Monday, 21 Apr 2008

The air smells very different at night than during the day, even when it is pre-dawn-almost-day.

white-tailed deer have the hugest white tails. one ran across the road in front of me last Sunday while I was delivering papers and even in the dim not-quite-daylight I could see it’s tail running away through the woods for several seconds. Speaking of delivering papers on Sunday I finally had a Sunday with no complaints. Seems I always forget one or two and end up driving back when they call.

Another paper related note. If it were me and I wanted to quit the paper job with no notice, I would just unplug the phone and sleep in. No way I would get up at 3:30AM, drive to the distribution center, spend 30 minutes bagging papers, load the papers into my car, drive to the neighborhood I deliver in then stop at a streetside basketball hoop and do foul shots with a couple hundred papers, leaving them in the road where they fell, then driving home. No, I would just sleep in, but taken by itself, as a gesture - I can appreciate the way the two guys who did this quit their route last week.

I am too lazy to check if I posted it already or not, but in case I didn’t here is a video with one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard in a long time. More poppy than I prefer to admit I like, but good poppy so far - in the general blondie/yeah-yeah-yeahs tradition. I am a big fan of the tom-tom drum too. Anyone who prefers the tom over the snare and cymbals gets extra brownie points. That was one of the things I liked about some of the bands who came out of the early punk movement like Adam & the Ants, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ultravox, Gang of Four, etc. (Note I didn’t say any of these bands were ‘punk’, I said “came out of the early punk movement”) Listen to them now before they get overplayed on the radio.

Wednesday, 16 Apr 2008

sometimes an hour or so can make all the difference in the way the world looks. for some inexplicable reason (ok, it’s entirely and easily explicable but so mundane that I think it sounds better to leave some mystery in the air) I woke up and left the house to deliver newspapers before I realized that I was exactly one hour ahead of my normal schedule. Since I generally only leave about 10 minutes between waking time and when I leave the house, it’s hard to make up enough time to leave an hour early even if I skip using the bathroom and dress quickly.

The teensie bit of the world I traverse seemed much quieter at 3AM than at 4AM. Fewer cars, more police sitting in parking lots. As I turned the corner into a neighborhood I could see up ahead towards the end of the street one house with some purple and blueish lights on in their yard. When I got closer I could see they were CHRISTMAS LIGHTS! Not just one strand, but a couple of shrubs were lit up, a hanging globey/ornament thing was hanging from a tree, etc) When I drove back down that street 10 minutes later on my way out of the neighborhood the lights were off.

I saw the shadows of a practically ghostlike herd of deer at the edge of the woods.

When I left the house at 2:30AM the moon was a normal fairly bright white. By 4:15AM the moon had turned a gorgeous shade of orange.

Got home to find that J was awake. She couldn’t get back to sleep so was watching TV news after she finished watching caccoon. She was looking for light and comedy so I found some suggestions, she decided on “Bottle Rocket”.

Tuesday, 8 Apr 2008

Ah. My 18 year old heart is all aflutter as I read that there was a new Doctor Who spinoff television show called “The Sarah Jane Adventures”. “Sarah Jane”? I thought… but she’s not one of the characters from one of the newer Doctor Who incarnations, she was on the show in the late 70’s with Tom Baker (THE definitive Doctor as anyone of at least average intelligence will confirm), it must be some new actress cast as Sarah Jane, the reporter. So clicked around and w00t! It’s the original actress! Ok, so she’s got to be close to 60 now so isn’t going to appeal to 18 year old geeks like she did when she was in her 20’s, but it’s SARAH JANE. I always thought Sarah Jane was the one of the Doctor’s sidekicks who I’d most like to um… I don’t know, it sounds odd to say she was the hottest, since it wasn’t really/just a sex appeal kind of thing, it was actually much more wholesome - she was just the most appealing in a “Wow, wouldn’t she be the best girlfriend?” kind of way. (Hey, I was a geeky 18 year old)

The official BBS site for the new show

Now , now and then.

ps. Just found out that a young Douglas Adams was a script writer on the Doctor Who show during the Tom Baker years.

pps. The ‘then’ picture doesn’t really do the actress justice, and one shouldn’t read too much into ‘types’ or anything like that. She’s just someone who caught my young eye.

Tuesday, 8 Apr 2008

For a very hollywood film I actually liked this more than I wanted to.

For sci-fi realism I’d say it compares with Men in Black.

For cast: A. Very good cast. Call me crazy, but somehow casting the egotistical television actor Tim Allen as an egotistical television actor actually worked. Ditto for casting the stealth-babe Sigorney Weaver as the eye-candy of the fictional TV show. I’ve always thought Sigorney’s babeness has been highly underappreciated - except among sci-fi geeks I guess. Tony Shaloob played to type as a laconic (stoned?) mellow person, and Alan Rickman’s character’s anguish over being a Shakespearean actor forever trapped in the public’s mind as an alien on a bad TV drama has shades of both how he probably felt doing this bubblegummy hollywood film, and is practically prescient about his role as ‘Snape’ in the Harry Potter movies.

I am sure a large part of my enjoyment comes from the spot-on parody of Star Trek that the fictional Galaxy Quest television show pulls off suprisingly well, and some of the humor was more than predictable, but some of it was quite amusing, even when playing on the stereotypes of the fictional actors thrust into a real mirror world of their television show.

The ‘good’ aliens were quite good if stereotypical. Their way of moving and speaking was just alien enough. The lead alien (the father from Veronica Mars) did a good job, took me a few minutes to realize who he was.

Tuesday, 8 Apr 2008

[[SPOILER ALERT]] ** Don’t read this if you don’t want to know things about the movie “Doomsday”, including but not limited to plot elements, character relationships, basic premise, etc)

Actually there’s not much to spoil - the film starts out having all those elements and seems to be going in the direction of a film with a narrative, but it devolves or entropy catches up with it and it ends up being a non-sensical derivative uber-bloody violent I am not sure what kind of film.

Where to begin:

Got to the 7:10pm showing at 7:15 so I missed some undetermined amount of previews. Walked in and smiled at the sound of the projector clicking. I haven’t been to the movies much lately and the big megaplexes have their projectors in isolated rooms that no sound gets out of - or at least the volume of the film is such that I don’t think I’ve ever heard the sound of a projector running at a megaplex. So I smiled. It wasn’t quite as enjoyable when the film tracking went way askew so the top 1/2 of the screen was showing on the bottom and the bottom half was on the top and it got progressively blurrier until it completely broke down, but that was enjoyable for different reasons which I’ll mention later.

The preview for “The Spiderwick Chronicles” was on screen when I walked in and WOW does that look like a bizarre movie. Then came a preview of a new version of The Incredible Hulk. hmmm. I didn’t see the last one, but don’t know why they need another one so soon. Aren’t there other superheros who haven’t had a film made about them yet that we could use as inspiration instead? Aquaman maybe? Or jeez I don’t know, but there must be someone else. How about Death from the Neil Gaiman comix?

Sorry, got off track there. Let’s see… how to describe this movie? If this movie were called “Doomsday : 28 Days Later in a Knight’s Tale and Road Warrior vs. the Resident Evil 80’s punk” that would probably about sum it up.

Let’s see if it has the requisite components for a succesful pop game-playing culture megaplex hit.

• Massive plague caused by highly contagious incurable disease? check.
• Quarantine of large part of population with government built walls to keep infected people isolated? check.
• Violent massacre of people attempting to exit quarantine area? check.
• Breakdown of society creating opportunity for alternative cultures to arise? check.
• Lots of bloody gunfire, explosions? check.
• Lots of bloody hand-to-hand medieval/martial-arts style combat? check.
• Crazed violent cult figure as leader of society? check. and check. (yes the film has two)
• Violent hot chick in tank top? check.
• Post-apocalyptic futuristic society that looks suspiciously like 1980’s pop-punk culture(ala Road Warrior)? check.
• Medieval Society with dudes in massive armor wielding big swords? check.
• Zombies, Cannibalism or some kind of flesh eating? check.
• Hot chick protagonist who is ruthless and violent and who wears form fitting clothes? check.
• Medieval society run by former respected person (plague researcher) now a recluse with a grudge against society? check.
• ADD-paced editing in the action scenes with cuts so abrupt it’s impossible to tell whether the fighting/action is remotely realistic looking? check.
• Dark sets and lots of night time shots to save money on sets and create spooky ambience on the cheap? check.
• Family Drama/conflict? check. (Punk leader of urban cannibal society is son of medieval lord, woman rescued from punk to lead team to researcher is daughter of medieval lord and sister of punk leader).
• Romance? check. (Daughter of medieval lord/sister of Urban society leader and surviving team member, urban society leader and tattoed soon to be headless cannibal tongue chick) (I TOLD YOU THERE WERE SPOILERS!)
• Car chases? check. (half Road Warrior, half german sports car ad)
• Comic book violence - including beheadings, cannibalism, people splattered by guns/cars/impact? check.
• Evil dishonest Government officials complicit in plans to let thousands/millions of people die? check.
• Protagonist who figures out a way to bring down evil government officials? check.
• Violent hot chick in tank top? check.

Ok, so enough about the good parts of the movie, here a few things that didn’t make sense or that I had a problem with.

• A REALLY long obviously government affiliated storage facility/tunnel that some of the people ‘use all the time’ is full of hundreds/thousands of boxes and crates and despite society itself and all manufacturing having broken down 30 years ago, no one has ever bothered to open any of the crates to see what’s in them.
• A cell phone stored in it’s original packing works 30 later.
• Ditto the sports car stored without packing in a large wooden crate. (was it stored with gas in the tank? there was no moisture/rust or deterioration of wires or battery or anything?)
• A group of ‘punks’ who were born AFTER 2008 in the isolated post-societal-breakdown world play 1980’s music during their big communal celebrations. (Ok, so I happen to think Adam and the Ants “Dog eat Dog” is timeless and obviously a rather blatant reference to the eating habits of the punks, but c’mon… “Fine Young Cannibals”? Why would these punks be playing music from 1983 in 2037? And where are their strippers finding fishnets these days? Maybe they barter with the medieval folk>
• Didn’t anyone in the country have more recent music in 2008 when the BMG record club stopped delivering to Scotland?
• A computerized wireless replacement eye that transmits video to a watch that can turn when taken out of the wearer’s eye socket and placed on the ground. I really want to know how this works.
• An extended Road Warrior chase scene with multiple punk vehicles. (where do they get the gas after 30 years?)
• Frequent use of motorcycles by the punks. (where do they get the gas?)
• Why would the medieval-raised daughter ask what a car ‘does’ if she had been in custody by the punks who used vehicles frequently?
• How could a medieval guy sneak a STEAM LOCOMOTIVE into a train station in the city only a few blocks from the punks’ hangouts?
• Why would the movie makers hire someone for one of the evil leaders who appeared to be part of the inconsistently not-so-talented baldwin family?
• Fight scenes that were SO chopped up that it was obvious that no one wanted to spend the time to train the actors to fight or spend the time to choreograph the fight sequences. Whoever edited those scenes should get a credit as fight coordinator, most of the fight scenes looked like they just said “ok, you guys fight for a while and film a couple of different endings and we’ll edit it to look coherent”.
• Shiny cars (A Bentley) that can crash THROUGH a school bus without damaging the grill or front end of the vehicle.  Granted, the schoolbus hasn’t been maintained very well, so it’s probably structurally a bit dodgy, but really - crash THROUGH the vehicle without a scratch, somehow managing to avoid the power train, or anything more substantial than the cardboard they apparently used to make the prop look like an actual bus? (and what’s with the exploding bus? Do old school buses usually burst into flames when their midsection (away from the engine or gas tanks) is crashed into? Maybe the bus was full of gasoline.

Best thing about my movie going experience: $1.98 ticket price, having the film tracking getting progressively worse ending in the projector breaking down twice. Not being cynical here, I just appreciated the reminder of the mechanical process and enjoyed other patrons consternation/disbelief that a movie would stop playing in the middle of the film.

Worst thing about my movie going experience: Deja vu, and the blurriness and tracking problems of the film at two fairly crucial points in the film. Too much product placement in the penultimate car chase. Not enough cash left to get popcorn.