Dec212006

The Funniest Photo I’ve Seen in Weeks

I just ran across this while I was surfing:

The true cost of remakes.

So typical. You do good work, attain some measure of fleeting fame, then slide into semi-obscurity when the money runs out. Twenty-five years later, you think you’re about to get your big chance at a comeback only to have your legs cut out from under you by a younger, flashier model. No doubt this photo was taken somewhere on Sunset Blvd., just to make the humiliation complete.

You know, something just occurred to me: I remember many people saying 25 years ago that the Cylon Centurions of Battlestar Galactica were obviously a rip-off of the armored Imperial stormtroopers from Star Wars. I never really saw the similarity back in the day… but it seems to me that the modern “reimagined” Centurions bear more than a passing resemblance to the Super Battle Droids seen in Episodes II and III. Hmmm…

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Dec212006

Nick Sagan on His Father

A quick scan of Joel Schlosberg’s Carl Sagan meta-post would suggest that the Memorial Blog-a-Thon was a success — by my count, Joel links to roughly 125 blog entries and online essays, many of them in languages other than English (I’m honored to be among them, not too far from Scalzi’s listing), and I imagine there are others around the ‘net that did not get listed by Joel for one reason or another. I’ve read a number of them, and they’re all moving tributes. But the best thing I’ve read in conjunction with all of this is, not surprisingly, the remarks made by Carl’s own son, Nick Sagan. He remembers Carl not as some inspiring idol-figure or media personality, but simply as Dad, a human being with hobbies and quirks, just like the rest of us. I was amused to learn, for instance, that the great astronomer and science advocate Carl Sagan liked to play pinball, that he loved basketball and grew to appreciate The Simpsons after a bad first impression, but never enjoyed Beavis and Butthead or Aliens, and that he “talked” with dolphins in their “native tongue.” And then there was this touching father-son moment:

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Dec192006

Like Something Out of James Bond

So how’s this for a science-fiction idea come to life: there’s a village high up in the Italian Alps that goes without sunlight for three months out of the year, so the townsfolks have erected a giant mirror to reflect some rays into the town’s piazza during the winter. It even tracks the sun under computer control to maximize the usable light yield. What a stroke of genius… so long as there are safeguards to prevent some evil genius from refining the mirror’s focus into a coherent heat-beam and zapping people into ashes, of course…

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Dec152006

Antique Style

One more item before I call it a weekend. I spotted the following on Boing Boing this morning and thought it was just amazingly cool:
German console hi-fi/TV, 1958
According to this source, this hi-fi/television combo console is of German origin and dates to 1958. No detail about how the source came to know these facts, though, so who knows how reliable they are. Wherever this thing came from, it’s another piece of evidence in support of my oft-repeated theory that objects made in the past had far more style than the stuff we have now. I think I want one of these…

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Dec152006

Geek Wars: The Twelve Colonies vs. The Empire Edition

You know, when I was a kid and my friends and I would debate over which side would win in a cross-universe match-up of apocalyptic proportions — the most common of which was, of course, the Starship Enterprise against an Imperial Star Destroyer — we had to imagine what it would look like. Maybe we were lucky enough to know a kid with some drawing skills who would doodle something in the margins of his Mead spiral-bound that he felt worthy of sharing with us, but mostly it all happened in our heads.

Not these days. Now the wonders of CGI and YouTube enable us to actually see all the action. Curiously, I don’t find it nearly as satisfying as seeing it all in my mind’s eye, but then I’m old fashioned that way. Your mileage may vary, of course. And on that note, here’s the latest example of the genre, in which a fleet of Colonial battlestars goes up against a fleet of Imperial Star Destroyers:

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Dec142006

I’m Done with Michael Crichton

There was a time — roughly 15 years ago, if you’re keeping track — when I would’ve called Michael Crichton one of my heroes. He was even somebody I aspired to be like, a popular storyteller who sold novels by the truckload, occasionally dabbled in Hollywood, ate dinner with Sean Connery, and routinely confounded the literary snobs who resented his success. I loved the movies Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and Runaway, which he wrote and directed; I was fascinated by his personal journeys as recounted in the autobiography Travels; and I thought (and still do) that the original Jurassic Park novel was a terrific thriller. In my unsophisticated youth, I even prophesied that Crichton would someday earn the respect of those aforementioned snobs through dint of his popularity, that his books, loved by millions, would endure long after the “literary fiction” beloved of the ivory-tower-types had passed from memory.

Then I grew up.

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Dec132006

Truly Awful Star Wars Collectibles

On a somewhat less curmudgeonly note (and just in case I needed a reminder that not everything from the years of my youth was all that cool), check out this list of really lame vintage Star Wars doo-dads. You gotta wonder what some of these designers were thinking. Did they really think they had a hit on their hands? Or did they just want five o’clock to hurry the hell up so they could get down to the local dive?

For the record, I own only one of these items, a copy of the infamous Wookiee Christmas tune. It’s never been played, at least not by me…

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Dec132006

Streets of Fire: The Glamourous ’80s

I watched a movie on DVD last night that I’ve heard about for years but somehow never gotten around to seeing, an odd little flick directed by Walter Hill called Streets of Fire.

Subtitled “A Rock & Roll Fable,” Streets of Fire seems to have been deliberately designed to become a cult classic. The plot is basic and more than a little silly: an evil motorcycle gang kidnaps a beautiful young singer; her former boyfriend and miscellaneous sidekicks venture into hostile territory to rescue her; and then they all fight their way back out and prepare for a big confrontation with the gang’s leader. The dialogue is utilitarian at best and the performances so uniformly stiff that I can only assume everyone was directed to act as woodenly as possible. (I blame the direction because we have plenty of evidence from other films that this cast — which includes a very young Willem Dafoe, Amy Madigan, and the ultra-yummy Diane Lane — really can, you know, act.) What makes Streets of Fire at all noteworthy is the film’s look: it’s set in some weird parallel-universe urban environment where women wear shoulder pads and fingerless gloves like all the girIs I remember seeing from high school, but the men all look like they just stepped out of Rebel Without a Cause. Well, all except for the bad guys, who look less like the hard-ass outlaw bikers they’re supposed to be than leatherboys from San Francisco’s Castro District. The streets of this city-without-a-name are always dark and wet, smeared with reflected colors from the neon overhead, and all the cars are vintage. And of course, as the title promises, there are lots of pretty flames flickering behind the action. In short, the movie represents a total triumph of style over substance.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; as harsh as all of the above sounds, I really did enjoy the movie. It even helped me put my finger on something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and that’s got to say something for its merits.

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