn ranks.

Eight crappy bands with cool names

Because sometimes the picture on the label turns out to be way better than what's in the can.

 

The Foo Fighters

The Name: Back in World War Two, bomber crews often flew long missions during which they were strapped immobile in their seats for hours and hours. Such prolonged sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations, particularly the false image of blobs of light flying around the aircraft. Nicknamed "foo fighters" by the crews, the phenomenon drew serious attention from military intelligence until they determined that the blobs were imaginary and not some kind of top secret, high speed enemy aircraft.

The Band: After Nirvana broke up, drummer Dave Grohl (not exactly the group's talent powerhouse) founded Foo Fighters. Their big claim to fame (other than Grohl's battles with Courtney Love over Nirvana song royalties) was a video exploiting/parodying uber-dork ads for Mentos.

 

White Zombie

The Name: Back before George Romero was even born, Bela Lugosi played the bad guy in White Zombie, considered the first feature-length zombie movie and a watershed moment in the development of the sub-genre.

The Band: Oh Rob Zombie, you just suck. Seriously, even the good stuff this guy does immediately turns to crap thanks to the adulation of his crap-loving fans.

 

Steely Dan

The Name: At one point in William S. Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch, one of the characters employs a strap-on sex toy called Steely Dan III.

The Band: Then several years later a couple of jazz fusion dildos formed a band of the same name. [Though the joke was kinda obvious, I should admit that I didn't come up with it. If I remember the original source, I'll add a cite here.]

 

Uriah Heep

The Name: As a Dickens bad guy, Uriah Heep isn't bad. He's snaky, greedy, ugly, everything you'd want in a Victorian villain. David Copperfield wouldn't be the same without him.

The Band: So why name a group after such a creep? Only this band knows for sure. They're credited along with Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin with pioneering the kind of music played by such bands. If you view that as a good thing, likely you won't agree with me about this entry.

 

Styx

The Name: As most folks learn sometime before graduating from high school, the River Styx was the divider between the land of the living and Hades (the realm of the dead) in Greek mythology.

The Band: To be fair, Styx was no crappier than any other band from the arena rock era. At least until Dennis DeYoung talked his bandmates into inflicting "Kilroy Was Here" (cool name for a crappy album) on the world. "Mister Roboto" fans please contemplate the meaning of "guilty pleasure."

 

Pure Prairie League

The Name: In the old Western Dodge City, the Pure Prairie League was a cinematic stand-in for the Women's Christian Temperance Union, a group of fanatic teetotalers known throughout the Old West for trashing saloons.

The Band: If Carrie Nation had lived long enough to hear these monsters of lite rock from the last gasps of music on AM, she would no doubt have turned her hatchets on radios everywhere in the name of protecting helpless youth from painfully mediocre music.

 

Tree of Woe

The Name: In one of the more philosophical moments in Conan the Barbarian, bad guy Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) gives the title character (Arnold Schwarzenegger) a lecture about the principle of "mind over matter." Concluding that the barbarian is too simple and selfish to understand the concept, Doom wraps up with the observation that "People have no grasp of what they do." Then he suggests that Conan "Contemplate this on the Tree of Woe." [It's traditional at this point for everyone in the room to shout "Whoa!"] The next shot finds our hero enjoying the recommended "think time" while nailed to a tree.

The Band: To be honest, for all I know these guys could be the next Velvet Underground. However, their web site makes them look like they're probably pretty familiar with venues that include pool tables, arm wrestling competitions and a host of other "audience distractions." Besides, even a good band would have trouble living up to the coolness of their name.

 

Sucking Chest Wound

The Name: A sucking chest wound is a traumatic injury that opens the chest cavity and draws air in through the hole when the victim inhales. You can tell when you have one because of the sucking, hissing sound it makes. That and the agonizing pain.

The Band: Okay, this one's a cheat. If the 8sails staff had ever formed our own garage band, this is what we would have called it. But despite our kick-ass name, we probably would have justified only the first word.

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.

The eight biggest media moments of 2010

This has been a crazy year. Truth be told, I’ve been so caught up with non-media stuff that a lot of the things I’d normally focus on got ignored. Still, it was an eventful year. Here are the highlights.

Show death – Several of the shows we regularly watched ran their final episodes this year. Oddly, none of them got the rug yanked out from under them. So at least they got the chance to wrap things up in tidy, story-arc-friendly ways. Lost was the most notable casualty, Abrams and company running out of weirdness and calling it quits even though they probably could have kept drawing audiences for another season or two. Likewise The Tudors concluded with Henry VIII’s death, a natural enough place to stop even though they could have continued to follow the Tudor monarchies with additional episodes if they’d been inclined.

More show death – On the other hand, 24 met a more traditional slipping-ratings death. In its heyday it drew a ton of attention and more than a little controversy, but by the end it passed on not with a bang but a whimper. They could have killed it more dramatically, but honestly it wouldn’t have mattered. Too bad, too. When it was going strong it was actually fairly entertaining.

The Lawrence Welk Easter show – Easter weekend was a strange time for me. That Saturday the strangeness was compounded when I found myself in a waiting room while a nearby television screened KCPT’s broadcast of an old Lawrence Welk Easter show. His cadre of abnormally cheerful regulars all dressed as giant, brightly-colored, fuzzy bunnies, ducklings and chicks singing about Peter Cottontail and Abbot the Rabbit … well, it was all just a little much.

My semi-triumphant return to the movie theater – For the past few years I’ve been avoiding movie theaters. Though this change in my media habits was completely justified, I admit I did miss the big screen experience a bit. So with the assistance of some fellow filmgoers I managed to make it to a few more theater-screened movies this year. Though it wasn’t exactly a “thank goodness I decided to come back” experience, it was at least a little nice to be back.

The death of the printed version of the Advocate – I’m a big fan of dead tree newspapers. Thus it was with great pain that I helped the staff of the student newspaper I advise to make the transition from print to web-only. Though it saddened me greatly to make the change, the time for change had come.

The Tea Party on the dance show – For some reason Sarah Palin’s daughter’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars seemed to cause quite a stir. Sure, she was talentless. Yes, the Tea Partiers out there kept calling in and voting for her. That’s America. If nothing else, it should serve as a sobering reminder that “Palin should run in 2012 because Obama will beat her easily” could be famous last words.

Midterm elections nonsense – And speaking of elections, we sat through another one. They just seem to get more and more vicious each time. It makes me shudder to think about what we’ll be “treated” to the next time around.

The phone, the phone – For the longest time the Lens household resisted any kind of Internet presence in the house. It just seemed too much like work creeping into our personal lives. But in June the time came to replace our old cell phones, and we made the jump to smart phones. That got the ball rolling, and by the end of the year we had a WiFi hub in the house. Time and tide.

Eight reasons why books are hard to review

Even a quick scan of this blog’s contents cloud shows one thing clearly: I have a lot more movie reviews than anything else. That’s in part because my book reviews are on Goodreads rather than here. But it’s also partially because I don’t read as many books as I’d like.

Oh, and books are harder to review. Much harder. Here are eight reasons why:

Educated people are taught to respect books – For the vast majority of the thousands of years of recorded human history, books – in one form or another – have stored our knowledge for us. Keeping this tradition alive requires what all living traditions need: a certain measure of reverence. Parents pass this sense of respect to their children, and teachers pass it to their students.

One of the few lectures I still remember from high school all these decades after graduation is the lesson one history teacher taught us about the crime of book burning. “Never burn a book,” he admonished. “Even if you don’t like it, that book might have something important to say to someone else.” To this day I have trouble throwing away even outdated phone books.

I notice this bias creeping into my reviews as well. While a talentless filmmaker can expect to get kicked rapidly to the curb, a similarly incompetent author is far more likely to get an “at least they tried” response.

They require undivided attention – A good movie commands complete attention while it’s on. But the vast majority of movies out there don’t merit such an intense time commitment. Instead, one can easily attend to something else (such as writing a top eight list) while keeping an eye on a movie playing in the background just to make sure that nothing especially good or bad gets missed. Books can’t be handled that way. You’re either reading it or you aren’t.

They take longer to finish – In addition to their resistance to “multitasking,” books are simply slower going. I know some folks can speed read (and others think they can), but I’m not among them. At full steam I can finish a book a week, though life’s little distractions often keep me at a slower pace. In that amount of time I’ll typically watch and review seven to ten movies.

They’re more emotionally involving – Because books require such a high commitment of time and mental energy, the reader often ends up in a “mini relationship” with them. “Books are our friends” sounds like it should be followed by “but they won’t pick you up at the airport.” But in a way we do make friends with the books we read. To be sure, some of them are friends we dislike for one reason or another. I admit that as I type this several weak books stare down at me from my shelves. They’re there because I had the experience of reading them, so now for better or worse they’re part of my life.

Even the bad ones can be good – Bad books have something to teach us. For example, I admit to being defeated by Henry James. I simply cannot bring myself to attempt any more of his stories. However, James teaches us by counter-example the importance of paragraph structure, narrative flow, and the wisdom of the old adage “brevity is the soul of wit.” Bad movies often cause the audience to merely lose interest, especially at home where distractions abound. Writing – from the best to the worst – is harder to ignore.

Sometimes the good ones are actually bad – By its nature the written word stimulates critical thinking. It makes our neurons fire in ways that most other media simply don’t. When watching an uninspiring movie that critics adore, it’s easy to keep one’s opinions to one’s self. Nod and smile and pretend you saw the Emperor’s fine new suit that everyone else seems to think is so grand. Books demand more from us. At the end of a “classic” that left you flat, you should be able to find specific fault with what you read, not merely shrug it off with a diffident teenager’s “that was boring.” Like a long distance run, the experience may not have been the most fun in the world, but at least it was good for you.

I find it easier to empathize with writers – When I was a lad I imagined that someday I would be a big-time movie director. The writing I’ve done for the last four and a half decades – combined with the extensive catalog of movies I never made – leads me to conclude that I may be a writer rather than a filmmaker. I’ve found this “defeat” easy to live with. I like words. I like sentences and paragraphs and stories and essays and novels and articles and you name it I probably like it. Even poetry, which I find hard to wrap my brain around, holds its charms. Thus I sympathize with the plight of anyone who struggles to bend words to her or his will. And I enjoy being in the company of the fruits of their labor.

Books need all the love they can get – Nobody reads books anymore, right? Wrong. The book publishing industry is thriving. Unfortunately, currently it thrives on garbage. Witless screed from pundits of all stripes. Celebrities who assure us we too can be fabulously famous if – like some wooden puppet in a Disney movie – we just believe with all our hearts. And any number of other similarly unworthy tomes biding their times on bookstore shelves and remainder bins. In this landfill of the mind, finding a book that genuinely calls to you is a moment to be treasured, and parting with a book – even a bad one – at the conclusion of the final page is a bittersweet moment.

My eight favorite robots

One of the most startling discoveries I made as a kid was that robots weren’t a 20th century invention. I’d assumed that the concept of a mechanical person would depend so heavily on electronics and other modern marvels that previous ages wouldn’t even have dreamed of such a thing.

But when I started reading Greek mythology, I found this wasn’t so. Thousands of years before such a thing would have been practically possible, spinners of myth were pondering the idea of building people out of metal.

Of course this discussion could rapidly devolve into hair-splitting about what can and can’t be considered a robot. Indeed, the term itself comes from a play about artificially created but non-mechanical workers, creatures that wouldn’t fit the image that the word now brings most readily to mind. Though the “replicants” of Blade Runner almost made the list, the robots here are all of the more standard mechanical ilk.

 

Robby – If you could have only one robot, Robby would be the guy. Living on a planet – even a forbidden one – with a deadly supernatural force is a small price to pay for owning a mechanical servant who can do most anything from cooking dinner to manufacturing diamonds in his spare time. Sure, his tone is a little smart-alecky at times. But that just gives him personality. He also deserves to top the list because he was the first big robot success story, a character that paved the way for cinema automatons everywhere.

C3PO – Sure, R2D2 is more popular. I can see why. Even a three-legged trashcan that can’t speak in anything but squeaks and beeps is still more likely to win the hearts and minds of moviegoers than a prissy android perpetually locked in fret mode. But hey, when Star Wars first hit theaters I was 11 and tended to fret too much myself. So it seemed to me like “goldenrod” was making good points about not getting into trouble. Besides, he looked more interesting than any of the other robots in the movie.

Huey, Dewey and Louie – This trio of walking boxes helped Bruce Dern tend to the last remaining fragments of wildlife in Silent Running. The movie overall is depressing and dumb (hence no review), but the robots in it are an odd combination of utilitarian and cute. It takes a little doing to give individual personalities to cubes with legs, but they manage to make it work.

The Terminator – I think we all knew Arnold Schwarzenegger would look like this if he ever peeled off his rubbery hide. And that’s when the Terminator gets really impressive. He’s okay when he can still pass for human, but when he gets stripped down to that shiny chrome skeleton, now that’s a scary robot. The scene in number one when the monster is chasing our heroes down a long, dark hallway is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Gort – On the surface, Klaatu’s sidekick from The Day the Earth Stood Still doesn’t seem to have much to him. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t water flowers or fix dinner. But for silent menace he can’t be beat. His design is particularly brilliant, his smooth, deco surfaces emphasizing just how attack-proof he is. I’d still rather have Robby in the kitchen, but Gort would be my choice for sentry to stand next to my cars while I’m asleep.

The Runaway spiders – I’m a big fan of the BEAM approach to robotics. The idea here is that it makes more sense to create lots of little, cheap robots for specific tasks than it does to make big, expensive, multi-purpose androids. Needless to say, such personality-free gizmos aren’t common in movies, where the need is greater for robots that can be characters that are voiced by actors. But in Runaway, the bad guy uses some BEAM-ish spiders to do his evil bidding. The plot even points out the big advantage to the BEAM scheme: a ton of tiny terrors is harder to evade than a single, human-sized opponent.

The Minoton – I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) that Ray Harryhausen never did more with robots. His Dynamation effects techniques were particularly well suited to mechanical creatures. But though he did some robot-like creatures from time to time – Talos in Jason and the Argonauts and the Kali statue in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad – the only real robot he ever did was the Minoton from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. It’s sadly under-utilized; a mechanical minotaur could have been a kick-ass bad guy rather than an elaborate outboard motor. But the design is still hard to beat. And true geek confession: I have models of all three of these aforementioned creatures sitting on a shelf above my desk.

Evil Maria – The robot in Metropolis is the ultimate in cinema injustice. She’s one of the first mechanical people ever to grace the silver screen, and her design set the bar impossibly high for every movie robot that followed. Further, the scene in which she’s transformed into a doppelganger of the heroine still impresses even in an age of computer effects a million times more sophisticated than what Fritz Lang had at his disposal in the 1920s. The rest of the movie is great as well, but I could sit through nothing but the robot sequences and still come away happy in the end.

My eight favorite aliens

To the question “Are we alone in the universe?” science fiction offers up a resounding “no.” The genre has served up innumerable inhabitants of countless worlds, everything from colossal beasts to dangerous microbes.

With so many to choose from, selecting eight was no easy task. I tried for a mix of different kinds of aliens, from the nearly human to the not-at-all. I also tried to choose creatures from movies that were worth watching (though in a couple of cases I had to bend that criterion at least a little).

And still the set suffers from weak spots. For example, some of the best aliens are the ones who come in peace to teach us something valuable about the universe and about ourselves. However, most of the visitors on this list are the other kind, the sort that seeks to subdue, study or just plain old eat us.

A quick note on the politics of the list: I’d made my choices and written most of the descriptions when I noticed that seven of the eight aliens were uninvited guests on Earth. This naturally raises questions about the parallels between movie xenophobia and real questions about undocumented immigrants, the folks who used to be called “illegal aliens.”

Space creatures have – for good or ill – occasionally stood in for marginalized members of society. They’ve also played other allegorical roles; for example, in the 1950s they frequently served as the Red Menace. More often, however, they’re intended to be exactly what they are: something more powerful than us with which we must contend or at least interact.

In any event, the closest any of the aliens on this list come to anything politically incorrect would be the immigrant street crime elements of Predator 2 (which didn’t actually make the list, though it has a class of creature in common with one of the following eight).

 

Aliens – It isn’t every species that can presume to go by the generic “Aliens.” But these bugs pull it off nicely. It helps that an artist – and a weird one at that – designed them. Plus they’re four aliens in one: the face hugger, the chest burster, the drone and the queen. After the second movie the series loses me a bit, but even in the bad ones the aliens still kick butt (indeed, the swimming alien was the highlight of number four).

Predator – If we’re going to include Aliens, then we’re also going to have to toss in their buddies the Predators. While most of Earth’s guests from outer space either come in peace or want to take over, all these guys want to do is get a little hunting in. I’ve seen these movies dozens of times (except for number three, for which I didn’t particularly care), and I still can’t quite decide if Stan Winston’s design of the creatures’ faces – the ultimate vagina dentata – is a “oh, cool!” or “ew, nasty!” moment. Still, I do love their M.O.

The Mutant from Metaluna – Most of the aliens in This Island Earth look just like we do (except they have bigger foreheads). But even though they show up claiming to need our help to save their planet, they turn out to have a scary-looking henchman. This “mutant” is the archetypal Bug-Eyed Monster with its huge, brain-looking head, fearsome claws and shiny space suit.

Martians – Of our three closest constant neighbors in the solar system, Mars seems to be the most constant source of alien invaders. At one point we figured we’d find people on the Moon when we got there, but they seldom seemed to have much interest in making a call on us. And of course Venus filled the heads of unimaginative screenwriters with visions of Zsa Zsa Gabor in an outlandish outfit that no inhabitant of a man-free world would ever put on. But Mars, ah, there be monsters. And they’re none too shy about engaging in a little interplanetary imperialism, either. Of all the denizens of the Red Planet, my favorite are the obnoxious little creeps from Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. They indulge in just about every evil alien cliché in the book.

The Blob – One of the most unfortunate tendencies of timid filmmakers is the inclination to anthropomorphize visitors from outer space. In a universe of nearly limitless possibility, I find myself consistently disappointed when the aliens turn out to be guys with rubber appliances glued to their foreheads. Thus anyone with the guts to break out of this mold commands at least a little respect. I concede that this movie suffers in the execution, turning into a story that seldom rises above Rebel Without a Cause versus A Giant Wad of Red Jell-o. Nonetheless, it musters a good-sized dose of creepiness solely from the extra-alien nature of the alien menace.

The body snatchers – On the other hand, alien invaders can also maximize their scariness by looking exactly like us. Indeed, the main awfulness of the body snatching menace is that they want to take our places and become us (or at least a weird simulation of us). Though this theme has been explored with varying degrees of success (and in the name of different psychological and political agendas) over the years, it always inspires a shudder or two.

It – Now consider the opposite thesis. The aliens in It Came from Outer Space look nothing like us, and as nonhumans they’re inherently to be feared. But then it turns out that the few humans who are willing to overcome their instincts and extend a little trust turn out to be correct about the nature of the visitors. Because all the other aliens on this list are out to do us harm, I wanted to include at least one intelligent example of the other possibility.

The Thing – This one is every imaginable form of alien menace rolled into one. It can be a ravening monster or look exactly like us. It can infect us from within before we even know what’s happening (not unlike The Andromeda Strain, a different kind of alien that nearly made this list). It’s a BEM, a body snatcher and an advanced case of AIDS. And it doesn’t exactly hurt that the movie going on around it is pretty good as well.

My eight favorite spaceships

If we’re going to the stars, we’re going to need a way to get there. That’s a simple enough proposition, but it gets complicated quickly. Physicists remind us about the trouble with traveling fast enough to get anywhere else without taking ages to get there. Psychologists and physiologists fret about the effects of spending long periods in the absence of Earth’s gravity.

Fortunately for us, movies seldom if ever concern themselves greatly with such weighty inquiries. They simply assume that in the future scientists will come up with something that violates Einstein’s speed limit and keeps us stuck to the floor while we’re on our way. Freed from worry about how we’ll make spaceships work, we can focus on more entertaining questions such as what they will look like and what they will do.

Here are eight particularly entertaining answers.

 

Saucers, saucers and more saucers – This could be a list all by itself. The notion of saucer-shaped spacecraft runs like a river through the genre. Aliens show up in them. They use them to freak us out and attack us. They try to leave in them. And for that matter, once we take to the stars ourselves we sometimes take a page from the aliens’ book. Though it’s impossible to pick just one example, the saucer had to be on the list.

The Space Ark - Of course the other “classic” spaceship design is the rocket, that long, skinny, shiny tribute to man’s desire to penetrate the heavens. Stainless deco rockets show up just about everywhere from Destination Moon to Bugs Bunny cartoons. But if I have to settle on a single example, I’ll go with the Space Ark from When Worlds Collide. It has the look and feel we need plus an out-of-the-ordinary horizontal launch track. Its role in a fun – if somewhat far-fetched – movie doesn’t exactly hurt, either.

The Executor – I’m guessing most Star Wars fans offered a choice of vehicles from the series would probably opt for the Millennium Falcon. I hate to say it, but I sorta share Princess Leia’s initial impression of Han Solo’s dragster. Instead, for my money the baddest ride in a galaxy far, far away is Darth Vader’s personal star destroyer, the Executor. The name’s a little awkward – is he going to execute people or just make sure their estates are properly distributed? – but for a combination of smooth design and awesome firepower this ship is hard to beat.

The Martian war machines – This one’s a bit of a cheat, because technically the Martians don’t use these to cross the vast gulfs of cold, empty space. Instead they use them after they arrive to trash the place, making them more like tanks than spacecraft. Though H.G. Wells had something more like the machines from the Steven Spielberg version in mind, I strongly prefer the smooth, deco styling of the George Pal production. These things kick our asses and look good doing it.

The moon bus – As noted in the list of our eight favorite sci fi movies, one of the great appeals of the genre is the implication that the extraordinary may someday become ordinary, that in the future we (or perhaps our descendants) will be able to journey to other planets with the same ease with which we currently travel to other cities. One of the big draws of 2001: A Space Odyssey is that it presents us with just such a world. Pan Am will be able to rocket us off to an orbiting hotel, and later we can visit the Moon. While we’re there, we’ll get around on moon buses, transports that look like a cross between a spaceship and a subway car. The familiar ordinariness of the thing is what makes it so appealing. In the present I might take the bus to work, but in the future I’ll use something similar to get around a place that now I can just dream about.

The Nostromo – On the other hand, the spaceship in Alien takes this almost too far. It’s a grim, greasy, dark place guaranteed to send shivers down the spine of anyone who’s ever worked in a factory. Who wants to imagine a future where the job market will be as miserable as it is today? Still, the industrial look and feel – combined with the quibbling in the script over Human Resources issues – make the setting and the monster eerily realistic.

The Thunder Road – I vaguely remember when I was a kid and I still had a sense of wonder or at least an imagination. Explorers combines a child’s ability to turn a pile of junk into a spacecraft with just enough alien tech to make the thing actually work. The aliens’ ships are clever as well. I wish I’d seen this movie when I was young enough to really appreciate it.

The Enterprise – To be completely precise, the original TV version of the Enterprise will always be nearest and dearest to my heart. Still, the slightly modified ship from the first couple of Star Trek movies is close enough for government work. The design incorporates both the saucer and the rocket into one awesome starship. But the thing that’s always intrigued me the most about it is the fact that it makes no sense from the perspective of those of us who live with gravity and aerodynamics. On Earth this thing would never fly, but in the boundless freedom of outer space it works perfectly. That makes it as forward-thinking as the series of which it was a vital part.

My eight favorite sci fi movies

So now here we are, in the century that was going to be the future. Actually, we’ve been here for a decade now, so by rights this list would have been more apropos ten years ago. But 8sails didn’t exist back then, so we’ll just have to play catch-up now.

“Science fiction” covers a lot of ground, from optimistic, outer-space extensions of Manifest Destiny to horrifying visions of future dystopias. A list of eight movies could never encompass the entire genre or even all the sci fi movies we like. These eight, however, all stand on their own merits in addition to being excellent representatives of their genre.

 

A Clockwork Orange – Though I don’t think Anthony Burgess’s novel should ever have been made into a movie, if a movie it had to be then this is the best it could have been. Malcolm McDowell turns in a delightfully over-the-top performance as a Teddy-Boy-of-the-Future robbed of his free will by a cruel experiment. From a sci-fi perspective, however, the real draw is the art direction. The picture’s world is Mid Century décor and architecture gone to hell, an eerily plausible alternative reality. The soundtrack’s creepy synthesizer distortion of familiar music doesn’t exactly hurt, either.

2001: A Space Odyssey – Sticking with Stanley Kubrick movies, let’s backtrack a picture to a more optimistic vision of the future. The Slab is the big star of the show, and of course the end sequence will probably continue to dazzle stoners for generations to come. But for my taste, the best parts are the small touches. For example, the space shuttle and space station both become more interesting via the addition of corporate logos. The suggestion is that this future isn’t entirely dissimilar to the real present, and someday we might be able to fly a Pan Am shuttle to an orbital Hilton just as easily as we can take a trip to Club Med now. It didn’t turn out to be true, but it was still a nice thought.

The Empire Strikes Back – I pretty much had to put one of the pictures in the Star Wars series on this list. The first one was a cultural phenomenon. This one was a better movie. This one won the spot.

1984 – This picture enjoys three big distinctions. First, it’s a remarkably faithful adaptation of Orwell’s famous novel. Indeed, where the two differ the movie is sometimes better than the book. Second, it was shot in the year referenced in the title and on the locations envisioned by the author 36 years earlier, making it the only production (as far as I know) to ever pull off this particular stunt. And third, it’s a really good movie. Depressing as hell, but still well worth a look.

Metropolis – This is the great grandmother of all science fiction movies. Though it isn’t the first sci fi movie ever made (Melies started playing around with trips to the moon two or three decades before this), it’s a watershed moment in the genre’s development. Fritz Lang demonstrated that script, acting (naturally somewhat diminished by the conventions of the silent era), special effects and politics could be combined into a single production.

The Day the Earth Stood Still – Speaking of politics, it must have taken some guts to stand up in the middle of the Cold War and produce a movie suggesting that “the enemy” might be just as human as us, if not more so. The simple premise – that a species capable of surviving long enough to develop interstellar flight would almost by definition have to be both more powerful and more peaceful than us – is cleverly advanced by a plot full of entertaining twists and turns. Paranoia has rarely been so gently exposed or so aptly punished.

Blade Runner – This one already made the list of our eight favorite movies. Thus I’ll just add that it’s an important part of the genre’s history as well. The art direction makes it a key moment in the movement afoot at the time to break away from the deco-clean visions of tomorrow and make the future a grimy place not entirely dissimilar to the present.

Forbidden Planet – I think I’ve seen this one more often than all the rest of the entries on the list put together, which is saying something because several of these are part of my personal collection. It’s just such a wonderful combination of elements: the story, the script, the acting, the robot, the monster. Even the dated elements – such as the Theremin and some of the effects – still hold considerable charm. And on top of its individual merit, it’s also a seminal piece of sci fi cinema. Star Trek in particular owes this movie a considerable debt.

Eight songs I never want to hear at the ballpark again

As noted in a blog post last year, one of the perils of holding season tickets for a Major League Baseball team is that by the end of the season you’ve gotten a thorough dose of all the franchise’s between-innings entertainment gimmicks. The Hot Dog Derby. The Wee Tyke Home Run Challenge. The Shrieking Host Trivia Game. And most of all, any song that gets played on a regular basis.

Even a song you like turns stale after it’s played over and over. Further, at Kauffman Stadium – home of the perpetually cellar-dwelling Kansas City Royals – the combination of a good song and a heapin’ helpin’ of rotten baseball can turn into a Ludovico Treatment experience.

If such a thing can happen to a good piece of music, then songs that were nerve grating to begin with … well, consider these eight specimens.

 

Centerfield – Dreadful songwriters everywhere take note: if you have nothing but bad music in your soul but still want to share your “gift” with the world, just stick a baseball reference into your work somewhere. Sing about being an all-star, or making the batter swing, or similar cliché. Back in the early 80s a talentless hack named Terry Cashman not only wrote a bad song about the sport – “Talkin’ Baseball” – but also adapted it with a different version for each MLB team. Now that’s marketing genius.

The all-time champ of this trick is former CCR front-man John Fogerty. “Centerfield” is the most goshawful parade of random clichés ever set to music. Honestly, this song could have been written by jotting baseball items – the sights and smells of summer, the names of some great players, references to “The Mighty Casey” and the like – onto index cards, shuffling them and putting pen to paper. Baseball fans are a sentimental lot, liable to go all teary-eyed over any reference to our beloved pastime. But surely we aren’t too simple minded to see through schlock like this. 

And if it was just ill-informed schlock, that might have been endurable. But Fogerty waves his ignorance around like a mascot with a victory banner after a home team win. The second verse is the main source of offense. It starts with the crap about Casey. Then it goes on to say “Say hey, Willie, tell Ty Cobb.” Even mentioning Willie Mays in the same breath with the virulent white supremacist Cobb is enough to toss the whole mess in the trash forever. But just to emphasize that he has no idea what he’s even singing about, he pronounces the racist bastard’s name “Tee.”

The final line in the verse is “Don’t say it ain’t so, you know the time is now.” Once again the songwriter’s stupidity rears its ugly head. I imagine a young fan looking up at Shoeless Joe Jackson and pleading “Don’t say it ain’t so, Joe.” Somewhere in that double negative, the tyke is begging his hero for assurance that he was indeed neck deep in a gambling scandal. Stupid stupid stupid.

The Boys of Summer – Taking the “baseball reference” thing one step farther, it turns out you don’t even have to make the song about the game. Just adding a familiar phrase or two is apparently enough to get your crap played at the ballpark. Take Eagles alum Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” This song has nothing to do with baseball. But because “boys of summer” is by sheer coincidence also a reference to baseball players, we have to spend season after season listening to Henley whine about getting old.

The Summer of 69 – And here’s another one. The Kansas City Royals franchise was founded in 1969, so maybe we’re the only ones who get stuck with this (or perhaps it plays in Queens as well in honor of the “Miracle Mets”). So Bryan Adams misses being a shiftless teenager? What the hell does that have to do with baseball?It isn’t even nostalgia for adolescence in 1969, when Adams was nine years old (and on that basis you can probably figure out for yourself what the number actually refers to).

Crazy Train – This Ozzy Ozborne tune has even less to do with the game than the last two put together. Indeed, if it didn’t start with Ozzy yelling “All aboard!” it would have no relevance at all. However, those first two words make in ever-so-mildly apt when the situation calls for the home fans to gloat because their team just loaded the bases. It’s a small silver lining on a big, dark cloud for Royals fans, because this happens so seldom that we don’t have to endure the song too frequently.

The home run theme from The Natural – At least this one has a legitimate baseball connection. The folks in the booth tend to play it at the obvious moment: as a player is rounding the bases after hitting one out of the park. This wouldn’t bother me at all except for one thing. Back in 1999 Royals great George Brett was selected for the Baseball Hall of Fame. They hyped his induction heavily that summer, and the plugs included this tune in the background. Thus in my mind it’s associated with the team’s glory days. Listening to it after some expensive free agent has-been or I-29 ping-pong ball accidentally clears the fences is bittersweet with emphasis on the former.

And now we come to the real heart of the problem. The franchise makes a little money from people who show up to watch the game. The family fun zone draws out a few more customers. But after observing crowd behavior at the ballpark for nearly 40 years now, I’ve reached a conclusion about which I am quite certain: the primary source of revenue for the Kansas City Royals is the mob of beer-swilling mooks who treat the ballpark as a giant, expensive bar with an outrageous cover charge.

Here class warfare rears its ugly head (not that drunken assholism is limited to a single class). I respect the right of the lumpenproletariat to listen to their music of choice while consuming their beverages of choice. But in a large public venue such as a stadium, some accommodation should be made for those of us who don’t care for redneck drinking screed any more than we want to hear the Phelps cult’s opinions about homosexuality. I’m willing to put up with at least some songs I don’t like because they may give pleasure to those around me. But a few cross a line that shouldn’t be that hard to draw. These final three, for example.

Sweet Home Alabama – If Alabama was the entire United States, this would be our national anthem. It’s geographically inappropriate in a world that includes plenty of songs about Kansas City, the Show Me State and the Sunflower State (hell, there’s an entire band named after Kansas). But for the most part it’s a relatively inoffensive little tune.

When it isn’t being highly offensive, that is. I care less than nothing about an ideological feud between the likes of Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd (aside from the suggestion that if someone makes a legitimate criticism of your state that sometimes it’s better just to take the hit). But a couple of verses later we’re confronted by the following observation “In Birmingham they love the governor (ooh ooh ooh).” That thought and the rest of the verse aren’t exactly strong praise for Wallace, but at the very least they’re an expression of a preference for segregation over Northern liberal meddling.

But that evades the real issue. Why disrupt a ballgame with a song that even mentions segregation? Or if the topic needs to be raised for collective edification between innings, why present anything other than a sound condemnation of the practice? Would we have to hear this song if the lyrics went “In Berlin they love the Fuhrer (heil heil heil)”? And if you’re about to point out that comparing anything to Hitler is automatically rhetorically invalid, please ponder this: how many centuries of slavery and genocide are the moral equivalent of a decade and a half of Nazism (especially when that selfsame apartheid is apparently a “going concern”)?

They never have the time to play the entire song anyway. So why not just cut the verses that suck?

Whiskey for My Men and Beer for My Horses – This thing makes “Sweet Home Alabama” sound like “We Shall Overcome.” Any song about ordering alcohol is a natural at a venue that depends heavily on beer sales, so the chorus fits well enough as ballpark fare. But the rest of the lyrics … seriously, did anybody bother to listen to this song before putting it on? This asshole is singing about how great it would be if we could only solve the nation’s crime problem by saddling up and going out lynching. Whenever it plays I’m brought mindful of Hang ‘Em High, a movie about an innocent man lynched by a pack of morons. He survives the ordeal and spends the rest of the movie exacting revenge. The thought of Clint Eastwood blowing Toby Keith’s head off fills my heart with cheer.

Friends in Low Places – Several years ago a terrible thing rose out of Fenway and spread across the land: the unofficial ballpark song. After discovering that the bean-eating throngs loved to sing along with “Sweet Caroline,” the Red Sox powers-that-be saw to it that it was played at every game. Fortunately for the Royals’ faithful, we didn’t get saddled with Neil Diamond. Unfortunately for us, we got saddled with Garth Brooks. Once a game beers are placed temporarily in cup holders so everyone can wrap arms around one another and sway back and forth to the charming tale of some drunken bozo who ruins his ex’s social event.

I hit this one hard last year, so I’ll sum up by standing on my previous statements.

My eight favorite Halloween movies

Just about any horror movie ever made could arguably be a good movie to watch on Halloween. However, this list is made up of movies that meet two additional criteria. First, they should have an October feel to them. The viewer should be able to feel the air grow colder and smell the smoke of burning leaves. At the very least, part of the movie should be set during autumn.

Second, the movie should somehow reflect the pre-movie pastime of telling ghost stories around a campfire. Plots should be simple and straightforward. Emphasis should be on the creepy, not necessarily the gory. It also wouldn’t hurt for the movie to be okay to watch with the whole family in the room (though I admit two or three movies on the list flunk that standard).

 

Halloween – Well, duh. Here we have that perpetual childhood favorite, The Boogeyman. Only here he’s real, come back to his old hometown for his favorite night of the year. This picture is actually fairly tame by current standards (though still maybe a bit much for pre-teens). The body count is low. The blood flows, but not by the bucketful. But back in 1978 it helped give birth to generations of slasher movies with supernatural villains. And yes, I’m talking about the John Carpenter original, not the Rob Zombie remake.

Creepshow – In the finest campfire tradition, here we get five short stories instead of one long yarn. Writer Stephen King modeled these stories from the immortal mould (or mold, if you prefer) established by William Gaines’ EC Comics (which also spawned the “Tales from the Crypt” TV series), and director George Romero gives the production a distinct comic book flavor.

Sleepy Hollow – Washington Irving’s classic tale of the Headless Horseman gets a new twist at the hands of master-creep Tim Burton. The original made a nice Disney cartoon (which you might consider adding as a warm-up), but the new take on the familiar story adds some entertaining elements to the mix. With Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci in the lead roles, this one has the cast that will be most familiar to 21st-century audiences.

Something Wicked This Way Comes – Sure, this one’s got some flaws. It’s one of those annoying movies that looks as if it was directed by a committee that never could quite manage to agree on what it was supposed to be. The result is stiff in spots and jumpy in others. But author Ray Bradbury’s “October People” are the heart of Halloween, the dark forces that roam the countryside as the evenings grow longer. Here they’re at their worst, masquerading as something innocent: a harmless carnival for children. Jonathan Pryce does an especially good job as Mr. Dark, the story’s arch-villain.

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors – No Halloween would be complete without at least one dreary old British horror picture, and this is one of the best. It’s another anthology, serving up a spooky story salad with something for everyone: a werewolf, a killer plant, a vampire, voodoo, and a disembodied hand out for revenge. The movie was directed by Freddie Francis and stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, all three staples of the low-budget English horror sub-genre.

The Fog – Ah, if only the good people of Antonio Bay hadn’t cheated those cranky lepers out of their money, they wouldn’t have to bar their doors and windows against a little night mist. I don’t want to overload you with Carpenter movies, but the list needed a good ghost story. And this one does the trick. What the production lacks in bloody violence and special effects it more than makes up for with a solid script and decent acting. Here’s another good example of an original that holds its own against a flashy, tech-intensive remake.

The Evil Dead – Send the kids off to bed before screening these last two. Here’s the no-budget masterpiece that gave Sam “Spider-man” Raimi his start. Though the production values are about as low as you can get, this picture has chills you can’t buy with the world’s biggest expense account. The plot – college students on a weekend trip to the back woods accidentally evoke bloodthirsty demons – takes me straight back to the sort of stories my friends and I would make up during sleep-overs when we were kids.

The Exorcist – Though this one’s famous for the big, dramatic stuff, I like the small touches. The Iraq sequence in the beginning is way creepier (and scarier, if you think about it) than all the soup-puking demon junk that happens later in the picture. This is the least light-hearted production of the lot, its seriousness a grim reminder that lurking in the background of Halloween is something more sinister than donning a costume and bobbing for apples.

My eight favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories

Though not as well-known as Poe (you probably never read a Lovecraft story in a high school English class), the works of H.P. Lovecraft have arguably been much more influential on genre fiction and filmmaking. Whole volumes have been written about the man’s work and its effect on popular culture, many of which are lurking on the shelf above my desk as I type this and daring me to dig into them.

Historical importance aside, I admit that I have a lot of personal affection for his work. The first time I ever got a story published – at the ripe old age of 16 – was in a small press anthology devoted to tales with Lovecraft’s “cosmic horror” as a theme. I’d tracked down his writing in order to get a feel for the conventions, and after “The Lurking Horror” and “Rats in the Walls” I was hooked.

Of course even the most ardent fan must acknowledge the flaws in Lovecraft’s writing. He was a racist even beyond what would be expected of an average white person growing up in early 20th century New England, and this unfortunate trait infects some of his work. He also sometimes suffered excessive influence from the stuffy preciousness Lord Dunsany, one of his literary heroes. And don’t even get me started on his addiction to adjectives. The shambling! The gibbering!

And Lovecraft is the God Emperor of authors who write long stories building up to a conclusion that even the dumbest reader already figured out pages and pages ago. His destinations are fascinating, but you’ll tend to get there before he does.

Faults notwithstanding, Lovecraft is worth reading as one of the first and still one of the best authors to write non-gothic horror. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, drafty castles, swooning maidens (indeed, women of any stripe) are few and far between. Instead, Lovecraft starts with a simple yet awe-inspiring notion: that the universe doesn’t revolve around the human race. He proceeds to weave an entire pantheon of god-like beings who are either mildly antipathetic or wholly indifferent to the protagonists of the tales.

This denial of the ontological-good-automatically-triumphs formula that served storytellers for millennia dovetailed nicely with the young 20th century, from the pyrrhic victories of World War One to the questions raised by quantum physics about the fabric of reality. Lovecraft’s fiction is the stuff of nightmares, not the kind where you accidentally forget to wear your pants to work but the kind when you wake up one morning to discover that everything you know is wrong.

The beautiful thing about the beasts of this brave new world is that they don’t come with easy answers. They don’t seem to want our blood, and they generally can’t be expelled with crosses or silver bullets. They’re difficult if not impossible to figure out, and to make matters worse they aren’t always consistent from story to story. Even their names are impossible to pronounce.

In a universe gone mad, these stories make perfect sense.

 

Nyarlathotep – We’ll begin the list with an “appetizer,” a short piece Lovecraft wrote after awakening from a particularly strange dream. His recording of a nightmare-like parade of bizarre sights and sounds is more poetic than most of his actual poetry.

The Lurking Fear – Having no sooner sung the praises of cosmic horror than I’m forced to admit I like some of his less overwhelming stuff as well. This tale concerns a family so deeply ruined by decadence and inbreeding that they’ve transformed into mole monsters. As a teen I had a great ambition to make a movie out of this, and I still think it has cinematic potential (though the only film version I’ve ever seen suggests otherwise).

Pickman’s Model – Another favorite from my youth. An artist paints pictures of horrible monstrosities that are just a little too realistic for the comfort of the New England art world. This tale is tailor-made for anyone who fancies himself an intense, angry, outsider artist.

The Shadow over Innsmouth – At first I didn’t care much for this one. But like a shambling, gibbering fungus from another dimension, it sort of grew on me. With the dexterity of a paranoid schizophrenic, Lovecraft manages to spin his hatreds of both inbreeding and miscegenation into a single ugly thread. And no matter how many times I read the story, the end just flat out sucks (I even wrote a story – one of my few complete ventures into fiction – exploring how in such a situation a normal human would respond differently than a Lovecraftian narrator). On the other hand, I do like a good sea monster story. And the monsters rock, no matter how creepy their origins might be.

At the Mountains of Madness – This is the longest story Lovecraft wrote (either this or The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, I can never remember which one holds the record). And it’s a glaring example of what I said above about the author telegraphing his moves so copiously that he ends up taking far longer than necessary to get where he’s going. On the other hand, it does get off to a heck of a start. I’m a sucker for stories set in Antarctica, so I might have liked this more than I should have. But most of all, this is one of the author’s more successful uses of “cosmic horror.” The protagonists’ discovery of a vast, frozen, empty city leads to some disturbing conclusions about the origins of humanity and the dangerous presence that may still lurk a bit too close for comfort.

The Call of Cthulhu – The list wouldn’t have been complete without this one. Cthulhu has become the Zeus of the “Yog Sothery” pantheon (though I’m not sure Lovecraft intended to place him in that role). This story lends its name to a role-playing game, a video game and at least one really good movie. And of course Cthulhu himself has become a minor pop culture phenomenon, showing up everywhere from the teddy bear aisle at the toy store to strange songs about narwhals. With that in mind, this story might best be considered a “humble origin.” It’s actually three stories in one, each of which would have done just fine on its own. We get strange relics, violent cultists, and an island thrust up from the bottom of the sea bearing with it something that should have stayed drowned and forgotten. I can see why this one is so popular. It’s Lovecraft at his most Lovecraftian.

The Color Out of Space – On the other hand, this one is Lovecraft at his least gothic. “The Color” isn’t even a monster in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s an undefined infection – though even the germ analogy sells it short – that comes to Earth on a meteor and begins to spread. Think “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” only without the comforting familiarity of moss.

The Whisperer in Darkness – With all due respect to the many beloved tales that didn’t make this list of eight, this one’s my favorite. I love the theme (about which I can’t say much without giving too much of the story away). I love the atmosphere. But even more than that, I love the balance. Throughout his career Lovecraft struggled to create just the right mix of reality and horror. Many of his stories are “okay, that’s way too much for me to accept,” while others are “wow, is that all there is to it?” For my taste, The Whisperer is neither too hot nor too cold, neither too hard nor too soft. It’s cosmic horror brought down to a personal level, and that’s where I find it most effective.

My eight favorite Edgar Allan Poe stories

Edgar Allan Poe is strongly commended to your attention by three facts: he was a brilliant writer, his writing is almost without exception short, and he’s been dead long enough for the copyright to lapse on his work.

That makes Poe’s stories perfect for Halloween. They’re a great experience whether you’re reading them by yourself or aloud to a group. And thanks to Project Gutenberg, the price is hard to beat.

To be sure, his oh-so-19th-century writing style may be a bit baroque for some modern audiences, particularly the maturity-challenged. And a dictionary is a handy thing to have nearby. On the other hand, Poe is one of a small number of authors who require patience to read and actually reward the effort.

I suppose I’d look more sophisticated if I populated this list with the author’s more obscure tales, long discourses with mummies about modern technology and the like. But his more famous tales are beloved for a reason: in addition to their literary merit, they’re good fun. Or at least good chills.

The Cask of Amontillado – Of all the revenge stories I’ve ever read, this is the revenge-iest. Poe gives us no indication what “the thousand injuries of Fortunado” might have been, but they must have been some bad stuff to merit walling the guy up alive. Still, who among us hasn’t secretly entertained the desire to do something really nasty to one of the jerks in our lives? In addition to the chilling deed itself, this tale also features some of the author’s legendary dry wit (such as the jerk’s repeated insistence that “Luchesi couldn’t tell amontillado from sherry”).

The Pit and the Pendulum – On the other hand, being on the receiving side of the torturer’s art isn’t so great. Poe’s version of the Spanish Inquisition is more artistically inclined – or at least more elaborate – than the real thing. For a short story, this does an excellent job of capturing the “long agony” of waiting to die, sweetened and poisoned by the faint hope that there might be a way to escape the relentless inevitable.

The Imp of the Perverse – Okay, here’s one brief nod to Poe’s more obscure, philosophical stuff. The piece ends with a brief, mediocre tale of a murderer undone by his own weakness. But the rest of the text discusses the peculiar human tendency to do the wrong thing simply because it’s the wrong thing to do. And what a great name for this tricky phenomenon.

Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether – Yeah, this is the original poster child for tales in which the reader figures out what’s going on well before the characters in the story tumble to the truth. Nonetheless, it’s still a bit of good fun. The inmates taking over the asylum, indeed.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar – Of all Poe’s many weird scenarios, this is one of the weirdest: what would happen if you hypnotized a guy right before he died? This was probably even scarier back when “mesmerism” was new and poorly understood. Because if Valdemar’s awful fate was actually plausible …

Hop-Frog – Misfits of the world, fear no longer. This is the forerunner of “Spurs” (the tale that gave birth to Freaks), all tales of innocent folks picked on by “normal people” for being different. Unlike Fortunado, here we know exactly what the bad guys did to deserve what they get. And boy do they ever get it.

The Tell-Tale Heart – Once again the tables turn. The nameless narrator murders his housemate merely because he can’t stand the old guy’s filmy eye (in the killer’s defense, Poe’s description of the eye does make it sound pretty gross). But then our old friend the Imp starts whispering in his ear.

The Masque of the Red Death – This is hands-down my favorite piece of Poe, the one I would turn into a movie if I had the time and resources. The obnoxious rich jerk who needs a good come-uppance. The bizarre, colorful chambers of the prince’s palace. And of course the Red Death. This is over-wrought gothic prose-poetry at its finest.