Pterodactyls can dodge stinger missles

And Coolio is a combat expert. (I love the Scifi Channel)

Quote of the week (paraphrased): King Kong looks like it's gonna be a lot better than it thinks it is. (Props to Burnsy for the quotables and potent potables this weekend)

The Brothers Grimm do not fear you!
Be afraid, be very afraid. In fact, don't pay to see Brothers Grimm. Rent Baron Munchausen and contribute to the maintenance of the Terry Gilliam legacy at the cost of his recent sins.

This is not movie for the faint of heart, nor the stout of mind, nor the proponents of decipherable dialogue in cinema. I can't imagine the difficulty that the average viewer had deciphering the plot. There must have been 5-6 people walk out of this flick and I wanted to join them more than once. It's just so hard to put my finger on it. The dialogue mostly sounded ad-libbed, but not in turn; it felt like everyone was competeing for lines and major plot points fell through the cracks amidst a noisy background and an overabundance of atmospheric distraction.

In addition to these suprisingly poor directorial moves, many of the main characters suffered from gratuitous accent. I loved all the actors in this movie, but seriously, aren't we at the point culturally where French characters don't have speak in stereotypes while the rest of Europe is fluent in British?

The Grimmies looked good, but there's no way there was a line of written dialogue for the actors, just atrocious. Ugh, that's where I'm gonna leave it. I can't say another negative thing about the movie without reference to the basic storytelling pitfalls this movie fell victim to.

I played around trying to think of a good fairy-tale metaphor to end on, but there's nothing. Maybe if we made a flute out the bones of this flick it will lead us to its killer.
Leave breadcrumbs, you'll need to follow them back to the 40-year old virgin.
Why plot, what big holes you have!
Have your true love on hand, cuz in 30 minutes you'll be sleeping beauty.

Ok that's enough.

Locomotive Breath (For reals this time)

Who's this guy on the pre-movie Coke commercial pretending he knows what to do with a Dobro?
I'd like to chill with the world a while.I'm sure they want to chill with me.

{Oh shit, Thunderball is on}
Coke ended the Cold War, let's see how it does with the War on Terror/The Conflict Against Extremism/Crusades '05

{Connery's about to whoop the cross-dressing Colonel}
{Jetpack in T-minus 2 minutes}
The irony bus left town and I wasn't on it.

I feel sorry for Tommy Lee. Well, not as sorry as I feel for Vince Neil's Chicken Dance. Still, I'd hate to be marginalized. Marginal is the new collar up.

{There it goes. That's a real Jetpack: NOT A SPECIAL EFFECT. I believe it uses a inert gas reaction, probably with Hydrogen Peroxide, to achieve thrust.}
Damn, Insomnia is a dope movie. It's so hard to find good endings these days.

{You don't believe me? Look it up}
Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer in a buddy cop movie!!!! This is the single greatest movie idea of the last 5 years. Both men have been lurking under the spotlight gearing up for comebacks. To put them both in a neo-lethal weapon is beyond awesome.
I wish I could get in on that action (Monetarily, take no sexual innuendo from that phrase).

{There were like 3 working prototypes. Only one survives. It's probably with the lost UFO hovercrafts built in the 50's-60's. Nobody knows what happened to them}
I don't really care for Pale Ale. It has too bitter of a taste for me.

My sister's rebuttal to my comment that a girl on the show House was going to bang her head on a diving board: "Come one, you know they won't do that. She's gonna have like edema in the brain or something and then hit her head on the board."Of course, we were both wrong. Well met Fox, well met.

Until we cross paths once more....

Thank Heaven for Quantum Leap

What other show could feature a cross-dressing main character every other week and still be creatively viable?

I hate Spike TV, but 4 epsiodes of Star Trek every morning has made my Summer liveable.

I wish I could figure out when The Monkees came on TVLand.

NOOOOOO. THEY STOPPED SHOWING IT!!!

Where am I to get my manufactured 60's pop now? Where oh Where???

For their sakes there had better be some Partridge Family in the cards.
For all our sakes.

I've seen every episode of Andy Griffith. Every one that matters. You can't live in North Carolina and not get the Andy Griffith show twice a day on every channel.

Long Live the New Flesh.

Dream a Little Dream

Last night I had a lucid dream. Didn't exactly turn out the way I expected it to, but then again, what does?

I awoke to find myself in the 70's standing in a park in the middle of some populous city. I knew it was the 70's because of the cars people were driving and the fact that everything appeared as it would on a 70's sitcom: same colors and general visual quality (reference previous post). It was like I was viewing everything around me as a low-quality digital recording.

Anyway, after I realized I was in fact dreaming, I decided I would take a look around said decade when Grandpa Joe from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/ The Man from Chico and the Man/ Dude in the Poseidon Adventure drove up and asked if I had a place to stay. I said no and he instructed me to go live under the local Toys R Us and drove off...never to be seen again.

At this point I was being chased by the police around the docks on my way to Toys R Us. I had to jump from intertube to intertube floating around the docks and eventually land on a floating Moonwalk which took me from the docks to the main highway. The Police disappeared.

I arrived at Toys R Us and found it to be little more than a glorified 1970's post-office. After running errands for the officers, I made my way downstairs to the basement to live. I found it to be barely high enough to crouch and there were scattered tattered plush sofas and couches. The ground was covered in cinderblocks and broken concrete. Despairing at my apparent living conditions, I laid down on the couch and fell asleep only to quickly ake up from my dream in the real world.

Ok, I didn't say it was a good dream. Nor an engaging narrative. Just an odd set of events I thought I would share with cyberspace.

Leviathan is better than Deep Star Six

I always wanted to find out for myself.

Does anybody else have a list of moviees that they always passed by in the video store as kids and always wanted to see?

The Borrower
Robot Jox

Television sets in the Late 70's and 80's were really depressing. Take Night Court for example. Not only was in shot in low-quality digital, but the sets were all taken from some sort of off-sterile Hospital Palette. It's the Hallmark of the sitcom, at least it used to be. Paint a world that is entertaining, but superficially unappealing.

Roman Holiday

Does anyone else think that Roman Polanski may have gotten off too easily with Hollywood? This is really an old issue, I know, and one that predates my birth by about 5 years, but I still feel that he has not been condemned in the way he should be. I'll be the first to tell you that I love his movies. Heck, I even liked the Ninth Gate and he did that post-exile, but I have a real problem with the general Hollywood attitude. If I had not known better back when he won the Oscar a few years ago, I would have thought him to have been a victim of injustice. It seemed to me that he was portrayed the tortured artist driven away by the forces of authority. Bullshit. Let me first clarify that I feel a great amount of sympathy for the man. He barely avoided the concentration camps and his wife was murdered by the Manson family. Seriously, I can understand if he is mentally unstable. I can understand if his crimes were committed under a delusional or unsound state of mind. But to plea bargain and then run away from the consequences of your actions is beyond deploreable. I can't accept that from anyone and I would have thought him to have the strength to accept responsibility.

Maybe I'm just being unfair, but I seriously doubt it. I throw my opinions on your just rulings.

Duck Soup

I enjoyed The Devil's Rejects a lot better when it was Mad Max

Seriously, I would take the Toe Cutter over Col. Spaulding just about any day of the week. Not to mention that I believe Mad Max to be the first movie to introduce Goose as a viable nickname and it probably originated the whole "cut through your appendage with a hacksaw before you burn alive" gimmick. Max wasn't nearly as homophobic, but then again there wasn't much "Lord Almighty" being thrown around.

Still, William Forsythe managed to salvage movie with his scenes juxtaposed with the wanton cruelty of the Firefly family even if I saw the Deus Ex at the end coming from the first 15 freaking minutes of the movie. There was very little on the way of criminal activity that wasn't already well-trod ground for the Knife Riders and Rob Zombie doesn't understand that gore isn't scary. The shoot-outs were solid, but constant bombardement of profanity and gore diminishes the shock factor and makes for a less-frightening experience. The only firefly scenes that actally worked for me were the ones where they were riding in the car and the one when Otis killed the two men looking for guns. Those were well handled. One should not see as much of the enemy in am ovie like this. This is a chase movie at its core. If you know where the quarry will be found the entire time, well it really weakens the impact when the climax arrives.

The reversal deal at the end was interesting, if completely unjustified in my eyes and DDP just wasn't given enough chance to shine. I just got hit with a diamond in the rough pun, but I'm gonna avoid it. Because I can.

I say judge for yourself. You may enjoy the film and there is action enough to suit even the most hardened slug-fest fiends. But this kind of exploitation just doesn't work well in translation. The formula was right the first time it jumped on the screen back in the 70's. Desert-action-romps are just better in Aussie.

When it rains it snows...

March of the Penguins

Sweet Sweetbacks and Care Bear Attacks

A groundbreaking 14 year study proves that dogs can live longer lives.

Common side-effects include blurred vision and indigestion.

Elephants can be controlled using Van de Graff generators.

There are untold riches in gold and silver buried under Pakistan left by fleeing Hellenic peoples.

Popular cross-cultural myths such as Dragons of different types, the Yeti, Bigfoot, etc. could be genetic memory from a time when our ancestors dealt with predatory animals such as larger simians, large cats, and serpents. There was a time when man co-existed in some parts of northern Asia with large humanoid animals who competed with us for food and shelter. In other words, I tend to believe that most myths and folklore, no matter how ridiculous, seem to have a root of truth: ie. there is evidence that anciet greeks had discovered fossilized remains of prehistoric animals. Why have we never heard of this? Because none of the popular writers ever discussed it since these remains were instantly thought of as remnants of Titans or heroes of myth and were not considered out of the ordinary to the culture. What does this mean for all of us? Not much really, I just felt like rambling.

Mental Accidental

It's a good thing Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction comes on right after re-runs of Star Trek TNG otherwise I might have nothing to compel me to productivity.

I challenge my Chicago compatriots to take a walk through Wit's End

Some channeling may be in order prior to the experience....

There'll be no further nasty

Lots of car chases, Lots of fist-fights, Lots of fun, and Lots of Babes. (LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS!!!!)
The story of my Summer or the plot of the Dukes of Hazzard? I'll let you decide which one.

Fine, I've got nothing really to write about so I'm just gonna do what most of the other bloggers seem to enjoy, comment on the news:

Teaching Intelligent design in school is absolutely ridiculous. Whether or not I believe in it is entirely irrelevant (although Bush seems to think that since he believes in it, it is relevant); there are no facts that point to intelligent design. It's not science. It's a subjective take on the complexity of life, a point of view. I learned about spontaneous generation in school. Do you remember what that was? That was a precursor to theories surrounding microorganisms that has been proven false. It is still taught because it was a theory that the facts supported at the time, but instead was replaced by a more relevant and conclusive theory on the makeup of the Universe. Do you think the religious in the time of the advent of cells wanted to believe that disease was not the work of witchcraft and God did not create maggots from meat? Of course they didn't. They weren't accepting the facts, they were making a subjective analysis based on belief. We can't teach intelligent design anymore than we can teach Creation "Science" or spontaneous generation. All science does is take the most current facts available and apply them in the most objective tense possible. That is what needs to be taught, believe what you will.

In other news. The shuttles need to be scrapped. First let me say that you are unlikely to find a more ardent supporter of the space program than myself, but the shuttles are outdated and failing. Now as far as Nasa is treating the current "crises", I think it's more than overreacted to the damage done to the shuttle. They should do what repairs they feel are necessary, but recent events and media over-hype has bred a culture of fear into the administration. This sort of thing is never good for engineering or advances in technology, but it does create the perfect oppurtunity to scrap our shuttles and start serious work on the next generation of space travel.

There are a lot of designs out there, but how many actual working prototypes? How many feasible solutions to space travel in the 21st century? In addition, we need to foster the privatization of space travel. This sort of thing was supposed to be commonplace by now, but we've moved at a snail's pace since the 60's. Government-approved privatization is the wave of future space innovation and will bring us in directions we never thought possible. I want to go from New York to Australia in 2 hours during my lifetime and dammit, I ought to be able.

I'm a charlatan, a quack, a fraud

I watch Kept on Vh1. Does that make me a bad person? Does it bother anyone that I'm concerned whether or not Seth or Austen wins? It bothers me. Of course, it doesn't bother me nearly as much as the fact that Jerri (Jeri?) Hall got all of her money from divorcing Mick Jagger and while she is American by birth and upbringing, insists on speaking in near-british Don't forget that her show is essentially a way for her to pick her perfect gigolo. Sure makes for good tv.

Now that I'm done self-deprecating, I'm gonna stop watching the music television and stop complaining about celebrities. I mean we all know that Anna Nicole didn't lose weight through Trimspa. We all know it was the drugs, but if it makes America happier to just let her make a fool of herself in front of the Universe, then I can live with that. Also, somebody stop Tommy Lee from making music. Please God stop him. Don't have him appear in Hip-Hop videos. I can stand watching Vince Neil do the Chicken Dance, he's earned it, but Tommy Lee in the Missy video????? It's more than a man can take. More than I can take. More than music can take.