Matt’s Week in Dork! (12/22/13-12/28/13)

Mmm. Crack.

    Ugh.  Glad this season is nearly at an end.  I miss when I could actually enjoy the holidays, when they weren’t just oppressive, depressive, stress filled weeks of gloom and frustration.  Flippin’ retail, man.  Flippin’ awful consumers.  I’m all for commerce, but the holiday season is sickening.  Like human swine pushing each other out of the way for more space at the trough, where they’re sucking down foul smelling bits of waste.   Anyway, the week was made better by a bunch of new movies.  I’ve been trying to cram in a bunch of 2013 films as we get down to the wire for writing the Dorkies.

The Prowler:  “If you were just a dame, it’d be different.”  Van Heflyn plays a failed sports star who became a cop for all the wrong reasons.  When he latches on to a bored housewife, the force of his persistent personality on her.  And it’s probably no surprise that things start getting ugly fast.  Heflyn is repugnant.  He should get together with Ann Savage from Detour.  The movie itself isn’t all that great.  But it’s fun to watch such an awful monster try to get one over on the world.

Stoker:  After the death of her father, a strange girl must deal with a distant mother and a sinister uncle.  Family secrets slowly creep out.  Things get weirder and weirder, as relationships become more tangled.  And then murder.  The film is extremely kinky and strange.  It’s beautifully shot and drips with a kind of Gothic eroticism.  I can’t say I loved the movie, but I definitely found myself enjoying watching it.  It’s like Poe writing a Noir.

Blancanieves:  This silent, black & white take on Snow White is a worthy attempt, though I don’t think a particular success.  There are some great bits, and I like some of the ending.  But it’s too often too modern, in spite of its early 20th century setting.  And, to be honest, the first hour is kind of bloated.  Still, there is charm, and it isn’t a bad movie.  I think it could have been much better, though.

Sapphire & Steel:  When I first tried this show, I wasn’t especially enamored of it, but for some reason kept watching, and came to really like it.  The atmosphere is kind of amazing; the surreal mystery and existential danger, with time and space being cracked in unfathomable ways.  I would love to try to recapture some of the gut-level weirdness this show managed to maintain.  Each story keeps you guessing, not just about where things will go, but even about where they’ve already been.  Really something.  And what an ending.  Holy crap.

Computer Chess:  “It could be Sanskrit, it could be Pig Latin.”  Set in the dorky world of a 1980s computer programmer chess tournament, this awkward slice of low budget comedy is very, very odd.  I suspect that much of the film is at least in part adlib, which definitely adds to the discomfort level, but I don’t know if it adds to the plot or characters all that much.  Man, things get so danged creepy and awkward as the film goes on.  Swingers are creepy, man.

Getaway:  Wow, this is some low-budget, shot in Eastern Europe garbage.  Cheap looking, boring, irritating, and ultimately dumb.  The ‘twist’ ending is f’ing stupid.  This along with The Purge, puts Ethan Hawke in two of the worst films of 2013.  I’ve never been a fan, but dang man.  What happened?  And Selena Gomez?  Some people have it.  And then there’s Selena Gomez.  I’ve now seen entirely too much of her attempts to act.  Enough.

Alice in Wonderland:  Disney’s take on the classic surreal children’s novel is kind of definitive Disney.  It has some really good moments and some technical mastery, but is ultimately a bit soulless and bland.  Alice wanders around, dealing with Warner Bros. cartoon type odd situations, where I guess she learns some lessons…sort of.  I feel about this movie sort of what I feel about the 1939 Wizard of Oz.  While taken on its own, it’s a heck of an achievement, but being familiar with the source material, I can’t help but be disappointed that more of the essential nature of the work didn’t make the translation.

Her:  This subject is something I’ve read a good deal about.  Emerging A.I., our relationships with them, the possibilities and pitfalls of romantic love with non-human intelligences, etc.  And Her does get into some of the less obvious, less ‘Hollywood’ areas of it.  And it creates a very buyable near-future world where this relationship becomes possible and very relatable.  It also manages to go in directions that kept me guessing for much of the film, which was itself sort of surprising.  That said, I didn’t love the movie.  I think part of what never quite worked for me might be what works for other people.  At its heart, it’s a movie about a guy and his difficulties with love.  OK.  That’s fine.  But while it did deal with some of the issues of human-A.I. love, it didn’t explore them to the depths I’d have liked.  The social aspects, the ramifications, etc.  Still, it felt more ‘adult’ than a lot of films about robots and A.I.  Less sensationalistic, and much less anti-tech than I expect from this sort of film.  And it’s well acted and well shot.  The movie looks beautiful.  Overall, I enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it.

The Future (Il Futuro):  “At the beginning, we’re all good.  And at some point, we all turn bad.”  The beginning of this movie reminded me of Rust and Bone, and other such depressing slice of European life movies.  You’ve got despondent young people, an emotionally confusing (and confused) young woman with an uncomfortable relationship with sex, thuggish petty criminals.  You know, all that Euro stuff that’s considered so ‘real’ and ‘not Hollywood,’ but is just as cliché as anything churned out by the US studios.  Not my favorite genre of film (Euro-Depression).  However, once Rutger Hauer appears as a former body builder and actor in schlocky 60s beefcake action movies, the film got my attention.  Hauer is typically excellent, playing a sad, former champion.  As he and the young woman, played by Manuela Martelli, begin their relationship, we see deeper levels of each.  She unravels his demon haunted past while he wakes her up to the wonder and possibilities of life.  Had the film not featured the whole drug dealing, weight-lifting thug subplot, and focused instead entirely on the Martelli-Hauer relationship, I think it would have been a better film, and I’d certainly have been more interested.  I don’t know that Martelli is a great actress (like most European actresses, she spends most of her time staring and looking sullen), but she and Hauer are excellent together and their scenes raise the movie several notches.

Tomb of Torture:  Yes, more like Tomb of Boring.  Perhaps not my most clever of reviews, but bloody true.  This movie looks pretty good.  The set design is nice and it’s shot competently, if not masterfully.  But it’s just so, amazing, completely, excruciatingly boring.  Even the Italians have done this kind of wannabe Edgar Alan Poe monster movie better elsewhere.  To say nothing of Corman and the like who could make a more interesting horror movie with a super 8 and fifty dollars.  Skip it.

John Dies at the End:  “Apparently, it’s Eyes Wide Shut World.”  Scott Pilgrim VS. The Naked Lunch.  Fear and Loathing in Las White Castle.  This hipster vision of a drug fueled break in timespace has elements of William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, and H.P. Lovecraft.  Unfortunately, it’s got a couple extra doses of Chris Hardwick and the MTV’s Wild ‘n Out.  There’s definitely a lot of things in the film I enjoyed, but at no point did it ever feel as authentically weird as the authors it was obviously harkening back to.  I never quite connected; never quite bought into the weird world.  I’d be curious to see a follow-up to the film.  I liked it enough to say that.  But I can’t sing its praises.  And really, I spent a lot of the film thinking about how much I'd like to punch in the smug faces of the two leads.  They're extremely unlikable in that jock/cockbag high school cool kid sort of way, with their constantly ironic tone and bored contemptuous expressions.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues:  Occasionally very funny, this sequel to one of my favorite modern comedies just doesn’t have the magic.  It’s not bad.  There are a bunch of really good bits.  But there are too many moments that just call back to the first one, and few of those are particularly good.  Everyone does a fine job and there are some good humorous shocks.  However, it seems like this is another sequel from 2013 that misses the boat.  Not as bad as Die Hard, Star Trek, Monsters Inc., or Machete, by any means.  But it doesn’t thrill.

    I found myself really digging M.I.A. this week, too.  Her album Kala has an old school Rap sound, mixed with some cool world beats.  The whole thing trips off my Cyberpunk love.  I imagine the sounds of the under-dome being something like this.

    And that was it.  I’m still scanning through various roleplaying game books to get ready for trying to run a game in the near future.  We set a date for the first meeting, near the end of January.  There are so many great games, and so little time.  I have a dozen or more that I’d love to run, and most of them I’d especially love to run as long term campaigns.  Obviously, that’s not going to happen.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (1/13-1/19)

    I got some reading done.  And as usual, several movies.  But the Dork highlight was Brad’s Macaroni Western night.

Gangster Squad:  Pretty much an L.A. based Untouchables, this bit of post-War tomfoolery is a fun watch if you’re in the mood for some action packed cops and robbers.  The cast of misfits fighting against a Dick Tracy villain while trying to avoid the cesspit of Burbank is a perfectly enjoyable, if by the numbers bit of fluff.  My one major complaint is the end, not only because it features a totally silly and out of place fist-fight, but because the digital cameras make the action look like TV sports.  Where Michael Mann and David Fincher can make digital look like art, this looks like live footage, which doesn’t work for me at all.  Whatever the case, while it’s no Chinatown, it’s leaps and bounds above more boring L.A. period pieces like Mulholland Falls or The Black Dahlia.

Drive:  I really dig this movie’s crazy slow build, driving early 80s style retro soundtrack, and sudden explosions of intense, graphic, extreme violence.  Driver is like some kind of sociopath, quietly minding his own business, but with a deep river of brutal animal violence just waiting to crest.  Bad luck, bad timing, and bad people make his life all complicated, and he needs to get things simply, fast and hard.  Stompin’ heads, hammerin’ hands, and kissin’ dames.

Spinout:  Elvis loves cars, singing, and skirts.  Those are the ingredients for whole cake full of trouble.  When all the birds want a piece of his hip-swinging, car driving, rocker, he’s got to do his darnedest to keep himself and his band (a lady drummer, no less!) out of the slop.  Holy smokes, his band is bananas, and they keep it classy with midnight picnic feasts (glad the drummer can make the coffee).  That poor drummer just wants some lovin’ but Elvis ain’t biting, so maybe that local cop will give her the business.  But what about that aggressive author?  Or the rich dude’s daughter (the rich dude is played by a clone of Darren McGavin, I think)?  Swinging pads, groovy gals, funky music, and love in the air.  But E knows the score.  There are a log of very sexy go-go dancing honies in this bit of 60s musical fun.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days:  “Why are you hugging me when mom isn’t around to see it?”  This poor kid isn’t aging well.  Still, this series remains charming and funny, focusing on all the horror and awkwardness of being a kid.  I didn’t have the same problems this kid has.  But I had all the embarrassment and dread.  Thankfully my summers really were an oasis freedom.  Still, I’m sure many people are stuck with parents who won’t let them be kids.  His exceptionally awkward best friend is fuel for many painful childhood flashbacks.  Greg and his dad’s hatred of Li’l Cutie is awesome.  It reminded me of reading Family Circus (“It’s not even a joke”).  And his brother’s band rocks that stuffy party hard.

Doctor Who: The Mysterious Planet: “I always like to do the unexpected.  Takes people by surprise.”  This story starts off the Trial of a0 Time Lord arc from the Colin Baker era.  Like The Master, I find myself much less engaged in Gallifrey centered episodes than I was when I was a kid.  And I find the court case set-up off-putting.  Still, the model work on the space station at the beginning is dared cool.  And the subway tunnel ruins are Beneath the Planet of the Apes awesome.  The giant black robot is super-cool, too.  And I’m glad they’re back to the 25 minute episodes.  45 minutes was an interesting experiment, and I think could have worked if it had been better handled.  But they never seemed to get the rhythm quite right.  Speaking of not getting the rhythm right, the them music has been substantially changed for this story, and…well, I’m just not into it.  Apparently, Doctor Who had actually been cancelled (nobody seemed to know exactly why), and this was its return to the air.  So the season long story arc was conceived as an attempt to shake things up and give it some new life.  The relationship between the Doctor and Peri is much more fun to watch, too.  And the guest characters in this story are a blast, especially the two oddly charming thugs.

Charro! “…Taco.”  I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this non-musical Elvis Western.  Not at all what I was expecting.  It’s actually pretty grim, and E does a pretty good job as the reformed crook who can’t get away from his old gang leader.  The gang is pretty dastardly, and the ladies are comely, for sure.  It doesn’t cover any new ground, sitting as a pretty standard classic Hollywood Western.  But as such, it’s quite enjoyable.

Birth of a Nation:  Gah.  What an awful thing this is.  That this was a technical and narrative shift in movies, ushering in the feature film makes it of historic significance for film historians and geeks.  There, that’s the good thing I can say about this appalling work of despicable sociopaths.  The obvious and easy label to give it is ‘racist.’  But I don’t think that really captures it.  This isn’t the subtle, misguided, or even good intentioned racism of Lovecraft, Conrad, or other authors of the time.  This is outright, hostile, and ugly.  And the actors in ‘blackface’ crank that ugly hostility up several notches.  Bah.  I need a shower.

    So, Friday night we all descended on Brad & Lisa’s place to watch some Spaghetti Westerns (while eating macaroni).  There were like eight of us, but I don’t think a lot of us were into it.  But hey, that’s what these nights are about, getting people to watch things what they wouldn’t otherwise see.

The Mercenary (aka Revenge of the Gunfighter): “I will demonstrate how a small jealous idiot can be punished.”  Franco Nero is beautiful, and he does his business for money.  While selling his services to Paco and fighting Curley, our gun fighting hero has all the swagger of a grand leading man.  A wink and a smile, a match lit on a woman’s chest, lessons taught to a man covered in pig poo.  Glorious.

    Lisa made some amazing food (as always).  And Sarah & Paul brought more.  Plus, we had some Bullet Rye, which was…Paaahhh! Smooth.

The Great Silence:  “You can arrest or execute anyone you want.”  This grim Western features lots and lots of snow, a whole bunch of ugly people, and Klaus Kinski.  It’s nasty.  And what an ending.  Not the best Spaghetti Western I’ve seen, but it’s solid, and has an interesting vibe.  And again, what an ending.

Django:  Franco Nero is the man, and when he travels to the nastiest, most rundown, muddy city on Earth, he shows everyone what the man does.  He doesn’t take kindly to anyone messing with the local prostitutes or the barkeep, be they Mexican banditos or soldiers.  One of the coolest, ugliest Spaghetti Westerns out there.  It’s no wonder it became an international hit, even if it never made much impact in the States.

    That was as far as I could go.  Brad popped on another one, but I checked out.  Old man blues, but at midnight this princess turns into a scullery made and goes to bed.

The Shaolin Drunken Monk:  Gordon Liu and his amazing hair (it changes length from scene to scene) star in this pretty cool low budget flick about a kid on a revenge quest who grows into a master of Drunken Boxing.  Liu is so crazy precise and rigid in his style that he makes an interesting counter to Jackie Chan’s more famous use of the style.  As usual with these movies, there is an impressive and wacky training sequence.  I agree with Rick Meyers when he says American movies could use these sorts of sequences, where we see how Arnold or someone trains to become the badass they are in the film.  There are some really excellent fight sequences.  Far better than the film probably should have.

Magic City Season 1:  “I will crush you with a legal s#!% hammer.”  I want this show to be better than it is.  It improved over the course of the season, but it still needs work.  Lacking the writing of Mad Men or the intensity of Boardwalk Empire, it is sadly saddled with a bit too much of Stars’ sensationalism.  I like Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Olga Kurylenko a lot, and I want to like Danny Houston more than 90% of his film appearances allow me to do (stop playing brutish villains for a while, man).  And while Miami doesn’t interest me at all, the time period (1959) does.  The shadow of Cuba’s fall hangs over the town, the mob flexes its muscle, and a self-made man tries to remain true to himself, his family, and his ideals in a dirty town and a dirty business.

Immortals:  “Titans…Unleashed.”  Definitely Tarsem’s best film to date, it finally marries a decent script with his usual visual flair.  This is grand, fun myth shaking adventure, like a modern day Harryhausen film.  It’s absolutely the sort of thing I would have loved as a boy.  Heck, it’s the sort of thing I love as a man.  One day, they’ve really got to focus this kind of attention on the other pantheons (obviously, Egyptian would make me happiest).  Man, would I love to see a really good Odyssey.  It is rated R for good reason.  The violence is at times extreme and bloody.  When the gods get to fighting, well, human bodies don’t put up much resistance to divine weapons.  They mostly just explode in bloody bits.

    Watched a few more episodes of The Clone Wars.  Pretty good show, though season 4 isn’t as good as some previous.  It is so sad that these cartoon episodes are so much more creative in story and design than the most recent batch of films.  I can’t help but think whatever Disney does with Star Wars, it’ll almost certainly be better than anything the silver screen has seen from the franchise in a couple decades.

    “On the contrary.  I’m afraid he’s a bit dead.”  I also watched some more Sapphire & Steel.  Really an interesting show once it gets going.  Like so many UK sci-fi shows, the creators had some pretty crazy ideas, even if it doesn’t always live up.  This story, Assignment V: Dr. McDee Must Die sets up a very strange tale.  A bunch of old people, a break in the time stream, broken memories.  This one was written by a different person than the rest of the series, and you can tell.  But it’s devilishly twisting.  Inspired by those Agatha Christi mysteries so popular on UK TV at that time, but with an almost Ray Bradbury type of haunting and surreal science fiction, this one keeps you scratching your head for all six episodes.

    In preparation for the next graphic novel club meeting, I read through the first two trades of The Walking Dead.  It’s a good series, but I have to admit, I’m just not in the headspace to get into it right now.  Too many years of over fishing the zombie waters have left this old fisherman coming up empty.  I’m just not feeling the love anymore.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (1/6-1/12)

    Starting my week, I was still working my way through the end of a nasty cold.  But I was well enough to take a quick trip over to Trader Joe’s, where I got the fixins for a frickin’ fantastic soup.  Diced green onions, a half a yellow onion, some mushrooms, some sliced potatoes, some chicken broth and a bit of oil and sauce.  That’s really about it.  But HOLY CRAP it was like eating heaven.  Eating hearty soup and listening to old timey radio shows on The Big Broadcast.  Doesn’t get much better.


The Long Hair of Death:  Another early Barbara Steele Italian horror film, this one is not as technically well done as An Angel for Satan, but still features some fantastic location shooting and a general creepy mood.  Bad dubbing doesn’t help, but with an innocent woman cursing a family while burning at the stake, the plague running rampant, and zombie avenger Steele, it’s got all kind of melodramatic crazy.  This movie does show the danger of being a murderer/conspirator in a castle where nobody ever goes to sleep; they just spend every night wandering around every danged part of the castle.  Like An Angel for Satan, this feels very much in the Roger Corman doing Poe movie style.

The Fruit is Ripe:  Fairly typical Euro-trash comedy.  Betty Verges is very pretty, but the movie is annoying.  Exceptionally awful music pokes at your brain continuously (seriously, they play that one song like 10 times), and Betty’s Patricia is a fickle, vacuous jerk.  I guess you’re supposed to think Patricia is a cool chick, but after she professes love for this Tom guy, she presents herself like a chimp in heat to every dude around, then gets all offended when he gets fed up and leaves, and blames him for their love not working out.  He didn’t have sex with a Greek dancer while out on a date with you, slag.  Anyway.  Again, Verges is very beautiful, looking like a 70s or early 80s Playmate (back when Playboy still featured different, natural women, not just the plastic blonde fembots of the last 20 years).  But it’s a really crappy movie.  Shocking, I know.

The American:  “Anything I’ve done, I’ve had good cause to do.”  One of those movies I can just pop in, The American feels like a throwback to 70s European spy/assassin films.  But with the story structure of a 70s Western.  A past haunted stranger comes to town, befriends a priest and a prostitute, and awaits the violence he knows will catch up with him.  Quiet Clooney, an old Italian village, beautiful countryside, gorgeous European women, and atmospheric music.  A dandy film.

Ted:  “This is art…Get it?”  Switch out Ted the teddy bear with Jason Lee or some other sketchy dude, and this is pretty much any other romantic comedy about a guy who loves a lady who wants her dude to act more ‘mature’ (mature meaning boring).  But the devil is in the details.  It really is darned funny, and the surreal bits are what keep it going.  In a never ending battle against people who have pictures of themselves with Tom Skerritt (not to mention Tiffany fans), one kinda dim bulb and his stuffed bear try to win the day.  But smoking weed with a talking teddy bear and watching Flash Gordon seems like a lot more fun.  As much as Mark Walberg annoys the crap out of me, he is oddly charming in this (like a mentally challenged puppy who does funny tricks) and the script has some genuinely clever bits.

The Bushido Blade:  Richard Boone looks like he’s on the verge of death.  The production is shoddy, and feels made for television.  The story seems like it could be pretty good if redone with a better crew.  It’s weird seeing Euro-sleaze starlet Laura Gemser in a role where she keeps her clothes on…for a while.  And at least she’s not supposed to be full blooded Japanese.  This is really not a good movie.

Dracula Blows His Cool:  “I’m especially impressed with your bizarre sense of sadism.”  I make mistakes.  Having access to NetFlix’s rather large library of crappy films, I sometimes watch things I should know not to bother with.  Still, seeing the very cute Betty Verges earlier this week, I thought I’d try another of her movies.  Horrible dubbing, unfunny jokes, and a stupid story.  I guess that’s to be expected.  Lots of nudity, which is also kind of expected in movies like this.  But it’s not good.  Not even really MST3K good.

Double Dragon:  What was originally just put on as background noise, ended up being so crappy I couldn’t help but pay attention.  It’s total garbage, but Robert Patrick’s crazy flattop is the business.  Scott Wolf is so pathetic, and that goofy looking blonde boy-hair Alyssa Milano…Wow.  I remember hating this movie when it first came out, and I was right to do so.

Lifespan:  A young scientist (who looks freakishly like Cyclopes from the X-Men movies) on the hunt for the secret of immortality travels to Amsterdam in order to work with another in the field.  When that doesn’t work out, he stays on and pursues the research among strange folk.  I was surprised that this movie actually touched on as much real science as it did.  The cinematography and editing felt a bit shabby, not helped by the bad dubbing.  But it was a cool premise with less technobabble, and more actual science than you get in most sci-fi horror films.  The b&d subplot kind of comes out of nowhere.

A Serious Man:  “But even though you can’t figure anything out, you will be responsible for it on the midterm.”  The Coen brothers explore the memory of their parents and their childhood in this odd tale of a quiet, suburban, Jewish man trying to get by in a world that doesn’t seem to want him to have a quiet, suburban, Jewish life.  His wife is leaving him, his brother is mooching, his student is trying to bribe him, his son wants to watch F-Troop, and dang lawyers cost a lot of money.  Life should be A-OK.  He’s living the American Dream.  But it isn’t working out.  Something is up.

    I finally got back into Sapphire & Steel, a show I find interesting, but can’t sing the praises of.  Of course, part of the problem is that I just don’t care for Joanna Lumley.  However, this, the fourth series was the best so far.  The villain-thing Shape is super-creepy.

    I finally finished a book.  With far too many going at once, I’ve been making precious little progress in any.  But I finished Lost to the West, which was really, really good.  An almost novel like history of Byzantium from a little before Constantine’s conversion to Christianity up to Constantine XI’s kind of amazing end, with so many wild characters and amazing events in between.

    I also read the graphic novels Higher Earth and Cold Space.

-Matt