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Brad and I have been extremely busy the last few weeks (and I've injured my hand).  But rest assured, we have not forgotten you, our loyal readers.  We'll be back soon with more timely and world changing bits of Dork Life.

-Matt

Two More Fistfuls of Favorites! (Matt’s Picks)

    In the Spring of 2012, as Brad and I were still riding high on 2011’s great movies, we got all mushy, and put together our lists of all time favorite films.  Of course there were classics like Jaws and Commando, but there were also some odd choices.  What do you expect from two Dorks like us, who hope with shivering anticipation that the Saw franchise comes back (Saw X needs to be in SPACE!!!) and that there will be a Crank Meets Transporter prequel set in the Wild West?

    Anyway, Brad got to thinking we should do another list, but this time doing our next round of favorites.   Our 11-20.  Cool.  I like making lists (like Liam Neeson).  If you’re so inclined, take a look back at my top 10 films, and here are my next ten favorites:

20.  Howard the Duck:  This movie takes all kinds of guff from every which way (including loose).  But, as I’ve said before, F the haters.  I absolutely love this film.  Lea Thompson is adorable, Howard balances charm and snark.  And I just love the whole look and feel of the film.  You can’t watch it with even an ounce of cynicism.  I know people hate it.  And I don’t think I can come up with an argument for the film that equates to much more than “Oh, come on! It’s awesome, man.”  Because it is.

19.  Forbidden Planet:  What was happening in science fiction literature for decades finally got screentime in this classic science fiction retelling of The Tempest that would pave the way for galaxy adventures like Star Trek and Star Wars.  Postulating a future where it wasn’t just about getting to space, and maybe, just maybe landing on another planet, Forbidden Planet takes us to a time when Humanity has reached out to the stars and established an interstellar civilization.  Amazing special effects, crazy experimental music, and great characters.  A watershed moment in science fiction cinema.

18.  The City of Lost Children:  Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro raided my dreams and came up with this amazing visual feast of chronologically untethered retro-fantasy.  A circus strongman and an orphan thief search the tumbling labyrinth of girders and rust that makes up the city, looking for a young boy who just wants a snack…well, all the snacks.  Along the way, they meet and battle an impressive cast of strange and deviant folk.  Religious zealots, clones, brains in fish tanks, and the Octopus.  It’s beautiful and strange, and it’s wonderful.

17.  The Thing:  It’s hard not to just gush about this movie.  Almost as hard as it was for the thing not to gush out of that Petri dish when exposed to heat.  It may be a ‘perfect film.’  Not only is it intensely unnerving, beautifully shot, and bloody intense.  But it also has great music, excellent effects, and a crackerjack script.  It does what too few horror movies do, and makes a large cast of interesting and endearing characters I find myself caring for.  When one is hurt or dies or turns into a giant mouth that bites someone’s arms off, I’m bummed out.  When that one guy is a little upset that he has had to go through a major ordeal while TIED TO THAT F*&#ING COUCH, it’s funny in a sad sort of way.  And then there’s the ending.

16.  Metropolis:  When all I had seen was the hacked up, 90ish minute version of this film, it was one of my favorites.  Now that I’ve seen the complete (99.9%) version, it’s so much more.  The story transcends time, the set design is gorgeous, and world created remains a tremendous achievement.  The head and the hand must work together.

15.  Streets of Fire:  The 80s and the 50s come together in a rock fueled fantasy world of the city and the streets.  Back from The War, a young man comes to the aid of his sister.  It seems his old flame, a messianic rocker-girl, has been kidnapped by the demonic leader of a motorcycle gang.  Assembling a crew, he has to go into hell to bring her back.  The movie is so 80s you need to wear legwarmers while watching it (that’s a law), and like a lot of movies I love, you have to check your cynicism at the door.  As it says at the beginning, it’s a Rock & Role Fable.  Plus, it’s got the best hammer fight ever.

14.  Conan the Barbarian:  Arnold’s best movie, and the only attempt at adapting Robert E. Howard’s classic Conan stories that got anything at all correct.  With one of the all time great movie scores, top notch, old-Hollywood production design, and so much awesome violence, Conan the Barbarian isn’t just one of the best fantasy films ever made…it’s one of the best films.  Take that, Annie Hall.

13.  Touch of Evil:  Citizen Kane really is a great film.  I do not begrudge its place on many ‘best movie ever’ lists.  But my favorite Orson Welles film is still Touch of Evil.  Heston is great, Welles is disgusting.  The women are fascinating.  The hoodlums are horrible.  Dennis Weaver is shooting his Norman Bates all over the place.  There’s that tremendous single-take scene that opens the film.  So good.

12.  Lost Highway:  “Who the hell owns that dog, anyway?”  This is my David Lynch.  It was the first Lynch film I saw on the big screen.  It led me to read Barry Gifford.  The soundtrack is amazing.  It has one great scene after another, one quotable line after another.  And it’s seriously weird.  Years later, I still can’t tell you quite what it’s about, or quite what happened.  You want me to draw a timeline?  Timespiral?  I got nothing.

11.  Logan’s Run:  “You don’t have to die.  You can LIVE!”  Utopia is running down, the system is less than perfect.  But for a society of pretty young things, everything seems A-OK.  Except for those few who donn’t want to ‘renew,’ who want to ask questions.  What starts as an undercover mystery turns into an odyssey.  I love every moment of this film, except for the awful Farrah Fawcett, who has never been worse.  The film has a magic so many are lacking.  Something more than the sum of its parts.

(See 1-10 here and 21-30 here).

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (8/4/13-8/10/13)

    I was on vacation this week, and I didn’t get much of anything accomplished.  Didn’t even get much reading done.  All things considered, I didn’t watch many movies, either.  Still, got into DC once, and hung with friends a bunch, so not too bad.  Still, I kind of need another week to get to all the projects and tasks I took this week off to do.  Alas.

Europa Report:  As I said when I saw Oblivion earlier this year, there should be movies like this coming out all the time.  If that were the case, this would be a solid, average semi-realistic science fiction film.  However, due to the rareness of films like this, it’s one of the better to come along in a while.  The story is fairly simple.  A bunch of astronauts are on a long journey to Europa, the moon of Jupiter, to investigate the potential for life.  As happens in these movies, things don’t go especially well.  However, unlike movies like Sunshine, the cast of characters doesn’t seem like a collection of maladjusted sociopaths and mental incompetents thrown into a slap-dash bargain basement ship.  These folk are mostly competent, sane, and even under extreme pressure don’t break down.  They may crack a bit, but they don’t break.  Also, the ship technology doesn’t break down constantly or at every key moment (like in Sunshine).  Though the movie is about the dangers we may face in Humanity’s ventures into space, it is also about the glory and wonder of facing those dangers.

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla: “Relax.  We’re with the government.”  The newer Godzilla movies are missing something, an essential charm.  They feel too rooted in modern Japanese science fiction, which is by and large total garbage, and less in the traditional Godzilla spirit.  This is no exception.  While the story of the disgraced soldier on a path to becoming a Mechagodzilla pilot is interesting, overall, the film is not.  And the monster fight effects are not good.  Everything looks cheaper, more made for TV.

2 Guns:  First, the good.  1) I’m glad this movie did well, so that Boom! Studios gets a cash influx, and maybe a bit of prestige.  Hopefully, that will turn into more of their comics getting adaptations, and in general, an improvement of titles they produce.  I  like Boom!  They tend to do the sorts of things I like to read (less superhero, more weird/science fiction stuff).  2) The Paula Patton nude scene is totally integral to the plot, and absolutely not gratuitous…Oh, wait, I mean had no reason for being there and was absolutely gratuitous.  Excellent.  After that, it’s all down hill.  Right from the start the dialog was awful.  The action scenes were boring.  And the whole plot was drab.  It felt like a second string 80s movie.  Like something Lou Diamond Philips would headline and Walter Hill would produce, but not direct.  Very bland.  Very typical.  No surprises.  No point.

King Kong Escapes:  Doctor Who (seriously, look it up) and a sinister governmental agent have finally figured out the best way to mine ultra-powerful radioactive elements from beneath the arctic ice.  Obviously, with a giant ape.  But where to find one?  Well, remember King Kong?  Yeah.  Right.  Well, we can’t get him.  So, uh, build a giant robot ape!  Duh.  But giant robot apes don’t do well with radiation.  And it turns out King Kong is around, and fighting dinosaurs on his island.  And boy is he horny.  Yup.  King Kong Escapes.  A whole bucket full of ‘what the hell’s wrong with Japan?’  But it’s also a lot of weird, silly fun.

The Host:  Holy balls, this movie is amazingly terrible.  It’s like the sad fantasies of a lonely high school girl.  Every line of dialog, every character decision, every plot turn feels like it was written on the back of a Trapper Keeper while listening to Debbie Gibson cassettes.  Many of these actors are better than this material, as is the director.  Frankly, the whole thing made me sad.  Not because the script was sad, but because it felt like watching a smart, beautiful woman descend into drugs and prostitution.  That’s what this movie felt like to me.  Sad and depressing.

It's so symbolic!

Yongary, Monster from the Deep:  “I’m going to see that monster.” Slow paced, low production value, and little of interest.  It’s not even up to the level of Gamera films.  Don’t bother.

Logan’s Run:  What can I say about this that I haven’t already?  One of my all time favorites.  It’s got all the stuff I love.  Dystopia, trippy music, Jenny Agutter in the buff, ruins of civilization, all that kind of thing.  A fun and twisting adventure of a style rarely done these days.  It scratches below the surface of a pretty paradise, digs into the underbelly, than rises up into the sun.  Awesome.

Elysium:  Overpopulation and climate change have turned large parts of the world into desolate urban sprawls.  The wealthy elite have fled, with their technology and know-how to a space station, where they’ve done a fine job of closing their eyes to life on Earth.  The look and feel of the movie is great.  The story is pretty basic sci-fi that’s been told scores and scores of times before.  A young man must rise from his humble place to free all the people from the oppressive regime.  Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Neo, Maria, the list goes on.  There aren’t very many twists.  It plays out in the expected ways.  But it’s well enough done to be enjoyable.  There is an over reliance on the dreaded ‘shaky-cam’ which is the bane of modern action film.  While not as poorly used as say Man of Steel or The Wolverine, it is still a black mark on the film’s record.  When will this nightmare of directors/producers/studios thinking that extreme close-ups and shaking cameras makes for good ‘tension’ end?  It just makes me sea-sick and angry.  But the thing I take away from this movie is that we’ve finally been given a really good vision of William Gibson’s cyberpunk world of Burning Chrome and Count Zero.  This movie is to Gibson and cyberpunk what In the Mouth of Madness was to Lovecraft and cosmic horror.  It isn’t based on any one work, but steeped in the genre, reaching for its essential center.  Is this going on my list of ‘best science fiction films’?  No.  But it’s a good one and worth checking out.  A good companion to The Running Man and Soylent Green.

Gantz II: Perfect Answer:  There are some extremely cool ideas at the heart of Gantz, but it fails in all the ways Japanese films tend to fail.  A sphere of ill-defined origin, with ill-defined motives, uses ill-defined powers to manipulate undefined characters on some ill-defined missions to terminate ill-defined aliens.  The Gantz anime had some good ideas too, but was stretched out over far too many episodes and never came together in any kind of satisfying way.  This two part adaptation condenses the series pretty well, and gives a better resolution.  Also, though not better defined, the characters are far less annoying and useless in this live-action version.  That said, Gantz II (and Gantz) is still a deeply flawed film with far too many problems and nothing especially amazing to make me recommend viewing.

    Wow.  Yeah, that’s pretty much my week.  Well, I did watch one other thing.  I powered through the first four seasons of Peep Show (It’s UK, so that’s not as impressive as it sounds. The seasons are only like 6 episodes long.).  The show is a touch painful, as David Mitchell’s character reminds me a lot of myself (actually, David Mitchell reminds me a lot of myself), and not always in a good way.  Funny.  But painful funny.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (11/18-11/24)

    A good week, I guess.  More comics.  More movies.  Some Lovecraft dramatizations.  Good stuff.


The Black Hole:  A science fiction film based on Heart of Darkness?  That could be awesome.  Sadly, while kind of fascinating, this movie isn’t all that great.  It has some fantastic production design and an interesting cast.  But the script is only so-so, and the ending doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Still, it’s worth a watch.  The model work is very good.  This came out in the wave of post Star Wars science fiction, but I think owes much more, stylistically, to Forbidden Planet.  It feels much more old school.  If I didn’t know better, I’d probably assume it was made in the late 60s, not the very early 80s.

Tron Legacy:  “Bio-digital jazz, man.”  The original Tron was an interesting and ambitious film that presaged films to come, while still being firmly rooted in moviemaking techniques of the past.  A strange and wondrous world, existing within the world of computers, peopled by programs of various powers and degrees of sentience.  This film extrapolates on those ideas to create a grand adventure, steeped in history and mystery.  Gorgeous visuals and a powerful electronica score from dance favorites Daft Punk help carry the viewer into the Grid, where Flynn’s right hand man, C.L.U., has taken over, driving the Creator into the wastelands.  His champion, Tron, now serves a new master.  The games have evolved, the programs have taken over, and something has emerged that was never intended.  With the exception of the fairly bland lead (he’s not bad, just dull), the cast is excellent, selling the insanity of the world and the story.  Just a really, really fun film.

Spaced Out:  A bit of cheeky goofiness from those blokes in the UK.  A bunch of dolts wander onto an alien craft that has stopped off on Earth for some repairs.  Culture clashes, biologic surprises, and boobs, boobs, boobs.  I can’t say this movie is good.  It’s not.  But dang, it made me laugh on several occasions.  Track-suited letch guy has some of the best scumbag expressions I’ve seen.  It does prompt me to ask, why would anyone in a dead-end job with no prospects even think about turning down a ship full of wanton women begging you to travel the galaxy?  Just doesn’t make sense.   And what’s with the end?

Pride and Prejudice:  Oh, those upper class twits.  They do get up to such nonsense.  Stiff upper lips, social climbing, and the petty difficulties between the rich and the not so rich.  A world where honesty and forthrightness are vices.  I can’t even imagine what romance must have been like from the inside during this era.  I see people going through the motions, but it seems like a religious ceremony; actions with meanings I find obscure.  As far as the film goes, it is very pretty, and you can see the early stylistic flourishes of director Joe Wright.  And I feel so danged bad for Tom Hollander’s priggish parson.  He doesn’t seem like such a bad chap; just horribly awkward.  But at least this movie shows the truth.  You can be terse, difficult, abrasive, and aloof and women will still find you charming and take the time to see the inner you, so long as you’ve got money.

My mansion makes me charming!

Drive:  A quiet loner does what needs to get done.  Made vulnerable by feelings for a woman, he gets into some trouble.  Not really a new story.  But with stylistic flourishes and a slow burn build-up to terror and violence, it rises above the simplicity of its plot to become compelling cinema.  Heck, it’s 40 minutes in before you get a hint that the Driver isn’t quite what he seems.  It feels like a movie from another era, the late 70s or early 80s.  In look, sound, and pacing, it doesn’t feel modern at all.  The characters are surprisingly complex and sympathetic, even when they shouldn’t be.

Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill:  Wait, Germany had an ‘answer to James Bond?’  I guess so.  Kommissar X is the slick 60s hero with all the tricks.  But why is he American?  The bad dubbing and shoddy quality make it a bit rough.  I’d like to see a cleaned up, subtitled version.  Except that the movie is also pretty dull and generally not well made.  So watching it again isn’t on my ‘to do’ list.

So Darling, So Deadly:  “All right, let’s stop talking about bananas.”  Kommissar X is back, this time in Asia to paw and leer at a new bunch of women.  More bad dubbing.  Truly awful music.  And lots of awkward action.  Then there’s something about a shipment of bananas.

Death is Nimble, Death is Quick:  Gah.  By the third film, the smarmy shenanigans of Kommissar X have long since warn out their welcome.  Germany may have had an answer to James Bond, but it was the wrong one.  These movies are craptastic.  And did he just make a pass at an elephant?  I think he did.

    I started watching the Logan’s Run TV show.  It’s something I’ve been wanting to watch for a long time, though I’ve heard little but bad about it.  Still, Logan’s Run is one of my favorite films and I was curious to see how they tried to translate it.  It’s odd seeing the first two thirds of the film cut down and repackaged into the first ten minutes of the first episode.  At about that point, things go off in a new direction.  Not one I’d take, but potentially interesting none the less.  Though, of course, an atomic war made DC look like Southern California (see also, the Planet of the Apes TV series).  The design work draws heavily from the film, but is a bit more conservative.  And the actors, while OK, are no Michael York and Jenny Agutter.

    “I’m good at platonic.  It’s my default sexual setting, after nervous.”  I finally started season 3 of Bored to Death.  Man, I love this show.  It’s so much fun.  So many evil people trying to do good things.  Sort of.  The crazy misadventures these folks get into are so nuts.  And holy crap, Dick Cavett is still alive?!

    On Sunday, as I was waiting to give a brief presentation at my job, I listened to the H.P. Lovecraft Society’s ‘radio drama’ of The Shadow Out of Time.  It’s a good adaptation of an awesome story.  On the surface, Lovecraft looks like a horror writer, but his work is generally more science fiction.  This one features time travel, aliens, archeology, cults, and a grand scope of time.

    I also listened to their adaptation of The Dunwich Horror, which was pretty good.  Though I didn’t like it quite as much as The Shadow Out of Time.  The voice work is mostly good, but there are some wonky bits.  The New England accents are spotty, sounding more like North Dakota than Massachusetts.  It’s a cool story, though.  Danged inbred freaks and their black magic.

    The adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I think my love for the story made me a bit more harsh on it that I should be.  The radio broadcasts in the first chapter went on too long.  What could have been very effective became tiresome.  But once it got past that part, things got better.  In fact, everything after the radio snippets is excellent.  Once it moves into the straight up narrative of what the second party discovered at the camp, and the exploration of the titular mountains, it became nearly as fascinating as the story.  Like The Shadow Out of Time, this story does a lot to give Lovecraft’s ‘mythos’ a solid basis, a faux history.

    And I managed to listen to the adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu.  Another pretty good adaptation.  It’s a strange story, and this dramatization kind of revels in its oddness.  Told in a collection of flashbacks, narratives, and fragments, it creates a larger story mostly through implication.  This isn’t the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s first go at The Call of Cthulhu, of course.  They were behind the excellent silent film adaptation from a few years ago.

    Continuing with the pile of comics Brad pushed into my hands last week, I read All New X-Men #1.  Couldn’t be much less aptly named, as it’s exactly the same as X-Men has always been, going round and round the same idea over and over again with little indication that anything will change or develop in any meaningful way.  It feels a bit like watching a soap opera, where every episode features a birth, a death, a court case, a wedding, and an affair.  Each issue of X-Men features a good guy working for the bad guys, a bad guy working for the good guys, a thinly veiled social issue, a mutant ready to give up, and some normal humans causing trouble.  If my keen sense of Marvel’s stock storytelling is accurate, this arc will end with Beast sacrificing himself in some way to save everyone.  Check back in two years and let me know.  I won’t be reading to see if I’m right.

    Marvel Now! Point One seems to be some kind of set-up for the whole Marvel re-start.  It intros several new series and hints at some larger story ideas.  What’s up with Miss America and her weird dimension?  Who the crap is that alien kid living in Wisconsin?  And Forge.  He’s crazy, huh?  But Nova seems really lame and Ant Man?  He doesn’t just seem lame.  Bah.

    The third issue of The Creep continues the mystery of the missing grandfather and the dead teens.  Our ugly, pill-popping hero takes a bus into the country to aid in a missing persons search, wandering the snow covered forest.  It’s an odd comic.  I want it to be more interesting, but it’s still well written, I guess.

    Winter Soldier issue 12 finds my interest in this series waning, to say the least.  What I liked about the early issues was the way the Cold War hung over Bucky’s life the way World War II had hung over Captain America.  But, though still rooted in that era, its shadow seems to have departed.  Instead, we’re subjected to appearances from incongruous members of Marvel’s usual cast.  Wolverine, Hawkeye (seriously, Hawkeye?  Ugh), and now Daredevil.  Groan.  I’m done.  F this series.

    Fantastic Four #1 shows a lot of potential.  Getting once more to the core of my problem with comics from the Big Two, a world where Reed Richards exists should probably be a technologic utopia within a decade.  That it’s not is part of the whole status quo thing in mainstream comics.  Still, with this issue they imply that the Richards about to take a fantastic journey, putting them out in the crazy cosmic universe they should always inhabit.  I am curious to see where things go.  The Fantastic Four are science fiction characters stuck in a non-sci-fi setting.  It looks like this series may take them in the right direction…for a while.

    I like Boom! Studios.  They publish a lot of interesting comics, frequently some good ones.  But, they also put out some dogs.  Though I gather it’s achieved some success, I really, really didn’t like Fanboys VS. Zombies, as a recent example.  And I felt much the same about Freelancers issue 1.  I like girls with guns.  But this is brutal.  It’s trying to be funny and hip.  It’s neither.  The art is simplistic when it’s not ugly.  And the overall effect is that of a child telling a boring story.

    X-O Manowar issue 6 is something I read.  I can’t say a lot more than that.  The art is fine, but where’s Cary Nord?  The writing is meh.  The story feels too small.  In movies, I have always been frustrated by the budgetary constraints that force the story into the modern era to save money.  Well, a comic isn’t constrained by budget.  They could be illustrating nearly anything, but instead, we’re on earth in a jungle with a ninja.  Yawn.  This could be a really fun series, but it’s not.

    I read the second John Grimes book by A. Bertram Chandler, To Prime the Pump.  Great classic space adventure.  Once again it makes me wish there were more examples of this type of science fiction on film or TV.  Will Disney’s recent acquisition of the Star Wars franchise help to bring science fiction back into the mainstream?

    And I read Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, which I’ll hold off on discussing or posting my review of until after the next meeting of the Justice League of Extraordinary Book Club.  I’ll only say that it didn’t win me over to Marvel’s way of doing things.

    And man, after watching Tron: Legacy again this week, I got totally hooked on the score for that film again, along with some of the other excellent electronic scores from the last couple years, like Hanna.  And it all goes right along with the soundtrack I’ve been building for the story I’ve been working on.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (3/25/12-3/31/12)

    This Dork was on a much needed vacation and making the best of it.  Got a bunch watched, a good deal read, some traveling done, plenty of cooking, and had a bunch of fun.  Relaxed, too.  The best vacation I've had in a long time.

Breaking Bad:  With plenty of crazy twists, this show does a good job of keeping things fast paced and brutal, but still funny and heartfelt.  Good scripts and a fine cast give it all a kick, and things don’t always go where you might expect from a TV show, reminding me once again how different TV has become.

Red Headed Woman:  Jean Harlow is a driven monster looking to move her way up the social and economic ladder, and she’s willing to do anything to get where she wants.  No matter who she steps on, sleeps with, and destroys.  All the usual awful behavior of pre-Code Hollywood is on display, especially sex and drinking.  I still don’t understand what the appeal of Jean Harlow was, but the movie is pretty good.

Waterloo Bridge:  A hard-luck showgirl and a swell but dopy doughboy meet up during an air raid, and awkward romance is born.  London during Great War is a rough place for love.  Poor Roy just doesn’t know how to deal with a woman, especially one who has been making a go of it in the best way she can (read: selling ‘affection’).

Baby Face:  Oh boy does our leading lady get around.  A young woman, raised by her awful father who sold her services to bar patrons since she was a kid, gets a little help from an old man who’s a fan of Nietzsche.  From him, she learns that she’s got power and can make men do what she wants.  And boy does she, sleeping her way up the social and economic ladder, driving men to all sorts of ugly deeds (the murder/suicide is pretty wild).  The movie sure does take a hard look at cruel, ugly, and stupid people.  Check out some pre-Code villainy.

The Virgin Spring:  Quiet, beautiful, and downright brutal, this Ingmar Bergman exploration of vengeance is something to see.  Certainly more graphic that an American movie of the same time, it’s still disquieting today.  The almost fairytale medieval setting is beguiling.  A whole lot of ugly lurks.

The Raid: Redemption:  Wow.  Don’t go to Indonesia.  A whole lot of people get brutally killed in some crazy gun blasting, face kicking, back breaking action.  This movie starts out a bit wonky, but once the poop hit’s the fan, it’s a balls-out rush through a kung-fu drug-house slum block.  There are some really crazy, intense fights in this movie, and fans of martial arts action should find plenty to like.  Plot?  Well, there really ain’t all that much.  Still, it makes up for it in bone-crunching violence.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure:  It’s probably not the best thing to admit, but this movie was extremely influential to young me.  As a budding (and sadly, failed) rocker, I think I half believed the 80s idea that rocking hard enough might actually change the world.  And I still say ‘dude’ and ‘excellent’ more than a normal fella ought.  And yes, history is awesome!  If Billy the Kid were half this cool, I’d hang out with Socrates Johnson and Bob Genghis Khan any day.

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey:  Not nearly as excellent as the first film, this movie is still a lot of fun, and plenty weird.  Evil robot versions of our bodacious heroes do most egregious evils.  Death himself gets in on the action, even if he’s not that good at Battlship.  And all kinds of crazy builds to a battle of the bands, and a moment that will change Earth’s future.  Worth checking out for sure.  Just not quite as awesome as the original.

The Hunger Games:  What do you get when you mix a bunch of painfully unappealing people with a bunch of poorly executed concepts that haven’t been fresh in science fiction for 60 years?  Well, so long as it’s set in a world of drag queens and miners, you get The Hunger Games, the latest in the ‘this crap wouldn’t cut it on the adult market, so let’s call it a teen novel’ subgenre of bad fiction that has been translated to the big screen.  If Twilight was too Mormon for you, and Bella too stupid, now you can have Katness(?) who is good at whatever for some reason and everything just sort of works out for her…for some reason.  With all the illusory depth of Escher but with none of the intellectual challenge, it feels like Leonard Malton explaining the plot to Blade Runner.  Character actors who should be better back up three young people who look like they were found in the clay while excavating Uglyass Island.  They didn’t top Twilight for hard to look at actors, but they gave it the old college try.  And maybe if any of them had a bit of charm or charisma, or characters we could care about…No, who am I kidding?  If that were the case, this would be a different film.  Skip it, and watch The Running Man and Logan’s Run.  It’s clearly what Suzanne Collins did.  And if I may, I’d like to ask that someone please check on the cameraman, as I think he may suffer from seizures, and should probably see a doctor.

Enemy Gold:  With the shift from Hawaii to Texas, we also have a change in cast, with only a few returning Sidaris regulars.  After a few ties to WWII in previous films, this time it’s the Civil War that gets a spotty handling.  Being firmly in the 90s, all the women sport silly looking fake boobs and being a Sidars film, all the men are genuine boobs.  And Julie Strain is back to throttle the concept of acting.  I’m always impressed when someone is a bad enough actor that even their standing or walking sucks.

Doctor Who: Warriors of the Deep:  The return of those bloody pre-Human reptile folk, the Silurians and the Sea Devils, this tale of the fifth Doctor still annoyingly features Tegan, who has to be right up at the top of my list of worst companions.  The costumes for the original Silurian design are much better, though still pretty stiff.  Oddly, the Sea Devils don’t look as good as their first appearance.  And boy did they ugly up Ingrid Pitt, who admittedly may have been past her prime, but was still a striking woman.  Not here.  This story goes brutal in its final episode.  Dang.

The Sister In-Law:  A hot and hot-to-trot soon to be ex-wife can’t get enough of dirty hippie John Savage.  He doesn’t have too much love for his jerk-wad brother, and doesn’t seem to have much problem with the idea of sleeping with the sister in-law (or the ‘other woman’).  The 70s were weird, man.  Goofy looking bearded guys had all the luck, it seems.  But the ladies in this sure are pretty.  Even when they’re having an awkward pool fight.  The moral of this film seems to be “don’t do business with drug dealers who look like Neal Diamond impersonators.”

Noon Sunday:  What?  The first feature film made in Guam?  Wow.  It sure is all kinds of made in Guam.  I guess.  Past their prime TV actors show up, read some lines, and then some stuff happens.  Blah.  Mark Lenard just looks sad, like he knows his career ain’t going anywhere, and this is what he can get.  The scenery looks like a depressing mix of southern California and the Philippines.  Ew.

Primeval Season 4 & 5:  Well look, if you’ve been watching Primeval up to this point, you know there are some great ideas, some likable characters, and an overall concept that could be really, really awesome.  But you also know it fails almost as often as it succeeds.  Often really big story ideas are introduced and then hardly explored, being pushed to the side in favor of ‘monster of the week’ episodes.  Then all of a sudden the big ideas all come to head, but in unsatisfactory ways.  I wish they could boil the whole thing down and re-do it as a single season/mini-series.

Logan’s Run:  I’ve watched Logan’s Run many, many times over the years since I discovered its particular brand of 70s crazy.  It’s a movie I genuinely love, in spite of some flaws.  I know it’s not to everyone’s taste, but seriously, I really love this movie.  And finally, I got to see it on the big screen, and that certain magic that happens only when you see movies in a theater happened again.  It felt like seeing it for the first time again, sort of.  Farrah Fawcett’s ‘performance’ is still jaw-droppingly awful and totally feels like it was tacked on as a favor.  It does nothing to help the film and is embarrassing for all involved.  But Peter Ustinov’s performance felt brand new and wonderful.  And his interaction with Agutter and York was brilliant.  The vision of the hedonistic future, the underbelly of the city, the overgrown outside, and the old man are all fantastic.  The clothing is a trippy mix of Rome and Woodstock.  The music hops back and forth between electronic noise and triumphant orchestration.  And man, someone should have an Oscar just for getting Jenny Agutter to show up in that outfit.  Do they give Oscars for Awesomeness?  This and Zardoz will always be linked in my mind; two films of stunning vision and weirdness, where I can’t figure out how they were ever made, but am oh so glad they were.  Oh, and this was 70s PG, which probably means a modern R.  There are some pretty dark themes, some blood, and a bunch of nudity.

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School:  Roger Corman and crew do a fun, goofy high school comedy.  The humor is extremely broad and the acting often wonky, but the overall movie is enjoyable.  Paul Bartell as the groovy teacher is all kinds of off-beat nutty.

BMX Bandits:  Australian 80s rad, man.  A bunch of kids run afoul of some two-bit hoods.  It’s total fluff, but enjoyably goofy fluff.  So 80s.  And Nichole Kidman’s hair.  Yikes.  This is totally an accurate representation of life on the back of a BMX, too.  Totally accurate.

    I also caught a few episodes of the anime Project Blue Earth: SOS, which suffers from the usual faults of Japanese animation (repetitive character design, choppy animation, dumb dialog, and crappy dubbing), but also has some charm.  Again, like most anime, it’s recycling ideas, this time they seem to be tapping into Gerry Anderson’s world.  A dash of Captain Scarlet, a large chunk of Thunderbirds and UFO.  We’ll see if the usual happens, if the show goes off track and wanders into boring oblivion, or if as I’ve seen happen on precious few occasions, it has satisfactory follow-through.

    And I watched a few episodes of Charlie’s Angels, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, The New Avengers, and Boardwalk Empire.  All a lot of fun, though season two of Charlie’s Angels is noticeably weaker than the first.  The writing just isn’t there.  The New Avengers has an odd vibe, very 70s.  Puts me in mind of The Sweeney and other UK cop shows of the time.  Not at all like the original show, though still charming.

    I got a bunch of reading done, too.  This week, B.P.R.D. Plague of Frogs (my review here) and The Amazing Screw-On Head (my review here).

    On Tuesday, while Brad and I were heading in to DC to see The Raid at E-Street, we ended up with some extra time.  So, we hit up the American Art Museum to check out the video game art exhibit.  Dang.  That was lame.  It might have made for an interesting first room in a more expansive exhibit.  One that featured more art and less video game systems in plastic cases.  It took all of ten minutes to see the whole thing, and about half that to realize the trip to the third floor wasn’t worth the effort.

Almost the extent of the 'art.'

    Finally got my essay on the Reason Rally posted, too.  Check it out here.

-Matt