Nostalgic rants and curmudgeonly rambles from R. Jason Bennion. I'm a writer, a wanderer, a movie buff, and a pack rat. But mostly I'm just an analog kind of guy lost in a digital world...
Last Friday, one of my coworkers -- a bright guy in his mid-twenties whom I quite like, but often struggle to find common ground with -- asked if I knew when Clash of the Titans was coming out.
"Sure," I replied, "the next time I take the DVD out of my video cabinet and play it."
Big laughs. The kid was talking, of course, about the upcoming remake of the Ray Harryhausen classic, while I was playing to my usual curmudgeonly, remake-hating persona.
Well, this humorous bonding moment led to a discussion of the original film, which my colleague had never seen, and he asked me if I'd recommend it. I told him yes, but qualified my opinion by advising that if he thought he might want to give Clash a try, he needed to keep in mind that it was a 30-year-old movie that was originally made for 12-year-olds. You see, I've been down this path before; I know how younger people usually react to the stuff I grew up liking.
Everybody's probably seen this by now, but just in case, here's something that's had the online fanboys buzzing for a couple days, namely a glimpse of Jeff Bridges in the upcoming sequel to TRON:
As usual, click for the full-size treatment.
Disney released this image Tuesday, possibly hoping to take advantage of Bridges' Oscar nomination for Crazy Heart to start building some hype for Tron: Legacy. As my Loyal Readers can probably imagine, given my usual feelings about reimaginings, revisitings, and other such tampering with the pop-cultural landmarks of my youth, I am deeply ambivalent about this project. TRON holds a big place in my heart, and I always worry that returning to a much-loved universe will somehow lessen the original. (I'm sure you can think of plenty of high-profile examples of this phenomenon if you just put your minds to it.) Plus there's also the question of why a sequel to a nicely self-contained story, and why now, after so much time -- 28 years -- has passed? If it's just to apply some updated special effects to a familiar landscape, then I'm not interested. I'm probably one of the few Gen-X nerds on the planet who didn't find himself drooling and making incoherent pleasure-sounds after seeing that teaser trailer that debuted at ComicCon a couple years ago. And the rumored storyline -- that Legacy will be a sort of science-fiction Apocalypse Now, with Bridges' character Kevin Flynn in the Col. Kurtz role, i.e., the macguffin at the end of another character's quest -- doesn't do much for me, either.
Still.... I have to admit it made me smile to see The Dude wearing that glowing Frisbee on his back again. The fact that Bridges is involved gives me some hope that there might be something worthwhile about this movie, because he's not the sort who takes on a job just to earn a mortgage payment. Also, I see on IMDB that Bruce Boxleitner, who played the title role in the original film, is on board as well. Granted, both men's screentime may not amount to anything more than glorified cameos, especially if the Apocalypse Now scenario is for real, but as I said in defense of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it may be enough for me just to see what a couple of my old friends -- Flynn and Tron -- have been up to since I last encountered them.
Tron: Legacy is set to premiere in December. This pic is popping up all over; for the record, I first saw it here.
Robert Landau, Native Guy And Photographer, Interview
Q-What is your favorite photo you've taken and why?
A-“Back in the 1980s I had a book published on the Sunset Strip billboards, called Billboard Art [Chronicle Books]. I was living near Tower records and every week there would be new hand painted pop art masterpieces promoting the latest Rock and Roll and movie stars. I took a photo of a street scene with a woman carrying a grocery bag walking under a billboard depicting an image of Christopher Reeve in Superman costume streaking across the landscape. It epitomized for me the surreal nature of Los Angeles with all its dimensions of overblown Hollywood pretense versus the reality of ordinary daily life.”
Like most American boys growing up in the 1970s, I was a regular reader of Mad magazine, and one of my favorite segments of that august publication was the "Spy Vs. Spy" cartoons that appeared in every issue. I loved SvS so much that I recall I even tried drawing a few of my own on the backs of brown paper grocery sacks. (They were neither funny nor particularly well drawn, thus ending my nascent interest in becoming a cartoonist.) This little adventure of the familiar black-and-white anti-heroes, which throws in a couple of beloved movie characters for good measure, cracked me up:
Lileks Downplays the Central Horror of a Classic Movie Nightmare
James Lileks, speaking of the Bedford Falls where George Bailey never existed:
I still think Pottersville would have been a great place to visit if you had a three-day pass from the Army.
Is it just me, or does our modern world far more resemble Pottersville than the quaint, well-mannered fantasy town in which George spends most of the movie?
I had just turned eight when Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in the fall of 1977, and I remember being completely freaked out by the commercials for the film. Oddly enough, the image that mashed down so hard on my "primal dread" button wasn't even in the movie: a POV shot in which we're flying down a highway at night toward a hill, on the other side of which is a brilliant, mysterious light. I'm sure my Loyal Readers would recognize that image. It was used on the movie's one-sheet and various tie-in products, and it's been copied and/or parodied so many times since that I'm willing to bet most people don't even realize where it comes from. Whenever I run across it today, I experience a warm spark of nostalgia; back in '77, it scared the ever-loving crap out of me.
The movie, of course, turned out to be entirely non-frightening (well, except for the scene where little Barry gets abducted from his house; that's pretty scary), but think of how terrifying it would've been had the aliens come from, shall we say, a more southernly part of the galaxy....
Via Sullivan, who somehow manages to find a lot of cool stuff in spite of making upwards of 50 or so political posts every single day. I envy him his blogging time...
Traveler's tales are still forthcoming, but first, I'd like to provide a little educational service for my recent traveling partner, Cranky Robert, whose knowledge of all things pop-cultural is somewhat, shall we say, less expansive than my own. He is especially lacking in the areas of B-movies, comic books, and pulp sci-fi novels. You know, the crap I grew up on. Makes you wonder what they're teaching those literature PhDs these days, doesn't it?
In any event, we were sitting in a Washington Starbucks one night discussing -- go figure -- the sorts of women we find attractive, and somehow my memory banks kicked out an image of the actress Pam Grier. I was surprised to learn that Robert had never heard of in spite of her frequently being credited as the first female action-movie hero. That's right, kids, there was a butt-kicking woman on the big screen long before Ripley told the Queen Mother Alien to get away from that little blond girl.
Pam may not be a household name, but she's had a long, more-or-less steady career in film and television, beginning with women-in-prison schlockers made for the drive-in and grindhouse circuit, then finding her first surge of fame in a pair of classic blaxploitation flicks, Foxy Brown and Coffy. In the '80s, she had a recurring role as Rico Tubbs' old flame on Miami Vice, then in the '90s, Quentin Tarentino gave her the lead in his Jackie Brown (no relation to Foxy Brown, as far as I know, but then I've never seen it). In between those landmarks, she's appeared in a slew of movies and television roles. According to Wikipedia, she's most recently been a regular on a cable TV series called The L Word.
But enough introductory blather... the point here is really to post up a couple pictures of Pam, to show Robert who I was talking about and also to amuse myself with photos of a beautiful woman.
Here she is in her blaxploitation heyday:
And here she is a couple decades later, looking classy in Jackie Brown:
The Sparkly Thing Just Makes Them Easier to Find...
Hey, there, me droogies.
Sorry, I don't know where that came from. Well, yes, I do, but I don't know why I'm making a Clockwork Orange reference at this particular time, other than it seemed really boring to just say "Hi, I'm back from DC, how are y'all?"
Anyhow, I'll be posting a recap of my Washington trip soon, but in the meantime, I'd like to celebrate tonight's big New Moon premiere with an image that depicts the movie I'd like to see:
Let's see if Edward Cullen's emo dreaminess can protect him from the sword of the Daywalker! Ha!
Seriously, I'm usually right there in the front of the line for all of the latest pop-cultural fads, but the whole Twilight thing mystifies me. The Girlfriend says it's because I was never a 15-year-old girl, and perhaps there's something to that. (Although if 15-year-old girls really fantasize about awaking to find a sullen, beady-eyed, greasy-haired guy who says it's a constant struggle to keep from killing them because they smell so damn good standing at the foot of their bed, and they think that's romantic rather than alarming, then I obviously never understood teenage girls half as well as I thought I did.) In any event, vampire stories just aren't what they were when I first discovered Lestat back in college. I'm predicting that once the cycle of movies based on Stephanie Meyer's novels runs out, these venerable immortal anti-heroes are going to, ahem, go underground for a good long while... at least, it's my opinion that they ought to. They've pretty much run their course for this generation. While they're resting up for a few years, maybe someone can figure out how to reinvigorate werewolves the way Anne Rice did the bloodsuckers...
(Credit Where It's Due Department: That nifty photoshop job has been all over the 'net, but I grabbed it from Michael May; he also posted this little gem, if you're looking for more Twilight-mocking fun...)
By some strange confluence of historical currents, there seems to be a number of noteworthy anniversaries happening within days of each other this week. The most significant, of course, is the fall of the Berlin Wall on this very night 20 years ago, when ordinary Germans took matters into their own hands -- literally, considering they went after the Wall with hammers, crowbars, and even their fingers -- and put an end to one of the most powerful symbols of Cold War tension and communist repression, while border guards and secret police stood by and let it happen without firing a shot.
Here's a strange thought: today would've been Christopher Reeve's 57th birthday. And in only a few days, on October 10, it will be five years since his death. Time flies, eh?
I don't intend to make a habit of observing celebrity birthdays here, especially those of celebrities who are no longer with us, but, well... Chris is kind of a special case for me. Besides, marking this particular date gives me an excuse to post a real treasure of a video, a clip of Chris' first appearance on The Tonight Show way back in 1978, when he was promoting Superman: The Movie. He comes across as very young, very earnest, more than a little nervous, and kinda goofy, especially when a couple of his jokes fall completely flat. Johnny Carson, though, is gracious as always and helps this up-and-coming young star through what must have been an incredibly nerve-wracking experience:
Strange to think that all three of the men featured in this clip -- Chris, Johnny, and Rodney Dangerfield -- are now gone. Without getting too maudlin about it, let me just say that realizations like this are what make me feel increasingly out of touch with the present.
Hat tip to LA Times' Hero Complex blog for the clip...
Like a lot of other young people, I went through a phase in my late teens and early twenties when I idolized the legendary actor James Dean. It's tough to explain the Dean mystique to someone who doesn't get it, but I think a major component is the unanswerable question of what might have happened to him if he hadn't died in a car crash at the age of 24. You see, he made only three movies before his untimely death, and by some quirk of fate, all three were good and memorable. He never had the chance to fail, to appear in a box-office dud or choose some experimental project that no one understands; to be involved in a career-threatening scandal or fall out of fashion with the fickle movie-going public. He is frozen in our collective consciousness at the peak of his physical and professional attractiveness, an eternal avatar of unfulfilled potential. Which means that, sociologically speaking, he's a blank slate onto which fans -- young fans, in particular -- can project their dreams and worries about the unpredictable future.
What classic-movie buff has not speculated on what Jimmy would've done if he had lived beyond the year 1955? Would he have flamed out in another year or two and gone back to Iowa to raise hogs in obscurity? Would he have gotten fat and weird like his own idol, Marlon Brando? Or would he have been the rare Hollywood personality who manages to build a lifelong career and ends up respected and beloved well into old age, like his contemporary Paul Newman? This same "what if?" scenario is at the heart of a pretty amazing TV commercial that I've been seeing around the 'net the past couple of days. Created for a South African investment company, this piece is brilliantly conceived and executed, in my humble opinion. I'm still trying to figure out just how it was done:
Seriously, was that a lookalike who's had his face tweaked with CGI? Or actual footage of Dean that's been inserted Forrest Gump-style into other settings? I'm usually pretty good at spotting special effects, but I honestly can't tell what's been done here. It's an impressive piece of work, regardless.
As I said, I've seen this in several places, but the first was (naturally) on Boing Boing. Surprisingly, the ad brought a lot of derision in the comments over there, with several posters saying that it was tasteless, disrespectful, or downright irrelevant because "hardly anyone under 50 remembers" Dean. The latter argument is just plain stupid -- I am under 50, and obviously I know who he is, and I'm willing to bet a lot of the Damn Kids™ I complain about are aware of him, too, as an iconic face and a legend, if nothing else. But I really don't get the charges of tastelessness and disrespect. Maybe I'm operating from a different paradigm or something, but it struck me as a very reverential piece, a harmless exercise in wish fulfillment that does nothing to diminish Dean's real life or reputation. I suppose you could argue it's crass to use a dead celebrity's image for advertising under any circumstances -- but that's problematic, given all the ways Dean's face is used to make money already -- or whether the concept of the ad is really suited for the thing being advertised. Personally, I think the company's slogan -- "given more time, imagine the possibilities" -- is both poignant in its connotations for Dean's life and appropriate for the services being sold, i.e., long-term investments.
Or maybe I'm just a sentimental dope who likes the fantasy of a life that might have been for the guy whose image hung over my bed for several years.
If you'd like to know more about the creation of the "James Dean (Legend)" ad or see a full-rez version of it, go here.
Reading the Sunday funnies yesterday brought me to an important moment of self-realization.
No, really.
You see, yesterday's edition of "Get Fuzzy" turned on a disparaging reference to the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men, a series that seems to be deeply loathed by a not-insignificant number of people. I like it, myself; it's not remotely deep, but I find it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, at least to my sensibilities, and I'm frankly baffled by the level of ire I often see directed at this amiable -- if admittedly crass -- little show.
So I was thinking all of these things about Two and a Half Men and suddenly it struck me.
OMG... I like crap.
The things the sophisticates, connoisseurs, intellectuals, and hipsters generally decry as lowbrow, superficial, or -- how I have come to loathe this word! -- cheesy are often the things I most enjoy. And in turn the things that make them gush with enthusiasm and sweet, sticky joy tend to leave me, well, unimpressed. Consider the evidence:
And Now for Something Completely Non-Controversial
Or so I hope. It's a photo of Sigourney Weaver eating a hot dog:
Why? I dunno. It amuses me, and I thought it might amuse my Loyal Readers. And after the day I had at work, and the heavy associations this day holds, and the earlier unpleasantness over Rep. Wilson, I figure we could all use some amusement.
Incidentally, the hot-dog-shaped hot-dog stand in the background is Tail o' the Pup, a Los Angeles-area landmark and a well-known example of programmatic architecture, i.e., buildings that were made to look like other objects, usually the products sold inside them, like giant donuts and such. Sadly, the Pup has been MIA since 2005, when it was evicted from its old lot by development plans. It was supposedly placed into storage until it could be relocated, but it's been four years now and I can't find any news about it coming back. I hope it does eventually. The world needs a hot-dog stand that looks like a hot dog.
I visited Tail o' the Pup shortly before it closed down, but I was on my way to the airport and had already lunched, so I only had a cherry Coke. That's another reason I hope it eventually reopens, so I can actually experience eating a dog there...
One of my pals from the old movie-theater days recently tagged me with this meme over on Facebook. The idea is to list "15 movies that will always stick with you," which I interpreted to mean those flicks for which I can still recall the circumstances of my first seeing them, or movies that have some special meaning or memory for me. These are not necessarily my picks for the best movies I've ever seen, or even my favorite movies -- although I'd be willing to call all of them faves, if you pressed me on it -- but rather these are ones that have, well, stayed with me over the years. You're not supposed to think too much about this exercise, though; the instructions call for you to just throw out the first 15 titles that come to mind, and you're not supposed to take any longer than 15 minutes to do it (as if it would take me 15 minutes to come up with a mere 15 titles!).
Following what seems to have become my usual custom for these Facebook things, I'm going to repost the results here, with some additional commentary. Hey, just think of this as the Expanded Edition! And in case you're wondering, I came up with this list in about three minutes, instead of the allotted 15. Because I'm a show-off that way.
And yet, somehow, so very right... it's Molly Ringwald in that inescapable slave-Leia outift:
Actually, I can imagine Molly playing Leia if the original trilogy had been made just a couple years later. But then I've got a weird imagination that way. I've always thought Humphrey Bogart would've rocked as Han Solo, too...
Let's move on to something a little more lighthearted, shall we?
First, a lesson in film history: Back in the 1930s and '40s, individual movie studios tended to specialize more in particular genres than they do now, and Universal had established itself as the "house of horror" with several monster -- forgive the pun -- hits that are still considered iconic, if not definitive films today, particularly the 1931 versions of Dracula and Frankenstein, and 1941's The Wolf Man. Universal execs naturally sought to maximize their earnings on these beloved characters by churning out several sequels for each -- proving that nothing ever changes all that much in Hollywood -- and finally culminating in two "monster rally" crossover films that featured all three characters: House of Frankenstein in 1944 and House of Dracula in '45. By the late '40s, however, the monster craze was waning, and several "Abbott and Costello Meet..." films reduced the legendary monsters of movieland to mere punchlines. Which meant poor Larry Talbot -- a.k.a. the Wolf Man -- never got his own "House of" movie.
Until now.
It seems an independent filmmaker named Eben McGarr has created a retro-tastic new flick called House of the Wolf Man. It's filmed in glorious black-and-white, shot in the period-appropriate "academy" aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (which we now call "full-screen" on the backs of our DVDs), and generally looks as if it's a long-lost treasure that's recently been discovered in Universal's vaults. Here's the trailer:
I don't know about you, but I think that looks a lot cooler than the upcoming Wolf Man remake with Benecio Del Toro (and that actually looks pretty good to me, as remakes go). I haven't heard anything about how or when this is going to be released, but I intend to be watching for it.
First, for any who may be wondering, the Odd Fellows Hall building I referenced in the previous entry successfully crossed Market Street yesterday, creating a really odd sight for anyone who happened to walk past the intersection of Market and Main. (Basically, Market dead-ended in a three-story brick wall for a good part of the day). The building still needs to be shoved sideways onto its new foundation -- which I guess gives the forces of entropy one last chance to try and implode the old thing into a dusty heap of shattered masonry -- but at this point I think the worst threat of it crumbling is past. Now all I have to do is get over the cognitive dissonance caused by having a big old building standing on the wrong side of the street!
Secondly, if you didn't see it, there was a very nice tribute to John Hughes in the New York Times a few days ago, written by the actress Molly Ringwald. She, of course, starred in three of Hughes' best-loved movies, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink. She reminisces about working with Hughes and the impact he had on her life and career, and also reveals some interesting personal details, such as the fact that Hughes held grudges, and both she and co-star Anthony Michael Hall felt like they ended up on the receiving end of them. It's a very heartfelt piece of writing from a woman who was in many ways a proxy for we children of the '80s; here she plays that role one last time to tell us what our friend and big brother John was really like.
Oh, and this is probably really dumb, but it makes me happy to think that she and Hall are still friends enough that they called one another after John died, and also that... well, I'll let you see for yourself how Molly's article ends...
You may have encountered this already, but here's a nifty little video clip that's making the rounds. It's a tribute to John Hughes comprising scenes from his best-loved movies set to The Who's "Baba O'Reilly," which many people think is called "Teenage Wasteland" because of the refrain. Whoever put it together did a fine job of editing, and I think it's quite effective:
There's a lot of memories and associations packed into that five minutes. Personally, every time I hear "Baba O'Reilly," I find myself instantly transported back to the speech and debate room at good old Bingham High School. (FYI, I was on the debate team for a year.) Somewhere along the way, I've lost the context of this memory; I don't know if the moment I recall so clearly occurred during the day or at one of our after-school prep sessions, or maybe it was in the wee hours after a tournament. I just have the moment of the song itself, the first time I remember hearing it, or at least the first time I paid attention to it. One of those moments when whatever's playing on the radio seems to have been programmed specifically for you, like the soundtrack of your life. I remember I wasn't especially happy at that moment. I didn't really like being on the debate team; it was more work than I'd anticipated, and less fun. I was worried that I didn't seem to have what it took to effectively compete. And of course I was swimming in all the usual adolescent angst, the insecurity poorly concealed by swagger, the constant preoccupation with the mysteries of sex, and the bigger mystery of why I couldn't get any. But man, I must've looked cool, crashed on the worn-out thrift-store couch in the back of the room, wearing my cheap Ray Ban knockoffs and my ratty old trench coat. Teenage wasteland indeed. Just like a John Hughes movie.
Getting back to him, I've collected a few links that fans may find interesting. First up is a brief retrospective of the music in his movies, which was essentially a character in itself and always seemed to be utterly perfect for the mood of the scene. Following that, have a look at where Hughes' teenage stars are now. I had a big crush on Molly Ringwald back in the day, and I think I kind of still do. Interestingly, the guy who played Jake Ryan in Sixteen Candles has completely dropped off the radar, as in reporters are unable to locate him. Rumor has it he's a carpenter now. Finally, this blog post is a personal remembrance of John Hughes and what he meant to a young woman who became his pen pal. It's a beautiful piece that gives you a good idea of what he must've really been like, and it even includes some insight into why he left Hollywood. (Here's a big hint: it involved his sons and John Candy's death.)
And just for a little treat after all that, here is something I never expected to stumble across, the original short story that inspired National Lampoon's Vacation. The basic bones of the movie are all here, but the overall effect is quite different. It's a fascinating comparison...
There's an empty storefront on Main Street here in downtown SLC, just across from the light-rail station where I get off in the mornings, in which someone has set up two big video displays in the windows, one on either side of the door. These displays run an endless loop of PSAs and promos for the Salt Lake Film Society, presumably for the purpose of informing and entertaining the captive audiences who are standing around waiting for their trains. Or something. Personally, I don't find the vids all that entertaining or informing most of the time. Moreover, I find I'm increasingly annoyed by the ubiquity of video screens in our environment. Ironic, I know, given my primary interests and hobbies, but honestly, there are times when I'd really rather not have the distraction. At least the loop changes every couple of days so I don't have to see and hear the same damn thing day after day. And every once in a while, something will turn up that actually catches my interest.
Today, for example, the screens were running the original trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I have no idea if this has anything to do with all the Apollo anniversary stuff going on, or if it's pure coincidence.) Well, naturally I had to stand and watch that iconic footage before heading on into the office.
Somehow, though, the experience of watching scenes from 2001 projected onto the window of an empty storefront in the year 2009, with a dreadlocked homeless guy reflected in the glass, is curiously lacking in magic...
Speaking of Pixar, you may recall my enthusiasm a while back at the news that Pixar -- the one movie studio these days that's consistently turning out genuine movies, as opposed to unsatisfying exercises in spectacle and marketing -- is developing a trilogy based on the pulp-tastic "Martian tales" of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Well, I've been accumulating little tidbits of news about the project for the past several months, and it's time to perform an infodump for any of my readers who may be interested. The last item should be particularly exciting for my fellow Utahns, if that's any incentive to click through...
Further Evidence of the Utter Awesomeness of Pixar
It's a sentimental story to be sure, almost too cinematic to be believed. But sometimes life really is like a movie, and in the immortal words of Kermit the Frog, sometimes we do get to write our own ending.
In this case, the protagonist is a ten-year-old girl named Colby who was dying of a rare and vicious form of cancer. The ending she wanted was simple enough: she wanted to live long enough to see the new Pixar movie Up. But by the time the movie opened, she was too ill to go out to the theater. So a family friend started cold-calling Pixar and Disney, hoping she could somehow make the little girl's wish happen before it was too late. She finally managed to reach an actual human at Pixar and explain her situation. And the very next day, a Pixar employee was knocking at Colby's front door with a DVD of Up -- it's still running in theaters, remember -- and a sack of related swag.
It was Colby's last day on Earth; she died seven hours after the movie ended. As fate would have it, she couldn't even open her eyes to actually see what was on the screen. But she could hear it, and her mom described the images to her.
I hope it made her happy. I can think of worse ways to spend your final day.
The article I linked above is worth reading in its entirety, by the way. If you can get through it without tearing up, you're not human.
Hat tip to Jaquandor for bringing this to my attention...
There Are Times When I Really Wish I Lived in LA...
Yeah, sure, the City of Angels suffers from atrocious traffic, smoggy air, and a surplus of shallow, pretty people -- and this is different from Salt Lake how? -- but for a TV and movie lover like myself, the place also offers endless amusements that my home town simply can't compete with. Like, for instance, a classic movie theater running a triple-feature of 1970s-vintage Battlestar Galactica movies this Saturday.
Darth Mojo has the details, but, in a nutshell, Universal Studios once tried to recoup some of the costs of the original Galactica by releasing several theatrical movies that were composed of edited episodes from the series and its bastard stepchild, Galactica 1980 (I shudder just typing those words...). According to Mojo, this will be the first time all three of these movies have been shown on the big screen in this country. Damn, how I'd like to be there! If nothing else, it'd just be cool to see in person that awesome Cylon graphic on the gorgeous old marquee shown above.
The theater that's hosting this triple-threat, American Cinematheque's Aero in Santa Monica, apparently shows mostly classic films; browsing over its current schedule, I think I'd probably be spending a lot of time there if I lived in the area...
...about David Carradine, I'd like to share a photo I ran across while I was searching for an image to include with the "In Memoriam" entry. It didn't suit my purposes for that -- I wanted something specific to Kung Fu, not just a portrait -- but I nevertheless thought this was a cool picture:
Incidentally, is it just me, or did Carradine have a striking resemblance to John Carpenter, the director of so many iconic B-movies of the '70s and '80s?
What do you think, long-lost brothers? Or is it just the "weather-beaten old guy with long gray hair and a cigarette" effect?
From the Department of Retro Awesomeness, Pulp Adventure Section (well, actually from Chris Roberson's blog, but that other intro sounds a lot more impressive, doesn't it?) comes this, a trailer for an upcoming web series that sets my heart a-racing:
A square-jawed, all-American hero dressed like the Rocketeer fights glowing space-ghost guys and a brain in a jar with a raygun, and all in glorious black and white? How could that not be cool? (Actually, don't answer that... this sort of thing is pretty tricky to pull off without falling into either self-conscious -- and usually not very funny -- parody or painfully earnest ridiculousness. Nevertheless, I think this attempt looks promising.)
I'm not especially a fan of Marilyn Monroe -- with the exception of the sublime Some Like It Hot, all of her movies that I've seen blur together in my memory, and I'm not even certain which ones I have seen -- but she was undeniably pretty, and I like photos of pretty girls. I'm also fascinated by those occasional stories of long-lost artifacts being rediscovered in somebody's attic, so naturally my ears pricked up when I heard on The Today Show this morning that a cache of unpublished photos of Marilyn had turned up in the archives of Life magazine. You can see a nice selection of them here. These shots were taken in August of 1950, when Marilyn was 24 years old and still a few years from attaining full-fledged stardom. To my eye, she looks happier and sexier in these than in most of the better-known images of her that were taken later on. But then I've long suspected she was much happier as Norma Jean than she ever was as Marilyn.
FYI, yesterday was her birthday. She would've been 83 years old, something that's nearly impossible to imagine...
Fourteen years ago Wednesday, Christopher Reeve -- a man I once callously dismissed as a second-rate has-been -- was critically injured when the horse he was riding in competition balked at jumping over an obstacle, and Chris was thrown. It was a mundane accident; at worst, he should have suffered only some bruises and a sore ego. Unfortunately, however, his hands tangled in the reins, which changed his trajectory so that he ended up crashing down directly on his head. We all know what happened next. Chris' neck was broken, and in a literal blink of an eye, he became the world's most famous quadriplegic.
He also became, in the years following the accident, a much better man than he had been before: a tireless advocate for medical research and an inspiration for those with spinal-cord injuries (and for people with a lot of other problems, too, and even for people with no problems at all). Chris was no saint, a point he emphasized in both of the books he wrote after the accident. He was frequently irritated by the media's insistence on calling him "a real-life Superman" (even though, for my money, that's exactly what he was). But he was a man who was handed one of the biggest lemons life can give you, and somehow he found a way to turn it into something of value, not only for himself, but for the rest of the world as well.
Chris is gone now -- he's been dead nearly five years, as strange as that is to contemplate -- and his beautiful and devoted wife Dana is, too. I'm not at all confident that there's anything waiting for us beyond this life, but if there is any kind of mercy in this universe, any sense of fairness, they are together, and Chris is free of that damned chair.
I bring all this up again because the news that so many years have passed since Chris' accident surprised me -- it doesn't seem that long -- and also because I believe Chris and Dana's lives are ones worth remembering and commemorating. So in that spirit, I going to ask everyone reading this to go visit the website for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. Learn about the good these two managed to accomplish, and what continues to be done in their names. And if you can spare a few dollars in these difficult times, make a little contribution to help carry on their work. Or better yet, make a pledge to support the efforts of Matthew Reeve, Chris' son, as he runs in the New York Marathon on behalf of his father's foundation.
Chris didn't live long enough to walk again, but he was convinced that it was possible. I am, too. Let's help make it happen.
Here's a meme-type thing about movies that I picked up over on Facebook. It was pretty obviously assembled by someone younger than me, since most of the titles on the list came out just in the past ten years or so, and the handful of older ones date only as far back as the '70s and '80s. Another clue is that most of the comedies on this list come from what I think of as the "asinine" school of comedy, the lamentable modern-day idiom that seems predicated on the idea that nothing's funnier than people uttering non-sequiturs and behaving as if they haven't got a brain in their heads. (See Dynamite, Napoleon. Or better yet, don't bother.) But I'm sure I'm just coming across as yet another grumpy old bastard yelling at The Damn Kids to get off my lawn. Such is life.
In any event, here's the meme. I've made a few modifications (correcting film titles that I knew were incomplete or inaccurate, etc.), and added some comments in square brackets ([]).
Via Evanier, I see that the final bits and pieces of the late Forrest J. Ackerman's collection of movie memorabilia have gone under the auctioneer's gavel. I've written before about Forry's legendary collection, how it was reputed to be the world's largest and how he would generously show it off to anyone who came calling on a Saturday afternoon, how plans to base a museum around it never seemed to come together and how in recent years he was forced to sell off the bulk of it to pay for his mounting medical expenses. I understand that the items that remained were his most cherished ones, the ones he couldn't part with while he was alive, including Bela Lugosi's Dracula ring, which Ackerman personally wore every day, and a replica of the Robotrix -- a clear ancestor of C-3PO -- from the silent classic Metropolis.
This news makes me deeply sad. To think that a man spends his entire life gathering around himself the things he loves only to have them scattered to the four winds upon his death... well, it all seems like rather an exercise in futility, doesn't it? I suppose you could see it as these items returning to circulation now that Forry's no longer using them, and hope that they've all gone to good homes with owners who love and appreciate them the way he did. Forry himself might have even wanted it that way. But I still have a problem wrapping my head around the way a person's hobbies and interests just... evaporate. If your collection ends up being broken apart anyway, if the people you leave behind have no interest in saving it and loving it as you did, why collect it in the first place?
I am working on something a bit more substantive, but for now I couldn't resist grabbing the "Alphabet of Obscure Science Fiction Classics" Meme from SF Signal. Here are the rules:
"You know the drill. Copy the list and make titles for movies you've seen appear in bold."
And now for the list, with my boldings and a few comments:
I've read in a couple different places this morning that the venerable magazine Starlog -- which is for sci-fi fans something like Rolling Stone is to music lovers -- has ceased publication. The official announcement calls it a "temporary" cessation while the publishers re-evaluate and revamp, and they apparently intend to continue producing digital content for their website, but I think we know what this move really means. For all intents and purposes, after 33 years and 374 issues, Starlog is finished. It may live on in a diminished form as some kind of blog or genre-centric website, but there are thousands, if not millions, of those already, and Starlog.com is going to have a hard time differentiating itself from, say, io9. The most public and respectable face of science-fiction film and television fandom -- our only honest-to-god, widely distributed, often-seen-on-regular-newsstands magazine -- is dead.
I find myself imagining these guys facing off against these guys in a battle royale like the world has never seen. (Personally, my money's on Connery kicking Keith Richards' butt up and down the beach.)
Since writing about the Warner Archive DVD-on-demand service the other day, I've been thinking about which currently MIA movies I'd most like to own in the form of a shiny silver disc. A few of them are pretty obscure, a couple are somewhat less so (i.e., I'm willing to bet my readers have at least heard of them), and four of them are beloved classics that simply have no good reason to be unavailable, aside from intransigence and the nonsense that so often just seems to happen in Hollywood.
Yesterday over on Facebook, I was tagged by Kelly -- better known in these parts as Jaquandor -- to do a meme about my life as a geek. I of course complied immediately, because, well, it's a meme. I'm reposting the results here, with some tweaks to the formatting and a few comments that I've reconsidered:
For all the thousands of movies that are available on DVD, there are many more that languish in the studio vaults, mostly forgotten or "smaller" films that are deemed too obscure to justify mass production. In other words, the studios don't want to take the chance of getting stuck with a bunch of unsold discs because there wasn't enough demand for a particular title. That's business, and it's completely understandable.
Still, it seems that just about every movie ever made has somebody who loves it, and it's a real drag when something you love has been consigned to the Memory Hole because of brute economics. Bootlegging is an option, and I'll admit to having occasionally resorted to it myself in certain cases. But I've always been somewhat less than comfortable with bootlegs, for various reasons. I'd prefer to have the real deal, i.e., a legitimate, professionally made DVD, if only one were available.
I've just learned that at least one movie studio has finally come up with a workable solution for this problem. Jaime over at Something Old, Nothing New has pointed me to The Warner Archive, a new service that allows you to special-order catalog films which are then manufactured on demand. There are more details here, but the bottom line is that for only $19.95 each, you can get these obscurities on a genuine, professionally made DVD with a presentation quality equal to any other Warner Bros. title.
Jaime notes that:
Most of the titles they have at the moment can be described as minor films of major stars: lots of not-yet-on-DVD movies by popular stars with huge filmographies, like Cary Grant, Norma Shearer, Clark Gable. There are a bunch of films that were released on VHS but never made it to DVD, and some real curios...
In other words, stuff that's not likely to appeal to the average consumer. However, browsing through the 137 titles currently available (I understand there are more coming), I see at least four movies that I might be interested in owning: Countdown, a space-race drama starring a young James Caan; The Rain People, which was Francis Ford Coppola's first movie; Oxford Blues, an early-80s Rob Lowe vehicle that was filmed on location in Oxford, England, and helped fuel my own interest in traveling to England; and Wisdom, another '80s trifle with Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore. None of these are great movies (well, I haven't seen The Rain People, but I'm guessing there's a reason why it more widely known), but they do have their pleasures, and I'm delighted that they're finally going to be available for psycho collectors like myself. I hope the other studios launch their own versions of this service as well...
Here's something fun for your St. Patty's Day, a trio of ads for a New Zealand TV network's upcoming airing of the execrable movie Alien vs. Predator (not to be confused with the excellent four-part comic-book miniseries Aliens versus Predator, which was published in the early '90s). The movie stinks, but I love the clever ads, especially this one:
As always, click to embiggenate.
Via the Bad Astronomer, who dubbed the campaign "beyond awesome." Total agreement here.
An acquaintance of mine told me a few days ago that he had no interest in watching the Academy Awards because it was always the same old thing. Or, as he more colorfully described it, "Guy in tux wins something, gives awkward speech; next actor and actress come up and awkwardly recite some boilerplate stuff before announcing next winner. Lather, rinse, repeat." Another guy I know boycotted the show this year because the nominees "never reflect the tastes of real people." (He was pissed that The Dark Knight wasn't up for Best Picture. Little tip for the uninitiated: The Return of the King notwithstanding, science fiction, fantasy, superhero, and horror flicks have no chance of ever winning in the "major" categories. They're just not taken seriously enough by enough people. I suspect the reason ROTK won was less a recognition of its quality than of the sheer massive effort that went into filming the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. And of course I'll never forget or forgive tedious and unfunny Annie Hall beating Star Wars back in '77. Grr.)
Personally, I like the Oscars, even in those years when I haven't seen many of the nominated films. Actually, I think I might enjoy them a little more when I don't have a horse in the race, so to speak, because then I'm not feeling competitive and I'm free to simply enjoy the self-indulgent spectacle. That doesn't mean, of course, that I like every year's show equally. Some years, they just don't work very well...
I'm having one of those "too busy to go to the bathroom, let alone write anything that means anything" days, so why don't we just take a moment to push back from our desks, breathe slowly, and gaze upon an image of two lovely people:
If you haven't figured it out from the available evidence, this is Tyrone Power and Maureen O'Hara, starring here in an old pirate movie called The Black Swan, which I have to admit I've never seen. I've only seen a couple of Tyrone Power movies, actually -- off the top of my head, all I can think of are his take on Zorro and Brigham Young -- so I don't really have a strong mental picture that immediately leaps to mind when I hear his name. Am I crazy, or does he look rather like 1970s-vintage Sean Connery in this shot?
Credit where it's due: I ganked the photo from Lileks, who, incidentally, has finally converted his Bleat into a genuine blog (i.e., he's now publishing it with WordPress instead of the hand-built labor of love he's been creating day by day for the last umpteen years; on the positive side, he's finally got a reliable RSS feed so I can include him in my aggregator instead of having to remember to click over to his site). And why did I steal this particular image, a screengrab from something Lileks was watching on DVD the other night? No reason, really -- I just like looking at attractive people in Technicolor. And there is that Sean Connery thing. That's just... weird...
I can't believe I'm about to admit this publicly, but one of my all-time favorite guilty-pleasure movies is The Sword and the Sorcerer, a quickie knock-off of Conan the Barbarian and one of a whole raft of fantasy flicks that emerged in the early '80s. (If you want to get really technical, both Sword and Conan belong to a sub-category I like to call "barechested warrior" flicks. See also The Beastmaster and -- if you can force yourself to sit through it -- Yor: The Hunter from the Future.)
Here's a random bit of flotsam I've been intending to post for a while, a really cool photo of the great silent-film comedian Buster Keaton taken late in his life:
I found it over at Booksteve's Library, where it's theorized that this image has something to do with a number of beer commercials Keaton made for television in the 1950s. (Ironic, considering Keaton was an alcoholic.)
As I said, I've been meaning to post it anyway because I like Keaton and I like the moody, noir-ish atmosphere captured in the pic. But it's got some special significance to me tonight, as I sit alone with my thoughts in a dark and quiet house. I'm feeling pretty moody myself, for reasons I'll explain later. In the meantime, just enjoy this uncommon look at a genuine Hollywood legend...
By now, everyone has no doubt seen that video of a disgruntled Iraqi journalist hurling his shoes at President Bush in a gesture of contempt. Naturally, the Internet was immediately awash in parodies, mash-ups, and remixes of said video. Here's my favorite response thus far:
(I moved it below the fold as a favor to anyone with a slow-loading connection...)
To commemorate today's release of the 22nd James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, allow me to present a nifty video clip I snagged from Jaquandor. It's a compilation of the "gun barrel" openings from all the previous Bond movies, from 1962's Dr. No to Casino Royale in 2006. Oddly, it even includes the "unofficial" Bond movie Never Say Never Again, which couldn't use the gun-barrel thing due to legal issues (the history of NSNA is one long legal nightmare) but attempted something similar.
Even with the increasingly astronomical ticket prices and all the ill-mannered half-wits who can't unplug themselves from their text-messaging gadgets for 90 lousy minutes, I still maintain that the best place to see a movie is in an honest-to-god movie theater. Yes, I have an HDTV and a huge collection of DVDs (and let's not forget those pathetic old VHS tapes!) and I watch movies at home all the time, but these are really just a pale substitute for what I consider to be the primal cinematic experience., i.e., watching a movie projected onto a screen while sitting in a dark room surrounded by many other fellow humans. And just why do I think that's so cool?
Because when you're watching a movie at home, even if you've got a few friends over, you can't possibly replicate the shared electricity generated by several hundred people sitting on the edges of their seats during a chase scene, jumping in fear when the velociraptor attacks, tearing up when Yoda dies, or laughing in unison at the antics of Charlie Chaplin. Movies can be watched in solitude, of course, and that has its pleasures, too (remind me sometime to recount my first viewing of The Silence of the Lambs -- all alone in a gradually cooling auditorium in the wee hours of the night), but my strongest, most satisfying movie experiences have always been communal. While movies don't always generate a strong audience reaction (sadly, most of the time they do not), when they work their magic on a big crowd, and the crowd's reaction mirrors and amplifies your own emotions... well, it can be a form of genuine transcendence.
That's my theory, anyhow. The ubiquitous John Scalzi has another one that I think is interesting, too:
I wasn't tagged by SamuraiFrog to participate in the Alphabet Movie Meme, but you know me and memes...
Here are the rules:
1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.
2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.
3. Return of the Jedi belongs under "R," not "S" as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with "S." Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under "R," not "I" as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Conversely, all films in the Lord of the Rings series belong under "L" and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under "C," as that's what those filmmakers called their films from the start. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.
4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."
5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.
[Update: Doh! I forgot to link back to Blog Cabins as requested. If any of my taggees happen to amble by, I hope you'll see this and modify your posts accordingly... Sorry, BC!]
6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.
Okay, for the sake of this little exercise I am going to do my best to choose titles you may not expect from me, given my usual obsessions on this blog. Which means, no Star Wars and no Indiana Jones-related titles. I will, in fact, try to avoid the Lucas-Spielberg ouevre. Just for the sake of variety, of course...
Nothing irritates me faster or more thoroughly than when some finger-wagging scold takes it upon themselves to save the rest of the community from the creeping stain of immorality instead of simply minding their own damn business and letting others go about theirs. This sort of thing, unfortunately, goes on all the time here in my home state, something which I've been depressingly aware of since I was a fairly young boy. Not a month goes by, it seems, without a letter-to-the-editor from some ninny who thinks the windows of Victoria's Secret ought to be painted black, or news of yet another effort to "simplify" Utah's ridiculously arcane liquor laws. Just this week, I've encountered two major eye-rollers from the front lines of the never-ending culture war:
Some time back in the dim mists of history -- farther back than I really want to admit -- The Girlfriend and I discovered this neat little place called The Organ Loft. I've written about it before, but for those of you who are just joining us, I should explain that The Loft is an unassuming little building in South Salt Lake wherein resides an unexpected treasure: one of the few surviving theater pipe organs of the type that were designed and manufactured in the early 20th century to accompany silent movies. Now, I'm the sort who would be satisfied if the organ had simply been preserved for people to look at, but the really cool thing about The Loft is that its owner puts it to use. Once or twice a month during the fall, winter, and spring, you can see silent movies there with live music (and sound effects!) played on the Mighty Wurlitzer, just like you would have experienced if you'd been around in about 1925.
It's great fun, and for several years, Anne and I were regular fixtures around the place. We went frequently enough that we -- or at least I, since I was the one who always made our reservations -- got to be known by name. Every time we walked through the door, the owner and host, Larry Bray, would greet me with a jaunty, "Good evening, Mr. Bennion." It was curiously gratifying to be recognized like that; it made us feel like we had a personal investment in the place, like we were in a friend's entertainment room rather than an impersonal movie theater. It made us feel like, well, somebodies instead of just run-of-the-mill nobodies, like everyone else.
You know, it's funny... I remember being fairly indifferent to the movie Footloose when it first came out way back in 1984. Being the geeky boy that I was -- oh, hell, still am -- I was far more interested in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Star Trek III, Ghostbusters, and even Gremlins. I snottily dismissed Footloose as a movie only girls would like. At some point, however, I did finally knuckle under and see it. I no longer remember why I gave in -- maybe I was on a date or something -- but I do recall that the setting was the old Cameo Theatre in Draper, the single-screen neighborhood movie house where I would soon have my first job, and if it was playing there, it must've been several months after the movie's initial release. Surprisingly, it turned out to be not such a bad movie after all. In fact, I ended up enjoying it quite a lot.
Even so, I never anticipated how much that little movie about teens who want to dance would come to mean to me. With each passing year since 1984, Footloose has moved higher and higher up my list of all-time favorites. In part, this is simply because the movie was filmed near my home and it's a wonderful time capsule from a lost era. It fills my sentimental need to see the world I grew up in and which is now long gone. And it's a great feel-good flick where the good guys win in the end, and the bad guys turn out to not be so bad after all. But a bigger issue, I think, is that its message of continuing to think freely in the face of even well-intentioned oppression resonates with me more now than it did even in my teen years. Make of that what you will given recent topics on this blog.
Anyhow, not only do I love this movie, but I'm also a sucker for those cast reunions you occasionally see on TV; I like to know what's become of people whose faces and voices are so indelibly printed in my imagination, to see how well (or poorly) the years are treating them. Which brings us, at last, to my point: The three stars of Footloose -- Kevin Bacon, John Lithgow, and Lori Singer -- recently appeared together on The Today Show, but I was only able to catch a few moments of their interview before I had to leave for work. Tonight, I thought to look up the video clip online, and I thought I'd share it with anyone who may be interested:
Because it's turning out to be kind of a silly day anyhow, I thought I'd post this charming behind-the-scenes photo of Godzilla taking time out from his busy filming schedule to shake some hands and sign some autographs:
More great Godzilla photos here, if you like this sort of thing. And you know you do...
The previous entry reminds me of an item I meant to post some time ago but let slide, another story about a cinematic treasure turning up in an unexpected place. This time, it's a complete print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which has not seen in its long-form version for 80 years.
Unseen Film Footage of Marilyn Monroe Up for Auction
I love stories like this: behind-the-scenes film footage of Marilyn Monroe playing with Tony Curtis on the San Diego beach location for Some Like It Hot has surfaced... in Australia, of all places. It's a two-and-a-half-minute reel of 8mm that was shot in 1959 by a sailor Marilyn had met and invited to the set; the reel, still in its original Kodak box, was passed on to the sailor's daughter after his death, and she's now putting it up for auction, ostensibly because she thinks it "might be of some significance to the film world." (Um, yeah, and the fact that similar amateur footage of Marilyn on the set of The Misfits was auctioned for $60K earlier this year had no bearing on this magnanimous gesture? Sure...)
Regardless of the motivation behind the auction, I hope the footage is made available to the public after the sale. I'm not a huge Marilyn fan -- I've never bought into that particular cult of celebrity, for some reason -- but I do enjoy glimpses of the stars "off-stage," as it were, especially from the days before behind-the-scenes material was commonplace. Also, Some Like It Hot is one of my favorite films, and this footage is reportedly in color, which will be interesting to see as the movie itself is black and white.
It just amazes me that treasures like this are lurking out there in people's attics and closets...
[Incidentally, the photo up there at the top has nothing to do with this story, aside from it being a picture of Marilyn Monroe, but it's one I've been meaning to post up for a while. It amuses me to see that even an icon of the stature of Humphrey freaking Bogart was still just a guy, and got caught doing exactly what any other guy would do if they found themselves sitting next to Marilyn Monroe...]
The Man Behind the Dreaded "Floating Head" Movie Posters!
As with so many other things that were much, much cooler twenty or thirty years ago, movie posters these days are pretty uninspired. It used to be that even the lowest-budget drive-in fodder was advertised with beautiful, colorful painted-art collages. That was before Photoshop and rock-bottom-line thinking took hold in the industry, though. These days, the dominant aesthetic -- if you could call it that -- is all about headshots of the cast. Here's a video introduction to the master of that particular craft:
I've found another movie meme over at Electronic Cerebrectomy, and like SamuraiFrog, the proprietor of that fine web establishment, I just can't resist a halfway-decent movie meme. So...
I've missed out on a lot of intriguing memes lately because I haven't had the time to comment on lengthy lists of stuff, so when I spotted a fairly short one over at SF Signal, I figured I'd better grab it. It's about sci-fi movies based on books...
[Update: Looks like I was having a moment of extreme dumbness when when I posted this last night -- instead of doing as the third rule asks and italicizing only the movie titles for which which I started the book but didn't finish it, I italicized all of the titles. Because they're titles and you're supposed to italicize those. Doh! Anyway, they're fixed now, if it matters to anyone...]
Just for fun, here's the prologue from Escape from New York, which explains the premise behind the film:
As I said in the previous entry, this was pretty mind-bending stuff when I was a wee lad. It still raises the hair on my arms, to be honest. It's perfectly executed, with its combination of groovy early-80s synth music, imitation computer graphics (hand-drawn animation, I believe), and the perfect female voiceover artist... not to mention the tongue-in-cheek irony of "Liberty Island Security Control." It's a bloody shame Hollywood has forgotten how to make solidly entertaining B-grade fare like this, which was well aware of its basic silliness but still managed to somehow be thought-provoking and cool, unlike most of the A-level spectaculars we get nowadays.
But then I'm well on my way to grumpy-old-manhood, and I suppose this is just another case of getting uptight at the damn kids playing on my lawn...
A couple years ago, I took note of a new housing development in Bend, Oregon, that was to be modeled after the bucolic Shire of Tolkien's (and Peter Jackson's) Lord of the Rings. I recall being both intrigued by and dubious of the project, writing at the time that:
...it would be the ultimate in geek bragging rights, I suppose. "Hey, look, I live in a hobbit hole!" But ultimately, it just seems a little too contrived to be desirable...
Turns out everybody else agreed with me. Today, I read the bank is foreclosing on The Shire. Only two homes (of a planned 31) have been finished, and only one of those has actually sold. The developer behind the project, Ron Meyers, is quoted as saying, "Some people were turned off by living in 'Disneyland.'"
Um... yeah. You didn't think of that before you took out massive loans and broke ground? And you didn't consider that the sorts of people who might like to live in a Disney-style re-creation of a fictional place probably don't have the income to buy million-dollar homes? Seems to me that folks who have that kind of scratch are usually interested in something a little less... gimmicky.
Somebody didn't do their market research, it seems...
Ever since I stumbled across that trailer Thursday, I've had the movie Heavy Metal on the brain. Not an entirely unpleasant situation, but definitely a little outside my usual obsessions...
Anyway, I tried talking about it to a few of my friends at work and found, much to my surprise, that this movie doesn't seem to be very well remembered. I didn't expect the kids in the office to know about it, but even the older guys could only scratch their heads and say they think they saw it and they kind of remember it, but not really. And here I've believed all these years that it was a minor touchstone for my generation, not on the level of Star Wars or even Tron, but at least equivalent to Caddyshack. Once again, however, I seem to find myself the Lone Keeper of Obsolete Pop Culture.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised in the case of Heavy Metal. It's not exactly a great classic, even by "cult classic" standards.
Today is Pioneer Day, a Utah state holiday commemorating the arrival of the first Mormon settlers here in the Salt Lake Valley. If you're from around here, you know what it's all about, but for my out-of-state readers I should explain that this day is basically an end-of-the-month do-over of the Fourth of July: we have a big parade in the morning, then picnics in the park, carnivals, day-long activities for the kids, and finally, fireworks at night. (There are some who grumble, in fact, that Utahns make a bigger deal of our local founder's day than our nation's Independence Day and that this indicates there's some lingering whiff of treason in Mormon culture. Personally, I think folks just like fireworks and parades.) Anyway, most of the state's population seems to have the day off... but not me. Nope, I work for The Man. Which means I'm sitting at my workstation, same as always, trying not to listen to the drums of the marching band a mere half-block away...
You know, on these hot summer days when responsibilities keep me inside drudging away at my desk instead of out playing as I'd like to be, my mind tends to wander back to my carefree adolescent years, when all I really had to think about was the anticipation of getting my driver's license and the beguiling, inscrutable mystery of girls. Oh, and of nonsense like this:
That's actually a trailer for the late-90s home-video release of Heavy Metal, not the original theatrical version from 1981, but as I recall the vintage advertising wasn't too different. You have no idea how exciting this movie looked to me when I was twelve. An R-rated cartoon? With aliens and starships and rock music and the possibility of... boobies?! It was utterly mind-blowing... and of course, there was no way my mom was going to let me see it, not with that R rating and those danged cartoon boobies. The innuendo in Moonraker had been bad enough. And so it was a long, long time before I would see Heavy Metal in its entirety (I think I was in my twenties before I finally caught it at a midnight screening), and naturally, after all those years of build-up, it turned out to be something of a disappointing mess. Ah, but the images and the music... man, that stuff lives on in my memory as a touchstone of all that was simultaneously cool and tacky about the early '80s.
Yeah... summer days in 1981...
From somewhere outside my office, I can hear that the parade carries on...
It's another of those crazy-making weeks that offers little chance to blog (and naturally, these are the weeks when I seem to have the most I want to blog about -- this is an immensely frustrating situation, believe me), so to keep you entertained until I manage to actually, you know, write something, allow me to direct your attention to Jaime J. Weinman's rationalization of how he can call Moonraker the dumbest James Bond movie ever (even over Die Another Day!) and yet still feel a certain affection for it:
...it's just so very good-natured and unpretentious in its desire to do anything to entertain; it wants you to like it so badly and will do anything to be liked, whether it's repeating the plot of a movie made two years earlier or turning a psychotic killer into a kid-friendly romantic comedy lead. I can't help but be a little charmed by a movie that's so anxious to be loved; today, when a blockbuster movie is bad, it's just loud and obnoxious, demanding our attention rather than giving us beautiful things to look at. Moonraker is like [director] Lewis Gilbert's home movies reel of cool stuff [production designer] Ken Adam built; that's enough to keep it out of Die Another Day purgatory.
For the record, I, too, harbor some warm feelings for Moonraker. It was the first Bond movie I ever saw; my mother took me and a half-dozen of my friends to see it for my tenth birthday. She was mortified by all the innuendo in the dialogue, certain that she would be getting some nasty phone calls from other mothers once my buddies started repeating things we'd heard, but we didn't care about all that mushy stuff -- in those days of the post-Star Wars space-movie craze, we were only there for the shuttles and lasers.
You might also want to check out I Expect You to Die!, an entertaining blog whose proprietor is reviewing one Bond flick a week until the release of the next one, Quantum of Solace, this fall. He's also doing additional commentary on certain related issues, such as the amusing (and dead-on) observation that the Bond-o-verse invariably presents Americans as bumbling yokels, and yet American audiences love the series anyhow.
I hope to be back later today with some thoughts on last weekend's concert experience...
A number of movie blogs are reporting that Quentin Tarantino's long-gestating World War II project Inglorious Bastards might be finally sputtering to life. My sharp-eyed loyal readers are aware, of course, that I don't much care for Tarantino films, but I find I'm looking forward to this one, for no other reason than to hear the fulminating reactions of the local prude brigades when the word "bastards" goes up on theater marquees all over the valley...
In the words of the immortal Bugs Bunny, "ain't I a stinker?"
So, I was just out to my mom's place and happened to catch a few minutes of EntertainmentInsideHollywoodAccessTonight, and what I heard during those few minutes utterly blew my mind: today is Kevin Bacon's fiftieth birthday.
Let me repeat that: Kevin Bacon -- one of my favorite actors, the star of one of my favorite movies (Footloose), the guy who brought to life the quintessential 1980s "rebel with a cause" (Ren McCormack, one of my many heroes during my high school years), the guy who everyone else is only six degrees away from -- has just hit the half-century mark.
And if that isn't alarming enough, they also said that there's a big-screen remake of Footloose in the works starring the tween sensation du jour, Zac Efron.
I'm going to go lie down with a cool cloth on my head now. God, I feel old...
You know, everybody thinks it'd be so awesome to live a life of adventure and derring-do, but have you thought about the practical considerations, the real-life inconveniences of having Nazis, commies, aliens, zombies, and indigenous tribespeople always trying to punch your timecard? Consider how your simplest daily activities would change if you really were Indiana Jones...
Great, more lists. This time we're looking at Entertainment Weekly's Top 100 Movies and Top 100 Books of the last 25 years. I'm not going to quibble with the actual rankings of these titles, since such things are almost entirely subjective in my opinion. My super-bestest faves aren't likely to be yours, after all. But what I will do is follow in Jaquandor's footsteps and bold the titles I've seen or read, with occasional commentary when I have something to say.
There seem to have been a lot of "list memes" floating around lately, that is, lists of book or movie titles that compulsive bloggers such as myself then feel, um, compelled to comment upon. Here are a couple I recently picked up from Jaquandor and SamuraiFrog, respectively...
If M. Night Shyamalan's new movie, "The Happening," only cost $500 to produce, was made on scratchy 16mm film and cast the late Bela Lugosi, it would be a thousand times more charming than the utter disaster it is now.
Another movie meme, again via SamuraiFrog, whose post is only one generation removed from the original source of this one. I'm not familiar with The Sickness Cinema blog, but I like their touch with a meme. So, without further ago, The First (as in inaugural) Sickness Cinema Meme:
I've seen an unusual number of attractive movie-related memes over the last couple of weeks, but, as you may have noticed, I've been somewhat preoccupied with other matters. Still, no good meme can go unmeme'd, so bear with me now as I launch into a veritable orgy of meme-ing. Or something to that effect. Basically, I'm trying to warn you that there's a mess o' memeage coming down the chute. But you probably gathered that already, didn't you?
The first up is a pretty high-falutin' one that I borrowed from SamuraiFrog. What do I mean by high-falutin'? Well, just wait until you see some of the questions and then tell me that anyone but a total film fanatic and/or snob would even know who or what they're about. I don't think anyone would consider me a slouch in the film-buff department, and even I had to look up quite a few of these. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot...
Briefly noted, today is the 75th anniversary of the first drive-in movie theater, which opened June 6, 1933, in Camden, New Jersey. I've never been a regular patron of drive-ins, but I have had a few memorable experiences at them -- no, you may not ask me to elaborate on those -- and of course I'm always a bleeding-heart for anything that's both nostalgic and endangered, which drive-ins definitely are. (There are fewer than 500 left today, down from some 5,000 in their heyday.)
Wired.com has a short history of this venerable institution, and local movie critic Sean Means lists the surviving Utah examples on his blog. I recommend the Motor Vu in Erda, for what it's worth; The Girlfriend and I spent a very pleasant evening there last summer with her family, all of whom live nearby. It's a family-run single-screener, charmingly low-budget and down-home feeling.
One moment in particular from that night stands out: as the darkness thickens and a cool breeze begins to rise from the surrounding farmland, I notice a freight train chugging along the benches of the mountain range to the east, behind the screen. It's far enough away that it looks like a black thread with a light at its tip, sliding along beneath the huge, projected face of Johnny Depp, the mournful cry of its horn providing counterpoint to Captain Jack Sparrow's dire circumstances (we were seeing Pirates 3, of course; I have to say, it worked much better as drive-in fare than it did the first time we saw it in a quote-unquote real theater). That, my friends, is one of those rare moments when you start to think time travel might actually be possible, when you find yourself connected by experience to an audience that would've been experiencing more or less the same thing 50 years earlier. Moments like those are truly magical and all-too-rare these days.
I'm sure you're dying to know what I thought, so here's the short version: I liked Crystal Skull well enough, but I didn't love it. I had some reservations, and some things I wanted to take a couple of days to think about before I posted anything.
While you wait for the longer review -- because I know everyone out there in InternetLand is waiting with bated breath for my humble opinion of a movie you've probably all seen by now anyway -- allow me to entertain you with the following video clip, relayed to me this morning by Brian Greenberg:
People are weird...
Update: Doh! BoingBoing is reporting that this video is a viral marketing campaign from an agency that has the LucasArts games account. And as it so happens, there is an Indiana Jones LEGO game coming out in a couple of weeks to tie in with the release of Crystal Skull. So... it looks like I got taken, kids, used against my will and without my knowledge to spread the word about a product I will see no profit from myself and have no interest in helping to promote. And I have to admit, I'm feeling pretty damn annoyed about that.
In the interest of full disclosure, my own employer has been involved in creating several viral campaigns, but personally, I just don't "get" this sort of marketing. It seems to me that there's something sneaky about it, like you're trying to fool people into listening to a pitch, and very often the pitch is so subtle that the commercial message doesn't come through anyhow. If you have to really dig into the background of a video clip or a web site to find out there's something being sold there, how can you say that your message is being effectively delivered? How many people really exert that kind of effort? And isn't there a potential backlash against the product that's being advertised when people do realize that that funny clip they've been passing around to their friends is just another freakin' ad? I know I'd feel a little bit scammed and a hell of a lot less charitable toward Product X. Just like I'm feeling right now about freakin' Lego video games...
The funny thing is, I don't even remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark when it first came out. That's odd for me, because I can recall the circumstances and specific theaters where I saw every other major landmark film of my childhood: the Star Wars trilogy, the early Star Trek films, Superman, Tron, The Black Hole, hell, even Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. But not Raiders.
Even as I type this, Dr. Jones is cracking his ratty old whip in theaters across the land and reviews are generally (thankfully) positive. Due to a cruel twist of fate, however, I won't be seeing it until tomorrow night, so all you folks out there who've already been just hold your tongues around me, okay? Okay!
In the meantime, let's all get in the mood with this catchy little ditty:
Eric D. Snider, a BYU alum who managed to escape from Happy Valley and find happiness and success as a film critic in the Pacific Northwest, still enjoys making the occasional good-natured jibe at the culture he left behind. Today, he offers us his suggestions for a whole new genre of filmmaking: the Mormon horror movie...
[Ed. note: these probably won't make sense to anyone who hasn't grown up behind the Zion Curtain, but trust me, to those in the know, this is good stuff...]
“Children of the Quorum”
“Friday the 31st” (aka “Home Teaching Day”)
“Pet Seminary”
“Enrichment Night of the Living Dead”
“I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I’m Telling Your Bishop”
“The (CTR) Ring”
“Rosemary’s Baby, Which is Her Fourth, and She’s Only 23″
“The Hills Have Tithes”
The travel site Expedia really knows how to push my buttons: they're now offering "Indiana Jones Travel Experiences," i.e., trip itineraries to India, Egypt, Italy, China, Jordan, Mexico, Peru, or the American Southwest, all places that have some kind of tie-in to the four Indy movies, and all of course intended to cash in on the marketing push surrounding Crystal Skull. Just book me for one big package that includes every one of these... and curse my movie-fueled imagination!
(Actually, the Southwestern destinations are all within a day's drive of me, so we can forget that one... but the others? One of these days, my friends, one of these days...)
The weekend box office results are in, and The Wachowski Brothers' live-action remake of the old Speed Racer cartoon is looking to be a total bomb. Doesn't surprise me in the least, as the previews made it look (to this grumpy old curmudgeon, at least) like a blur of meaningless color and noise that nobody would remember five minutes after leaving the theater, let alone a year from now. Peter David, however, liked the film and has a different prediction of how Speed Racer will fare long-term:
...I realized a lot of this negativism was sounding familiar to me. Too long. Too loud. Too overwhelming visually with lots of mindless sound and fury signifying nothing. And I realized where and when I had heard it all before:
"Blade Runner."
Critics and fans leveled many of the same complaints at "Blade Runner," comparing it unfavorably to other then-popular SF films, and it was crushed at the box office by a powerhouse called "E.T." "Blade Runner" tanked.
Yet over time it was seen as visionary, and its stylings le[f]t an indelible impression on fans and future filmmakers. Any number of dramatic endeavors have the visual stamp of "Blade Runner" upon them. ...I suspect you're going to see tricks from "Speed Racer" showing up in other films in the next years, and it's going to be one of those movies in which, years from now, film students are going to be seeing the basis for many subsequent films.
Well, maybe. You never know what's going to inspire today's kids when they become tomorrow's filmmakers, and it's tough to predict how any given thing is going to look after 10 or 20 years of hindsight. Still, I can see one big difference between Speed Racer in the year 2008 and Blade Runner in the year 1981:
One of the little games I enjoy is trying to imagine what iconic movie characters would've been like if they'd been played by someone other than whoever made them into icons. For example, I think everyone knows that Tom Selleck would've been Indiana Jones if CBS hadn't held him to his Magnum contract, and that Ronald Reagan was once considered for Bogart's signature role, Rick Blaine in Casablanca. (For the record, I think Selleck would've made a fine Indy, but nobody today would remember Casablanca if Reagan had played Rick. Just my opinion, of course...)
Somewhat lesser known is that Nick Nolte was considered for Han Solo, and that Luke and Leia could just as easily have been played by William Katt (of The Greatest American Hero fame) and Spielberg's one-time girlfriend, Amy Irving, rather than Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.
One of the most intriguing possibilities, however, is the notion that Cary Grant could've been the original James Bond. That seems startling at first, given the lightweight stuff that Grant is mostly remembered for, but I really think it might have worked. I've long thought that North by Northwest has much the same tone and style as Dr. No, and I believe Grant could've played brutality if the script had called for it. Someone else apparently thinks so, too. Here's a video compilation that gives you a taste of what might have been:
The image you see up there at the top of this entry is a poster I remember well from my younger days, when I was working at that infamous movie theater I've mentioned many times before. You see, back in the late '80s, THX sound was still quite the novelty, at least in these parts, and my theater -- the first in Utah to boast a THX-certified auditorium -- used to heavily promote the system. This item, which the manager would occasionally throw up in one of the one-sheet cases when he didn't have any interesting new movie posters to display, attempted to explain to average movie-goers why sound is a critical part of their viewing experience, and how a THX-certified system enhances that experience.
I was always weirdly fond of this poster. I was proud of that whole "first in Utah" thing and thrilled to be a booster for both my employer and a division of Lucasfilm, a company that at that time could do no wrong in my eyes. And of course it amused my inner fanboy that the little cartoon audience on the poster is watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
I don't know what happened to that poster. A lot of one-sheets from the theater found their way into the hands of me and my co-workers, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that one of my buddies ended up with it, but if that's the case, I don't know about it. Whatever happened, it eventually stopped appearing in the one-sheet cases, and then I eventually left that job and now damn near 20 years have passed. I probably haven't seen this particular poster since 1991 or thereabouts.
This morning, I happened to run across a source that is selling them. Not reproductions, but actual vintage posters. I was immediately tempted to pull out the credit card, but... it's been a long time since I impulse-bought any collectible stuff with no practical value, and I wasn't sure if it was a good idea or something I'd come to regret. Lately I've been thinking again that I ought to be liquidating some (most) of the crap down in the Bennion Archive (a.k.a., my basement), not adding to it. Unsure of what to do, I called The Girlfriend for advice. I told her what the item was and why it tempted me (i.e., it's both a sentimental relic from my theater days and an Indiana Jones collectible). Here's how our conversation went:
You may have noticed that I'm not always the world's cheeriest person. What can I say? I think too much and life has a tendency of getting me down. But every once in a while something comes along that wipes away all the gunge for a brief time and leaves me, to borrow a phrase some of you out there will easily identify, giddy as a schoolboy:
If you you look back through the archives of Simple Tricks, you'll see quite an evolution regarding this movie. At first, I wanted nothing to do with a fourth Indiana Jones flick. I didn't see any need for one and I had no confidence that G. Lucas could pull it off. My position gradually weakened as filming began and I started seeing stills from the new movie. And now... maybe it's just simple Pavlovian conditioning keyed to a familiar theme song, but this trailer causes me to break out in a big ol' grin every time I watch it... and I've watched it about a dozen times now since a crappy phone-cam bootleg of it surfaced on Friday night. Screw Iron Man, I'm ready for some Jones! Only 17 days to go...
The first summer I worked at that movie theater job I'm always yammering on about was amazing. It was amazing for a lot of reasons: I had my first "real" job, I was positively goofy about this particular girl I happened to know, and I was making friendships with a posse of guys I'm still friendly with nearly 20 years later... it was simply one of the best times of my life. But one of the biggest reasons the summer of '89 was so great was that the movies that were running in the background of all those coming-of-age moments were great, too. I've never done the research, so this is entirely subjective on my part, but I can't think of any other summertime movie season that has been so chock-full of flicks that were both (a) immensely successful and (b) so damn good (or at least so really damn enjoyable, which isn't necessarily the same thing). The line-up for the Memorial-Day-to-Labor-Day period that year included: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Batman, Lethal Weapon 2, Dead Poets Society, The Abyss, License to Kill, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, When Harry Met Sally..., and probably a dozen more I'm not remembering right now. There were just so many titles coming out that summer that caught my -- and everybody else's -- attention, and we at the theater were all so aware of what was coming up. I miss being so plugged in to the scene. Or to any scene, really. Every weekend brought some new wonder, some new zap of electric anticipation for both us theater-drones and the patrons queuing up in the lobby. It was an exciting time to be working in the movie industry, and to be a movie fan.
However, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old curmudgeon who's always going on about how much better things were back in his day, it's been one long, slow downward slope ever since. I still reflexively get excited at the approach of the summer season, but year by year, summer by summer, the ratio of disappointment to awesomeness has been creeping upwards. Worse, it's getting to the point where the upcoming releases aren't even that interesting to begin with. (Of course, this problem isn't confined to just the summer months; The Girlfriend and I used to go to the movies at least once a week, and sometimes two or three times, but over the last couple of years we've scaled back to about once a month. And it's not because we're all that busy -- although we are -- it's mostly a function of how few flicks are coming out that we really want to see...)
Let's examine this summer's schedule (which officially kicks off this Friday with the release of Iron Man) and see what catches our eye, shall we?
And if you've ever wondered whatever happened to one of the best-known writer/directors of the 1980s, it seems that these days John Hughes is making like Howard Hughes. Too bad...
Incidentally, does anyone else wonder what Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane are up to these days? I've often had the thought that it'd be very interesting if Ferris has become a burned-out, work-obsessed capitalist and his old buddy Cameron shows up to remind him of the life-changing lesson he taught 20 years ago...
She's Not Bad, She's Just Drawn That... Well, Okay, Maybe She's Bad
Remember a couple of weeks ago when the hot thing sweeping the InterWebs was those deeply unsettling images of Homer Simpson and Mario as they'd appear if they were "real"? The creator of those images has struck again, this time giving us an "untooned" version of Jessica Rabbit from the classic movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. As one might expect, she's much less grotesque than the other two...
To my knowledge, I've never really had a genuine, honest-to-gosh nemesis, but I'm beginning to think it just might be Matthew McConaughey. Yes, that Matthew McConaughey, the naked-bongo-playing goodtime-funboy with the perfect six-pack abs and the spotty box-office record.
And why, you may ask, would I elevate this inoffensively goofy would-be movie star to the level of "nemesis"? Well, first, he brought his special kind of blandness to Dirk Pitt, the literary swashbuckler whose adventures I devoured as a youth. Now, according to ScreenRant.com, he may be in line to transform another of my puberty-era heroes into one of his signature sleepy-eyed slacker doofuses (doofi?): Thomas Magnum, a.k.a. Magnum, P.I., the Ferrari-driving, Hawaii-based TV detective played in the 1980s by Tom Selleck.
You may recall me mentioning a while back that Pixar is adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs' fabulous pulp novels about John Carter of Mars into a mixed live-action/CGI film trilogy. Well, I've just learned they're not the first animators to take a crack at ERB's manly Virginia gentleman who becomes the warlord of an alien world. Another attempt was made to translate Carter to film way back in the 1930s by Bob Clampett, an alumnus of Warner Brothers' famous Termite Terrace and the director of many well-known Looney Tunes shorts (including one of my favorites, Falling Hare, in which Bugs Bunny battles a gremlin).
According to this guy, the attempt never amounted to much, because Clampett and ERB had a different creative vision than the movie studios -- unthinkable, I know! -- but Clampett got as far as making some test footage, which I now present as a Fascinating Historical Curiosity:
I don't know about you, but I think that stuff looks really cool, very much in the vein of the extremely nifty Superman shorts produced by Max Fleischer in the '40s. The running thoat -- the eight-legged animal -- is especially impressive. Sigh. Yet another item for the "If Only" file...
(Hat tip to Chris Roberson for posting the video first.)
Stop! I'm Going to Have to Put You on the Cardboard Game Grid!
Okay, so it seems that the hot new fad sweeping the InterWebs is "sweded" movies, i.e., ultra-cheap homemade re-creations of well-known films using cardboard, tin foil, and household items as props and costumes. The inspiration behind this phenomenon is apparently a Jack Black comedy called Be Kind, Rewind (which hasn't even been released yet) in which a couple of dim-bulb video-store owners accidentally erase their entire inventory of VHS cassettes and then start replacing those movies with their own half-assed reproductions. Which of course their customers love more than the originals, causing the two to be elevated into folk heroes or something.
Yeah, I know, it doesn't sound very funny to me either, but I guess this is the sort of thing the kids are going for these days. And to think our parents didn't get Yahoo Serious! Oh, wait... neither did I.
Anyhow, the aesthetic at work in these "sweded" flicks -- the term comes from one Be Kind, Rewind character's BS explanation that the replacement movies are the Swedish versions -- seems to be "the cheesier, the better." And oh, god, is this stuff cheesy. Not just cheesy, but cheez-ee. I've seen a lot of amateur movies in my time, and even been in a few, but these things strike a new low in sheer painfulness. There is, for example, a sweded version of Star Wars that consists of people wearing cardboard X-wings and TIE-fighter panels chasing each other around a lawn while somebody hums the theme music. I couldn't even finish that one, it was so embarrassing. Click that link at your own peril.
I'll be honest, I think the whole sweding thing is just plain dumb. But for every rule, of course, there are exceptions. The following video, sent to me by my buddy Chenopup, is so audacious, so ambitious, so well-done, that I simply couldn't help but sit in awe as it played for the first time. It's the lightcycle scene from Tron, completely redone in cardboard, Saran Wrap, and stop-motion animation... and it is frakkin' awesome:
I'm amazed at how close the sweders got their version to the original... of course, now I want to go watch the real Tron again. Look, it's The Dude in a funny hat!
One element that has so far been missing from every major film derived from a comic book is the sense that the titular hero shares his world with a whole bunch of other superheroes. For example, Spider-Man-the-film gave no hint that Spider-Man-the-character was only one of a vast pantheon of characters who all live in the same world. Superhero movies to date have all been entirely self-contained and, so far as the novice viewer can tell, each tells of the only super-powered person on the planet.
That's not how it is in the comics medium, where the world is lousy with super-powered people and creatures, and any character who is owned by a particular publisher is likely to show up in any other character's book at some point. This is especially true in the case of the so-called Marvel Universe, the shared setting of all the titles published by Marvel Comics, so it is somewhat surprising that all the films based on Marvel titles -- and that would be most of the superhero flicks of the last ten years or so, including X-Men, Daredevil, The Hulk, Ghost Rider, and The Fantastic Four -- have not so far included any crossovers between them. (Actually, I guess it's not that surprising, since crossovers would be meaningless -- if not actually confusing -- for the average viewer who sees only one of these films a year and doesn't know anything about comics.)
But now, in a summer that's going to see two major movie releases based on Marvel titles, it looks like the powers that be are going to throw in the sort of thing that comics fans have enjoyed for years: according to this blog, Robert Downey, Jr., who is playing the title role in the much-anticipated Iron Man, will have a cameo appearance in The Incredible Hulk. There is also some rumbling that another big name who is supposed to star in another upcoming Marvel-licensed flick -- the rumor mill says that it will be Samuel L. Jackson playing the character Nick Fury -- will appear briefly in Iron Man.
I think this brilliant, a nice gesture to comics fans and a good marketing ploy to promote the other movies based on the same universe that will be released around the same time. Now, if they could just somehow get all the movies to meet the same standard of quality...
One more quick item before I shut down for the night:
Stephen Sommers, who scored big with his goofy-fun remake of The Mummy and then flopped even bigger with the dismal Van Helsing, is once again looking to the classic Universal monsters for inspiration. This time, it's The Wolf Man getting an upgrade. I've got to admit, I wasn't too crazy about this idea when I first heard it. I don't usually care for remakes, Sommers has a spotty record, and the 1941 Wolf Man with Lon Chaney, Jr., has always been my favorite of the Universal monster movies.
But then I heard Benicio del Toro would be playing Lon Chaney part, and my interest level rose a hair. Then I heard the legendary Rick Baker -- who brought An American Werewolf in London to life, among many other projects -- would be doing the make-up effects and that he intended to remain true to the look of the original, and my interest level climbed a bit more.
Then I saw a photo of del Toro in Baker's make-up:
As expected, that one-sheet for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that you've been seeing around is just the "teaser." Here's the regular release design, which the official Indiana Jones web site is calling the "payoff" poster:
I've never heard that term before, but it seems to fit. In more ways than one. I really like this design. It's in keeping with the standard pattern for Indiana Jones movies: the first poster depicted just Indy alone, and now this design is a collage featuring all the primary characters with a bit of action at the bottom. It is, in fact, very similar to the regular release design for Last Crusade, which is as it should be. It makes this fourth movie feel like it really is part of the series instead of just an afterthought. (Of course, we'll see what the actual movie is like, but I think at this point my skepticism has degraded to about the same consistency as cheesecloth. I'm ready Uncle George, take me now!)
Still a couple of months to go, of course, before opening day. In the meantime, I think I'll get out the old credit card and acquire another item for the Archives...
People tend to think that winning an Oscar is evidence that an actor is, in the words of Jon Lovitz, a Master Thespian, i.e., an immense talent who appears only in serious cinema that stretches the minds of all who see it, superior to all those journeyman types who eke out a living doing mere movies. Um, no. The truth is that most Oscar winners get lucky. That's not to say that they're not talented -- although you can always quibble about some -- but rather that they had the good sense or the good fortune to choose the right project at the right time. Acting, like careers in every other industry you can think of, depends as much on factors that the individual cannot control as those he or she can, and most of the time, achieving the pinnacle of an Oscar win is followed by an inevitable decline into "paying the mortgage" roles.
All of which is a rather long and pretentious way of introducing the following amusing video, ganked from AMC-TV's SciFi Scanner blog:
For the record, I don't remember Ray Milland as the star of The Thing with Two Heads. No, in my mind, he will forever be the unscrupulous Sire Uri from the original Battlestar Galactica. He appeared only in the three-hour pilot film and was last seen cravenly running for his life from the attacking Cylon ground forces on Carillon (I like to think he took a laser blast in his smug, puffy face and the Ovions ate what was left over), but he's always stood out in my mind as an embodiment of the petty evil that so often stems from personal wealth and an overblown sense of entitlement.
I don't know why I keep watching the Oscars year after year. It's not like it was back in the old days when I worked at the theater. Back then, I saw pretty much every movie that came out within a week or two of its release, I had very strong opinions about them all, and I enjoyed the validation that the Oscars provided, either by honoring the movies I liked or by giving me the chance to feel superior to those jerks on the Academy when they honored the stuff I didn't like.
From the Department of Holy-Crap-How-Did-I-Get-to-Be-This-Frakkin'-Old? comes the news that today is Molly Ringwald's 40th birthday. Forty. Wow. Hard to believe that so much time has passed since I first laid eyes on her in the first season of The Facts of Life. (Yes, I'm one of the three people that actually remembers her being on TFoL, before she was jettisoned along with several other girls in the second-season retool.)
Of course, everyone knows her breakout role was in the seminal Eighties teen flick Sixteen Candles, in which she played hapless Samantha Baker (hence the title of this entry), whose entire family utterly forgets her sweet-sixteen because of the chaos surrounding her older sister's wedding. (As it so happens, I caught a few minutes of Candles on TV the other night; I still think it's pretty damn funny, although I grant that you maybe had to be there at the time to think so. If I ever get around to having kids, they probably won't understand enough of the cultural underpinnings of the movie to get the jokes.)
I'm not shy about admitting that I had a pretty hard crush on Molly back in her Sixteen Candles/Breakfast Club days. She was about my age and her characters seemed like girls I might actually know, as opposed to the usual perfect automatons created by Hollywood make-up artists (Ferris Bueller's girlfriend Cameron, for example, was utterly cool and utterly beautiful and no one like her has ever existed in any high school anywhere on this -- or probably any other -- planet.) Molly's career faltered as she matured -- she reportedly turned down the lead roles in both Pretty Woman and Ghost (doh!) -- but she luckily managed to avoid the drugs, booze, and general nonsense that befell many of her fellow "Brat Pack" contemporaries.
A year or two back, the Girlfriend and I saw Molly Ringwald in the touring revival of the Broadway musical Sweet Charity, and although I know the critics weren't very kind about her performance, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. Maybe that was simply because I enjoy seeing someone I used to like return to the spotlight, or maybe it was just another case of the critics being unnecessarily harsh and snobby. Either way, it was good to see her again. I'd love to hear that a comeback is in the offing...
(Hat tip to SamuraiFrog, who brought this my attention and shares some similar sentiments about Ms. Ringwald...)
As promised, the trailer for Crystal Skull is now online. You can see it at the official website, or I imagine it'll be all over the Interwebs by afternoon (if it's not already).
I've watched it three times already and, as trailers go, it's a good one. Not surprisingly, it plays very heavily on audience nostalgia, easing us into the proper mindset with scenes from Raiders, Temple of Doom, and Last Crusade before a classic "intro" shot involving the hat, the music, and a familiar silhouette. What follows is non-stop action with a few humorous one-liners and very little clue for the non-obsessed as to what's going on. The trailer does confirm that there is a big set-piece inside The Warehouse, the "TOP SECRET DO NOT OPEN!" crate does not contain the Ark (if you freeze-frame at the right moment, you can see that it's filled with files), and there is, as much as I hate to say it, a Roswell connection.
That said, there is no sign (in this trailer at least) of Greys or flying saucers, and there is plenty of whip-cracking, truck-smashing, bone-crunching punches, ancient jungle temples, and naked tribesmen. It feels, in short, very much like one of the classic Indiana Jones flicks. And there are even a couple of gags relating to Indy's advancing age, so they're not trying to pretend the years haven't taken their toll on him. (It's not an age joke, but I really like the exchange right at the end of the trailer between Indy and Indy, Jr.: "You a teacher?" "Part-time..." There are echoes there of exchanges between Indy and his dad...)
Maybe it's just a Pavlovian reaction, but when I saw the fedora lying in the dirt and heard the "Raiders March" begin, I broke into a big grin. I'm still a bit wary -- I keep thinking of how awesome a trailer for a certain other revisit to my childhood was compared to the finished product -- but I'm definitely excited for Memorial Day weekend now...
Jones Family Portrait, and Some Disturbing Possibilities
This image has been floating around the 'webs for a couple of weeks now, so it's not a scoop for Simple Tricks or anything like that. I just happen to like the picture. It amuses me. The look on Indy Jr.'s face (I remain convinced Shia's character is going to turn out to be Indy and Marion's love child, until I see otherwise in the finished movie!) is so alarmed, so clearly saying, "Holy crap, what're you going to do with that?!", whereas Marion's expression is more, "Oh, God, I know exactly what he's going to do with that, and isn't it just like him?" I suspect this whole scene -- whatever may be actually going on, plot-wise -- is designed as a nod back to one of the most memorable moments of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Sallah asks Indy what're they going to do next, and Indy replies, "I don't know, I'm making this up as I go." It's the possibility of that sort of thing -- fun little gifts to the fans who've been quoting lines and scenes from Raiders and the others for 27 years(!), and a warm reunion with characters we grew up loving -- that's been driving much of my interest in this film.
However, other recent insights into The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull have revived my reservations about the project, and whether it's ultimately going to be an embarrassingly lame epilogue for one of my favorite movie series
I'm pretty unrelenting in my affection and respect for pop-cultural relics that the rest of society long ago dismissed as hopelessly cheez-ball (e.g., the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica, pretty much the entire career of William Shatner), but even I would be daunted by the current blog-project of a guy named Larry Aydlette. In honor of the impending 72nd birthday of Burt Reynolds, the man whose mustache epitomized the late 1970s, Larry has decided to "honor [Burt's] work ethic and use his birth month for 29 straight days of Burt Reynolds coverage." Or, as his blog's tagline puts it, he's going "All Burt. All month."
This isn't a love-a-thon. In rewatching a lot of his movies, I've come to the conclusion that he didn't necessarily deserve to win the Oscar for the films that he and many critics thought he should have won them for. And he was never nominated for what seems to me to be his one indisputable masterpiece (although I doubt many critics will agree with me). But there are quite a few of his films that are very, very good, and deserve reconsideration.
I do think the breadth of his career is certainly worthy of an honorary Oscar. Let's not forget that he ruled America's box office from the late '70s to the early '80s. He is the self-proclaimed "Picasso of car pictures." He was a big, big star.
No argument from me on any of that. At one time, I probably would've classed Burt among my heroes. Hell, he was The Bandit, man. I still envy that character's way with the ladies, and of course that kick-ass black Trans Am.
Anyway, Larry is doing some genuinely interesting film criticism and cultural history over there. I found his re-appraisal of Semi-Tough and Boogie Nights especially interesting. Go have a look...
The Netflix queue I share with The Girlfriend (but which, I must be honest, consists mostly of stuff I'm interested in) just broke 400 titles. Four hundred. Specifically, I now have 404 movies and/or TV-on-DVD discs waiting for my attentions. How many hours of my life do you suppose that number represents?
If you care -- or even if you don't -- here is the batch of titles I just entered, the ones that pushed me over the top of normality into the realm of the obsessively nutty:
3:10 to Yuma (2007 version)
Sunshine
28 Days Later
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Defending Your Life
Eastern Promises
Memoirs of a Geisha
30 Days of Night
New York Doll
The Martian Child
Amazing Grace
Zodiac
At my current rate of viewing, I'd guess I'll probably be getting to these around 2015 or so...
Interesting... it appears I was somewhat misinformed on that whole CleanFlicks story. According to a follow-up in today's Tribune, Daniel Thompson, the movie bowdlerizer who was arrested for having sex with underage girls and making porn in the back room of his video shop, was not the founder of the original CleanFlicks business. In addition to all his other problems, he's now being sued by the real CleanFlicks for trademark infringements. My cynical guess is that the non-Thompson CleanFlicks didn't care so much about their trademark until Thompson got busted, and now the original is frantically trying to distance itself from him before the "family values" crowd abandons what's left of its business.
It's funny how there always seem to be wheels within within wheels when these stories come out...
Back in my days of working at the multiplex, Lucasfilm's THX sound-system standard was still something of a novelty, at least in these parts, and to a bunch of teenaged and early-20s ushers, it was a Very Big Deal indeed. We were proud of the fact that our theater -- Cinemark's Sandy Movies 7, later called Movies 9 -- was the first in the state to earn that coveted certification. I remember many debates about which of THX's iconic trailers was coolest -- I've always preferred the basic "Broadway" one, although the recent "Moo-Can" trailer amuses me -- but I think this one probably has them all beat:
Putting a Bullet Through the Brain of the CleanFlicks Zombie
Today's amusing item from behind the Zion Curtain takes a bit of set-up, but the payoff is utterly delicious. Bear with me on this.
The first thing you need to know is that many observant LDS people have a general policy of avoiding R-rated films. Their religion counsels them to eschew profanity and depictions of sex and violence on moral grounds, and since R-rated movies usually tend to have copious amounts of these things, such movies automatically go on the "do not see" list. While I can respect the moral stand taken by these anti-R Mormons, I personally think they miss out on a lot of good movies -- good both in the sense of entertaining, but also frequently in the sense of good art. (I think it's very difficult to intelligently explore many areas of the human condition without including profanity and sex, because life is just like that. I do find, however, that the constant use of the F-word in some flicks gets pretty tiresome. I've always said that I don't mind profanity in my dialogue, but I hate it when it is the dialogue.) Still, it's their choice to make, and I support their right to make it. And anyway, I much prefer that people who are offended by certain content simply not watch that content, rather than attempting to enforce any form of censorship that would prevent me from watching it.
A few years ago, a Utah entrepeneur named Daniel Thompson apparently thought anti-R Mormons were missing out on a lot of good movies, too, so he came up with a novel idea: he started a video sales-and-rental business called CleanFlicks, which offered popular R-rated movies with the offensive bits cut out so as to suit the sensibilities of the niche market he was targeting. A good idea, on the face of it. There was only one problem: Thompson and his staff were the ones doing the editing. They didn't have permission from the Hollywood studios that owned the films, and they didn't have any kind of input from the writers and directors who created those movies.
Hard to believe now, but there was a time, a very long time ago, when I couldn't stand Johnny Depp. I thought he was a no-talent pretty boy with greasy, stupid-looking hair and lousy taste in clothes. Of course, a lot of this enmity probably stemmed from the way my girlfriend at the time got all dewy every time she saw a commercial for 21 Jump Street. You see, I was painfully aware of how very, very un-Depp-like I was -- I was much more along the lines of his Jump Street co-star Peter DeLuise in build, style, and attitude -- and, well, teenage males of the species have a tendency to turn jealousy into hostility, often with a layer of homophobia for good effect. That's why I denounced all the members of Duran Duran as "fags" (even though I wasn't exactly clear on what a fag was, or why it was so bad to be one), and that's why I really hated Johnny Depp. (Don't even get me started on Richard Greico and his shaved eyebrows!)
I was perfectly content with my Johnny-Depp-sucks paradigm. No, really, it was working for me. But then he had to go and star in Edward Scissorhands, which was directed by the guy who made Batman so you know I just had to see it, and wouldn't you know it, Depp was actually pretty good in it, damn him. And then he just kept making movies I liked, or at least movies in which I liked him. He wasn't afraid to choose roles that made him look weird or unsavory or unsympathetic or wussy, and I could respect that. And he could actually act, too, and he proved it by trying not to do the same type of role twice, which, again, I really respected. And gradually, movie by movie, performance by performance, he wore me down. (To tell the truth, it really didn't take that long; breaking up with that girl who made me feel second-best to a TV character accelerated the process considerably, and by the time Ed Wood opened in '94, I was, if not an actual Depp fan, at least comfortable saying I wanted to see his new movie.)
These days, post-Pirates, I'm fully recovered from my adolescent insecurity and Johnny Depp now holds a high position on my short-list of favorite actors. And you know what? The more I learn about what he's like off-screen, the more I think he probably ought to be on my short-list of favorite people, too, because he strikes me as one damn cool cat. For instance, did you hear the story of how he donated a million pounds to the hospital where his daughter was treated a year ago for a potentially fatal case of E. coli? And this was after inviting five of the doctors and nurses from the hospital -- I presume they were the ones who actually treated his little girl -- to the London premiere of Sweeney Todd (which he'd been working on when she got sick). And then -- and here's the part that really impressed me -- he quietly spent four hours at the hospital in character and full costume as Captain Jack Sparrow, reading stories to sick kids. There were no news cameras or paparazzi around, and the event doesn't seem to have been widely reported; it wasn't about getting some good PR in advance of the next big film opening. It was just a kindly thing to do in an attempt to show some gratitude.
These days when so many of the people in the public eye seem hell-bent on behaving as outrageously as possible, it's so refreshing to hear about a wealthy celebrity performing a simple little act of human decency.
The Salt Lake Tribune's film critic Sean Means is reporting that the Trolley Square Cinemas will go dark by the end of the month, a casualty of the extensive renovation project that is converting Trolley Square from an interesting, funky, uniquely Salt Lake shopping mall into a less-interesting, brighter-lighted, and no doubt utterly homogenized shopping mall. There is no word on whether a new movie theater will be incorporated into the redesigned Trolley, but my hunch is that there won't be. And that seems like real shame to me.
Interesting... I just learned from Michael May's Adventure Blog that there's another Hulk movie in the works, something of a surprise considering that Ang Lee's dismal and ridiculous take on the character didn't exactly set the world on fire. I guess you can't keep a good (potential) movie franchise down.
This new film, titled The Incredible Hulk, is apparently intended to be something of a reboot, even though it's not explicitly billed as such. The entire cast has been changed out, with Edward Norton now playing the modern-day Jeckyll-and-Hyde character Bruce Banner, and, while the Hulk's origin story isn't going to be retold, I gather that the events of the first film will not be mentioned. The tone of the movie is said to echo the old '70s-vintage TV series, and Norton reportedly won the role of Banner in part because he reminded the filmmakers of the late Bill Bixby, who starred in the TV version.
The echoes of the old Incredible Hulk are pretty obvious in this photo from the new film:
Compare that to this screen-grab from the opening credits of Bixby's Hulk:
Look familiar? I'm sure it's no coincidence, and I hope this obvious homage is a sign that the filmmakers know what they're doing. The Hulk isn't one of my favorite superheroes, but I enjoyed the TV series when I was a kid, and I'd like to see a good feature film version. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will be it.
There are a few more photos here, if you're interested. Oh, and as a technical note, that screen-grab from vintage Hulk is my very first one. Cool, eh? Well, I thought so...
I used to be quite an avid collector of one-sheets, those oversized posters that advertise the coming attractions out in front of movie theaters. I eventually dropped the habit, partly because my interests were pulling me toward other categories of collectibles, but also because the painted artwork-type posters that I particularly loved fell out of style. (If you haven't noticed, one-sheets for the last decade or so have mostly consisted of boring photoshopped "face collages." Bleh. I hate those things. One is practically indistinguishable from the next; nothing distinctive or interesting about any of them.) I'm therefore very pleased to see that the powers-that-be have chosen to go retro for the official Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull "teaser" one-sheet*, which was just unveiled today:
The artwork is by master illustrator Drew Struzan, who was one of my faves back in my collecting days. Struzan has one of the most distinctive and recognizable styles out there in the illustration world, and a great deal of his work would no doubt look familiar even to the most casual of movie-goers. He also has a long history with Lucasfilm -- he's painted many one-sheets and book covers for both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises -- so it's no surprise he was tapped for this project, and it looks like he's turned in another classic piece.
Although I haven't collected one-sheets on any kind of regular basis in a very long time, I do still occasionally pick up those that strike my fancy. This is definitely one that'll find its way into the fabulous Bennion Archives...
*FYI, most "big" movies -- a Star Wars or Indiana Jones -- will actually come with two one-sheets. The teaser comes out first and is exactly what it sounds like: an advance design that is intended basically just to let the public know the movie is coming. Usually the design on the teaser is more pared back, a single, striking image designed to generate discussion, curiosity, etc. (One of the more interesting teasers I've ever seen was for Back to the Future II; it was simply a black poster with a pair of fire trails like those left behind by the time-traveling Delorean receding off into the distance. No text, nothing to tell you what the flick is, unless you remembered that particular effect from the first film.) The second, or "regular" design usually comes out much closer to the film's actual release date, and will typically feature more elaborate art and design, complete credits, etc. If Crystal Skull follows the usual Indy movie pattern, this first design -- which feature Indy alone and looking heroic -- will be followed by a collage showing the other characters and one or two of the set pieces from the film. Can't wait to see it!
From the "Oh, God, I Hope They Don't Screw This Up" file, the latest peeks at Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that are currently circulating the webospheres:
"The Mangerie," and My Manifesto on Digital Tinkering
A couple weeks ago, The Girlfriend and I, along with several of our friends from the subgroup I like to think of as "The Usual Suspects,"* attended something rather unusual: a one-time-only theatrical screening of "The Menagerie," an episode of the original Star Trek television series. The screening was essentially a promotional gimmick for the release of the series on the HD-DVD format, so naturally what we were seeing was the "remastered" version of the episode -- that is, the one with all the new digital "enhancements." Not that anyone except me seemed to mind. We shared a sold-out house with several hundred enthusiastic members of the uniform-wearing faithful (there was even a guy there in full-blown Andorian make-up, complete with antennae!), and there was much ooh-ing and aah-ing over the digital recreations of scenes we've all seen a thousand times. Even I have to grudgingly admit that whoever is behind the CG tinkering is doing a very nice job of it. The new footage is very faithful to the look of the original series -- the Enterprise isn't suddenly an unnaturally manuverable cartoon -- and there has been no "Greedo shoots first" revisionism to any of the stories that I have seen. I will even concede that some of what's been done is an improvement. (Click here for a gallery of screencaps and judge for yourselves; my thanks to Mike G for sending me the link.) Nevertheless, as my Three Loyal Readers can probably predict, I remain opposed to the updates on basic principle.
My stubbornness on this point led to a pretty interesting conversation following the screening, which in turn led me to a whole new understanding of my own thoughts on this matter of updating old movies and TV properties, and which types of changes bother me and which types don't.
Courtesy of John Rogers, a concise, easy-to-follow, and surprisingly entertaining explanation of why all your favorite shows are drifting into re-runs:
And in case you're wondering, yes, I support the WGA wholeheartedly in this matter. Writers don't typically get a lot of recognition or respect in the film and television industry, but they are, to my mind, the most important part of the process. If somebody doesn't write the story to begin with, the guy in the jodhpurs and riding boots has nothing to direct, and the "talent" have nothing to say. It's that simple. And in a business as flush as Hollywood, to say there isn't enough money to go around is disingenuous at best. The vast majority of WGA members really don't make much money for their efforts, and if they're trying to survive purely on screenwriting, their income is likely to be pretty sporadic. In my book, they deserve their modest cut of the residuals pie a lot more than the suits deserve another Gulfstream...
Odd... I anticipated a higher score than this. I thought perhaps my score was lower than expected because the game is predicated on gender and I've missed the boat on a lot of traditional "guy" films. However, when I took the "girl" quiz, I did even worse:
Joss Whedon, the revered creator of the cult-fave TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, has been venting online about the way some in the press describe the ongoing writer's strike out in Hollywood. His comments are worth reading in their entirety, but I like the way he describes the act and art of writing (something I am not entirely unfamiliar with myself...):
Writing is largely not considered work. Art in general is not considered work. Work is a thing you physically labor at, or at the very least, hate. Art is fun. (And Hollywood writers are overpaid, scarf-wearing dainties.) It’s an easy argument to make. And a hard one to dispute.
...Writing is enjoyable and ephemeral. And it’s hard work.
It’s always hard. Not just dealing with obtuse, intrusive studio execs, temperamental stars and family-prohibiting hours. Those are producer issues as much as anything else. Not just trying to get your first script sold, or seen, or finished, when nobody around believes you can/will/should… the ACT of writing is hard. When Buffy was flowing at its flowingest, David Greenwalt [Ed. note: Greenwalt was a writer and producer on Buffy] used to turn to me at some point during every torturous story-breaking session and say “Why is it still hard? When do we just get to be good at it?” I’ll only bore you with one theory: because every good story needs to be completely personal (so there are no guidelines) and completely universal (so it’s all been done). It’s just never simple.
It’s necessary, though. We’re talking about story-telling, the most basic human need. Food? That’s an animal need. Shelter? That’s a luxury item that leads to social grouping, which leads directly to fancy scarves. But human awareness is all about story-telling. The selective narrative of your memory. The story of why the Sky Bully throws lightning at you. From the first, stories, even unspoken, separated us from the other, cooler beasts. And now we’re talking about the stories that define our nation’s popular culture – a huge part of its identity. These are the people that think those up. Working writers.
"Human awareness is all about story-telling." Nice.
So, I've been thinking all day about that Starfighter video game, specifically about how truly weird it is that somebody bothered to make one and that people -- at least a few people -- are moved to talk about it here in the year 2007, some 23 years down the road from the movie's release.
Look at this way: the guys who made that game, the bloggers who've posted about it, and the people who read those blogs are all using technologies that would've sounded almost as science-fictiony back in 1984, the year The Last Starfighter was released, as the idea of aliens recruiting Earth kids to fight in interstellar wars, which is that movie's premise. The Internet is arguably one of the most revolutionary gadgets our species has ever come up with, and what do we mostly use it for? Besides distributing pictures of naked girls, I mean? To commemorate, reproduce, disseminate, and obsess over pop-cultural artifacts that are two or three decades old. In other words, we're using this very futuristic tech to talk about stuff from the past. Does that strike anyone else as weird?
I've been gradually formulating an idea over the past several months, largely in response to all the recent remakes of movies that I loved as a kid, that popular culture seems to have frozen -- some would probably say "stagnated" -- somewhere around the end of the 1980s. Oh, sure, a lot of original work is still being produced, but the stuff that really gets people talking all stems from a roughly 25-year period -- let's say 1966-1989 -- that ended a generation ago.
This one took a little effort, but you kids are worth it: earlier this afternoon, my buddy Dave sent me a link to a short blog entry which reads as follows:
If you're a child of the 1980s, you're no doubt well aware of the movie The Last Starfighter, the fantasy epic about a videogame lovin' kid in a trailer park who's recruited by aliens as a gunner an intergalactic battle. I mean, based on that short description alone how can you not think the movie is awesome? The only problem is that the Last Starfighter game was never actually released. As crazy as it is, Atari developed the game but never released it for some reason. Talk about not following through on capitalizing on ancillary markets and product tie-ins.
Well, 23 years later the game has finally seen the light of day. Sure, its tech specs are less than impressive at this point, but you can't beat the nostalgia value. It was custom-built into a cabinet that looks exactly like the one from the movie, but if you want to try it in the comfort of your own home you can now download the game as a simple exe file. Who knows, maybe you'll be recruited if you try it out and are good enough.
Hmm, thinks I, this is intriguing. I remember liking The Last Starfighter back in the day. I would've been about 14 when it came out, and it was a perfect little piece of summertime adolescent wish fulfillment; what disaffected teen hasn't dreamed of discovering they have some remarkable talent that will enable them to save the day? Or, in the case of Alex Rogan, the protagonist of TLS, the universe? The summer of '84 was also the golden age of my interest in video gaming, so naturally I thought it be totally awesome to play a for-real arcade game just like the one in the flick. And now someone has finally made such a game? Awesome! Where do I click for more information? I tried here, the link referenced in the blog entry I quote above. Nope, not the source of this story, just another blog:
Who didn't walk out of The Last Starfighter -- yep, the Lance Guest movie from the '80s -- hoping to find a Starfighter game in the arcade? Sadly, the game was never produced. But some guys over at Rogue Synapse recreated a playable version of the actual game from the movie -- it's a free download -- and offer drawings of the movie-prop game cabinet. Add a little MAME ingenuity and you've got yourself the arcade you dreamed of as a kid. (Just don't leave me behind if Centauri comes for you first.)
Okay, now we're getting somewhere, a destination at last... and I'll be darned if the screen caps of the game these guys have cooked up don't lookjustlikewhatI rememberfrom the movie. Very impressive indeed... personally, I can't imagine having enough dedication to any movie to spend the time and effort needed to develop a game, let alone build a cabinet to house it, but I am utterly blown away that someone out there has. It's so easy to imagine myself walking up to this thing in the middle of a dark, cacophonous room that smells of sweat and ozone, a heavy wad of quarters dragging my pants pocket all out of shape, only moments away from becoming the hero of the story behind the screen, and in my own mind... sometimes I really miss being 14.
My parents maintained a pretty liberal movie policy when I was growing up. Unlike a lot of Utah households, "R" movies weren't automatically prohibited from our home simply because of their rating. Instead, my folks -- well, my mom, since Dad was never much interested in movies -- would do a little research and maybe a preview screening to find out exactly why the movie was rated R. Bad language was no problem, since she correctly assumed that I'd already heard every naughty word in the book (and quite a few that no one's bothered to write down) while hanging out with my dad in the garage. Violence was likewise allowable, once I got old enough to stop having bad dreams brought on what's now euphemistically called "intense content" by the MPAA. (For example, she flatly refused to let my uncle take me to see Alien on the big screen when it first came out -- I was around nine, as I recall -- but she gave her blessing for me to see it on video a couple of years later. Looking back, I think that was a wise decision. I love the flick now, but at nine... well, I probably would've had nightmares for years.)
Sex, however, was a little more complicated. Mom generally didn't get upset at brief flashes of nudity or Benny Hill-style innuendo. (I guess her thinking was that if I was laughing, I couldn't be getting too many ideas, or maybe she just liked the fact that Dad and I, who generally had so little in common, both enjoyed Benny's hijinks.) But she became very uncomfortable with anything more, well, educational. This, of course, made such movies intensely appealing to me. However, being a good boy who always followed his mother's wishes -- i.e., a kid who was prone to fantastic bouts of guilt at the thought of "getting in trouble" -- I never tried to sneak around behind her back like some kids would've. If Mom didn't think I ought to see something, I didn't see it. And that's how I missed out on a landmark movie called Porky's.
Some of my favorite books growing up were the so-called Martian Tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the pulpy adventures of a Civil War veteran from Virginia named John Carter who is magically transported to the dying planet Mars (Barsoom, to the locals), where he encounters all manner of creatures, monsters, beasts, villains, lunatics, arcane technology, ancient civilizations, and, of course, beautiful, scantily clad women as seen in the wonderful artwork above. (That painting by Michael Whelan was used for the cover of the first book in the series, A Princess of Mars, during the 1970s and '80s, and is the imagery I automatically associate with these stories. Click to embiggen.)
For an adolescent boy who had moved beyond childish things but hasn't yet hit the full flush of puberty -- say around 11 or 12 -- those books were like catnip for the imagination, amazing, swashbuckling stories in which swordplay mingled with anti-gravity technology, and adventure and feats of derring-do were always in the offing. Oh, and did I mention the scantily clad women?
There has been talk of a movie version of Princess of Mars for years, but nothing has ever come of it, probably because special effects technology just wasn't up to the task of depicting what Burroughs described without coming off as impossibly cheesy. At least not at a halfway-reasonable cost. And an animated Barsoom movie, while always possible, probably would've been prohibitively expensive, too, certainly if it was going to be as eye-popping as it deserves to be.
That's no longer a problem, however, and it looks like a John Carter movie may finally be happening. Even better, it's being developed by Pixar, a film company with what I would consider to be a flawless record.
Star Wars (Duh! And, of course, by "Star Wars," I mean the very first one made, what you whippersnappers refer to as "Episode IV: A New Hope." Of course, again, I stubbornly refuse to think of it in those terms.)
The Terminator
Superman: The Movie
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn
The Fifth Element
Given the make-up of my All-Time Favorites list and my tendency to re-watch pretty much any movie I like, I can't tell you how hard it was to narrow my choices to a mere five. I finally decided to go with the ones that I never, ever turn off if I happen to find them on television, the ones that still suck me in completely and make me laugh, cry, or just keep watching, no matter how many times I've seen them before. Even going by that criterion, however, my choices were still difficult. Because having to choose just sucks.
This has been another time-wasting collection of unsolicited trivia about yours truly. We now return you to more productive activities.
I haven't exactly planned it this way, but it seems like I've been blogging a lot lately about movie and television remakes. (Probably just because of how damn many of them are currently under development. Anyone out there know of a site that has a comprehensive list of all the remakes that are either shooting now or at least are being talked about?) As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm generally opposed to them.
I am utterly convinced that studio heads these days think more in terms of branding than storytelling, that they figure a remake is an easier sell than something wholly original because the title and possibly the general premise are already known to the consumer. It's like bringing out a new variety of Coke, rather than trying to find a niche for an entirely new beverage. But is that really so bad? My knee-jerk reaction is, yes, of course it's bad, especially if somebody has the audacity to remake a movie that I personally love. (Escape from New York comes to mind, for example; it made a big impact on me as a kid, and I think it's perfect just as it is, still a perfectly entertaining B-grade action flick. Except now it's going to be a big-budget, CGI'd, and probably far-less-cool action flick.) I could go on for eight or nine hundred words about how creatively bankrupt it is to approach movie-making like factory work, and how disposable, forgettable, and ultimately pointless most remakes are.
Except... I can always find exceptions, can't I? I'm on record here on this blog as saying that I'm okay, at least in principle, with updated versions of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Logan's Run. I love the original versions of these, but revisiting them doesn't bother me. However, the thought of a new Day the Earth Stood Still turns my stomach. So how do I reconcile these opposing viewpoints?
It seems I'm not the only movie buff who struggles with this issue. The proprietor of ScreenRant.com has been pondering the same thing, and he's come up with several criteria for making a decent remake. As it so happens, I agree completely with his thinking, right down to the examples he's chosen. With his indulgence for blantantly ripping him off, read on to see how I (and the ScreenRant guy) think remakes ought to be done:
I've got a much longer entry in the works about what I did over the weekend, but I'm in the middle of a crushingly busy week, so I don't know when I'll be able to finish it. In the meantime, here's a quick note about yesterday's big announcement. If you didn't hear, Shia LaBeouf revealed the title of the upcoming fourth Indiana Jones movie at the MTV Video Music Awards. It is -- are you ready? -- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The reactions I've heard thus far have been luke-warm at best, with many people saying that the title is too long. I'll admit, it's a bit ungainly -- it would be better if Uncle George shortened it to Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull -- but I'm generally fine with it. It has an appropriately pulpish sound, and crystal skulls -- which do exist and have long been rumored to possess occult or mystical powers -- are far more the sort of thing you'd expect an Indiana Jones story to pivot around than Area 51 and the Roswell aliens. (One of the rumored plotlines from a couple years ago had our favorite fedora-wearing whipcracker uncovering the truth that Mulder never seemed to get to the bottom of, an utterly ridiculous idea that would make a disastrous movie, in my not-so-humble opinion.)
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think I like the title. I'm starting to think that maybe George, Steven, and Harrison might be making a for-real Indy movie, instead of the lame and pointless mess that everyone fears...
[Ranty little editorial note: I modified this title, which Premiere has listed as Star Wars: Episode V -- The Empire Strikes Back. Perhaps I'm just showing my age, but I'll never get down with this episode numbering schtick. The first movie was Star Wars, and its sequels were Empire and Return of the Jedi. Call the prequels whatever you like, but I remember How Things Used to Be...]
Fight Club (1999)
Psycho (1960)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Soylent Green (1973)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Oldboy (2003)
Mission: Impossible (1996)
Friday the 13th (1980)
Chinatown (1974)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
The Wicker Man (1973)
12 Monkeys (1995)
Jacob's Ladder (1990)
Eddie & the Cruisers (1983)
Angel Heart (1987)
The Game (1997)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Crying Game (1992)
It's a pretty good list, I think, although some of these -- Apes, Empire, Soylent Green, Kane -- have been so parodied, imitated, or otherwise talked about that they long ago lost their power to surprise anyone but the most sheltered media consumer. Still, I can attest from personal experience that Empire's big revelation was damn powerful when it was fresh, and I imagine Rosebud and the Statue of Liberty must've packed similar punches in the days before the Internet and home video made everyone into obsessive pop-cultural encyclopedias.
For the record, I've seen all but six of these movies. The ones I've missed (assuming anyone cares) are The Usual Suspects, Oldboy (which I've never heard of prior to seeing this list), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Wicker Man, Angel Heart, and The Game.
And moving right along, Michael Hinman at SyFy Portalsays the "reimagined" Flash Gordon isn't long for this or any other world. Not a big surprise, based on the reactions I've been reading (which range from tepid to loathing). I'm still morbidly curious about it, though; maybe it'll get a DVD release so I can at least rent it...
Genre fans like myself have done a lot of groaning in recent days over the news that Hollywood -- which lately seems to be more interested in leveraging recognizable brands (i.e., churning out new versions of properties whose names are already familiar to movie-goers) than in filming original screenplays -- is forging ahead with a remake of Escape from New York and that Keanu will be playing Klaatu in a new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. (Actually, he'll probably be just fine in that role; he even has a passing resemblance to Michael Rennie. It's just the principle of remaking an undisputed classic like Day that bothers me.) So it came as a pleasant surprise to read about an interview with the eternally awesome Bruce Campbell in which the Brucester puts to rest a number of rumors that have been causing me some concern:
Campbell will not be reprising his role as Old Elvis/Sebastian Haff in a sequel to the charmingly goofy Bubba Ho-Tep. (The sequel -- supposed to be called Bubba Nosferatu -- may still go ahead without him, but I don't see how anyone could hope to fill those porkchop sideburns the way Bruce did.)
There will be no lame-ass mash-up of Freddy (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Jason (the Friday the 13th series), and Bruce's signature character Ash (The Evil Dead trilogy).
There will not be an Evil Dead 4. (Really, what could possibly be left to do after the utter silliness of Army of Darkness?)
And finally -- saving the best for last -- there will be no remake of the original Evil Dead starring Ashton Kutcher as Ash. Said Campbell: "The feedback from the fans was 90 percent negative. It's going nowhere."
It's nice to hear that, occasionally, rarely, common sense prevails...
Well, I've been been accomplishing nothing fast on this lovely Saturday afternoon. The Girlfriend is spending the weekend at her parents' place out in Tooele and I was planning to take care of all kinds of mundane jobs around the Compound that I keep putting off, but instead I've spent much of the day puttering around my office, surfing the web, IM'ing with some buddies, and listening to Pandora.com. (That's been a strange journey today. The algorithms that supposedly determine your tastes started me off with Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn"; now, three hours later, I'm listening to Ozzy Osbourne. That either says something about me, or about Pandora, and I haven't been able to decide which...)
You know what, though? I'm okay with not having done anything noteworthy today. It's felt damn good to just screw around, actually. I've been something of a stress-kitten lately, and I've been suffering for it (briefly, I carry my tension in my back and I also tend to sleep in awkward positions, and those two variables reached critical mass about a week ago and left me with a kinked neck that I couldn't turn to the left without yelping in pain). Well, I just realized that nothing hurts at the moment, for the first time in days. It's luxurious, and it goes a long way toward assuaging my conscience.
And if that's not enough, I've found some amusing stuff out there today, which I will share with you below the fold:
Courtesy of Eric D. Snider, a former Utahn who now snarks at movies for a living in Portland, Oregon, comes a manifesto written by this guy, a radio DJ from the Pacific Northwest. With only a few minor tweaks, it could've just as easily been written by myself:
What a geek believes
According to Rick Emerson
I believe that Han shot first. I believe that Ally Sheedy was hotter before Molly Ringwald cleaned her up. I believe in miniatures, models, claymation, and not revealing the shark until you absolutely have to. I believe that George Lucas, for better or for worse, change[d] the way we see the world, each other, and ourselves. And I believe that we will someday reach those stars that he himself made visible. I believe that George Lucas is also a narrow-minded, money-grubbing, pig-headed slave to the now, who ought to be locked away from his own creations, lest he do them further harm. I believe that Jean-Luc Picard is the better Starship Captain, but I also believe that James Tiberius Kirk is infinitely cooler. I believe that a child standing in line to buy a book at midnight is fantastic; I believe that reading makes you smart — it’s schools that make you dumb. I believe that any episode of Futurama is better than any program featuring a precocious teenager who’s wise beyond their years. I also believe Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be the sole exception that proves this rule. I believe that comic books are an art form, and will someday be recognized as such. I believe that good shows die too young; and crap shows last too long. I believe that Eddie Izzard is the funniest man alive, and I don’t care whether you’ve ever heard of him or not — it’s still true. I believe that a girl who likes movies about zombies is hotter than whoever is on the cover of Maxim this month. I believe that Belloch ate that fly, I swear to God that I heard Luke call Leia “Carrie,” and I believe that Samwise Gamgee never quite got the credit he really deserved. I believe in magic, I believe in dreams, I believe in the power of music, movies, and the untold worlds inside an everyday library card. And I do not believe that geeks will inherit the earth; I believe that we already have.
So, did you catch all the references? If you're wondering about those tweaks I mentioned, they're after the fold:
Wil Wheaton on reports that Hollywood execs were using last week's Comic-Con as a focus group:
For those [Hollywood] executives [who almost always seem to screw up movie adaptations of the things fanboys love], I present a very brief, very simple primer in understanding geeks: We want this stuff to be done right because we’ve lived it for our entire lives and know it better than any of you ever will. We’ve played with the action figures and written the fan fiction and crammed fifteen of our friends into the hotel room so we could afford to go to the conventions where we buy T-shirts that say HAN SHOT FIRST because, goddammit, this stuff is our lives. Before we could talk to girls, there was Princess Leia. Before we had cars, there was the Batmobile. Before we could find escape from the horrors of modren life in a bottle, we escaped into the pages of comic books and science fiction magazines.
These stories that you buy and put on the big screen may just be numbers on a yearly accounting to you, but they are more than that to us. To us, they are something that brings us together and makes us part of an exclusive (and frequently stinky, unfortunately) club.
I concur. The whole essay is a passionate battle-cry that's worth reading if you've ever salivated at the thought of your favorite superhero coming to live-action life, only to be crushed when the movie turns out to be colossal dud like, well, 98% of the superhero movies that come out. Be warned, though -- Wil can get pretty potty-mouthed when he's worked up about something, and he's very worked up about the upcoming movie adaptation of Watchmen...
It's confirmed: Karen Allen is reprising her role as Marion Ravenwood in Indy IV. Here's a photo of the cast that was revealed yesterday at Comic-Con:
My enthusiasm for this project continues to grow... I think Karen looks great, and it's good to see her alongside Steven and Harrison again. It's like a reunion of long-estranged family members or something. Click the photo to enlarge, click through for more Indy goodness!
Here's something else I'm obsessing over lately: the upcoming DVD release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut. (Actually, I'm obsessed with the fact that all the earlier, non-digitally-enhanced versions of this movie will be made available along with this revised version, just like the fans desire, unlike a certain other highly desirable landmark film of the science fiction persuasion, whose fans apparently don't have a voice in the matter...)
The crew from The Digital Bits is currently at the legendary Comic-Con convention in San Diego (which these days covers a lot more than just comics), and they've just posted up the official details of the release, including photos of the two-disc, four-disc, and "Deckard's briefcase" variants. The details generally match what I already posted a while back, but clear up (for you non-fanatics in the audience) what the differences between the movie versions are and describe exactly which features are included in which set. I'm pleased to see that I won't be forced to buy the briefcase full of unnecessary doodads in order to get the original theatrical cut of the movie. (I am kind of bummed that the legendary Work Print will only be available in the briefcase set, but I've reached a point where I just don't need all the little premiums and the oddball packaging cluttering up my place. If it won't fit nicely on a shelf with all the other standardized cases -- reference my experience with The Big Stupid Cylon Head -- then I don't want it. And while I'm curious about the Work Print, it's really not enough to justify the aggravation of finding someplace to store the oddball package. He said bravely, knowing there was still a good chance he'd cave and buy the damn thing anyway.)
All three variants of Blade Runner will be out on December 18th. A little late for a Christmas gift, but maybe you can buy it for yourself with the money you get every year from your favorite auntie, and watch it on New Year's Day instead of football...
In other news, The Bits is also reporting a rumor that Lucasfilm is going to make some kind of DVD-related announcement at the con, and naturally there's speculation that it involves the long-promised "Ultimate Edition Star Wars Saga" Set. But you guys know where I stand on that: if there's no anamorphic transfer of the unrevised original film, then there's no sale here.
Yes, I'm obsessing. We fanboys do that from time to time...
The cool thing about this clip -- the opening titles from the 1980 Flash Gordon feature film, in case you didn't know -- is the artwork that appears in and among the credits. That's taken from the original comic-strip by Alex Raymond, my friends, the medium where Flash was born. It's neat stuff, I think, and I'd love to see a live-action movie or television series that was truly faithful to the look. That's what I was hoping to see in the new Sci-Fi Channel series. Maybe in the next remake...
Arg! I have several longer entries that I'd like to finish and get posted up here, but naturally my days have been too hectic recently to allow that. So, in lieu of writing anything genuinely interesting, allow me to direct you to this preview of the Sci-Fi Channel's upcoming Flash Gordon series.
The trailer doesn't show you very much, but my first impression is that it looks promising. I'm getting a definite sense of cliffhanger-style derring-do, although that could just be an artifact of fast editing and the proper choice of music. (I must admit, I started grinning like an idiot when I noticed the "dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-Flash!-Ah-aaaahhh!" in the background. I hope they actually use some of the old Queen theme song in this new show, and that it's not just a tease to get us thirtysomething fanboys all hyped up.)
I have heard some rumors that I'm not happy about, namely that Flash and his sidekicks reach the planet Mongo via some kind of stargate, rather than aboard a rocketship as in every previous version of Alex Raymond's venerable tale. Also, the new series will apparently lack many of the familiar supporting characters from the earlier versions -- no Barin, Aura, Fria, Thun, or Vultan, and probably no hawkmen or floating city in the sky either. In short, many of the elements that distinguish Flash Gordon in the first place. I find myself wondering yet again, as I did when I first saw the new Battlestar Galactica, exactly how much you can get away with changing before a remake should more properly be allowed to develop into a whole new (if somewhat similar) property, with a different title and different characters.
On the positive side, however, a glance through Sci-Fi's gallery of publicity stills turns up a number of Flash Gordon-y images, including some good, old-fashioned female pulchritude and our hero in pulpy peril. Oh, and I've heard that the producers have approached Sam J. Jones, the 1980 Flash, about doing a cameo or longer guest appearance. That sort of thing makes me happy; it's like when the 1979 Buck Rogers series included a role for Buster Crabbe, the original Buck and Flash. While some may dismiss these inclusions as stunts calculated to draw fans of the older version, I think they demonstrate that the producers of the new version respect what came before them. It's a decent thing to do for the older actors, and for fanboys like me who still revere the originals, it's fun and heartwarming.
Here's something I've been meaning to put up for a few days, another snapshot from the set of Indiana Jones IV:
I like this shot a lot. I think Indy looks much more "old mannish" here than he did in the one of him in his "work clothes" -- in fact, I think his suit looks a lot like the one that Connery wore as Henry, Sr., in Last Crusade, perhaps deliberately so -- but there's a great period feel here, and it's a neat bike. I still haven't heard any confirmation that Shia LaBeouf is playing Indy's son, but I see a look of both Harrison Ford and Karen Allen in his features, so I feel comfortable in assuming that's who he's supposed to be. I suppose it could be a case that Indy thinks this might be his son, only to learn otherwise at the end, but I have a feeling we're looking at a Kirk-and-David-Marcus scenario here. And the rumor that John Hurt is playing Abner Ravenwood -- Marion's father, and possibly-Indy-Jr.'s-grandfather -- only adds to my suspicions. We'll see, I suppose. I hate to admit it because I was so opposed the idea of doing another Indy flick, but I'm really starting to get enthused about this...
Click the picture for the big view. More photos from the location shooting in New Haven, CT, can be found here and here.
Wired.com has a short interview with Patton Oswalt, who voices the lead rat in the new Pixar film, Ratatouille. Oswalt, whom you may recognize from the TV sitcom The King of Queens, is a self-proclaimed geek who is proud of the fact that his midlife crisis consists of taking up Dungeons and Dragons instead of buying a sports car. I like how he differentiates between nerds and geeks:
A lot of nerds aren't aware they're nerds. A geek has thrown his hands up to the universe and gone, "I speak Klingon — who am I fooling? You win! I'm just gonna openly like what I like." Geeks tend to be a little happier with themselves.
Based on his definition of the term, I think I've finally reached the geek stage. During the past ten years, it seems like I've been constantly debating non-geeks and even fellow fanboys over the things that matter to me -- for example, you can search this blog for my entries on Battlestar Galactica and read the comment-war I had with a detractor of the original series -- and I've finally reached the point where I'm sick of feeling like I have to defend the stuff I love. I love the crap that I love. I admit it, and I'm not so worried about trying to justify it anymore.
Am I the only thirtysomething fanboy type in the country who couldn't care less about the new Transformers movie opening tomorrow next week? Seriously, I can hardly hear my own typing over the sound of all that saliva pouring into keyboards all across the blogosphere. Wired.com has published no less thanthreearticles and a photo gallery; Boing Boing has already posted a point-counterpoint review entry; and my good friend Steve is alternately doing the Snoopy dance over the concept of photo-realistic Autobots and fulminating against the fact that notorious crap-master Michael Bay directed the film.
Me, I just don't get the fuss. I watched the old cartoon show and found it entertaining enough, and I also think its way cool that Peter Cullen -- the voice actor who played heroic Optimus Prime on the old cartoon -- was asked to reprise the role for this new movie. But I never owned a Transformer toy, I never saw the 1986 animated Transformers movie, and the previews for this new version leave me absolutely cold. I guess I'm just a couple years too old for this particular pop-cultural touchstone to have affected me... and for some reason, that bothers me. I don't know why...
I've been pretty dubious of the whole idea of doing a fourth Indy movie, but I've got to admit, this picture brought a smile to my lips and injected a little cheer into an otherwise crappy day. It's good to see you again, Dr. Jones...
Well, I just seem to be puttering away here today, don't I, posting up my little bits of nothing? Here's some more, courtesy of Lileks:
[Back to the Future], which I still think is a perfect little thing, was made in 1985. Marty was sent back to 1955. If they made the movie today, he’d go back to 1977.
Think about that. 1977 would look like today, minus computers. Same clothes, same Pink Floyd tunes on the classic rock station, same smear of gimcrack commercial architecture interspersed with stalwarts from the 20s. Color TV, Star Wars, angry Iran. Marty could order a Pepsi Free in 1977, and they’d think it was a sugarless brand they hadn’t gotten yet.
How's that for a scary thought? I, and I daresay most of the people reading this blog, are now the age of Marty McFly's parents in Back to the Future, a movie that came out when we were about Marty's age.
This actually parallels an equally scary thought I had the other day: in Back to the Future II, Marty travels 30 years ahead to what is, to him, the fairly distant future. That distant future was the year 2015... which is only eight years away from us now!
On the positive side, maybe this means that self-adjusting sneakers, hoverboards, Mr. Fusion, and the Cafe 80s aren't very far away. That would be nice...
In light of all the talk today about the AFI's 100 Greatest Movies list, I thought this was an interesting counterpoint:
In 1995, to commemorate 100 years of film-making, the Vatican made a list of what it called "Some Important Films." The list was divided into three areas--Religion, Values and Art.
Cyberpunkreview.com has posted the specs on the upcoming limited edition DVD super-set release that I've been talking about for months, and they are impressive indeed:
Something That Bugs Me: Things That Started "It" All
So, I'm sitting here watching the AFI 100 Greatest Movies of All Time (10th Anniversary Edition) special, and I just saw a commercial for Blade Runner: The Final Cut, coming soon on DVD and (according to this commercial) to theaters this fall. Leaving aside my conviction that acknowledged classics shouldn't be revised or messed with (and also that Ridley Scott is horribly misguided in his efforts to convince us that Deckard is a replicant), it was pretty exciting to see this film being advertised again. However, something about the ad really grated on me: the obligatory slogan, "The One That Started It All."
I say "obligatory" because it seems these days that every single film that has inspired sequels or imitators uses it; for example, it popped up again recently when the original Shrek was aired on TV a few weeks back. I hate this slogan. It's hackneyed and virtually meaningless. What the hell is "it" anyway? "It" is never defined, and there are apparently lots of different "its" out there, since Shrek's "it" most likely is not Blade Runner's "it" (although it'd be interesting if it was -- imagine a dystopian future-noir fairy tale...). Really what "it" is, is lazy marketing. It's a simple, cliche'd fix for a copywriter who's staring down a deadline and doesn't have the slightest original thought in his head about the movie in question. As with all the other stuff that bugs me, this slogan will be forbidden when I become the Unquestioned Ruler of the Universe.
Well, rats: Connery won't be reprising his role as Indy's dad in Indiana Jones IV after all. Sir Sean issued the disappointing news in a classy statement, at least:
"I get asked the question so often, I thought it best to make an announcement. I thought long and hard about it and if anything could have pulled me out of retirement it would have been an Indiana Jones film. I love working with Steven and George, and it goes without saying that it is an honor to have Harrison as my son. But in the end, retirement is just too damned much fun. I, do however, have one bit of advice for Junior: Demand that the critters be digital, the cliffs be low, and for goodness sake keep that whip by your side at all times in case you need to escape from the stunt coordinator! This is a remarkable cast, and I can only say, 'Break a leg, everyone.' I'll see you on May 22, 2008, at the theater!"
I'm not troubled by the idea of Henry not appearing in this new Indy movie -- his character arc was pretty thoroughly finished by the end of Last Crusade -- but it now looks definite that the bleeding-from-the-eyes-awful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is going to be the final title on Connery's filmography, and that, my friends, is an unbelievable tragedy.
The article I linked above also mentions that Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone, and John Hurt are in the movie -- this is seconded on the official Lucasfilm Indy site here -- and that rumors that Karen Allen, Kate Capshaw, or both might be on board for a cameo remain unconfirmed one way or the other. (Personally, I'm rooting for at least a glimpse of Allen's Marion, the most logical "Indy girl" for our hero to have had a son with... assuming that Shia LaBouef is actually playing Henry Jones III, that is.)
In other Indy IV news, I've heard that John Rhys-Davies, a.k.a. Indy's favorite Egyptian digger and loyal sidekick Sallah, won't be coming back either, but depending on what Indy IV is actually about, his character might not fit into this particular story or setting, so I'm okay with his absence...
Two of my favorite stories in my younger days were Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Edgar Rice Burroughs' At the Earth's Core. (Notice I said stories, because, as it happened, I first knew these tales through their movieincarnations, and only came to the original novels later on, with a detour through the Classic Comics versions in between.) Both works stem from the premise that our planet is hollow, or at least contains vast subterranean open spaces, and that there is life, usually some weird mishmash of prehistoric beasts and highly advanced civilizations, in this interior realm.
It's actually a pretty common idea within a certain subset of fantasy-adventure pulp fiction. But just recently I've learned that there are apparently people out there who think it's more than just a good idea for a story. Some people really think the Hollow Earth theory is possible... and one guy aims to prove it:
Their world crumbled; the cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting; a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads, it was a white-line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice...
You know how I'm always complaining that things aren't turning out like the movies I liked when I was a kid? Maybe I ought to be more specific about which movies I'm talking about...
As fate would have it, today, in addition to the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, is also Towel Day, the international tribute to the late Douglas Adams. The 25th of May is a very hoopy day indeed.
Lincoln Memorial / Totalitarianism / Ice Cave / Man Hunt
You remember the rules from before: Name the SF flick based on those keyword clues from the IMDB. I actually thought this quiz was quite a bit easier than the first one. My answers are below the cut. You might want to write yours down or something before you click through...
Just in case you read my pointless ramblings via an aggregator, or otherwise don't follow the comments, there's been an interesting development in regards to yesterday's entry on the new Flash Gordon series. I've been contacted by Andrea, the webmaster for EricJohnsonWeb.com, who informs me that the head shot of Eric I saw is seven years out of date. She directed me to this more recent photo, and, based on it, I've got to admit that I was wrong. A little older now, Mr. Johnson has definitely acquired what I would consider the proper "Flash Gordon look" since that Smallville shot was taken. So this latest incarnation of Alex Raymond's legendary adventure story has that much going for it at least.
Interestingly, I failed to notice yesterday that Eric has, in fact, done some work I have some passing familiarity with, namely the Work and the Glory films. If you haven't heard of these, don't feel bad. I doubt that many people outside of Utah have.
FYI to anyone reading this: the film's title is Blade Runner, not Bladerunner. I see this mistake made all over the place (most recently here) and it grates on my nerves like stainless-steel fingernails on a chalkboard.
Remember a while back when I expressed cautious enthusiasm for the SciFi Channel's upcoming take on the venerable Flash Gordon character? Well, I'm no longer so optimistic about this project, not after seeing who the producers have cast as Flash and his lady love, Dale Arden.
So it occurred to me in the shower this morning that six of the big "tentpole" film releases this summer are "part threes": Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Ocean's Thirteen, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Rush Hour 3. Sequels are the bread and butter of summertime movie-going, of course, but I can't recall any other year that had so many of them that were the same number in their respective series. Seems rather odd to me, like some kind of harmonic convergence or that planetary alignment that took place a few years ago, when the gravitational forces were all supposed to be amplified and wreck the Earth or some damn thing.
And another thing: back in my ticket-tearing days at the old Cinemark -- which began some 18 years ago (holy crap!) -- the summer blockbuster season started on Memorial Day weekend and ended on Labor Day weekend. Now, the season kicks off with the first weekend on May (as evidenced by the release of Spider-Man 3 a couple weeks ago) and looks like it will be pretty much over by the first weekend of August. That feels wrong to me. If this trend continues, we'll soon be seeing the the big mindless spectacles we all love so much around Valentine's Day instead of the Fourth of July, and that will just be... wrong. It'll be chaos, I tells ya! Dogs and cats living together! Yeargh!
Believe it or not, the primary focus of my fanboy energies throughout most of the 1990s was not the Star Wars saga. Really. I know it's hard to accept, but it really wasn't. It wasn't even Star Trek, despite all the various TV spin-offs running at that time. No, for the better part of the final decade of the 20th Century, I was seriously preoccupied by a fictional universe called Highlander.
Highlander is tough to explain to the uninitiated. It has a fairly bizarre premise to begin with, and its cause isn't helped by the fact that all the different properties that fall under the Highlander brand tend to contradict each other, or at the very least don't share the same continuity. I'm not going to go into all that in this entry -- I'll explore that topic some other time -- but what you need to know (if you don't already) is that the entire franchise originated with a 1986 movie and was revisited in a television series by the same name that ran from 1992 through 1998.
When Highlander: The Series ceased production in '98, The Girlfriend and I were sufficiently wrapped up in the whole scene that we flew to LA to attend a big farewell convention dedicated to the show. It was an exciting event -- the entire regular cast was in attendance, as well as a lot of the more prominent guest stars, and, of course, fans from all over the country.
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