Monthly Archives: July 2011

Getting introduced to Pink Floyd’s music

I’m nowhere near Pink Floyd’s biggest fan. I own several albums,  (The Wall, Dark Side of The Moon, and Wish You Were Here) and enjoy them very much, but as you can see there is a lot I do not have. What this story is about is how I first listened to Pink Floyd.

It was the mid 1980s and I was an usher at a movie theater, UA Glasshouse 6 – no defunct and long out of business. I was involved with a lovely redhead and she and I were going through rough times. My shift had ended at the theater, but I really did not want to go home. I suffer from depression, and already in a black mood I knew it would get worse because she was not going to be there.

A life lobe love of movies had given me the avenue of escape through film. A good movie was my preferred method of getting away from my troubles and out of my head. It was late at the theater and the midnight movies would be starting soon. Free movies as an usher was the best benefit for working at the theater. I scanned the titles and found nothing I knew and flt strongly about, still I knew I did not want to go home.

hmmm, The Wall, My pal ray had told me that The Wall was a very good film and he and I tended to have similar tastes, so The Wall it was.

I was not prepared for a film that was entirely music and visual, but I settled in and let the film wash over me. Quickly disturbing parallels between ‘Pink’ the subject of The Wall and myself revealed themselves. We both lost our father’s when we were young, a devastating event, we were both artistically inclined, we both kept most people at a distance, had lovely redheaded girlfriends, but relationship troubles, and both given to wild mood swings. (ahh yes, One Of My Turns is a song I very much identify with.)

This movie was NOT cheering me up. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of depression and that to quote another song, “he was killing me softly.”

I made it through the screening with my wrists intact, and my head throughly spinning. The music stuck with me. The songs reverberated in my skull and while my depression lifted, as it always will do given enough time, the impact of that film and those songs did not.

Being horribly depressed is not my recommended introduction to Pink Floyd and The Wall, but it did work for me.

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Sunday Night Movie:X2: X-Men United

So Sunday turned out to be a really Marvel Day for your humble host. (Don;t snicker, I am too humble.  I’m WAY more humble than you are.) Anyway I started my day getting up and 8:00 am and no I am not a church-goin kind of fellow, unless you count movies as church, which they might in my case. Anyway I, and my sweetie-wife, rose early so we could catch a 9:15 showing of Captain America: The First Avenger, the last piece needed before next year’s The Avengers. (my quick opinion on Captain America? It rocked. This is a very hard character to write and I imagine a harder one to play but the writers nailed it, and Chris Evans did a fine job. Frankly I consider this film an apology from director Joe Johnston for The Wolfman.) Continue reading →

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Sunday Night Movie: Think Fast, Mr. Moto

Technically this is a Saturday Afternoon movie as the film I tried to watch Sunday Night could not hold my interest and I crawled off the bed rather early. (A weekend filled with Universal Studios, Harry Potter 7.2, fantastically lucky Scrabble games makes for a very short Sunday Evening.)

When I was younger I watched a lot of the old Charlie Chan films. Sometime ago I learned about another Asian detective from Hollywood’s less than enlightened period, Mr. Moto. Think Fast, Mr. Moto is the first in a series of movies starring Peter Lorre as a Japanese Businessman and dilettante detective. Made in 1937, before Lorre absolutely stunning job in The Maltese Falcon, Lorre, a Hungarian raised in Austria is of course cast as a Japanese detective because at this time Hollywood would never stoop to have an actual Japanese actor in a lead.

If possible this film is more insulting in its portrayal of Japanese peoples than the Chan films were of Chinese peoples. It seems that the script writers had a default rule, when in doubt has Moto say, ‘Ah so‘ for absolutely any and no reason at all. Lorre’s small stature made stature, fake buck teeth, and round glasses all added to the stereotypical image Americans had of the Japanese in these pre-war years. (While far from an expert in any manner shape or form on Japanese culture I saw nothing that indicated any research or study of the island nation by the writers. as shame.)

This mystery worked out in a standard B-mobvie plot kind of way. Moto is brilliant and two steps ahead of the crooks at nearly every turn. Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects to this story is that Moto plays at being a villain to gain information and trust, a subtly of performance that Lorre does admirably. (That would be no surprise to anyone who had seen in the Fritz Lang’s M.)

However, as much as I like Lorre, this series offers too little to entice me to watch the other seven film.

 

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Quick update

So I will let everyone know how well my weekend went tomorrow. (hint, it went well.) Tonight I’m going to be out at The Old Globe Theater in Balboa park here in San Diego to see a production of The Tempest.

 

 

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no wasted writing

So I’m working on a story that has no potential for sale or submission, but I’m writing it just the same. It’s crude, very crude, but likely to be short. I think under two thousand words. after that hardly anyone is ever going to see it.

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Sunday NIght Movie:Ringu

Sorry about the Sunday Night Movie feature, upon its return, being a day late. Last night I had a nasty migraine start up — reminds me I need ot log that — and while the treximet took care of the headache nicely, it was severe enough to pack me off to bed rather early. So, a day late, but not a dollar short because this is free, here is this week’s film.

Ringu is the Japanese Horror film that was adapted into the American film The Ring, starring Naomi Watts. Ringu is based upon a novel, also Japanese, titled Ringu or The Ring. I first saw the american film, but not in theaters as the premise seemed too silly for my tastes. A killer video tape? really? I was sorry I had missed it in the theaters as The Ring turned out to be a very good horror film. A fairly low body count, and very little violence, this was not a butcher’s bill of hormone addled teenagers being watched for their sins, not was this a torture-porn of pure sadism, this was a film about knowing your end is coming and having no options to avoid it. The horror evolved from the characters and the nature of their dilemma not from how gruesome the murders were.

Having enjoyed The Ring I was determined to hunt down the source material. I purchased a collection off Amazon of 4 Ringu films on DVD. The movie had been enough of a success in Japan to spawn a sequel, a prequel and then a  revised prequel that retconned elements tha fan objected to in the previous prequel. (Ahh if only we could get Lucas to listen to us.) I also tracked down the original novel, albeit an English translation as I do not read Japanese.

Ringu is a throughly enjoyable horror film. If you have seen The Ring then you will recognized the major elements of sweep of Ringu, however there are differences that make each film throughly unique. In The Ring there is no explanation for why Rachel’s son, Aidan, is such an odd child. In Ringu there is an entire element, taken from the novel, dealing with ESP and psionic ability that explained why the main characters react the way they do and just what is at the heart of Sada’s curse. Also the Japanese film plays with a more explicit supernatural element than the American movie. Both versions abandon sub-plots from the novel, including the explanation for why the curse works in the manner it does. (it deals with if I remember correctly the polio virus and was never a satisfactory element for my tastes.)

Interestingly all film versions replace the male protagonist with a female protagonist. I find it interesting that the switch occurred though I suspect the American and Korean (yes, there is a Korean version as well) well simply following the Japanese film more than the novel.

Ringu is well acted, directed, and photographed, playing for a subtle horror that ignore the temptation of special effects make=up in favor of strong performances and suspenseful scenes.

For anyone who enjoys horror and for whom subtitles are not a barrier to suspension of disbelief, Ringu is a film I heartily recommend.

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Quick thoughts on Escape From Hell

Back in 1976 Science-fiction authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle published their fantasy novel Inferno, about an SF writer who dies and goes to hell as described by Dante in if classic work, Inferno.  I have read this novel two ro three times and it is very enjoyable and quite an interesting take Dante’s vision through a modern perspective.

Two years they published a sequel novel, Escape From Hell, which I purchased a few months back and now that I have time, I have finally read. I do not think this book is as good as the original and in part I think politics marred this novel, which just as easily be titled Liberals In Hell. Jerry Pournelle maintains a blog — he hates that words but that is what the world calls such things — and so as a frequent reader I have a taste for what the author thinks versus what his characters are saying. (Larry Niven does not maintain such on line presence and so his thoughts are more mysterious.)

This book in many ways feels like the authors having fun putting their political rivals in Hell and torturing them. There is a decided lack of conservative figures in hell, while prominent liberal such as President Lyndon Johnson, are named and figure as characters. Now I am not insisting that author must maintain an quota system for such works, that’s silly, but the complete absence of namable conservatives betrays the heavy bias and that undercuts any arguments and persuasive  powers the text might have.

This major flaw made the book far less enjoyable than the original, even with that novel’s flaws. (Such as maintaining homosexuality as a sin, something that was seriously modified by the sequel. Apparently hell is subject to retconning.)

Wortha  read, but with a large amount of salt nearby.

 

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I have sinned

I must publicly confess my sin and make proper atonement.

For the past two days I have sought out and deliberately watched two episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise. I do not have the excuse that these episodes, a two parter, were written by a friends as I did when I watch episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, and as such this is a sin against taste.

I watched the Season 3 episodes, Through A Mirror, Darkly parts 1 & 2 via the Netflix instant view.  This story arc takes place entirely in the producers views of the Mirror Mirror universe first seen in the original series episode of the same name. ( a truly great Episode.) Howevere the producers did not pay attention to that episode and were wildly off the mark on how that universe worked. In Mirror Mirror counter-Spock warns Counter-Sulu that should he, Spock, go missing, his asscoicates would come looking for revenge. Counter-Sulu blanches when counter-Spock that some of his associates are Vulcans. In that one moment we get so much about what has changed. The Vulcan are bad asses, more like Romulans than the pacifists we know. In this Enterprise story the Vulcan are enslaved to the humans, but basicly the same. In fact they are leading a revolt against the empire instead of being a terror within it.

There are numerous other faults in these two episodes. Production design managed to copy known sets from the original series, (The Starship Defiant, lost in the episode The Tholian Web, has appeared in the Mirror Mirror universe, bring the empire tech from about a hundred years down the road.) However they try to create sets that are meant to be aboard Defiant but are not copies of original sets, and the design fails. These new sets do not look like the belong on the same ship. There is also a CGI Gorn in the second part. they smartly kept the effect mainly to the shadows, but it did not look like a Gorn. The body looked pretty good, but the head was entirely different. Also they portrayed the Gorn as quick and nimble, guess the original wasn’t good enough for them.

During the second episode counter-Archer (the lead and Captain in the series) is repeatedly advised and taunted my visions of regular Archer. I kept waiting for the explanation for what this was. It never came. None at all. Nothing that happened in the story impacted on the regular universe and the whole story arc was pointless.

 

A waste of time. How shall I atone?

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