If memory serves...why can't I get it do what I want?

There are times when memories are jolted out of my subconscious by sudden recognition. It happens, most enjoyably, with movies.  For instance:  When I was young, 5 maybe?, I wandered into the room when my dad was watching a movie.  I saw a guy who was lying in bed, this girl pushes a button on the wall and the bed flips up, then two guys come in with guns and shoot into the back of the flipped up bed.  I remembered it for a long long time, but never knew what movie it was from until I was about 14 or so and I got to see You Only Live Twice with Sean Connery, and that scene is where he gets "killed".  After they shoot him in the bed they put his body in a coffin and throw it overboard, burial at sea style.  A submarine picks up the coffin, brings it on board and James Bond just gets out and later has plastic surgery so he can look Japanese.  

That's a pretty big scene from a movie everyone knows, or knows of, that was floating around in my head until I suddenly came upon it.  I love James Bond movies and have been watching them for a long time, but I had no idea when I started watching You Only Live Twice all those years ago that I would finally be able to put a title to that scene I saw when I was 5.  A similar thing happened when I watched The Goonies...but it was kind of in reverse.  We were shown The Goonies in school, second grade I think, and then I didn't see it again in its complete form until I was almost 20.  I always had this recollection of seeing a guy in a jail cell who had hung himself, but when the guard comes in the guy kills the guard and escapes, and of course that's the opening of The Goonies.  

When I was a kid we had a Beta deck instead of VHS.  That meant I could never rent movies, but we always had tons of recorded cartoon specials and movies and shows.  It was kind of fun because you could keep seeing the old McDonalds commercials and old trailers for movies that were coming out into the theater then.  Our recorded Beta tape of Garfield's Halloween had a trailer on it for The Ice Pirates, an awesome low budget sci-fi comedy from 1984 with Robert Urich, Ron Pearlman and Anjelica Huston.  Trust me when I say that it's funny and ridiculous. So I spent many years watching this trailer, always wondering if I'd ever see that movie in my life, or if anyone ever saw it.  Then one day my dad came home with two huge boxes.  He had gone to an electronics store, and because Beta had recently lost in the format war to VHS, he got a shit-ton of Beta tapes for cheap.  We ended up with the oddest assortment of crap and greatness all at once.  Imagine my surprise and excitement when I rummaged through the boxes and found a copy of The Ice Pirates!  I saw the movie and it is what it is: Not great, but far from awful; very watchable and enjoyable.  Plus it's always fun to go back and revisit old movies with people who were just starting their careers, but maybe that's tomorrow's post.

I'll leave you with one more, and then maybe you will want to share some scenes that are lost in your own minds.  (Maybe I can help you piece those mysteries together.)  My favorite holiday is Halloween and I love, more than anything else, the atmosphere that pervades television during Halloween.  Channels add all sorts of cauldron and cobweb graphics, and the color and music queues change to reflect the feel of the haunting season.  I never took note of television schedules.  I never watched any shows on a regular basis, I always just turned the set on and checked the channels that I remembered had good shows.  Consequently I would tune into the middle of interesting things never to know what they were or see them again.  One year in October I tuned into some channel and saw a Halloween cartoon that I had never seen before. There was a green goblin-looking guy in a suite with a huge cape and some costumed-kids were hanging onto the ends of his cape and they were flying.  They flew to a place where there was a broom festival and witches were chanting and cavorting about.  The show had a great feel to it, good atmosphere too.  I always wanted to know what it was, but never saw it on TV again.  By accident I started reading a great Ray Bradbury book, years and years later, called "The Halloween Tree".  Something in my memory jogged and I checked good ol' imdb.com to see if there was ever a movie version made.  There was of course, an animated movie of the same name.  I rented it, and then bought it immediately.  I still watch it every year, but on VHS as there isn't a DVD version yet.  Searching specifically for something can be fun, but stumbling upon some treasure from your past is even better.  

Information

Think you're worldly?  Check out this Flash presentation on the world's most overcrowded slums. It's interesting, and provides a good ground-eye view of some places you don't normally hear about or get to see pictures of.

The Places We Live

All in a golden afternoon...

...Full leisurely we glide;

For both our oars, with little skill,

By little arms are plied,

While little hands make vain pretense

Our wanderings to guide.

Today is Charles Dodgson's birthday, or would be if he were alive. He is one of my favorite authors and is well known by almost everyone, although by a different name.  Charles Dodgson's pen name was Lewis Carroll.  Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as Sylvie and Bruno and The Hunting of the Snark.  I've been a fan of the Alice stories for a long time, I bet we all have, and I've taken my childhood appreciation of Carroll's work into adulthood and have collected some of his work in first editions, as well as some other peripheral books.  

Today, for bloggers, is Down the Rabbit Hole Day, and you're supposed to blog about something that's not your style to blog about.  I pretty much only blog about movies, so I guess anything's fair game, so I guess it makes sense to write a little about Lewis Carroll and his works that have given me so much joy.

Through the Looking Glass used to be my favorite Carroll work, until I read The Hunting of the Snark.  It's a poem in rhyming style, and is only about 20 pages long, without annotations.  The story tells of a group of people, a boots, a barrister, a broker, a billiard marker, a banker, a beaver and the Bellman, who go on a long sea voyage to find a snark.  While on the journey they all get in each other's hair and when they hit land they go searching for the snark being careful not to find a boojum instead.  The tale is illustrated by Henry Holiday in a style that is described by Martin Gardner as "grotesque", but not in the sense that the pictures are disgusting.  They are just oddly proportioned and strangely creepy at times.  Also, there are many hints at what is happening in the poem hidden in the illustrations, but there are also inconsistencies between the description in the poem and the pictures that accompany the words.  Sometimes these can be chalked up to the pictures having been completed, and the text having been edited at the last minute, but some of the alterations are motive-less and it all adds to the surreal atmosphere of the whole work.  The Hunting of the Snark is a fun, easy read that has many strange elements as well.  I fully endorse it.

The poem at the top of the post is the opening verse of "A Golden Afternoon" which is the poem that begins Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  Dodgson created the Alice stories for his three little friends, the Liddell sisters.  Alice herself was the middle child.  Dodgson was a logic and mathematics professor at Christ Church, Oxford, and the little Liddell girls were daughters of a co-worker of his.  The poem refers directly to them by saying "little skill", "little arms", "little hands", as "little" and "Liddell" are homonyms.  Dodgson did a lot of fun stuff like that in his writing.  Another great poem of his that I like is "Phantasmagoria" a poem in seven cantos in a collection of his poetry called Rhyme? And Reason?.  In "Phantasmagoria", a man comes home from a night of drinking with friend to find a ghost in his flat.  He and the ghost strike up a conversation and end up telling each other all sorts of things.  The ghost starts telling the man the differences between ghosts, spectres, phantoms, etc.  

Charles Dodgson gets a lot of flak for being a pedophile, and while he did have tendencies that were of that nature, the people who knew him maintain that he never acted upon those urges, urges which he himself has said had haunted and tormented him.  He took photographs too.  I have a couple books of his photography and it's all amazing.  He has great photos of animal skeletons and still lifes, as well as many many...far too many...pictures of little girls and boys portraying scenes from literature.  The Liddell girls in "Chinese dress", St. George and the Dragon, etc.)  He was perhaps more prolific a photographer than he was a writer.  

For better or for worse, Charles Dodgson produced some great art in his lifetime.  I will make sure my future kids know Alice in Wonderland, and all the versions of it that there are too.  For the record Disney's version is alright for a fusing of the two books, The Natalie Gregory version from 1985 made for TV is great because of all the people in it, but the strangest and most interesting one is Jan Svankmajer's Alice from 1988.  it's a strange fusion of live action and stop motion animation, but it is not or the faint of heart.  It's surreal and odd, and those are understatements!  Check it out if you feel up for something off the beaten path.  Thanks for reading.  Wish Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson a happy birthday for the 27th and me a happy birthday for the 28th!

Good news for media!

No, I'm not talking about newspapers...they're still all dead or dying...but the sharing of digital media has gained ground. I talk a lot on here about DRM, copyright infringement, etc., and there is a lot of back and forths going on around the web on whether or not people actually lose money by having their songs and/or movies downloaded for free.  Here is some conclusive proof:

Monty Python, which you can find all over YouTube in very poor quality, is doing something good and making money from it.  Monty Python got sick and tired of having their stuff thrown onto YouTube for free and in bad condition so they have created their very own YouTube channel.  Everything is free and in great quality.  They specifically sought out the most watched videos on YouTube and uploaded pristine editions of them to replace the pixelated versions. All the Monty Python stuff is free...but there are links all over the page that will bring you to Amazon to buy their DVDs.

Since Monty Python's YouTube channel has been active, their videos are the highest rated and most watched on YouTube, and the sales of their movies and TV show DVDs has risen by about 23,000%.  Is there a better argument for free and unrestricted sharing of media and digital entertainment?  Locks only keep dishonest people out, and the people who illegally download the most MP3s are also the ones who legally buy the most CDs and go to the most concerts. Refusing to let people share media does more harm than good.

Wanna make yourself think?

By far the best thing I've read today is this paragraph:

"...more items are invented and manufactured – while the total number of hours in a day to enjoy them remains fixed – we spend less and less time per item. In other words the long-term trend in our modern lives is that ALL goods and services will be short-term use. Therefore all goods and services are candidates for rental, sharing, and the social commons."  -  Kevin Kelly

The entire essay/blog post is here.  I recommend you read it.  Even if you don't agree with everything Mr. Kelly is saying, it's still rich food for thought, and is indicative of where things are headed.  (For most of us we are here already.)

Some creative stuff

The only new things I've seen lately are Juno, which was hilarious and all sorts of emotional awesomeness, and Bringing Up Baby, which is also very enjoyable and funny, if you can forget that Katharine Hepburn's character is fucking nuts and annoying as hell. If I were in Cary Grant's position, I never would've been so insufferably polite. But I digress.

Since I'm sure no on out there wasn't to read my thoughts about teen pregnancy and Juno, and you just heard what I think of Bringing Up Baby, here are some pictures I've done today and yesterday for the GF. Enjoy!



If you see this broad on the street, back off and find a new route. She's obviously got some craaaaazy mood swings!

Heartbreaking & Awesome

This is hilarious, disturbing, creative, pitiful and ridiculous all at the same time. The music and the image come together perfectly.

Chocolade Haas

Let the Right One In

Last Friday night I saw the Swedish horror film Let the Right One In. It's one of the very few horror films to come out of Scandinavia, and of course Dead Snow is on its way too, so maybe this is the sign of a renaissance of horror films from the bitter cold of Norway and Sweden?

Let the Right One In has made many horror "Best of..." lists for it's great story that makes the vampire elements secondary and incidental. It's boy-meets-girl in a very simplistic and pure approach. The boy is 12 and is a bullied only child from two divorced parents. The dad provides little structure and the mom is left to basically be the iron fist, preventing her from finding a healthy balance between discipline and friendship that every parent needs. It's not a healthy environment and the boy has no self esteem or confidence. He lies about bruises and cuts from his bullying at school.

Enter the girl, a seeming 12 years old herself, but really she's a 100+ year old vampire who moved into the apartment next door. They meet in the courtyard one night and a tentative friendship begins to form, even though each one makes sure to tell the other how disinterested in having friends they are. The rapport between the two kids is great, and it's funny to watch them being children, then realizing that one of them has been around for centuries. In the background there are townsfolk reacting to the various murders perpetrated by the vampire's adult "helper". The movie moves at its own pace, which might be a bit slow for some, but the story is genuinely touching and the gore factor is something you forget about between the sparse, but vivid, bloodlettings.

Half-way through the movie, which follows very classic vampire mythology and rules, it becomes apparent that the title has a three-fold meaning: the girl is an old vampire and has to be careful who she trusts, the boy is also careful about who he "lets in" because of his experiences with bullies and alienation from his parents, and they each have to be careful about who they let in to their personal living spaces. A vampire cannot enter a dwelling unless he/she has been invited, and we find out what happens when they try without that formal invitation. The boy needs to be careful who he lets into his room, and he makes a good choice with the girl; she is a vampire in whom he can trust and confide.

A hesitant camaraderie becomes a fast friendship, even though the boy doesn't really catch on to the true nature of his friend until wall into the final third of the film. (Watch the sparks fly when he decides they should be "blood-brothers" and cuts his palm in front of her.) She looks out for him, and in the end he has to do the same for her. They both reach depths of feeling that they never knew existed before.

The dark, long winter of Sweden makes for a fantastic and unsettling backdrop. Snow has never looked so beautiful, yet after watching a movie like 30 Days of Night, you're reminded of how long those nights can last in the winter months and how that can drain hope and joie de vivre. The most suicides occur in the winter, and I can rightly assume, the most vampiric killings. Let the Right One In is a beautiful film with a beautiful story. It has horror elements, but when you leave the theater you'll only be thinking of the great coming together of two beings who found friendship, not the eerie scenes of blood-sucking.

WTF

I don't know what the purpose of this robot is, but over at Boing Boing Gadgets there is a video of a Japanese push-up robot who turns evil. I especially like the arterial spray.

Put a little Love-craft in your heart

Cheesy, yes, apt, possibly. I finally got around to finishing the meagre 40-pages of The Dunwich Horror, by H.P. Lovecraft. I had watched the 1970 film version not long ago and, having read that the movie was a far from accurate adaptation, I decided to read the original tale.

About halfway through reading I figured out that the movie is as far from accurate as one can get. Something big must have happened half-way, I hear you say to yourself. Well you're right. The main character of the movie dies half-way through the book. And he looks nothing like his film counter-part either. The story concerns an apparently fatherless man who seeks out a book called the Necronomicon in which he hopes to find spells that will allow him to conjure up the Great Old Ones and take over the Earth. Later in the book you find out that he has a twin brother, who is pretty much a complete monster, who eats raw cattle and lives in the barn. The main character himself, Wilbur Whateley, is 9 feet tall and wears baggy clothes to hide his deranged lower half. You find out, after he dies, that his legs and feet resemble those of an elephant, and he has many tentacles coming out of his stomach and back. The filmmakers thought that Wilbur should look like this instead:

His twin, after Wilbur dies, goes on a rampage and kills and destroys things around the countryside. Some men, a few of them learned men, destroy "him" with some counter spells also found in the Necronomicon. After that no one speaks of the Whateley's again. The movie has Wilbur hooking up with Sandra Dee with the hopes of using her as a human vessel with which to bring the Great Old One, Yog Sothoth, to Earth. Kinda different, right? Remember, Wilbur Whateley is supposed to be 9 feet tall with elephant feet in the book, but in the movie he looks like this:

I know why they had to make him look like that. Sandra Dee is not a great animal lover, and even if she were she'd probably shy away from someone with the legs of an elephant. I will say this about the movie: It's got a lot of great 60's/70's horror movie tropes. The clothing is ridiculous and hilarious and every time the strange monster is shown a whole bunch of colors flow around the screen and the image gets all distorted like you're on an acid trip. There's also some obligatory nudity-on-the-altar-of-sacrifice stuff. (I suspect that it's a body double for Sandra Dee, though, because you never see her face in the frame at the same time as the naked body.)

Lovecraft adaptations are made by people who love Lovecraft, but who just get so excited about making their little opus/ode/homage that they fuck it all up. Not once have I seen a movie even begin to communicate the eerie feeling I get when reading Lovecraft's tales. The only person I'd like to see try would be Daren Aronofsky. I think he could do a great job. I'd also like him to use the all in-camera effects from The Fountain because there was no CGI in that movie, and everything had a great texture and tangible nature to it. Maybe this upcoming adaptation will be a bit better:

Dunwich Horror Trailer
Uploaded by dreadcentral

I can think of two movie that strayed so far from their source material: Starship Troopers and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Oh, you didn't know Roger Rabbit was based on a book? Well, you'll find out more about that next time.

Some stuff

Here's a funny commercial from Durex, which I found on The Reverse Cowgirl blog.



And here's a poster for the Nazi-zombie flick from Scandanavia that I mentioned here before. I want to see this movie very badly now. It's becoming an obsession for me. In the same vein I also want to play and beat Call of Duty 5 because after you win you unlock a level wherein you get to take on WW2 Nazi zombies in an old abandoned mansion! This video could also double as a teaser for Dead Snow. At least I hope Dead Snow is as good as this. Here's a look!



And this is just for fun.

How could I forget!

I was over at a new favorite movie site of mine, twitchfilm.net, and I saw a t-shirt that they were advertising. It's the pic you see above, black shirt with a VHS tape on it saying "Never Forget". I suppose this marks the officiality of the death of VHS and the true reigning of DVD/Blu-ray as the rulers of home media. VHS was on it's deathbed, wheezing through a respirator for some years though, so it's hardly a surprisse to anyone. However, this made me think back some years when we were all using tapes, and I got in touch with my feelings about them.

Tapes, not only VHS but Beta too!, had a kind of allure. The tape itself degraded with time, so when you got your hands on an old tape you knew how much it had been played/loved/obesessed over. I saw a few big movies on old copied beta tapes in my youth and I still recall those watchings with a fondness for the lack of contrast, darkness that crept over it's boundaries encompassing the rest of the frame, tracking issues that you could minimize but never completely dispel. Movies I first saw on poor-quality tape: Animal House, Jokes My Folks Never Told Me, The Empire Strikes Back.



As a family we recorded many TV specials off of TV and I still watch A Charlie Brown Christmas (and It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown!) with a sense that a commercial is on the horizon and I'll see that old McDonald's ad where Ronald and the kids are skating on the pond, but the youngest of the group can't keep up. I miss the '80's CBS Special logo and the old NBC peacock that was actually a peacock with a head and neck and legs. Those logos and tags were indicators that what I was watching was not run-of-the-mill.



The copy of Empire Strikes Back that I watched had a Degobah so green and dark that I never clearly knew what was going on. There were so many things I caught hints of in the background and that added a mystery to the Star Wars movie that I will never get back, since now I can see everything...even the new things that have been added to "improve" upon the original release. Oh, and it was formatted wrong: the widescreen image had been compressed to fit a TV screen and I saw a Chewbacca that was taller and thinner than even a wookie could ever be. My copy of Animal House had no contrast, so the nudity really had an underground feel to it. I had discovered an adult movie and was watching it at too young an age. The texture of the tape only amplified that sense of wrong-doing. It made watching exciting.

The same can be said for Jokes My Folks Never Told Me, a film I'm sure none of you have ever heard of, although it is Anthony Keidis' third acting role, well before he formed Red Hot Chili Peppers. Jokes... is a collection of dirty jokes played out by actors with all the sex and nudity you could want. And it's real '70's nudity. No silicon. But maybe that rant is for another post. Unfortunately the copy of Jokes... that was available to me was not complete and I've never seen the ending. It doesn't exist on DVD so I may never know what the rest of the jokes are. I wouldn't mind except throughout the movie there was one joke they told in parts, and I'll never know that punchline.

I was too young and afraid to get into the horror VHS boom of the 1980's. I wish I had, but I was too young for all that stuff. Home video really let horror loose on the world and the horror junkies ate it up with reckless abandon, causing some countries to ban many films with a fervor you wouldn't believe. Britain banned 37 horror films and took severe legal action against stores selling them. These films were called the Video Nasties and I'll probably do a post on just them another time.

So VHS has had a colored history, but it's one I wouldn't trade for anything. It's too bad that kids these days will never have the fun of watching a movie with all the imperfections that tapes had to offer. Scrubbing the negative clean for Star Wars was ultimately a great thing, as a movie like that needs to look good. Cleaning up The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? I'd rather watch it on the 15-year old tape we rented where the grime of the Hewitt house was magnified by the grime on the cassette. Besides, the phrase "stash of porno DVDs" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Important tip

Two blog posts in one day! Yay!!

Neither of them are about movies! Boo!!

But this is an important piece of info! I had a web problem at work yesterday that continued on until just recently. It wasn't because I was visiting NSFW web sites, anyone can get this malware, so watch yourselves!

The problem I had was within the internet. I would do a Google search, and when I would click on a search result link I'd be taken to a shopping page somewhere, or a Yellow Pages search for commerce of some sort. It was really fucking frustrating. I could always manually type in a URL and go there, unless the URL was to a site that had to do with anti spyware programs...then I'd be denied access by my own browser. It's really hard to get information about a malware or spyware infection when your browser won't allow you to go to pages about anti spyware programs.

If you are a Firefox user, when you settle your mouse cursor over a link, the address that the link will take you to appears in the lower left hand corner. When I would move my cursor over a link, it would say go.google and then have a shit-ton of numbers and letters, etc. But I finally learned that this malware/spyware effects many, and you can get it just by being in the web. (So that proves that I really wasn't looking at anything bad at work!) I followed the advice of several cross-referenced blogs and decided to go with Dr. Web CureIt!, a scanner that finds and destroys malware and spyware.

In order to get that program onto my computer, because my browser wouldn't let me get to any of the sites I could download the program from, I had to download it at home, save it to a flash drive, bring the drive to work and upload it to my computer from there. Tedious, but not that hard. The point of this blog post is that it worked perfectly the first time around. I haven't even done the deep clean yet, just the quick scan and my internet browser works fine now.

So, if this ever happens to you, or you just wanna scan your comp to see how it's doing, go to:

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/drweb-cureit/cureit.html

and download the program. It's pretty self-explanatory from there. It's nice to a free program that is helpful and works. Have fun and happy problem-free browsing!

The Future of Television

This week, right now, as I type and you read, CES is going in Las Vegas. CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is where new technologies get unveiled every year, from electric bicycles to a solar and wind powered recharging devices. Mostly people go to CES, or follow the happenings at CE, to find out what new advancements have been made in home theater equipment, DVDs, TVs, cell phones, etc. This year, as you may have expected, there are a lot of companies trying to make the thinnest TVs around.

When was the last time you went TV shopping and wondered if you could get your HDTV to possibly be just a little bit thinner? have you ever sat and pined at home about your sorry lot in life because you are the sad owner of a 3.5" thick 60" HDTV instead of a .8" thick 60" HDTV? Neither have I. (In fact, I don't have an HDTV yet, so there!) Toshiba, a fantastic company that lost-the-hi-definition-war-to-Blu-ray-but-invented-DVD-technology-anyway-so-they're-still-cool, have wondered allowed why other companies seem to think that thinner TVs are a good thing to spend [read: waste] your money and time improving? No one knows why thin is such a big deal, but Toshiba has descided to put their best foot forward and predict the state of televisions in the not-so-distant-future.

Cell-TV.

From audioholics.com:

Toshiba again talked about its upcoming Cell TV technology which utilizes the IBM/Sony PowerPC-based Cell processor to allow for advanced video processing and frame interpolation o both standard definition and high definition content. There is a lot being talked about, and a working demo on the show floor, however now they are claiming that this will be shipping in 2009! The new Cell TV will feature:

• A powerful cell broadband processor with a focus on advanced picture quality and advanced applications
• Wireless HD video support, even at the highest resolutions
• Built-in hard disc storage with server capabilities for receiving and distributing content throughout the home
• Seamless Internet connectivity for downloading and accessing network content

The Cell TV will ultimately combine elements of IPTV, multi-source file compatibility (HDD, SD, USB, etc), DLNA support for remote file sharing/streaming, and full (and largely transparent) Internet support.

On the real cutting edge side of the Cell TV, the system is said to be able to handle six (6) simultaneous HD streams at once. That means it can record 6 HD streams to the drive or storage system simultaneously. It will utilize a completely new 3D graphical user interface (GUI) and provide a new way of accessing data and programming material easily and from multiple locations. DLNA support and advanced networking would indicate that this box should be able to serve an entire home full of HD displays and enable itself to be a potential AV hub for large amounts of content.

With that said, Toshiba claims they will release this technology this year, however we'll refrain from holding our breath until we see an actual set-top product arrive on the market. It's certainly got potential and was the most exciting thing we heard at Toshiba's press event.

For additional information please visit www.tacp.toshiba.com.

So the device that you're sitting in front of right now will be what televisions will change into in soon. You can already get PC-driven home theater systems, and Apple TV is a pretty big deal these days too. (Even though NetGear debuted their "AppleTV-killer" at CES as well.) So TVs and are getting closer to computers all the time. But Toshiba wants to make monitors and then couple them with cell-powered CPUs of a fashion that can bring you a cable interface that more closely resembles the internet. It's an exciting thing. Netflix already has their set-top box that streams movies stright from your queue online, so this is just expanding on that a bit.

Too Much Rambo

This past year, 2008, I had the chance to see a couple movie marathons. We didn't watch horror films, but there were quite a few scenes of bloody carnage. In case you haven't guessed...and you haven't...I sat through all four Rambo movies in one night. (I also watched the first three Indiana Jones movies twice in two days, but that will have to wait.) I don't know how many of you have seen a Rambo film, much less all of them, but please take me word for it that Rambo shooting someone in the jungles of Vietnam is the same as Rambo shooting someone in Afghanistan, Burma and Oregon. The only thing that changes are some of the plants and the amount of blood. I confess that I fell asleep and Rambo I-III started to blend together.

I passed out sometime in the fourth quarter of Rambo II, while Rambo was knifing people in the jungle, and I woke up sometime during Rambo III when Rambo was knifing people in the Afghan mountains. Rambo IV I watched completely, but it moves at a much different pace and is really a separate movie from its predecessors. Rambo is pretty easy to recognize as it takes place in America, so everyone is speaking English. Plus Brian Dennehy is in it, so it's hard to mistake Rambo for any of the other Rambos. Rambo II takes place in Vietnam and Rambo is rescuing some POWs in the jungle. Rambo III takes place in Afghanistan and has the worst subtitles I've ever seen in my entire life. Rambo IV takes place in Burma and Rambo is killing the entire Burmese army in ultra violent and bloody ways. (It's pretty awesome actually.)

The subtitles in Rambo III follow this pattern: translate the most mundane Russian dialogue spoken by the extras; fail to translate important Russian dialogue by major players. An important Russian torturer yells commands as the American captive, but we get no subtitles letting us know what he's saying. This would be an interesting device, reminding us that when we are interrogated by a foreigner, we don't know what is being yelled at us. However, a few minutes later we get a scene with Rambo creeping through the Russian camp and overhearing two guards talking. This should also warrant zero subtitles as it's completely unimportant, but no...we find out that they're talking about what time dinner is. That complete reversal of correct subtitle usage is fairly indicative of Rambo III. There are Afghan enemies and Russian enemies, but there are also Afghan good guys, and you can't tell who's who. (All Russians are bad.) So I slept, like a baby, during some intense machine gun fire and a lot of exploding-tip arrows.



Rambo III, while being the most iconic of the Rambo movies, is a little misguided. I believe the pitch for Rambo III went something like this: "It's Lawrence of Arabia, but with guns and Lawrence has more muscles and exploding-tip arrows." Rambo III is Sly's Lawrence of Arabia. It's just that the film makers messed up: they remembered to kill a lot of evil Middle Easterners, they just forgot to add splendor and a message. It's not all bad though, at least Rambo gets to ride a horse. I want this picture in velvet in my house.

I recommend, even though I just spent a few paragraphs mud-slinging, that you check out any or all of the Rambo movies, because they're a lot of fun, taken at face value. Then you can go watch this and actually appreciate it:

and still...

Yesterday I wasn't feeling well so I posted an article from Patton Oswalt instead of my own words. Today, I'm still not 100%, so I'm posting an entire post from another blog that also happens to be taken out of a book that someday soon I think I need to read. I happen to think this is pretty amazing, even if it may be too vulgar on the surface for many of you to actually get through.

From The Reverse Cowgirl:

"One night, for no particular reason, he went out to wander around the lifeless neighborhood of the West Fifties and walked into a topless bar. As he sat there at his table drinking a beer, he suddenly found himself sitting next to a voluptuously naked young woman. She sidled up to him and began to describe all the lewd things she would do to him if he paid her to go to 'the back room.' There was something so openly humorous and matter-of-fact about her approach, that he finally agreed to her proposition. The best thing, they decided, would be for her to suck his penis, since she claimed an extraordinary talent for this activity. And indeed, she threw herself into it with an enthusiasm that fairly astonished him. As he came in her mouth a few moments later, with a long and throbbing flood of semen, he had this vision, at just that second, which has continued to radiate inside him: that each ejaculation contains several billion sperm cells--or roughly the same number as there are people in the world--which means that, in himself, each man holds the potential of an entire world. And what would happen, could it happen, is the full range of possibilities: a spawn of idiots and geniuses, of the beautiful and the deformed, of saints, catatonics, thieves, stock brokers, and high-wire artists. Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or, as Leibniz put it: 'Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.' For the fact is, we are of the same stuff that came into being with the first explosion of the first spark in the infinite emptiness of space. Or so he said to himself, at that moment, as his penis exploded into the mouth of that naked woman, whose name he has now forgotten. He thought: the irreducible monad. And then, as though taking hold of it at last, he thought of the furtive, microscopic cell that had fought its way up through his wife's body, some three years earlier, to become his son." Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude, care of A."

I know it's laziness, but I'm almost finished watching The Dunwich Horror, and I'll definitely have something to say about that tomorrow.

Funniest article of 2008

I'm not feeling well today, and I'm going to be lazy. The A.V. Club put up an article listing their favorite self-written pieces of 2008, and I'm linking you guys to the article that Patton Oswalt wrote for them about KFC's Famous Bowl. Patton

Oswalt drives to KFC, buys a Famous Bowl and eats it and reviews it. I really want to go to the KFC that he visited because there's something magnetizing about a KFC that "...had withstood assault by bullets, flamethrowers, Baseball Furies, and a hundred hook-handed whores."

Here you go. Enjoy.