Matt’s Week in Dork! (4/6/14-4/12/14)

    Mostly just movies this week, but good times, none the less.  I love living in the greater DC area.  The options for seeing movies, movies you just don’t get to see on the big screen elsewhere…It’s the berries.

The Raid 2: Berandal:  The Raid was a pretty intense, violent, and action packed little movie.  It has, essentially, the same story as Dredd, but set in Indonesia instead of MegaCity 1 (pick your urban hellscape).  With the sequel, the world is greatly expanded, with several factions of organized crime, corrupt cops, various heavies, and all kinds of horrible places to die.  As far as the plot goes, there’s nothing to write home about.  It’s the usual "cop goes undercover to infiltrate organized crime, using the headstrong, screw-up scion of a major crime family" story you’ve seen dozens of times.  But the cast and the action are what make the film stand on its own.  This is, straight up, one of the most violent films I’ve ever seen, and almost certainly the most violent film I’ve seen that somehow managed to get an R rating from the MPAA.  Of course, we know, you can show almost all the violence you want, so long as you don’t talk realistically about sex (or show a penis).  But even so, I’m shocked this was able to get an R.  If anything I’ve seen warrants and NC-17, it’s this film.  The action and violence are extremely well done, and in spite of a lot of handheld work, I never got frustrated and annoyed by it like I do in most of our modern ‘shaky-cam’ action scenes.  The meat-hook brutality of the combat is at times grueling.  But for action/martial arts fans, this one is well worth seeing.  So.  Dang.  Violent.  Probably the biggest surprise is that the extremely cliché character of the head-strong son of the mob boss isn’t horribly annoying.  I actually like him and his Asian Bruce Campbell cool.

12 Years a Slave:  “I don’t want to survive.  I want to live.”  I know the basics of the history.  I know how economic and religious ideas came together (with a dash of scientific quackery) in a horrible partnership that created the national shame that was the enslavement of large numbers of Africans in the early Americas through the 1800s (let’s skip the post Civil War awfulness for the sake of this discussion).  I’ve read the books and I’ve seen the movies.  But I don’t get it.  I don’t understand how it could be so widely practiced and accepted.  I know that it was.  And I know that similar things go on today, be it genital mutilation and enshrouding of women or colossal oppression of a people by their government, or whatever.  I know that it happens.  I see it.  But I don’t get it.  How did it take so long to stop what was so obviously a horrible and disgusting practice?  I don’t know.  That’s what I kept thinking through watching this movie.  How did so many people let it happen, keep it going, revel in it?  The movie itself is beautifully immersive, capturing the beauty of the land, while not shying away from the horrors visited brother against brother, sister against sister.  The story is compelling and the acting fantastic.  There’s good reason this was up for all the awards.  But it is a brutal viewing, no doubt about it.  If I have one critique of the film, it’s that I never got the sense of passing time.  I feel like part of the horror of Solomon Northup’s journey was how much of his life was lost.  But the movie felt like it took place over a matter of weeks or months.  Still, it’s a heck of a powerful movie.  Thinking about it over the course of the week, what made this movie more effective for me than some others on the same subject may be that Solomon Northup started the film as a free man, minding his own business, who gets kidnapped and taken to a hostile land.  I can relate to that more than the usual story of a person who grew up under the boot heal of slavery.  It makes things less abstract.

Particle Fever:  This movie made me want to go out and do Science! for a living.  I know that’s not in the cards.  I’m too old, and I suck at math.  But for an hour and a half, I felt like I could be part of all this wonder and the expansion of Human understanding.  Through the eyes of a handful of interesting physicists, we see the final stages of the construction and early tests of the Large Hadron Collider, a machine designed to smash particles together and see what comes out.  Some of these people had theories that were decades old, with no ability to test them until this massive machine was built.  The movie does an excellent job of showing what life on the inside of this particular fishbowl was like, while showing the passions of the people involved.  I also like that it prominently and positively featured women in science without being about women in science.  Typically with a movie like this, if they were going to have one of the key protagonists be a woman, they’d spend 10 or 15 minutes talking about the challenge of being a woman in a male dominated field.  Something that would almost certainly be off-putting for young women looking to get into that field.  Instead, we see women working right alongside men in the office, in the classrooms, and in the construction of the machine, and running the overall project, just as it should be.  No, it’s not like it was a 50/50 split.  But the mix is a heck of a lot better than a couple decades ago.  And if we stop scaring our daughters off of male dominated fields by driving home how challenging they’ll be, maybe that split will decrease more in the coming years.  A movie like this is going to be a heck of a lot more inspirational than one that focuses on the negative.  And inspirational is how I’d describe it.  I’ll admit, there were several times, when the music swelled, the camera moved  over the machine, or we watched one of these scientists’ dawning awareness of new revelations, that I got a bit misty.  Watching the work of so many people come together.  Watching the power of the Human mind to unlock the secrets of the universe, even if only in a small way.  And of course, knowing that science transcends culture and border, becoming the collective effort of our whole species to better know the nature of reality, without the weight of our hatreds and fears.  Is uplifting.

Alexandria The Greatest City:  Over the last decade or so, I’ve become quite the fan of Bettany Hughes and her passion for history.  This exploration of Alexandria is cursory, but interesting.  It makes a good deal of use of clips from the Alexandria set film Agora.  There’s not a lot to this one, but Hughes always makes it interesting, and makes me want to read more.

Lizzie Borden Took an Ax:  No, no, no.  I didn’t think this was going to be what we might traditionally think of as ‘good.’  But as soon as it started, I had that Quantum Leap ‘Oh, boy’ moment.  It’s shot like crappy TV.  It’s written like crappy TV.  It’s crappy TV.  Everyone in this should know better.  I don’t know what the idea was in using modern Black Keys wannabe music for the soundtrack.  But it was bad.  A bad idea.  On a purely shallow note, Christina Ricci did look extremely cute in the period costumes.  I wish she could have stepped out of this movie and into a good Western or whatever.

Battle of the Darned:  Dolph Lundgren teams up with killer robots to fight zombies?  Sold!  Actually, this movie is better than I expected, but that might be to its detriment.  If it was worse, it might have been more fun.  It’s not good enough to recommend.  It’s OK.  The kind of thing that if you find playing while you’re flipping channels, you could do much worse.  The camera shakes way to much (it is an action movie made after the Bourne franchise) and the CG on the robots is wonky in places.  But it’s OK.  I liked the scenes with Dolph and the robots back to back.  I’d have liked more of that.

Engineering Ancient Egypt:  Another documentary presented by Bettany Hughes, this time on two of Egypt’s most successful pharaohs, Khufu and Ramses II.  By examining the whys and wherefores of building the pyramids first, and the temple at Abu Simbel, she gets into the belief systems and key historic events that shaped the two men and their times.  As often happens, taking the time to look into history produces information that doesn’t jive with generally held beliefs.  One of the primary things I grew up with, that has been rather soundly trounced is the idea that slaves (generally thought to have been Hebrew slaves) built the pyramids.  Hughes’s documentaries are always entertaining and informative, though frequently only introductory.  They’re good starts for further research.

    On Thursday night Brad and I, and a couple others from our graphic novel group, all headed out to the Alamo to watch a VHS projection of that classic, 3 Dev Adam, one of the best Captain America films ever made.  Awesome.

3 Dev Adam (aka Turkish Captain America):  What can one say about this film?  The plot is totally unintelligible, and I don’t know if that’s because of the subtitles or the editing.  The villains have a plan, I guess.  The heroes have a plan, too.  Or something.  They fight sometimes.  In the middle of fight scenes, they often cut to people walking.  Throughout most of the film, it sounds like there are nervous horses on cobblestones, which I think is supposed to be the sounds of footsteps.  I’ve got no idea.  But it was all awesome.  A film to share with friends, for sure.  Plus, who doesn’t love an awkward puppet moment during sexual coupling?

A Touch of Sin:  I went into this film knowing nothing about it at all, beyond the poster image of the guy sitting on his motorcycle in front of a crashed fruit truck.  I recommend going into it the same way.  I won’t give away story or character.  But I’ll say this about the film; it’s beautifully shot and well acted.  It has a slow pace, but isn’t ever dull.  There are some gorgeous images of China, even when they’re of various ugly things or environments you’d never want to live in or possibly even go to.  The film feels extremely contemporary, and not just because it features a lot of people staring at their cell phones.  And if I was left with any message, it’s ‘don’t go to China.’  Very worth seeking out, though.  Know in advance that there is some rather graphic violence.

The Raid:  Having watched The Raid 2 a few days back, I decided to revisit the first one.  It’s a heck of a violent movie.  Not much in the way of plot, but that would have gotten in the way of the horrible, bone-cracking action.  Anyone into brutal action movies needs to see this one.  Good camera work, nasty violence, and excellent gun and hand to hand choreography.

Nova: The Vikings:  This documentary from 2000 does a pretty good job of reintroducing the Vikings, putting the sword to some commonly held misconceptions.  I’m always fascinated by our evolving understanding of those who came before.  This is a very cursory examination of the subject, but still managed to have some interesting bits for me to look into, especially with the Vikings in Russia.

Ninotchka:  When three bumbling Soviets in Paris screw up a deal for the Reds back home, Moscow sends along a hard-line agent to kick things into shape, in the shapely Greta Garbo.  French playboy Melvyn Douglas sets his sights on melting her heart, unleashing the charming woman hiding beneath the utilitarian comrade.  Ernst Lubitsch crafts another supremely funny, cheeky, and surprisingly sexy comedy.  It’s funny how timeless the issues of the film, then quite topical, remain.

Orca: The Killer Whale:  Obviously made to capitalize on the huge success of Jaws, this Ahab Vs. Killer Whale film looks pretty good, but is mostly just silly.  I love the cast and Michael Anderson knows how to make a good looking film.  But it’s so hackneyed.

I just wanna watch the world burn!

    I’ve been doing a bunch of reading, but from a bunch of different books, none of which I’m all that close to finishing.  Dang, Lord of Light is a dense read.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (10/23/11-10/29/11)

    I had a good Week in Dork.  Oh, maybe not as glamorously dorky as comic-cons or celebrity photo-ops.  But, the kind of stuff that makes me love being a dork in the first place.  The inspirational, good feeling kind of thing you get from watching an especially interesting movie or reading something extra cool. 


The Shuttered Room:  What the snooze.  This awful, boring, cheesy horror flick is supposedly based on a Lovecraft story.  Nothing Lovecraft here.  Awful dubbing.  Bad acting.  Just lame.

It!:  Roddy McDowall is a cracked nut who lucks into controlling a golem.  But, controlling a golem is a dangerous proposition.  The movie is OK, but fairly goofy.  Worth a watch if you’re in the mood for one of those 60s/70s British horror films.

Carnival of Souls:  Haunting and strange, this movie is exceptionally creepy and really just genuinely interesting.  The low budget is used to powerful effect.  And star Candace Hilligoss holds the viewer’s attention as she wanders through the world, trying to find her place.  A must for horror fans.

The Lost Future:  I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed this low budget, made for TV feeling science fiction yarn.  It reminded me some classic novels, like Andre Norton’s Daybreak 2250 AD.  A group of young people are just trying to survive in a world of mutants and plagues, where prehistoric monsters recreated by long dead scientists roam the forests.  Can they recover the cure to the mutations?  Can a brotherhood of heroes guide humanity back to civilization?  It feels like the pilot for a show I’d have loved to watch.  But, it works all right as a stand alone.

The Watcher in the Woods:  Man, Disney made some darned strange movies once upon a time.  It seems, in the dim and mythical past, there were studio execs with some creative and daring bones in their bodies.  Otherwise, films like this probably wouldn’t have been made.  It’s a well made, beautiful children’s horror film.  Not amazing, but certainly nice to look at.  Not as terrifying as Something Wicked This Way Comes, but still creepier than most kid-aimed works of today.  Sadly, neither of the alternate endings were used.  Both are very cool, and take the film to a whole new and really interesting level.  At least they’re on the DVD.

Them!:  One of the all time greats, Them! is the best of the atomic horror sub-genre.  A great cast, from the leads down to the bit players, it also features some crackerjack dialog, a driving story, and cool set pieces.  The nest clearing sequence is great (and everyone keeps their mask on, even when saying lines!) and the battle beneath L.A. is awesome.  So much fire.

The Phantom of the Opera:  One of the first silent films I ever saw, this stylish, creepy flick still holds up.  Having just been lucky enough to see it with a live band playing the music was a real treat.  Lon Chaney is beautifully hideous as the Phantom, and the story crazy and rushed, but kind of awesome.  Christine is a total evil monster, playing both her lover and the Phantom for fools.  I know she’s supposed to be the damsel in distress, but she basically sets every fire and then throws gas on the flames.  The film is full of great moments and moody set pieces.  A must for fans of silent films and for horror aficionados.

Dark Waters:  Stylish, but ultimately lacking, this Eastern European horror film features a lot of mean nuns, creepy townsfolk, and, well, water.  It looks nice, and I think a lot of good elements went into the film, which I can only imagine was done on the cheap.  Perhaps it needed to be shorter.  Perhaps it needed more story.  I’m not sure.  But the random murderous nun attacks became almost laughable, and nobody seemed especially interested in doing anything, be it evil or good.  OK, but not great.

Doctor Who: Snakedance:  The follow-up to Kinda, this episode sees the Doctor and companions revisiting the world of the Mara.  Again laced with Buddhist symbolism, this story also has a lot to say about past glory and the selling-out of wonder.  Scenes with the clairvoyant and with the carnival barker are especially poignant, as they admit to the sad truth of their hucksterism.  A good story, and typically weird Davison era.

 
    I also watched a few more episodes of Fringe, which remains fun.  I feel a little bad that I’m not moving through it a touch faster, but I haven’t really been spending as much time in front of the TV/computer lately.  I guess that’s not a bad thing.

    Got Tom Waits new album this week, Bad As Me, and I’ve been digging that crazy.

    And, finally, finally, I finished Bettany Hughes’ Helen of Troy.  The book is good.  It’s packed with fascinating information and extremely readable.  It simply took a long danged time to read it.  I actually started it not too long after it came out, took a many year break and then started making a more directed effort to finish it this past summer.  But, like a lot of non-fiction, I found it easy to put down and pick up, so it was put down many times.  None the less, I recommend it.  It’s very good.

    Also, I’ve been reading more Clark Ashton Smith, which has been amazing.  And I finally started reading an Andre Norton book I’ve been meaning to read since I was a small boy, The Time Traders.  So far, so good.  Between all the classic science fiction and horror films I’ve watched recently, and reading the Clark Ashton Smith, I’m really in that mode.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of that era when we were all so much more hopeful about the future, and willing to do what it takes to make it happen.  I long to see that spirit arise in humanity again.

    And finally, I wrote another brief list for cineAWESOME!  Check out my Halloween Playlist.

-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

Matt's Week in Dork (6/5/11-6/11/11)

    Kind of a light week on dorkness.  Only a few movies and some reading.  Otherwise, pretty lackluster.  So, first, the handful of movies I watched:

Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara:  This fourth story in the Key to Time finds the Doctor and Romana mixed up in some courtly politics on the planet Tara.  Android replacements and a battle to take the thrown, not to mention a woman who looks just like Romana, make for dangerous territory.  Classic TV actor Peter Jeffrey is fantastically diabolical as Count Grendel.  Plenty of twists and turns make for some entertaining fun.

 
Doctor Who: The Time Warrior:  With a spiffy new opening, Jon Pertwee begins his final season as the good Doctor.  He also meets a young woman who will become very important to Doctor Who, Sarah Jane Smith, a plucky reporter looking for a good story.  A Sontaran, medieval thuggery, and Boba Fett the archer are all in the mix for a solid, if not especially memorable tale.  They do get their money’s worth of location shooting, though.

Athens: The Dawn of Democracy:  Bettany Hughes is back to bring the ancient world alive once again.  This time, she turns her focus upon the city-state of Athens.  She attempts to dispel some of our rose colored illusions, while still revealing an amazing people in a wild time.  The duality of freedom and oppression.  The amazing expansion of science and philosophy, side by side with shockingly primitive superstitions and human brutality.  As with her other documentaries, Hughes’ passion for the subject draws you in and makes you want to know more, while being frustratingly brief.  A good companion to her other Greek themed documentaries.

Super 8:  Like finding a forgotten gem in a video store, Super 8 harkens back to the kid adventure films of the 80s, like The Goonies, The Explorers, Space Camp, and so many others.  Filled with interesting characters and thrilling action, it’s got a lot of heart to back it all up.  And it sports a great cast of kid actors, each putting their stamp on various genre regulars (the Fat Kid, the Nerdy Kid, the Sensitive Kid, etc.).  Put aside your cynicism, and remember why we love movies.

The Philadelphia Story:  A great cast and great script make this worthy of its classic status.  The three leads are all at the height of their comic power and the complicated story of love, expectation, class, divorce and marriage is fertile ground.  When I’m not watching Jimmy Stewart, I sometimes forget how awesome he was.  Hepburn and Grant are always with me, but Stewart fades from my mind a lot, perhaps obscured by his pop culture image (the good guy from It’s A Wonderful Live).  But he has an unmistakable star power, tinged with an undercurrent of bitter rage that lends him depth missing from some others of his age.  The whole film is a bit crazy, but a lot of fun and well worth a watch.

    I also caught a couple episodes from the first few seasons of The Simpsons.  Man, I love that show.  Seeing some of them, it’s like every line, ever scene is a classic.

    In an unusual turn, I actually played a video game called I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1.  A full frontal assault on the senses, it’s a good deal of fun, so long as you don’t collapse with seizures.  The play grid begins to strobe, geometric shapes and green blobs come a calling, and…is that a photo of a cat?  All the while, the video game’s title song is blaring at you.  Somehow, it all comes together to be a crazy Smash TV style bit of fun, though I don’t think a properly functioning human could play this for more than 15 or 20 minutes before they start getting a little punch drunk.

    On the book front, I read volume 3 of Conan, The Tower of the Elephant.  And I made some headway in Reality is Broken, which I’m really, really enjoying.  With so much anti-science, anti-modernity in the media, and with so many neo-Luddites wandering around talking about the sky falling because somebody likes video games or uses a cell phone, it’s  an extremely refreshing breath of fresh air to read about someone who not only loves technology, but is coming up with valid and usable uses for it that could improve everyone’s quality of life.  Not just a commentary on how pointless negativity and fear of technology can be, like Everything Bad is Good for You, but a real call of action for making ourselves and our world work better for everyone.

    On the music front, I’ve been enjoying Kate Nash quite a bit.  And I picked up a good collection of Lightnin Hopkins.  I’m not a huge blues man, never was.  But I’m still enjoying it.

-Matt