Matt’s Week in Dork! (9/15/13-9/21/13)

I'm no flat tire. How 'bout a Gin Rickey?

    Trying to fit some reading and some writing in, but mostly just working and recovering from working.  Got a little cycling in.  Otherwise, mostly just stared at my walls.

Riddick:  “It matches your nipples.”  This movie is not horrible, and that’s about all I wanted from it.  I really enjoyed Pitch Black, and while I kinda enjoy Chronicles of Riddick, it never quite worked for me, seeing how it seems to take place in a totally different style of science fiction universe.  This third film feels more like Pitch Black in style, though it holds over some elements of the more fanciful Chronicles.  It starts as a Robinson Crusoe story, with Riddick left for dead on a hostile world, learning to live and thrive in the environment.  This is the best part of the movie, and I was a little sad to see him push the button that would summon more characters and shift the tone.  From that point on, it began to smell more and more of Pitch Black rehash, though it still wasn’t bad.  The dialog is frequently awkward (though nothing tops ‘you keep what you kill’ and a dozen other idiocies from Chronicles’ Necromongers).  As a science fiction movie?  This is pretty crappy.  As a fun, silly adventure film in space, this is exactly what I was looking for.  Again, if movies like this, After Earth, Oblivion, etc. were just more common, I’d be a bit harsher on them.  But as it is, big-idea, out there science fiction is still all too rare.

Beyond the Rocks:  I’m always happy to hear about movies thought lost that are rediscovered and recovered.  But, while the fact of its recovery is good, the movie itself is so-so.  A fairly bland romantic film with little to make it stand out.  Apparently, putting two big names in one feature (here, Valentino and Gloria Swanson) was unusual.  Sadly, neither seems to be especially energetic or interesting.  I’m assuming Valentino is better elsewhere, because as far as silent actors go, he did not impress in this film, and I know ladies went nuts for him once upon a time.

The Delicious Little Devil:  Not much to this short film.  It’s mildly amusing.  But it’s also pretty darned forgettable.

The Bad and the Beautiful:  Kirk Douglas’s eyes should be registered as deadly weapons.  The man can hate-stare so intently it makes women pregnant and men into women (who subsequently discover they are pregnant).  The rest of the cast is quite good.  I especially like Walter Pidgeon and Barry Sullivan (who was also awesome in the recently viewed Tension).  But it’s Douglas’s movie, and he’s a mad genius who takes no guff.  Hollywood is skewered from the inside by this expose sort of movie.  But it makes all the dirty backstage dealings seem sort of charming and exciting, anyway.  Gloria Grahame shows up briefly (somehow earning an Oscar for the part, which isn't much more than a glorified cameo) as a conniving, luxury hungry wife, and she’s quite good.

    Friday night, we all gathered at Robert’s place for a Barbeque and graphic novel club meeting.  We discussed Astonishing X-Men volumes revolving around the marriage of Northstar and his idiot boyfriend Kyle.  I was unable to read the whole assigned work for various reasons.  But as far as I made it, it was bloody awful.  I have come to hate the X-Men (and the Avengers right along side).  Just dreadful writing and awful characters.  Enough of this status quo maintaining mandated garbage.

Looks like Kyle read this garbage.

Valley of the Dragons:  I had never heard of this particular adaptation of a Jules Verne story, and I guess I can understand why.  It’s not especially interesting.  Still, I do love lost world stories.  And a lost world that is also on the Moon?  Cool.  Two big problems present themselves, however.  I don’t like when real animals are used as ‘dinosaurs.’  Partly, because they look terrible.  But mostly because I don’t like that so often it is clear that the animal was being mistreated to get the shot right.  No, I don’t think lizards have a great deal of mental capacity, nor are the self aware.  But needlessly causing pain to an animal, even to reptiles or insects seems barbaric and lacing in a degree of class.  The second problem is Rodan.  Yes, Rodan.  The giant kaiju from Japan seems to be flying around this moonscape.  I guess they had access to the footage and thought nobody would notice?  But I noticed.  Getting past that, the story of two rivals forced to work together on a hostile world is pretty good, and their adventures with the local population are nice.  The Neanderthals and whatever the heck the albino things were (Morlocks?) are especially disgusting.  Worth a watch if you’re into this sort of film, but not one to expend a great deal of effort tracking down.

    Saturday found me feeling pretty crappy, my weeks of not sleeping and stress finally catching up with me.  Some kind of cold or something.  Oh, boy.  I started going through my various con acquisitions and other sundry things that have been piling up of late.  In doing so, I read through three comics I got from local artist/writer Andy K.  Mind Games is a pretty gross little horror short.  The Secret Origin of John Elway is nuts.  And Neon Super Gladiator has a cool feel.  His stuff reminds me of something that might have been on Liquid Television back in the 90s.  Weird and uncomfortable.  I also read Jennifer Hachigian’s Pocket Editor Two, which she gave me because she liked my shirt (“Arthur Turing Fought Nazis With Science”).  It plays on that old video game thing with “All your base are belong to us” but manages to correct the grammar.  I flipped through super-nice guy Alex Fine’s Il Brutto, which re-imagines various movie characters as played by Charles Bronson.  And lastly, I looked through Sam Wolk’s Alpha Beasts and Alpha Bots, two collections of 26 drawings, each based on a letter (T is for Twiki, J is for Jersey Devil, etc.).  Quite cool.  I still have more stuff to get to, and some prints to frame.

    When I got home Friday night, I had a package waiting for me.  I keep forgetting that I’m a patron of the arts.  My old high school chum Serena Andrews is a musician and artist, and has a project she’s working on that involves a tour and a book.  I got some perks for my donation to the project, including a CD of music by Serena, which I listened to on Saturday afternoon.  Buried somewhere in the attic of my mother’s house is a cassette of Serena's music she put out back in the mid 90s.  I always liked her stuff, and still do.  It has a Tori Amos/Regina Spektor kind of thing going, with a bit of Kate Bush and Laurie Anderson.  All good in my book.

    And late Saturday night I picked up and finished the very short, but fun book Bright Young Things by Alison Maloney.  It’s a hand book for Roaring 20s living, with phrases, cocktails, party plans, and fashion, mixed with historic notes and cultural gossip of the time.  The book doesn’t go into a great deal of depth, but I think it would be a handy guide to have while reading fiction of the time (like The Great Gatsby), or history texts (like Flapper), or for those inclined, playing period roleplaying games (like Call of Cthulhu).  If you're looking for a sweet biscuit for barney-making, and you need to know if the bank's closed, this book ain't banana oil.  It's the elephant's instep, see.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork (6/12/11-6/18/11)

As always, we begin with the movies I checked out this week. 

His Kind of Woman:  If for no other reason, this movie must be seen for the Vincent Price performance.  Mitchum is cool, sure.  And the twisting story of mob bosses, dames, plastic surgery, and drunken expatriates is fine.  But Price is far more then worth the price of admission.  His genius performance as a twisted version of himself is alternately sad, charming, and exceptionally funny.  A good deal of it actually feels adlib, and I gather this film was kind of slap-dash, with script pages being written on the day.  But it doesn’t stop it from being entertaining.  And, certainly Jane Russell is easy on the eyes, but she’s also charmingly tough.  The ending is a touch drawn out, but the film is enjoyable.

The Secret Service:  Another Gerry and Sylvia Anderson supermarionation show, this one uses a distracting amount of live action material, including nearly all long distant shots and much of the driving about.  And generally, it’s just not all that interesting.  A vicar/secret agent handler and his shrinking agent solve various, not especially good problems.  Meanwhile, they continually play up the gag that when the vicar is talking to his agent, people think he’s praying.  That gets old within the first episode, but doesn’t stop throughout the first six episodes.  It’s not bad, but it’s probably the least exciting and watchable of the  Century 21 Television Production shows I’ve seen so far.

Doctor Who: The Monster of Peladon:  The Doctor returns to Peladon a generation after his last visit to find that trouble is still brewing.  The story is pretty good, with a nice twist in the middle.  But, as with many Jon Pertwee stories, it’s a bit overlong.  It is nice to see the effects of time passing on a location the Doctor visited.

Doctor Who:  Planet of Spiders:  This one takes a while to get going, including an excessive chase sequence that takes almost an entire episode and serves pretty much no purpose beyond extending run-time.  However, once they actually reach the titular planet, things get interesting.  While not amazing, it’s a solid send-off for Pertwee.

McQ:  Oh, the 70s, where charisma-lacking old men could still draw the ladies.  Where rough cops made their own rules, roused the occasional beatnik, and blasted their way to justice.  Overlong and filled with the typical genre cliché, it reminds me of all the reasons I don’t like John Wayne movies, even when he’s not riding a horse.  Some good supporting performances help, but it’s not enough to make an interesting film.  Not even Clu Gulager.  Good music though.

The Emperor’s New Groove:  There’s some good stuff in this film.  It’s occasionally quite clever.  But honestly, another Disney animated musical comedy?  I kept wanting the jokes to stop, but it seems like telling a serious story has long since gone out of fashion with the powers that be.  It’s worth watching, but has none of the timelessness of a good Disney film.

Halo Legends:  Much like The Animatrix and Gotham Nights, this animated anthology is uneven and too weighed down by anime cliché .  The Halo universe is surprisingly well thought out and interesting for a first person shooter, and the idea of an anthology to explore it is great.  Unfortunately, like the afore mentioned anthologies, the powers that be equate ‘adult animation’ with Japanese animation.  Thus we’re subjected to giant eyes, pointy chins, long weird pauses in action, and vaguely depressed leading characters.  Still, there are some beautiful images, and a couple of the shorts were pretty good.  But then, right in the middle there’s a comedy story that is absolutely painful to sit through.  For fans of the game, this is probably worth a watch.  I don’t see that it would be of much interest to anyone else.  I wish it had more substance, and perhaps some non-anime directors working on it.  But it’s watchable. [Upon watching this for a second time, I’m struck once again by the limitations and rampant cliché in anime.  I swear, there are like 8 plots, 8 characters, 3 art style variations, and maybe 3 themes.  They just mix and match over and over to produce something ‘new.’]

Haven't we been through all this before...frequently.

Brokeback Mountain:  Between the near constant, almost tuneless guitar picking and Heath Ledger’s mumbling, the first 45 minutes of this film are a grueling trek.  Yeah, mountains are pretty.  Buy a postcard.  Eventually things pick up, becoming simply dull.  If the two leads weren’t gay, this would be just another forgettable Lifetime movie.  People lying to each other and themselves.  Crying.  A little yelling.  And a whole lot of me needing a cup of coffee to keep my eyes open.  Yeah, Ang Lee makes beautiful looking films.  But he’s also been known to make interesting ones.  This isn’t on that list.

Yep.  Dem sure are some purty mountains.

Green Lantern: First Flight:  Origin stories, origin stories.  Honestly, how many do we need.  Much of this film could have been done in a flashback, but it’s still fairly watchable.  DC certainly seems to have a good handle on the animated film.  I just wish they’d stop doing origin stories (well, and Batman/Superman films).  Good voice work, pretty good animation, and a quick pace.  If you don’t know anything about the Green Lantern or his particular patch of the DC universe, this is a good introduction.

    On Wednesday, Brad and I played a bit of Halo.  I’ve been wanting to play it again for a while, plus, I’ve got access to a 360 now, so I may finally be able to play Halo 3.  While reading Reality is Broken, I was reminded of how much I enjoy the game, and recruited Brad to help me out.  Having not played it in a while, I’d sort of forgotten that the game is ten years old.  Seeing it, on an HD TV, you can really tell that graphically, it’s not up to snuff with modern games.  I mean, what do you expect?  But the scenery is still gorgeous and the gameplay still fun.  All the little Aliens references.  The beautiful ringworld setting.  Bouncing across the landscape in that dreadful Warthog.  It comes together quite well.  And the cooperative play is a lot of fun.  It was one of the first games I ever played with that good a cooperative mode.  We didn’t get very far, and haven’t really gotten into the story yet.  But it was a nice little intro.  I believe on our next go, we’ll be storming a Covenant ship.  That should be fun.  Seeing the game again, and having just seen the announcement of Halo 4 last week, I’m just glad to see a serious science fiction property being developed.  Yes, it’s basically one of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers teaming up with the Space Marines from Aliens to fight the Church on Larry Niven’s Ringworld only to discover Heinlein’s Puppetmasters.  But though derivative, it’s still solid and a great deal of fun to play.  And it does have a good story.

    Sure, I’d love to see a Halo movie.  I mean, it kind of lends itself to film.  But then, so did Wing Commander, and look how that turned out.  What it really makes me long for, however, is some old style, grand scale science fiction.  The big idea stuff that was more common in the 50s and 60s, before everything became so filled with fear and an obsession with human weakness.  I want to see Foundation, Ringworld, or something like that.  What the original Star Trek had aspirations of being, but not the budget or technological capability.

     I'm almost finished with Reality is Broken, and it's been something.  Very readable, but very challenging.  I want to do more than just write a review when it's done, so stay tuned.  And I did finish the fourth Conan volume, The Hall of the Dead and Other Stories.

     I had a nice surprise this past week, when my old high school friend Serena Andrews released a new music video.  It's very catchy. 

     And I continue to enjoy Kate Nash, who does such a good job of capturing the pain and awkwardness of fumbled love.  This song was kind of a gut-punch, having gone through the same thing myself.

-Matt