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

Matt’s Week in Dork! (9/1/13-9/7/13)

    I started out the week by actually finishing some things.  Yes is the Answer, a sort of oral history of Prog Rock and The Burning Man, Chirsta Faust’s latest Fringe novel.  And the end of the week went crazy with Baltimore Comic-Con, and a visit from Dan and Chris.

Dredd:  A satisfyingly brutal take on the venerable comic character, Dredd finally does 2000AD’s bent sense of humor and grim future justice.  And yes, the helmet NEVER comes off.  Karl Urban makes a great Judge Dredd, with a constant frown and that chiseled jaw.  The villains are nasty, the heroes are nastier.  The violence is weirdly beautiful and the world building is spot on.  For some reason I’ll never understand, this movie did not get anything like the audience it should have.  I’m constantly seeing stuff online from people just seeing it, saying ‘this is so good; how did I not see it before?’  I don’t know.  I saw it in the theater, and had it been there longer, I’d have gone again.  Loved it then, and love it on this second viewing.

Battle In Outer Space:  A pretty good space launch turned alien attack movie from Japan, this is perhaps too slow paced.  Still, in spite of the slow pace and the occasionally meandering plot, I found myself enjoying the adventures of the various characters.  Cool Toho type model work.  It’s not great, and not as wild and weird as some others of the era.  But it’s good.

Mothra:  The argument could be made that this is just kind of a Godzilla clone, with a giant moth instead of a giant dinosaur.  But so what?  It’s fun, it’s well done, and it’s got some cool model destruction.  The King Kong style island adventure in the middle is cool.  There’s a nice twist in the middle.  And the action is solid.

Lords of Salem:  I’m actually kind of impressed by just how unimpressive this film is.  It’s easy to crap on Rob Zombie.  House of 1000 Corpses was a jumbled mess (with a few interesting bits).  The Devil’s Rejects (his best) is uneven, to say the least.  The Halloween remakes sucks (there; I said it; it sucks).  El Superbeasto was absolute garbage.  And now Lords of Salem.  It has a lot of the disorganized, aimless feel of 1000 Corpses, with the yawn inducing boredom of Halloween.  But, it also looks great.  That’s the thing with Zombie’s work.  He does some good stuff.  He works with different cinematographers every time, but always has very cool imagery in his films, which I assume come from him.  But the writing.  It’s just not there.  I loved a lot of the early scenes of Sheri Moon Zombie walking around, and going about her life.  It had a very nostalgic, New England in the early 80s vibe to it that I thought was quite nice.  But otherwise, the movie is just a mess.  I think he was aiming for some combination of The Devil’s Rain and The Sentinel, but he missed the mark.

Hey look.  A goat.

The African Queen:  “Ain’t a thing I can do about it.”  I enjoy the heck out of this light-hearted adventure movie, set against WWI era Africa.  Bogart and Hepburn are two down and out people on the edge of nowhere, who come together with a hair-brained plan to strike a blow against the Kaiser.  We then follow these two down a torturous river and through the fumblings of a budding romance.  I love that the actors don’t look good.  Hepburn is clearly getting older.  Bogart looks like crap.  They sweat, they get dirty, and they just don’t look like movie stars.  Yet, the film is beautiful to look at.  Is it an amazing, life changing film?  No.  But I get why it’s a classic, and I do really enjoy it.

Wrong:  “I only realized that I loved my face after it had been burned with acid.”  Two years ago, Rubber kind of blew me away.  It was so out of nowhere, so strange, so sickly clever that a movie about a murderous psychic tire (yup!) made it on my top ten list.  Wrong is fun, and it’s weird.  But it’s not on the same level.  Sure, there’s plenty of weirdass behavior and strange images.  But while I enjoyed it, I wasn’t blow away by it.

    So, Friday night, Chris and Dan arrived.  Saturday morning…way too early Saturday morning, we hopped in the car and headed to Baltimore, setting up the Warrior 27 table.  We were each able to make various excursions around the place over the course of the day, and I got to see a lot of cool stuff.  This year stood out for me because of the breadth and obscurity of the cosplay.  I was impressed.  Sure, there were a lot of New Who costumes (only one good enough for me to give a pass on the cliché/overexposure).  And there were a bunch of Deadpools (I don’t get it).  But there was a Captain Haddock (from Tintin) for crying out loud.  There was even a couple of ladies doing the nerdy scientists from Pacific Rim.  It was pretty cool.  After the show, co-Dork Brad and our friend Robert joined us for some Mexican at a place not too far from my house.  Too late to bed, and an early rise the next day for Day 2 of the con.  More on that next week, I guess.

-Matt

Two Fistfuls of Sexy Women! (Matt’s Picks)

    OK, so the recent poll that awarded Jennifer Aniston the title ‘sexiest woman of all time’ got me to thinking.  What!?  Are you flippin’ kidding me?  OK.  OK.  I know taste and beauty are totally subjective.  But hang on.  What?!

    So, after bouncing the idea off co-Dork Brad, we decided to put together our individual top ten lists of sexiest women (that’s right, a special double-Fistful this week).  Hard as it was, I left off my first crushes.  Erin Gray, Lynda Carter, Nichelle Nichols, Karen Allen, and Lea Thompson will have to wait for another list.  I also had to skip long time crush Angela Bassett, because my feelings for her are based almost entirely on the film Strange Days, and that’s not enough.  Same with Mathilday May from Lifeforce.  Just to help narrow the field, I restricted myself to movies and TV (no music, models, etc.).  Give me another ten years for some perspective, and newer potentials like Olga Kurylenko and Shu Qi, might end up on the list.  Time will tell.

***

10.  Cate Blanchett:  OK, yeah, so Australian accents have always done something for me.  But, getting beyond that, Blanchett’s strange beauty has been fascinating since I first saw her in Elizabeth.  She has consistently turned in interesting, frequently strong performances, which can be all too rare for women in film these days.  She even played one of my all time favorites (and number 9 on this list), capturing not just her mannerisms, but her fire.

9.  Katharine Hepburn:  Though many of her most famous roles came when she was older, and had segued from young firebrand into tough spinster, young Katharine Hepburn was actually a strikingly beautiful woman who oozed confidence and style.  Her screen persona is exactly the kind of woman I like, powerful, willful, and maybe a bit brash, but soft in all the right places.

8.  Lena Olin:  OK, I admit it.  I’m a square.  I’m one of those suckers that gets in over his head in a classic Noir film.  That’s one reason I recognize the danger of Lena Olin.  She has some femme fatale power that punches through my ‘good guy’ ways and makes me want to do bad things.  From her voice to that deadly predator look in her eyes, I don’t know that I’d do any better than Depp if she wanted something I had.  Even if she cut off her own arm (seriously, this woman has played some crazy characters). 

7.  Jennifer Connelly:  I kind of grew up with Jennifer Connelly.  She’s about my age, and has been acting for a long time.  As a kid, I connected with her in Labyrinth (and yes, had a crush on her).  As an adult, I enjoyed her retro-fueled performances in The Rocketeer and Dark City.  And was weirded out by scary stuff like Requiem for a Dream.  With classic, almost timeless features, a willingness to take chances, and a pretty wide range, Connelly may not have the tabloid glitz of many modern starlets, but she’s got what counts.

6.  Gloria Grahame:  I’ve said this before, but never has a woman so not my type been so my type.  Usually bottle blond, with an upturned nose and a bit of a sour face, she manages to burn with a volcanic rage in one film and radiate innocent sweetness in another.  Her sly cleverness and dangerous curiosity in In a Lonely Place alone would have been enough for me. 

5.  Pam Grier:  The Queen of Blaxploitation, Pam Grier is a powerhouse.  With a career that has spanned decades, she’s had ups and downs, highs and lows.  But she’s always brought the goods.  From Coffy to Jackie Brown and beyond, Ms. Grier will always hold a special place in my heart.

4.  Michelle Yeoh:  A marginal actress who was only kinda cute, Michelle Yeoh could have faded away, becoming a footnote on the history of 80s martial arts films.  She got married.  She retired.  Forgotten.  But, she didn’t stay gone.  After separating from her husband, she came back to acting in a big way, and age had been more than kind.  Year by year, she grew more and more beautiful, while honing her skills as an actress, not to mention as a martial arts movie extraordinaire.

3.  Jenny Agutter:  Perhaps not classically beautiful, Agutter is extremely cute and devilishly sexy at the same time.  Giant eyes, sexy accent, and, well, she’s never been shy about showing it all off.  To top that off, she's a very talented actress with a lot of cool and weird movies to her name.

2.  Rachel Weisz:  She’s been acting for a long time, and I saw her in many movies without much thought.  But as time went on, I noticed her more and more, until I realized she had become one of my favorite active actresses.  Weisz has a quiet charm and dignity, combined with an earthy approachableness that makes her somehow both ethereal and real at the same time.

1.  Monica Bellucci:  A Mediterranean goddess, Bellucci has Gong Li’s almost inhuman ability to look sad, and to make you want to do something about it.  Constantly taking chances in the roles that she picks, unfortunately, she often ends up in not-so-good stuff.  However, for a model turned actress, she’s actually quite good, and when that occasional good part comes along, she shines.  Also, like the proverbial fine wine (and like the above Michelle Yeoh), she only seems to grow more beautiful with age.

-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