Matt’s Week in Dork! (3/16/14-3/22/14)

    This week is a bit of a blur.  In the aftermath of filming, I went into a slightly more funky funk, combined with some unrelated stress, and just didn’t have my mind on the Dork Life.  Still, there were bright points, to be sure.

Star Trek Into Darkness:  Upon second viewing, I find this film both better and worse.  On the one hand, I find a lot of things that I really enjoy.  Little bits of dialog, sequences, or production design.  But I’m also more bothered by how much better it not only could have been, but absolutely should have been.  Kirk is made into a horrible, sniveling, weak-willed little child.  Spock is a whiny a-hole.  Uhura has become a shrewish nag.  And the unnecessary villains are bordering on mentally enfeebled when it comes to plans and schemes.  At almost every turn, the writers had chances to make a very interesting movie, that continued to take the new timeline Trek on its own course.  Alas, at every turn, they made silly call-backs, rehashed old characters and plots, and on more than one occasion bent plot and story out of whack, just to do something stupid.  If Harrison wasn’t Khan?  Better film.  If Khan and Kirk teamed up, then went on their separate paths?  Better film.  If it had been a dilemma to solve, not a villain to punch?  Better film.  If Carol Marcus wasn’t involved?  Better film.  If the Klingons weren’t involved?  Better film.  And didn’t they already do the Admiral Robocop storyline in Star Trek VI?  I mean, why rip off both Star Trek II’s plot and Star Trek IV?  Anyway, this ultimately aggravating film has a ton of potential, but drops almost every ball it tries to juggle.  After such a good start to the re-launched series, this stumble feels catastrophic and probably terminal.  My interest in the franchise dropped down to the levels Star Wars has been enjoying for the last fifteen years.  And that ain’t good.

Alice Adams:  Katharine Hepburn plays a somewhat spoiled daughter of a struggling middle class family, who, along with her mother, is a bit obsessed with being perceived as part of the more sophisticated upper class.  What follows is an enjoyable light comedy of manors and misunderstandings.  Nothing too heavy.  One thing I find odd/interesting is the politics of race in the film.  You see racism, and there is certainly a character that seems like a racist archetype when you first see her.  But, it seems like the movie is lampooning racist assumptions and behaviors.  Or is it?  I’m removed enough from the time period that I’m not quite sure.  Was it subversively forward thinking, or am I giving them too much credit?  Overall, I really liked the movie, even though Fred MacMurray was the romantic lead.  Though his boring stiffness may have been to the benefit of the picture.

Dirty Harry:  One of the great pieces of 70s sleaze.  One of the best anti-hero cop films.  Dirty Harry is pretty much a rehash of Bullitt, but 100% more entertaining.  Clint Eastwood grimaces and sneers his way through life, hating the world and every piece of scum in it.  And when a giggling whack-job with a rifle starts picking people off, nothing is gonna stop Harry from getting his hands dirty, with punk blood.  No pointless romance sub-plot.  No great moral victory.  No personal growth.  Just hard, mean, ugly business.  A great score, fantastic footage of San Francisco, and some memorable lines help cement Dirty Harry as a landmark in cynical cinema.

    Because I’ve had a hard time focusing on reading lately, I paid a lot more attention to the music I had on during bus trips this week.  I really got into St. Vincent’s new, self titled CD.  After a few listens, I give it an enthusiastic thumbs up.  Very good.

The Astronaut Farmer:  This is a great family movie, about a family working together to realize dreams.  In a lot of ways, it felt like a film from the earlier 1980s.  Another case of ‘they don’t make movies like this anymore.’  It’s heart warming, gentle, and seriously enjoyable.  It’s got plenty of ‘that guy’ actors and lots of solid character performances.  Heck, even the kid actors are good.  This is the kind of thing I can imagine inspiring little kids to reach for the stars, and we could certainly use more of that.  Matt’s Family Seal of Approval.

The Grapes of Wrath:  The Great Depression shot by John Ford?  Normally, that idea would not thrill me at all.  But this adaptation of the classic novel of one of America’s darkest times is engrossing, entertaining, and ultimately uplifting.  Though the end sugar coats the book’s message, I find its hope filled look off into the distance of time to be satisfying.  The movie looks great, with some excellent faces and the desperate human misery of displaced peoples in stark black & white.  The acting tends toward the theatrical, but as the film takes on an almost mythic cast, that’s not such a bad thing.  Watching it made me want to dip back into HBO’s Carnivalle and follow it up with Sullivan’s Travels.  I’ve got a week off coming up.  We’ll see.

    Thursday night I watched the first disk of The Waltons.  Man, I hated that show when I was a wee lad, but I find it charming and fun now.  It’s wholesome and perhaps a bit saccharine, but it’s also refreshing and pleasant.  I know that over the course of its near decade run (plus several movies) the characters grow and experience snippets of history (from the Depression through WWII), and I find that interesting.  I may be sitting down for a long haul, watching the entire show.

The Call of Cthulhu:  I still find myself enjoying this darned faithful adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic story.  On a limited budget, they attempted to recreate the silent movie era, and for the most part, it works.  Not even close to my favorite Lovecraft tale, it’s still nice to see some of the author’s essential content make it onto the screen, something so rare in previous purported adaptations.  It makes me more and more hungry to see a faithful adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time or of course, At the Mountains of Madness.  Heck, a well made Shadow Over Innsmouth would still make me smile.

Legendary Weapons of China:  An excellent, probably way over-complicated martial arts adventure movie, Legendary Weapons of China is set in the latter days of the Boxer Rebellion (or just after).  It involved conflicted philosophies of martial arts and its place in society…and lots of fighting.  The tone is odd, with a good deal of goofing, but with some serious issues being discussed and fought over.  Yet, unlike some, it manages not to strike any notes too jarring for this viewer.  I enjoy hand to hand martial arts, but my preference is for weapon combat, and as the film’s name implies, this one features weapons.  Lots and lots of weapons.  Excellent.

    Saturday night was the latest meeting of the graphic novel club, where this month we discussed Brian K. Vaughn’s Pride of Bagdad.  The book left me cold upon reading it, but I did gain some appreciation for it, seeing it through some other readers’ eyes.  The art is nice, but it felt the most like when we read Get Jiro a while back; a bunch of potentially interesting ideas that didn’t go anywhere.

    I finally got back to and finished Philip Reeve’s Goblins.  It’s a fun children’s fantasy novel in the spirit of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain cycle (see…or don’t…Disney’s boring adaptation of The Black Cauldron).  The fact that it took so long from the time I started to the time I finished is not a statement about the book’s quality, but my own scatterbrained funk and lack of focus I’ve been suffering for some months.

-Matt

What I’m Listening To (3/2/14)

    Though I still find myself listening to M.I.A. while riding the bus, I’ve been listening to a bunch of other stuff while at home.  Due in part to starting up a Call of Cthulhu game, and because I like it, I’ve been cycling through a lot of 20s music, from some Jelly Roll Morton to Eddie Cantor to Josephine Baker.  I knew I had a good deal of music from the time, but I was surprised how easy it was to assemble a 4 hour playlist, especially considering many of the songs are rather short.  Along with the 20s music (some of it 30s), I raided my soundtrack collection, pulling tunes from Cloud Atlas, The Cell, and even Once Upon a Time in the West.  And I’ve been on YouTube listening to some weird electronica in the vein of the sadly unavailable Beyond the Black Rainbow soundtrack.  Black Mountain and Sinoia Caves both share musicians in some complicated Canadian way I don’t understand.  But there are traces of the Black Rainbow sound in there.  More investigation is needed.

    So, here are some of the things I’m listening to this week.

Artist: Die Antwoord
Album: $O$
    Somehow, I stumbled across this group in my net crawling, and found something about them challenging and appealing.  Their Zef style is so off-putting, yet taps into that 80s Cyberpunk spirit I love so much.  "The Street finds its own uses for things."  And the dirty, in your face, middle finger waving music kept me listening.  Are they good?  I don’t think so.  But darn it if some of their tunes aren’t aggressively catchy.  In Your Face, Enter the Ninja, Rich Bitch, and Doos Dronk are all infectious.  And the others keep you going from track to track.  Ninja is actually a pretty good rapper, and Yo-Landi’s weirdass singing works well with the whole package.  This isn’t going to be for everyone.  Even for fans of rap (I’m generally not among them), this stuff is pretty crazy.  This is music I could imagine being performed in a Bartertown bar, with Master-Blaster rocking out in the corner.

Artist: St. Vincent
Album: St. Vincent
    I first found St. Vincent a few years back as a blind buy, and I really enjoyed the album I picked up (Actor).  It reminded me a bit of Laurie Anderson, but there was certainly a unique quality.  Over the last couple years, I’ve picked up more albums (Marry Me, Strange Mercy, and the David Byrne collaboration Love the Giant).  As I listened to more and more of her music, I began to put her in with Devo and well, David Byrne and Talking Heads.  Her music is more experimental and challenging than a simple singer/songwriter.  This is Nerd Rock.  So last week, she put out a new album, the self titled St. Vincent.  Listening to it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the recent Devo album Something for Everybody.  She even deals with the kinds of emotional dissonance of the digital age Devo touches on.  I’ve listened to the album a couple times through so far, and I’m certainly liking it.  As with the best Nerd Rock, I doubt I ‘get’ half of it.  The music feels smarter than me, if you catch my drift.  It’s not like hearing Celine Dion, where you can guess all the lyrics of the song from the first few lines, or Fergie, where you feel yourself getting dumber while you listen.  I’m going to need more time with it to feel my way through each track.  But my overall feeling is that this is a another winner from a very interesting contemporary musician.

Artist: H.P. Lovecraft
Album: H.P. Lovecraft I
    I always had a taste for the psychedelic music of the 60s and 70s, and the wild imagery they conjure when you let yourself drift off with headphones on.  I’m two steps from Straight Edge and I’ve never dabbled in recreational drugs, but this music still hits a chord with me.  And in the case of the semi-obscure band H.P. Lovecraft, there’s also the added bonus of their tenuous connection to the works of…well, H.P. Lovecraft.  They draw on Lovecraft’s work in much the same way, and with a similar frequency, as Led Zeppelin with J.R.R. Tolkien.  I love the dreamy organ playing, the duel vocals, and the messy guitars.  Wayfaring Stranger and The White Ship are my two favorite tracks.  The White Ship is their epic masterpiece.  It’s a dreamy trip through astral space.  Really listening to it is like meditation, and by the time it ends, I feel more mentally clear than when I started.

    So, that’s some of what’s on my rotation right now.  St. Vincent’s new album has got me in the mood for something a bit different than the harsh, messy rap-beat stuff I’ve been consuming a lot since the beginning of the year.  Maybe, with Spring allegedly on its way, I’ll slide over into the more nostalgic, mellow music I have a tendency to play around this time of year.  I think pulling up H.P. Lovecraft might have been the beginning of that.  Until next time…

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (8/14/11-8/20/11)

    Though the beginning of the week was somewhat light on dorkiness, the end was capped off with the Baltimore Comic-Con, so that’s a heck of a cherry on top.  As usual, first we have the movies.


100 Rifles:  There was a time, a strange and wonderful time, when Burt Reynolds ruled Hollywood and Jim Brown was in nearly every film that came out.  100 Rifles comes from that.  Not a great movie, and not especially original or ground breaking, it’s still a lot of fun.  Some good, blazing gun battles.  A beautiful Raquel Welch.  And a pretty good odd couple team of Reynolds and Brown.  That and an excellent cast of character actors and beautiful scenery all bring the movie a touch of unexpected quality.  If you’re in the mood for some westploitation, check this one out.

Star Trek The Motion Picture:  An attempt to elevate Star Trek into the realm, not of Star Wars, but of 2001, this movie sports some impressive special effects and sets, and perhaps some heavy concepts.  However, the story itself is extremely simple, and those heavy concepts were already well traveled lands when this film came out (several times on the original show, in fact).  It is very slow paced, which I think is what many don’t care for.  I find myself liking the film quite a bit, though.  If not always for what it does, but often for what it tried to do.  With the follow-up, Wrath of Khan, Trek films became largely a science fiction action movie series.  But this was trying to be a serious science fiction film.  The score is really fantastic, too.  Often unfairly judged, this was really quite an accomplishment.  Check it out, and try to watch it with an open mind.

Final Destination 5:  Tony Todd watches people not die…then die.  Have you seen one of these movies?  Then you’ve seen this movie.  It’s stupid, stupid, stupid.  And this batch of actors was especially bad.  I’m always glad to see Tony Todd, but I wish he was in better stuff.

"Seriously, it's the same movie.  But my check cleared."

Doctor Who: Image of the Fendahl:  A solid, if not especially great story finds the Doctor and Leela facing off against an ancient evil from the dawn of the Solar system.  This story does have an excellent cast and they get a good deal of play.  Leela looks a little weird in this story, due to the actress getting a rather unfortunate haircut.  Otherwise, while good, there’s not a lot to make it really stand out.

Arabesque:  Gregory Peck channels Cary Grant in this screw-ball, espionage romantic caper.  I don’t think there’s a single Arab actor playing any one of the many Arab characters.  It’s funny, has some crazy swinging music from Henry Mancini, and some totally over the top direction from Stanley Donen (his follow up to the actual Cary Grant film, Charade).  I’m sure when this was made, they were tossing around “James Bond like” and there are some obvious parallels.  But this is its own thing.  And it’s worth checking out just to see Peck playing a goof.

Super:  Wow.  Feel like getting depressed?  This occasionally funny, often grim, and almost always sad look at a man who wants to do good in a world of bad is certainly worth a watch.  A great cast does a fine job, many in small but enjoyable roles (look out for William Katt!).  But this is not the feel good hit of the year, that’s for sure.

The Birds:  What a really, really strange movie.  From the lack of score to the crazy character interactions, this is simply odd.  Rod Taylor is one smooth dude, though; navigating through a minefield of womanly emotions from his clingy mother to his impetuous sister, not to mention the stalker socialite.  And then the birds show up.  Madness.  Seeing it at the AFI Silver was a great experience, too. 

Exposed:  Christina Lindberg does her thing.  She’s kind of cute in a girl next door sort of way, and she takes her clothes off a lot.  Otherwise, this movie is indistinguishable from dozens and dozens of other Euro-trash movies.  The music is pretty good, in that swinging late 60s sort of way.

Conan the Barbarian (2011):  This piece of cinematic garbage makes me long for the magic of Ralf Moeller’s Conan the Adventurer.  I don’t know if it is actually possible to screw this up more than the filmmakers did.  From details to the grandest of themes, this isn’t Robert E. Howard’s classic character.  And, it’s simply an awful film to boot.  Bad acting, boring action, crappy effects, dreadful music, and completely idiotic script.  A true turd of a film. 

No matter how far I ride, I can not find a shirt!

    So, on Saturday, Brad, Lisa, our mutual friend Robert, and I all traveled to the Baltimore Comic-Con, which was, as usual, a lot of fun.  Hopefully, Brad and I will have more on it in the days to come.  I think our lives should be getting back to some kind of order after a month or so of nuttiness.  The artist’s ally seemed more jam-packed than in years before.  I like the diversity of people, too.  The big name companies don’t seem to be all that interested in the con scene anymore, so Marvel and DC didn’t really represent.  But they weren’t really missed, either.  From Boom! Studios to Top Shelf to lots and lots of self publishers, there was far more than costumed heroes to check out.  And there were tons of costumed fans.  A surprising number of pretty good ones, too.  I do with the con ran a little longer.  I was only there for the one day, and 6PM seemed early for wrapping up.  I’ll talk about the con a bit more later, and hopefully have some pictures of some of my spoils.

    Plus, when we got back to VA, we stopped at Brad's and watched some episodes of Batman!

    On the book front, I have again picked up Helen of Troy, by Bettany Hughes.  I really mean to finish it this time.  It’s a good book.  Very well written and interesting.  I’ve just gotten side-tracked every time I’ve picked it up.  I’m gonna try this time.  Really, I am.  And I’m interested in reading her new book, The Hemlock Cup.  I’ve still not gotten around to writing up my Conan graphic novel reviews for the last few volumes, and feel like a chump about that.  But I’ll get to it.  Honestly, haven’t been writing all that much of anything recently (as readers of this blog will already have noticed).

    As far as music goes, I snagged an older St. Vincent CD, but haven’t really listened to it much.

-Matt