Pasithea

Did some unpacking yesterday but mostly took a bit of a rest from the move. We still have to do some serious work and actually if anyone knows two fairly strong people we could really stand to borrow them for about half an hour. There's one object that Stacey and I can't quite move ourselves.

Anyhow, spent the evening watching some incredibly terrible movies.
Lair of the White Worm It's sort of soft-core porn for tripped out gamers I think. It was (intentionally, I think) hilarious with way too many straight lines.

Robot Holocaust ... I blame Stacey for picking this one. Oh man was it bad. Valaria (as well as all the other players) delivered their line as if they were all on valium. Some of the worst acting I've every seen, and the story was incredibly incoherent. Less coherent than an Ed Wood movie. This movie seems like it was made by people who lost a bet with someone and were being made to perform in it against their will while their friends sat snickering out of shot.

Robotcop 3 Is it bad? It's robocop! Of course its bad! This one is really bad. It's riding on name alone and really has nothing to carry it. Actually it's kind of depressing to see the genre subverted the way it is. In the first movie, Robocop is about our fear of machines taking over and the power of big business and big government. By 3, there's still a pretense of "We're fighting the corporations!" but the people are fragmented. Different social groups are treated with fear and disdain. Sure, the corporate bully gets stopped but the splatter punks are continually the bad guys, not on the side of THE LAW and the 'good people'. They're the pawns of the corporations whereas the mouthbreathers at home watching TV are the 'good guys'. Blah.

Cherry 2000 I didn't care for this movie the first few times I saw it but I admit it's kind of grown on me. A total wanker plunging into the wastes all to win the body of the sexbot he loves. Still. His tracker could have done a LOT better. I confess that the desolate sandy landscapes, the weird desert people, and the carnival-like decay also remind me a LOT of Burning Man. In the future I think if someone asks me what it's like to go to Burning Man, I'll tell them that it's sort of but not quite completely unlike Cherry 2000.

Futureworld Sequel to Westworld. Okay. I lied. They weren't all bad movies. This one is actually pretty good. Oh sure, some of the acting is a bit hammy but the story is pretty decent. The 'bad guys' in this film are the robots I guess but they're pretty sympathetic villains. All they want to do is live and not be wiped out by man's incompetence. A story I can totally sympathize with. Oh sure, they replace a few world leaders with ones who are a bit more unified and logical. Ya'know? I think that's a pretty great idea. The only consolation is that at the end of the movie, our 'heros' believe they've won, neglecting to realize that Delos already controls enough powerful world leader sorts to probably protect itself. So they get to keep their humanity and the robots probably survive. Everybody wins!

I kept Stacey up too late Friday night to get her out of bed in the morning to go oyster hunting Saturday morning. So instead, we went to see a matinee showing of Taking Woodstock It was playing in Palo Alto and we timed it such that after the show was over, it'd be just a short jaunt up to the woods to do the hiking we'd planned to do that morning.

The film has gotten mixed reviews, but most of the negative reviews have come from either A) People who were throwing a tantrum about the main character being gay or B) People who were throwing a fit because it was a movie about Woodstock that had none of the nostalgic music from Woodstock that they desired.

On the topic of the first part. DEAL WITH IT! Look. I know a bunch of our current right-whingers are people who like to blither on about how the Boomers were the GREATEST GENERATION EVAH and they want to take pride in an event that they were no part of and claim the awesomeness of it as their own as a way they can look down on the rest of us... But here's the thing... The movie was based on the AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Elliot Tiber. He is gay. He wrote it himself. The guy that gave Woodstock a venue after right-whinge asshats ran them out of two other venues was a GAY JEW. Suck it up!

As for the music... I think I understand the artistic choice to use stuff that wasn't at Woodstock. The event was about the music, yeah, but it was about the music of the moment, not nostalgia. It was also about love and peace and all that, not about RIAA profit margins. We all know what Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and the Who sound like. Does everything need to be nostalgia and remix?

Besides, the movie was presented as being about the town and the kid who was managing the venue. He wasn't quite part of 'it' and the townspeople certainly weren't. Finally... How could a 2hr film possibly even hope to pay its due to three days of nonstop music? It's not feasible. You could never present the true sound of Woodstock in that amount of time.

Personally, I'm lucky enough to have a pile of reel-to-reel tapes my dad had and one of them happens to be a few hours of stuff that was recorded live at Woodstock (patched off the sound system, not open mic) and even the ~6hrs of sound I've got really doesn't even start to cover what things must have been like.

So... Now that I've addressed the critics, let me address the film: I really thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was really neat to see a film about Woodstock that wasn't focused on nostalgia and pop culture but instead was showing you the behind-the-scenes. All the people who worked to make it happen and the amount of effort and organization required to pull it off. The sheer scale of the thing is boggling. Burning Man caps at 50,000... That's about 1/10th the estimated 500,000 that were at Woodstock. It must have been totally overwhelming. The logistics of trying to pull off an event of that magnitude are staggering.

Speaking of Burning Man, I think that was part of what interested me most about Taking Woodstock. A lot of the people at Woodstock were proto-Burners. There was much commonality but there were also differences. It was really interesting to see what 40 years of event planning has done. Woodstock was not a Zero-Impact event. The people going to the thing made quite a mess by most counts and left the event sponsors doing a lot of the cleanup. Plus, it was different from Burn in that it was a show. At Burning Man, there are no spectators. You are part of it. I think this happened at Woodstock too, but not as consciously or intentionally as Burning Man. It's a subtle change in philosophy but it's important. Perhaps it was just my timing on seeing the film and my interests and some of my current project goals but I found the film really enjoyable and inspiring.

On only the thinnest tangent of connection, I started teaching myself to play the Beatles song "All you need is love" I'm learning the second-guitar chord parts first because chords are a lot more challenging for me than the first guitar melody. It's the first time I've tried playing guitar since I gashed my thumb with a meat cleaver a month ago and I played my acoustic guitar which as a wider neck than the electric. Happily, I was able to play for about half an hour before it started getting a little achey and I decided I'd best give it a rest. It's going to take a while before my thumb is really back up to full strength (I'm going to be taking it easy for the next two months just to be sure I don't re-injure it) but the outlook so far is promising.

Heh. Stacey isn't a big fan of the Beatles but likes a few of their songs. She skeptically asked if my book had "Paperback Writer" in it and was surprised that it did.... Actually, this book contains EVERY Beatles song (though some of them are in easier keys than they'd normally have been played) Somehow, this ended up in us looking the book up online and... Holy crap, I got a steal! I bought the book on our store credit at the used bookstore for what would have been $12 (but was effectively free due to trade-ins) The book is Beatles Complete Easy Guitar by Hal Leonard publishing. On Amazon stores, the book sells for between $65 and $210 O_O Wow. Glad I got it when I did. Needless to say, the book is out of print and is unlikely to ever be printed again. F***ing greedy music labels grubbing for every penny. *sigh* The current implementation of copyright law makes me so very sad. At the end of Taking Woodstock, Mike mentions that what happens next is probably that everyone sues everyone else as they chase the money. I don't know if this was an anachronism put in by Elliot or prophetic, but it is sad. Greed is so ruinous.

Last night, I decided to test a new idea. My experiments can be a little iffy at times, but I think this one went well outside the realms of sanity and I learned things that I think mankind was never meant to know...

I have two monitors and two DVD players... So I played 'Fritz the Cat' and 'The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat' side by side and.... Wow... The horror. What I learned is this: Ralph Bakshi's film was better animated, more coherent, less rotoscoped, and less offensive than 'Nine Lives'. Let me repeat that: RALPH BAKSHI'S FILM WAS COMPLETELY SUPERIOR. And now I must live with this knowledge.

Swiped from triggur.

I'm making this a meme. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao

I'd heard that Warner was going to discontinue the 'Golden Edition' collection of shorts, which is a real shame because getting to see all the old shorts in the original editing is awesome. Anyhow. I was quite surprised to see Volume 6 when we were at the store and I picked it up.

In a lot of ways, Volumes 5 and 6 have been my favorites so far. They have a lot of weird stuff that I've not seen as much or in some cases at all. Volume six has a lot of war era cartoons, and those are really neat but I've seen a lot of them on Toonheads. However, there's also a lot of Bosco and Foxy shorts that I haven't seen at all or have only seen once. Disk 3 gets even more creepy, moving from WWII into the post-war boom. It has several cartoons that I have to infliction on prickvixen because they are horrible Randian screeds done with beloved cartoon characters. They're absolutely appalling and half baked. They sound EXACTLY like where modern republicans seem to get their understanding of the economy.

And finally, there's disk 4. Disk 4 is, I suspect the 'The animators did a bunch of acid and then drew stuff' disk. It's GREAT! Oh man how I loved those weird-sounding WB intros and I confess that I do actually like the AP style. These really took me back to my childhood. Dark distant memories of strange barely familiar cartoons. This one in particular tickled ancient parts of my brain:

Meet Norman Normal. He's a lot like yooooooOOuuu! This cartoon is so awesome! Short of the one where Porky makes a cartoon, this is one of my favorite collections (despite the sometimes hard to watch racist and sexist overtones of parts)

Anyhow. I'd like to write a longer review but I'm going to be late for a date. Seriously though. At $40 (The cost of 4 movie tickets around here) this disk set totally worth a look.

For some reason, I've had a strange urge to watch The Water Babies It's a film I haven't seen since I was a child. I bet it's terrible. :)

Heck. While we're at it. I'd also like to see Moon Madness: the secret of the selenites. (An animated Baron Von Munchausen film)

And since the picture mentions them... 'The Mysterious Cities of Gold' and 'Spartacus and the Sun Beneath the Sea'..

Funny if I think about it. How is it I grew up in the heart of dumfukistan with 3 TV channels and yet somehow I managed to find all this weird funky stuff to fall in love with.

I must have chose quite wisely when they started doing video tapes at the local library. ^_^

This will be part movie review and part rant. Contains no more spoilers than you get from the trailers.

So. For the review portion, let me say the film effects are great. The world isn't defined to my taste and a lot of stuff feels hurried and it feels like a middle-movie, having the same tone as The Two Towers or Empire Strikes Back So. Nothing I particularly disliked about the film but nothing that I really loved either.

Now, on to the rant!

It's come to my attention that the film is being boycotted by various religious groups, screaming that it's anti-religion or some bloody nonsense like that. I think perhaps if I'd heard these whinges beforehand, it might have upped my enjoyment of the film as I'd have been actively doing something to piss of the religious right. Instead, I'm left having watched a film that was not especially moving and then finding out there's a bunch of self-righteous indignation about it.

So... Is the Magesterium a power-broker with a hint of a religious undertone? Sure. Absolutely. Does that make it an attack on all that is holy? Don't be stupid. Compared to most films I've seen which deal with a theocracy, this one was pretty thin on the parallels. No one was dressed up in funny gowns or waving about anything ornamented in a way to suggest they were a member of any church. No one was called a bishop, priest, cardinal, or pope. There was one person named Coulter (some rightwingnut pointed this out rather loudly) and she was even blonde and psychotic. However, she wasn't Annie's version of psychotic. No foaming at the mouth, no screaming, jumping up and down, or flinging feces, and she didn't seem like she'd ever lived in a trailer park.

If you saw your religion reflected in the Magesterium, perhaps there's something wrong with your religion and you need to address that. Certainly, this isn't the first film that's had a corrupt theocracy that the 'heros' are fighting against. Here's a few. There are many more.

V for Vendetta, Riddick, Water World, Tank Girl, The BeastMaster, Star Wars, Krull, Planet of the Apes, etc.

You can probably name a few hundred others. Of course, none of these are films 'for kids'. That's got to be what the religious groups are squawking about, right? Okay. So what about Narnia, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty? I know... Evil queens are DIFFERENT, right?

Oh very well. You know that I've kept an ace in the hole. Let's go ahead and play it. Prince of Egypt... More to the point, the story of Moses. According to the bible, the religion of Egypt is corrupt and full of falsehoods. Moses goes before Pharoh and his clerics and for each bit of magic they do, he does as well. He even transforms a stick into a snake. Rather like the daemons in a way. In fact, there's a lot of parallels. Moses (Lyra) (an orphan BTW) spends some time as guest of the pharoh (Magesterium) before he challenges their power and flees. He is found by his friends and then guides the Israelites (Gyptians) through the desert. No golden compass is mentioned but only he knew the way, and mana (dust) falls from heaven and several other parallels that you can find for yourself if you're bored.

Not a perfect parallel but there certainly are a number of similarities. So I have to ask. Is the story of Moses an anti-religious anit-christian story? How about the story of Jesus? He says some rot about the churches being corrupt too. Perhaps christian groups should boycott Jesus next. It only seems sensible. He apparently doesn't stand for anything they want to believe in these days.

Anyhow, that's my take on it. The movie is probably passible if you really need to get out of the house and will probably be better in the context of a sequel but it's nothing special. The noise and nonsense from the right wing though. Definite thumbs down. Plot holes the size of arks. (Which are an entirely different story)

So... In short, it wasn't a bad film but it wasn't a good film. We had a particularly obnoxious audience of mostly teens who all felt they needed to outperform one another and the film by screaming, squealing, shouting, booing, etc the movie as much as possible. I wouldn't have minded if they had been enthused but the tone was more of one-upmanship than excitement.

The plot is the same as the other films in the series. Real world sucks. Harry almost doesn't get to go to school. Some big name 'rescues' him from mortal world. Rides some enchanted vehicle. First semester is reasonably light, getting more dark. Stuff that could get him kicked from school. Lonely sad unhappy christmas. Afterwards, things get darker. Climax. End.

This one wasn't nearly as well made as the earlier ones. The musical score and direction were markedly worse. Also, presumably since her target market is growing up, the story has more teen angst than the prior films.

Quite predictable and ordinary really. No magic at all.

It was inevitable that I'd see the Transformers movie just due to the noise and because I was vaguely curious. Also, since it's a truly mainstream film, it would give me some idea of the mindset of the mainstream (a horror I subject myself to periodically because I'm a masochist) So it seemed like the best thing to do was get it out of the way quickly. I had no pretenses that it would be good. I kind of liked the cartoon when I was a child though I was never a fan and never had any of the toys (Although we did have a few Go-bots.)

With the possible exception of Ghost Rider this is the worst film I've ever seen or at least the worst I've seen since the last time I subjected myself to a Michael Bay film. Seriously. Who is he blowing or blackmailing to keep getting directing credits? The military general-type guy (Jon Voigt) was the only semi-competent actor in the film (and looking at his other credits on IMDB, that's a really sad statement) For the rest, I've seen significantly better acting in pornos.

The film is basically a 3 hour long commercial for the loltard lifestyle. A unending assault of car and AXE commercials with some 3 Stooges thrown in. An unending stream of poorly delivered catch-phrases, feeble self-reference, oogling the starlet, and rich yuppie 'nerd' kids somehow making it good despite being a complete loser.

I realize now that it was worse than Ghost Rider. With that piece of crap I could at least pinch my nose and get into the film a little bit. This piece of crap, I was outside the film the entire time, sitting there in excruciating agony for an eternity waiting for the thing to end. It was truly awful.

I'll summarize the movie with this spoiler: Since all man's inventions like the car, airplane and radio were invented by stealing technology from Megatron after he was found in the 1920s, frozen at the north pole where he'd been for a thousand years, the Decepticons are able to make a virus that takes down all world communications systems. So they find the old telegraph station in the 1920's base and have to hotwire a computer to it to send morse code. The guy on the receiving end taps out the message on the transmitter and the day is saved.

No. I'm not making that up. Any of it. It's a movie made by and for the sort of people that comment on Digg and Youtube. I'm sure it will do well with its target market.

I really need to find a way off this planet.

Ooooh.

TCM was playing The 5000 fingers of Dr. T. Made in 1953, this movie is all that and a bag of chips. It's in the family of films like Dr Strangelove and Charlie and the Chocolate factory. It's surrealist with some nice biting commentary towards the conformity of the 50's and everyone's fear of the Atom Bomb. I can't imagine anyone on my friend's list who wouldn't like this film. If you've not seen it, do so. :) I'm going to make myself a Happy Fingers hat to wear on SecondLife.