Somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of the Bennion Archive, I've got a stack of old Science Digest magazines, a gift subscription my parents bought for me around 1982 or thereabouts. I keep meaning to have a look through them some mellow afternoon when I have nothing better to do, and I've even had thoughts of scanning the more interesting covers for my photo gallery, but naturally I never seem to find the time.
A long time ago, just before I started my freshman year of high school, I fell in love with the British TV series Doctor Who. You know, that ultra-low-budget sci-fi serial about a guy who time-travels in an old telephone booth (well, technically, a police box, but it's still a variety of phone booth) and encounters all manner of bizarre creatures bent on destroying humanity and conquering the universe?
A few recent tidbits concerning that "save the chocolate" thing:
If anyone out there would like to know more about East Hollywood High School, that film-oriented charter school I mentioned a week or so ago, my buddy Mike Chenoweth just sent me a link to a nice write-up published today in the Davis County Clipper. It describes pretty thoroughly what the school is all about, quotes the Chenopup very liberally, and even features a photo of the man himself, just in case you like knowing what your fellow Loyal Readers look like. Go give it a read...
So, as long as we're dwelling in Lucasland today, here's the latest stuff I've heard about Indiana Jones IV:
Over the past ten years or so, George Lucas has seemed to go out of his way to alienate his own fan base. There were, of course, the Special Edition re-edits of the classic Star Wars trilogy, the myriad disappointments that accompanied the prequel trilogy, and the milking of our wallets with multiple home-video releases of the original films that still, somehow, never quite deliver what we actually want. But he's also said a lot of offensive things, like his recent comment that he considers The Empire Strikes Back -- generally seen by the fans as the best of the six Star Wars movies -- to be the worst of the series. (I personally think this was probably not worth the uproar it provoked. I suspect it was a failed attempt at a joke, or something taken way out of context. Or maybe he just wanted to screw with our heads and he knew exactly which button to push.) The impression he often gives is that he'd be a lot happier if the whole Star Wars thing had never happened and he didn't have any fans.
That's why it was so surprising to read that he has offered official Lucasfilm support for the upcoming indie movie Fanboys, which follows the adventures of a group of Star Wars fans driving cross-country to steal a print of The Phantom Menace from Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. George has also lent his approval and Lucasfilm's assistance to a 30-minute Star Wars spoof for the animated cable series Robot Chicken (don't feel bad, I've never heard of it either), going so far as to lend his voice to his own stop-motion likeness.
Could it be that Uncle George is finally gaining a sense of humor about this whole crazy thing? And that maybe, just maybe, now that the pressure of making the prequels is off, he's even learning to appreciate his fans again? Anything's possible... although I'll be more inclined to believe it when I'm holding a DVD of the unrevised Star Wars in my clammy little fanboy hands...
(Incidentally, the trailer for Fanboys is online here. It looks pretty damn funny... and, in a show of cross-franchise solidarity, it even includes The Shat!)
Cranky Robert just sent me this:
Oh, if only I'd kept up on my Sith lessons. I could totally use that Force-choke thing just about everytime I'm out in public...
Here's a genuine headline from today's Salt Lake Tribune:
Satan behind illegal immigration, Utah County Republican claims
And the relevant graf:
District 65 Chairman Don Larsen submitted a resolution to be discussed at Saturday's Utah County Republican Convention that opposes the devil's plan to destroy the country by stealth invasion of illegal immigrants.
I love living in this state. No, really, I do...
So, a few days ago, I reminisced about how my friend Cheno and our merry little band of youthful movie buffs used to shoot our own movies on a VHS camcorder. Cheno was the writer-director on most of these efforts, while the rest of us pulled multiple duties as on-screen talent, camera operators, stunt performers, grips, prop masters, and caterers. Our finished films -- the ones we did finish, that is -- were always entertaining, and Cheno came up with a lot of creative solutions to deal with various problems, but I must be honest: they were pretty primitive stuff. They couldn't be anything otherwise, given the equipment we had available at the time.
That's why I am continually amazed at the amateur-made stuff I see on the web nowadays. As uncomfortable as I may be with many aspects of the digital revolution that's swept our society in the past 20 years, I can't deny that it's made a lot of things possible for the average person that weren't even worth dreaming about back in the day. Take, for example, the short animated film C.O.D.E. Guardian, which imagines a World War II battle fought with anime-style giant robots (it's presented in two parts in the following YouTube clips):
As long as I'm in a complaining mood today anyway, I may as well mention that one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of so-called "literary fiction" is the way authors of this stuff so often play with the standard rules and techniques of fiction writing. Presumably they're trying for some kind of effect, and also presumably fans of LitFic appreciate and enjoy this; me, I just think it comes across as pretentious and gimmicky.
Case in point: I'm currently reading a novel called This is the Place by Peter Rock, which, in general, I am enjoying. (Rock has created some wonderful evocations of Wendover, Nevada, and the Bonneville Salt Flats, two places I just visited last month.) However, the guy is apparently unaware of the existence of the quotation mark. None of the book's dialogue uses it. Instead, you're just supposed to pick up from context that someone is speaking, as in this passage:
How you doing, Jamie? The bartender knew what she wanted before she said a word. He brought two cocktails and she drank the first one fast.
I'm doing, she said. Hard at work here.
It's not a huge thing, but it's driving me crazy. It's sometimes confusing, but the biggest issue is that I just don't see any reason, artistic or otherwise, for doing it, and it's coming off as more of a distraction, an affectation, than anything that adds value to the work...
This is something that's bothered me off and on for several years, but this morning I finally reached my breaking point: what the hell is the matter with the audio mix on The Today Show?
Anytime they use background music for a segment -- which is pretty much all the time these days on this increasingly fluffy and pointless "news" program -- the music is so loud that it drowns out the voiceover. It happened this morning while Matt Lauer was reminiscing about his best experiences while doing his "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" segments, which I still enjoy despite my general disdain for Today. The insidiously catchy and terminally annoying Outkast tune "Hey Ya" was playing over the story, cranked up to the point where I could hardly hear Matt at all, so what I ended up with essentially a music video with visuals of Lauer on an aircraft carrier, walking around Red Square, etc.
I've wondered for some time if the problem was with the TV in my bedroom (I usually half-listen to the various morning shows while I dress for work, so I can catch a weather forecast), but today, because I was actually interested in the story in question, I tried the HDTV in my living room; same thing there. Are the show's producers even aware of this issue? Is it deliberate on their part? Do they think for some reason that viewers find it pleasant or exciting to have music drowning out the host personalities that we're supposedly tuning in to listen to? Or are we just supposed to look at them? Why have the hosts at all? Why not just play music? Oh, wait, that's what the radio is for, isn't it? Idiots...
Oh, and as long as I'm bitching, I'd love to see all the national morning shows drop their outside "plaza" segments, too; listening to the screaming crowds of people who all seem to think that their Aunt Mildred in Peoria will somehow pick out their single voice from the cacophony is even more annoying than the nine-millionth play of "Hey Ya." Not that the goofball weather-guessers who mingle with the crowd ever have anything all that important or amusing to say, I just don't like all the noise. Arg...
The Don't Mess With Our Chocolate site is reporting that the FDA has extended the comment period through May 25, so we might have a chance after all of stopping the corporate weenies who want to cheapen our chocolate in the name of bigger shareholder profits! Don't hesitate: click that link above right now and follow the campaign's instructions on how to submit your thoughts to the FDA.
And if you just tuned in and don't know what in the hell I'm talking about, read my previous entry on this subject, then click over to Don't Mess With Our Chocolate. Power -- and decent quality chocolate -- to the people!
(In spite of the light 'n' sassy tone I'm using with these posts, I really do take the subject very seriously, and I hope you'll join me in fighting this. I despise the thought of stockholders fattening their bottom lines by taking away value for the consumer -- a game they've learned to play with consummate skill over the past 20 years -- and I feel like it's finally time to draw a line in the sand on something. Chocolate is a good place to start. Maybe if we're loud enough, we can not only stop the plan to cheapen the quality of this one product, but actually turn back the clock on some other things as well.)
One of the many, many items on the List of Things That Are Turning Me Into a Grumpy Old Man™ is the fact that an entire generation of kids has grown up not knowing what Coca-Cola is supposed to taste like. That's because, back around 1985 or so, the evil penny-pinching, bean-counting corporate stooges in Atlanta decided -- without bothering to consult the consumers who would be buying and drinking the stuff, mind you -- to replace the yummy, yummy sugar in Coke with this new-fangled, better-living-through-modern-chemistry (and, not coincidentally, cheaper) dreck called high-fructose corn syrup. The value of this change was entirely one-sided: the company saved money on the production side by using the cheaper sweetener, which of course boosted the stockholders' portfolio. Coke drinkers, on the other hand, got shafted. They lost the flavor they'd enjoyed for a hundred years and were forced to either adapt to the new, less-pleasant (and possibly downright harmful, if you believe the bad press on corn syrup) Coke formula, or find some other beverage fix.
(For the record, I don't generally buy into conspiracy theories, but I find it entirely plausible that the marketing disaster that was New Coke really was an insidious ploy to wean consumers off sugar-based Coke so we'd be more accepting of the corn-syrup formula when Classic Coke "returned." I'm not saying I definitely believe that, only that I find it believable.)
The really frustrating thing about the Coke situation was that the battle was lost before anyone knew it was being fought. And the same damn thing is about to happen again with another beloved luxury food: chocolate.
Cadged from Brian Greenberg, who caught the brilliant, hilarious (and seriously weird) comedian Steven Wright on Letterman last night:
A friend of mine has a trophy wife, but apparently it wasn't first place.
For the past several years, my friend, collaborator, and frequent Simple Tricks commenter Mike Chenoweth has been working with a local charter school called East Hollywood High. EHHS is a pretty exciting idea, a place where artistically inclined kids can take, in addition to a standard high school curriculum, elective courses in film history and practical film production techniques, taught by people who actually work in the film industry. Mike has been instrumental in shaping this elective program, first as a teacher and, more recently, as Director of Film Studies.
A couple weeks ago, he asked me to do him a favor and judge a number of student-made films for the school's annual Telos competition. On Friday night, it was my honor to attend the awards ceremony for the nominees and winners.
Look, kids, it's another quiz! It's the lazy blogger's way of posting up some quick 'n' easy content for your reading pleasure!
This one is a little different, at least. It's about music:
Originally an email quiz, now gone to ground somewhere in the vast, vast Internet:
Tales of the Gold Monkey, which I mentioned in the previous entry, was another one-season-wonder of a television show that gouged a huge divot in my impressionable young brain. Curiously, it ran in the same 1982-83 television season as Voyagers! (back when network series still had discreet and contiguous seasons instead of only occasionally airing new episodes in between re-runs); there must've been something in the air that year that caused TV shows to lodge themselves so firmly in my memory. Hell, I still remember the actual time slots of the shows I loved: Voyagers! was on Sunday nights and Gold Monkey was Wednesdays. Yes, I did spend far too much time thinking about what was on the tube...
Be that as it may, Gold Monkey was a nifty show, a good old-fashioned pulp adventure set in the South Pacific of the 1930s. I think it failed largely because people compared it unfavorably to Raiders of the Lost Ark; both were set in the '30s and featured an all-American leather-jacketed hero and dastardly Nazis, so of course one had to be a rip-off of the other. But I didn't care about the similarities when I was a kid, and I've since decided that Gold Monkey was actually far more similar to the Bogart-Bacall classic To Have and Have Not than any of the Indiana Jones movies. Even in the '80s, however, nobody bothered to watch the classics, so the rip-off accusation stuck, and by the start of the '83-'84 season, Gold Monkey was only a memory. At least until somebody finally gets those DVDs into production!
While we wait for that boxed set of shiny silver discs, here's the opening title sequence, featuring an appropriately jaunty theme song by uber-composer Mike Post. I miss opening title sequences...
Wow, here's an announcement I never thought I'd read: the TV series Voyagers! will be released on DVD on July 17th.
What's that? You say you've never heard of Voyagers!? Well, I'm not surprised. It lasted only a single season, but it made a huge impression on me. Aimed squarely at the 10-14 year old market, the show was about a handsome-but-lunkheaded time traveler who accidentally picks up a 10-year-old companion, then finds himself unable to return the kid to his own time. Not that the kid wants to go... you see, he's a history buff and an orphan, so blazing through the past is far more appealing than growing up in a boring old foster home in 1982. And his knowledge of history comes in useful, because our grown-up Voyager lost his handy guidebook and doesn't know crap about any of the events they keep finding themselves in the middle of.
It was all pretty silly and self-consciously educational in the way of early-80s kidvid, but I'm pretty sure this is one I'll still enjoy. I've already earmarked my $49.98 for the set. Now, if only somebody would get to work on Tales of the Gold Monkey...
Here are the opening credits for Voyagers!, which should give you a taste of the show if you don't remember it, or generate a nice nostalgic glow if you do:
There were zombies wandering the streets of Salt Lake this past Sunday... and no, I don't mean the usual handful of homeless guys or would-be shoppers who didn't get the memo about the downtown malls being demolished. No, I'm talking about genuine, flesh-eating, shambling-corpse, movie-style zombies. Seems there was a film crew here last week shooting a pilot for a new TV series called The Rising, about the undead taking over an unnamed American city.
This really is the perfect location for a zombie project -- anyone who lives around here can tell you that Salt Lake is eerily appropriate for the anonymous role of "unnamed American city," and filming downtown on a Sunday provides that deserted, end-of-the-world look without even having to redirect traffic.
Brandon Griggs of the Salt Lake Tribune lent a helping hand as an extra; he writes about the experience here. There's also this nifty little behind-the-scenes video:
A quick note of explanation for the out-of-towners: that distinctive "cuckoo" sound you can hear as the zombie crowd begins to move is a audio cue that's linked to all the "walk/don't walk" lights in the downtown area. I guess it's intended to help blind pedestrians. If you're crossing in the north-south direction, you get the cuckoo; east-west is a "cheep-cheep" noise. As far as I know, this system is unique to Salt Lake. I've never heard these sounds in any other city I've ever visited.
Also, if you're curious, that zombie crowd is only about two blocks from my office building...
There are a number of topics I wanted to blog about today, big, important topics that would require lengthy entries to fully explore. Today would be a perfect day to write them, too, because it's been relatively slow at work. So what have I been doing? Playing with this HeroMachine doohickey I ganked from jaquandor, naturally. This is what I would look like if I chucked the writing and proofreading gigs and became some kind of latter-day gentleman-adventurer:
Of course, to really look like that, I'd need to be taller. And in better shape. And still have hair on top of my head instead of only in the back. And not wear glasses. And be able to afford really cool boots. And a good tailor. And... oh, jeez, this is depressing...
When last we encountered Melvin Dummar, the Utah native who claims to have once given Howard Hughes a ride and that he's owed a share of the Hughes fortune, his last-ditch lawsuit -- which alleged that new-found evidence showed the original 1978 probate trial was tainted by false testimony -- had been thrown out by the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake. I figured that would be the last we'd hear of old Mel until the time came for an obit.
Looks like I was wrong. Melvin has now filed a new lawsuit in Nevada, repeating the same claims as last year's failed Utah suit. As I've said before, I'm inclined to believe Melvin's story, both because it seems plausible based on what I know about Howard, and also because it's just such a damn good story. Such an American story, really, the tall tale that has the ring of truth, of two self-made (or, in Melvin's case, self-defeating) men who meet by chance in the wide open Western deserts.
I wish him luck with this new suit, although I remain pessimistic about his chances of actually getting anything...
I don't know if this is widely known outside the Zion Curtain, but the Dark Lord himself, Vice President Dick Cheney, has been invited to give this year's commencement address at Brigham Young University in a few weeks. BYU (or "The Y," as it's more commonly known in these parts) is, of course, the most conservative college in Utah, possible even in the country. It's so conservative that male students aren't even allowed to wear beards.
(True story: I actually applied to the Y back in my pre-bearded days. I was conditionally accepted pending a letter of recommendation from my spiritual leader. Smart-ass that I am, I was tempted to forge a letter in fractured English and sign it, "Yoda, Jedi-Master of Dagobah," but ultimately I decided it wasn't worth the trouble, and anyway I didn't want to go to a school that would forbid me from dressing like Sonny Crockett. [I was very big into Miami Vice at the time, and had this thing about muscle shirts, not shaving for four days at a stretch, and going sockless, all big no-nos at the Y.])
As conservative as the school is, however, there are protests planned to coincide with Darth Cheney's visit. But I don't think it's necessary to dwell on the fact that even BYU students think the man is nasty and hateful. I think we should instead concentrate on the really important matters:
...the question remains whether Cheney will get an honorary degree. And, if so, what would it be? International diplomacy? Public Relations? Energy Policy? Environmental Science?
Enquiring minds want to know!
Given the horrifying events at Virginia Tech this morning, the following video (courtesy of Chris Roberson) is either wildly inappropriate at this time or a much-needed break from the gloom. Personally, I just thought it was funny:
As long as I'm feeling grumbly this afternoon anyway, I may as well note that two more genre classics are scheduled to be remade: Barbarella and The Day the Earth Stood Still.
I can actually see some value in redoing Barbarella, which, despite its kooky, 60s-ish charms, is a pretty bad movie. As I was saying the other day, there is a case to be made for trying to improve questionable material. But The Day the Earth Stood Still? A movie that (a) is just about perfect on its own terms, (b) holds up quite well even after 50 years, and (c) stemmed entirely from the nuclear nightmares of the early Cold War times in which it was made? Come on. What's the point?
Here's an interesting random factoid: according to this, Salt Lake's light-rail system -- the train I mention so often on this blog -- is ranked tenth out of 27 cities in terms of ridership. Not bad, considering a lot of people protested its construction a few years ago on the grounds that "no one would ride it." (We're still hearing that argument from folks who don't want extensions running through their neighborhoods.)
Now, if only I could find some statistics on the number of people who leave chicken bones under train seats and pretend no one saw them...
So, I get on my train this morning at my usual station, the end-of-the-line terminus at the south end of the valley. The train sits at this stop for 15 minutes or so in between runs, to give people time to actually walk across the immense park 'n' ride lot and get on board, which means that on mornings when I'm one of the first people on -- as I was today -- I get to sit in a mostly empty train car and observe what human beings do when they think no one's around. And today I saw a corker:
There was this corpulent, sour-faced old man in cheap velcro-fastened shoes who apparently doesn't know or doesn't care that you're not supposed to eat on the train. I watched as he pulled a leftover KFC drumstick out of a plastic grocery bag and commenced to chowing down, dropping bits of Extra Crispy coating all over himself and the bench seat on which he'd parked his immense rear. This was mildly annoying, but I see people eating or drinking coffee fairly often in the mornings, so I could let it slide. No, the thing that really got me was that when he finished his breakfast, he carefully placed the bone under the seat in front of him, then got up and moved to another seat.
I debated for some time over whether to go tap him on the shoulder and ask him if he really thought no one had seen him commit his tiny act of ignorant, inconsiderate crappiness, but he looked like the sort who would escalate the situation into something truly ugly. In the end, I wussed out and chose to avoid confrontation. And it's been bothering me ever since... I really should have just faced the argument and let the stupid old son of a bitch have it with both barrels.
Kristy Kruger is an award-winning singer-songwriter from Texas whose older brother, Lt. Col. Eric Kruger, was killed in Iraq a few months ago, on only his second day in the country. Kristy has since written a sad, sweet, deeply moving little song of farewell to her brother, and she's now on a 50-state tour of the U.S. to pay tribute to Eric's memory (she says she'd like to see what he died for, i.e., the whole of America). The tour has brought her here to Salt Lake, where she'll be performing tonight at a venue called Kilby Court.
Andrew Leonard has a nice personal remembrance of Kurt Vonnegut over at Salon. I think you'll have to sit through a commercial to read the whole thing, but here's the part I liked:
Andrew Sullivan on the whole Don Imus thing:
I wish I'd taped the conversation I had today with the editor of the Sunday Times in London when I had to explain exactly what "nappy-headed hos" were. He had images of garden tools covered in diapers.
And they say Americans and Brits speak the same language...
Renowned author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., died yesterday at the age of 84, and I find myself rather puzzled by the depth of my reaction to the news. I feel truly, deeply bummed about this, which would make sense if Vonnegut had been one of my heroes. But the truth is, the only work of his I've ever read is a single short story back in high school, the same short story that everyone else reads in high school, "Harrison Bergeron." I've always meant to read some Vonnegut, or at least his best-known novel Slaughterhouse-Five, but I just haven't gotten around to it.
Remakes have been a significant part of Hollywood's output since at least the 1930s, when many silent movies were filmed again as talkies. But it seems to me that the philosophy behind remakes has changed in recent years. It used to be that you remade less-than-memorable movies in hopes of coming up with something better. The Maltese Falcon is the perfect example; few people today realize that the Bogart classic was actually the third time Dashiell Hammett's novel had been adapted for the screen. The two earlier versions have been largely forgotten, presumably for good reason.
Today, however, remakes mostly seem to be movies that audiences do remember, and even revere; cult classics seem to be particularly vulnerable. (My theory is that modern remakes are largely exercises in branding; Hollywood is updating familiar movies because audiences are already aware of the titles and basic premises, so there's less of a challenge for the marketing department.)
Take, for example, the latest exercise in "why is this necessary"-ism: a remake of the John Carpenter-Kurt Russell favorite Escape from New York. Wow, what a brilliant idea, a real natural. After all, the last remake of a Carpenter film, The Fog, did so spectacularly well at the box office, didn't it? (Yes, kids, that's sarcasm you're reading.) While we're at it, why doesn't somebody remake Carpenter's best-known film, his big breakthrough and masterpiece, Halloween? Oh... never mind...
You know, I saw Kurt Russell on The Late, Late Show the other night. He was there to plug Grindhouse, naturally, but the host, Craig Ferguson, was far more interested in discussing the Escape remake. Kurt, classy guy that he is, said he had no issues with it and wished the new production well. I tend to agree with Craig, though; he said (in his amusing Scottish accent) that it was bullshite, that Kurt was Snake Plissken, that Snake was an icon, and that no one else could take over the role. And then for good measure, he repeated himself: it's bullshite.
I would just add that somebody already did a remake of Escape from New York. It was called Escape from L.A. What's that, you say? You don't remember that one? Yeah, well, that pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
One of the regrets I've carried forward from my college years was my failure to form personal relationships with any of my instructors. While friends of mine can talk of networking opportunities or outright friendships with their professors, I doubt my former teachers would even recognize my face these days. And things aren't much better on my side of the equation, as a conversation with a co-worker and fellow U. of U. alum earlier today forcefully demonstrated: we were talking about the horrors of writing workshops, and she asked me who my teacher had been during a particular workshop experience. To my surprise and sincere discomfort, I couldn't remember the man's name. I could summon up his face reasonably well, but the name was a complete blank. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I have the same problem with most of my professors.
The shame of this realization sent me scrambling across the Internet, compulsively searching for any mention I could find of the four or five names I can still recall. And lo and behold, I stumbled across this upcoming release from the University of Utah Press: Wallace Stegner’s Salt Lake City by Robert C. Steensma.
Well, this is entirely unsurprising and also extremely disappointing: reports are surfacing that that the upcoming DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati -- one of my all-time favorite television comedies -- has been heavily edited because of music clearance issues. Jaime J. Weinman has the details, but the short version is that pretty much all of the original music from the show is gone. And so are many scenes in which characters explicitly reference the original music, or which only make sense in the context of viewers hearing the music (like the infamous scene in which Mr. Carlson asks burn-out DJ Johnny Fever if he hears dogs barking while a Pink Floyd album plays).
Just to show you how reliable these Internet quizzes are, I just took another Firefly/Serenity-related one, and it tagged me as an entirely different character than the previous one:
This is kind of cool:
From the Department of Stuff I Mentioned Months Ago and Then Forgot to Follow Through On (DSIMMATFFTO), may I now present my new and improved photo gallery? It's got a whole new interface (which I find much more aesthetically pleasing than the old one) and I've even reorganized and added some new sub-albums, so if you've ever been curious about what I or my world looks like, go have a look. The link over there in the sidebar has been updated, too...
I do most of my online reading these days through an RSS aggregator. For my readers who don't live and breathe this stuff, I should explain that an aggregator is an online service that compiles the content of blogs and other websites together in a single place, so you don't have to move from site to site to keep up to date on all the ones you like to follow. There are a number of aggregators out there on the InterWeb; personally, I like Bloglines.
However, one drawback to using an aggregator is that the interface doesn't show you what the blogs you're reading actually look like; all you get is the content. Which is why I got such a start this morning when I clicked on over to Wil Wheaton's blog for the first time in six or eight months and discovered that he's using the exact same stylesheet that I'm using here on Simple Tricks. In other words, our sites look more-or-less exactly the same! In fact, I thought at first that I'd somehow bounced back here, and that something had gone wrong with all my entry titles. It was very disconcerting.
Still, it's kind of cool to learn that one of the better-known stars in the blogosphere firmament shares my excellent taste in decorating schemes. Bravo, Wil!
From a Time magazine review of the new Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez shlock-o-rama Grindhouse, here's an observation that I found interesting:
You won't find sex, or even the aura of sexuality, in films by the current generation of pop-referencing auteurs. They swarm all over the violence in 60s-70s grindhouse movies but are squeamish in showing the eroticism that once was crucial to the genre. The generation of "kids with beards," as Billy Wilder called Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, took their cues from a wide range of movie sources — Saturday-matinee serials, John Cassavetes improv dramas, European angst-athons — and if they got excessive, it was in kitsch and violence, not sex. Rodriguez got some puffs of grindhouse steam going in Sin City; but here, he and Tarantino are as puritanical as their predecessors. All bang-bang, no French kiss-kiss.
In both "features" of Grindhouse, the MISSING REEL card flashes as a sex scene has just begun. That's a comment on the old days, but it also proves that when it comes to eroticism, of the true or even exploitation variety, these directors are such cowards. If they use sex at all, it is in the horror-film mode pioneered by Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Show a woman in a shower, then kill her. The impulse is both prurient and puritanical; they provide a brief voyeuristic pleasure, then feel obliged to punish the women, and the audience, and themselves.
This reminds me of something I noticed when I worked at the multiplex back in college: the viewers who squawked with moral outrage and demanded refunds at the briefest glimpse of a feminine nipple were usually the same folks who enthusiastically turned out on opening night for the latest action or horror bloodbaths. One family of regular patrons stands out in my mind; the numb-skulled parents thought it was peachy keen to take their five kids -- who, as I recall, ranged in age from teen down to toddler -- to Total Recall three or four times, but were appalled that their precious younglings' eyes were exposed to the sexual content in The Fabulous Baker Boys. Both films were rated R and, in my opinion, were inappropriate for kids regardless of their respective particulars, simply because they dealt with grown-up subject matter. (Well, Baker Boys did, anyway, but Total Recall definitely wasn't made with families in mind, regardless of its subject.) But these folks thought that Michael Ironside getting his arms ripped off ("See you at the pahty, Ricktah!") was fine family entertainment while Michelle Pfeiffer's boobage was the very embodiment of evil.
I was thinking then that there was something out of whack with the cultural values being expressed through our entertainment, the dichotomy of "immoral" sexual content versus "perfectly acceptable" violence, and that was almost 20 years ago. The equation has only gotten more lopsided since then; our theater screens are awash in gore and sadism, but I honestly can't recall the last time I saw any nudity in a film... what is it about Americans that we prefer fake bloodshed over cinematic nookie? And does that make anyone else out there uneasy, or is it just me?
One of my co-workers just cracked me up with the following observation:
"It's just like that movie with Russell Crowe that I didn't watch."
Yeah, it's just like that, isn't it?
The way I remember it, there was one summer when I didn't think much about music at all, when I was just a wee lad content to listen to whatever Mom put on our gargantuan old hi-fi console, and then the very next year after that, I was a budding audiophile who obsessively followed the weekly Top Ten Countdown and toted around a transistor radio everywhere I went. The biggest song in the land that summer was "Jessie's Girl" by Rick Springfield, and I was absolutely crazy about it.
Bob Clark, the director of one of my favorite holiday movies, A Christmas Story, was killed today in a car accident, along with his 22-year-old son Ariel. Their sedan was struck by a sport utility vehicle being driven by an unlicensed idiot who sustained only minor injuries. The idiot is expected to be booked on suspicion of driving under the influence and gross vehicular manslaughter. I hope they throw away the key.
The LA Times has the details of the accident and a brief obit here.
Boy, does this ever sound like a recipe for total fanboy embarassment: take an ex-boy-bander who's gone a bit beefy with maturity, put him on a dippy reality-show dance-off with a bunch of other has-beens and B-listers, and let him do a routine set to that old disco-ized version of the main title from Star Wars, complete with a lightsaber prop. When I heard about this, I was prepared to hang my head in shame for ever liking a movie that could lead to this... and yet it turned out to be surprisingly entertaining, if not exactly cool:
No doubt it was the girl's Leia-style metal bikini that salvaged the whole thing...
That episode of Boston Legal I mentioned a while back aired tonight, the one that was going to incorporate footage from a legal drama William Shatner did 50 years ago. It wasn't quite what I was expecting -- the episode used only three short vintage clips, and their usage was rather understated, with none of the "significant television event" atmosphere that usually permeates this sort of stunt. But it was nevertheless a very good episode. Writer-producer David E. Kelley dialed his trademark silliness way down for a tense hostage-crisis story that's really about the way fathers continue to influence grown men long after dad has passed on. Shatner, who is of course known as a relentless chewer of scenery and whose character on this show, Denny Crane, is something of a nutcase, delivered a subtle performance that I think ranks among the very best work he's ever done. And the final scene, in which Denny discusses the day's traumatic events with his friend Alan (James Spader), brought a lump to my throat; every BL episode ends on a similar note, with these two very successful, very damaged men sharing good cigars, good whiskey, friendship, and truths that have never before been spoken. But this one, in which Denny quietly says that he dosen't want to go home tonight and Alan immediately offer to come keep him company, was immensely moving.
I haven't been a regular viewer of this show, but I think I like it more with every episode I see...
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