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John Williams cures insomnia [Nov. 25th, 2009|02:21 pm] [ Tags | dvd, family, holiday, movie, music ] Been getting the house ready for Thanksgiving. Bathroom, kitchen, dining area, and living room cleaned up... CHECK! Turkey dethawed... CHECK! Stuffing... CHECK! Mashed-a-taters... Gonna mash 'em tomorrow, but CHECK! Punkin' Pie... CHECK! Sody-pop... CHECK! Potato chips, Keebler Club Crackers, and Wheat Thins... already eating them, but CHECK! Video games primed and ready for me to spank the kids at a few rounds of Double-Dash!!... DOUBLE CHECK!! I've been in pretty good spirits lately. About a month or so ago, I wasn't, and I'd been losing a lot of sleep, fretting over money and how I was going to pay bills. I'm doing better now. Enough that I can host Thanksgiving without having a nervous breakdown. (It also helps that I share a house with my uncle and my mother. I know, ladies. That's so sexy.) But for a time, I was having trouble sleeping at night. Sometimes I would exacerbate the problem by hopping on the internet when I couldn't sleep. That is the WRONG thing to do. I couldn't quiet my mind, though. I kept having these thoughts like, "I just need to coast through the next few weeks, but I can't, because I need money that I don't have." ...Money that I eventually DID have, thanks to some of my internet friends. And personal friends. But I digress. It was during this time that I rediscovered a little trick to getting to sleep. I had received the four-disc collectors edition of Superman, the Christopher Reeve film, for a birthday a few years ago. I like that film. But I discovered recently that there's a special music-only track on the DVD, and upon realizing this, I soon found myself using it to lull myself to sleep. That's not really a knock on John Williams. The thing about the Superman score is that John isn't steamrolling the listener with wall-to-wall trumpeting music like he does in Star Wars. Sometimes the music is very quiet, and occasionally it backs off entirely. I'm not sure, but I suspect this can be attributed to Richard Donner. I think Donner understand the importance of music subtlety whereas George Lucas knows nothing of subtlety. In spite of the bombastic opening credit roll, the rest of the movie is very soothing to listen to in this mode. Enough so that I can sleep to it. And once the movie is over, you're mercifully ejected to a menu without any music at all, until the DVD player finally shuts itself off. I used to do this trick with Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here, but I can only listen to those so many times. I'm actually getting a little tired of this now, too. I'm thinking about asking for the Donner Cut of Superman II for Christmas when everyone's around the table tomorrow. I think they said that they had gotten Williams to score the entire movie for Donner's version. I hope it has the same feature. Wizard Of Oz also has a feature similar to this. It's a music and effects track, but it's still soothing enough to quiet your mind. I use that sometimes. I also use Cosmos. Cosmos has one of the most relaxing music-only tracks of any DVD I've ever owned. Of course, you don't necessarily need the music to lull you to sleep. Usually the sound of Carl Sagan's voice is enough to do that. "There are billions and billions of stars in the cosmos..." ZZZZZZZ!!!! Speaking of whom, there's some guy who recently made a song out of sound clips of Carl Sagan. It's actually pretty good, and it's got the same lull-you-to-sleep vibe to it. The only bad thing about the Superman DVD is that the music-only track has that stupid poem that Margot Kidder is reading while they're flying. I guess they wanted her to be singing, and even though they later changed it to spoken words, they still consider it part of the music track. I don't know what's up with that. Thankfully, I'm usually long asleep by then. My buddy Mike was first to adopt this system. Back in high school, we used to pool our collective CDs together and make cassette tapes based on themes, the equivalent of making an MP3 set list today. He had this one that was mostly comprised of strangely mellow songs by heavy metal bands. Songs like Ozzy's "Tonight", Black Sabbath's "Laguna Sunrise" and "Planet Caravan", and even Iron Maiden's "Strange World". These are not power ballads, mind you! These are mellow songs from bands that are normally loud and obnoxious. He managed to fill an entire 90-minute tape with mellow stuff, and he even used the sound channel control to ensure that the tape would play quieter than other tapes. I believe he dubbed it "Mellow: The Tape". Listening to this thing would put you to sleep. If you could make it through both sides of the cassette, you were hardcore. I was thinking I should rip some MP3s from my old CDs and recreate the set list, but alas, that would require effort. I'd have to borrow a couple CDs, and I have to dig through a couple boxes to get the rest. Actually, I used to have a 6-hour VHS where I mixed a lot of relaxing sounds together with songs. It was pretty clever. Also clever was that my only tools were a VCR, two CD players, and a Super Nintendo. (I used the Super Nintendo to make a blank screen. Not hard; all you need is game with dirty contacts, and you're good to go.) Unfortunately, it meant that I had to plan this all out in advance and monitor the thing for the full six hours. But the result was that I had the ultimate relax-you-to-sleep tape of all time. And sometimes I'd wake up, and it would still be playing. The things I used to do when I was in high school and didn't want to do homework. Oh wait, that was senior year, when I didn't HAVE homework. (See my blog entry about the barely-there senior year.) I think it helped that I was actually taking a media course at the time. So I guess it kind of counted as homework. And yes, seeing that I could duplicate the project with Audacity does make me cry. A little. Being a man does give me room to feel proud that I used limited technology to do something cool. That's a guy thing. "These tools are entirely inadequate, but I made them work anyway, because I'm so awesome." Yeah... I guess I can end there. link talk nerdy to me

Turtles Forever - REVIEW [Nov. 23rd, 2009|01:22 pm] [ Tags | movie, review ] I'm going to keep this brief and try not to give away any spoilers. Still, if you haven't seen it yet, you should probably refrain from reading this, just in case. Well, the one thing I have to say is that this was just AWESOME! What began as a celebration of 25 years and the finale of the last Turtles show ended as the swan song of the Mirage Studios era. This was the perfect way to end an era. I'm not even a fan of the 2003 series, but I couldn't complain here. This was just fan service from beginning to end. If I had to call out a stumbling block, it would be that they didn't get the voices of the 1987 series. Even so, the voices were seldom distracting and most of the impersonations were pretty good. I wasn't really dissatisfied with any of them. The only other problem I had was that the 80s cartoon Turtles were even goofier than I remembered. They should have been a little more serious, but I can't complain too much. I do like that the movie payed homage to the ridiculous technology of the old series, even explicitly saying so. In one scene, 1987 Donatello creates a dimensional gate machine out of a flashlight. That's pretty spot on with the old series. The fourth wall jokes were just clever. Every now and then, 1987 Raphael would turn to the "camera" and speak to the audience, causing the more modern characters to exchange confused looks. Also clever was the revelation of the Turtle multiverse. Now, I couldn't identify every incarnation they showed, but I'm assuming that a lot of them are from various incarnations of the comic. It also looked like they included some of the more bizarre toyline incarnations. You even got to see the movie Turtles, which was awesome! And of course, we can't not mention the Mirage Turtles. To save all Turtle worlds, the eight cartoon Turtles have to follow the 2003 Shredder to "Turtle Prime", which is the world of the original comic book. They didn't just gray-scale normal background plates. They literally made it feel like an old comic book, right down the pencil shading on the buildings and the occasional dotted-look of comic book print shading. Now, there's so much I'm not giving away here, because you need to see this. Apparently, the airing was one-time-only, but they are doing a three-part airing over the next three weeks on CW 4Kidz. Check your local listings. Also, there are apparently 12 minutes cut from the feature to get it down to broadcast length, but the extended cut will appear on the 4Kidz website at some point in the future, AND there's going to be a DVD. So, keep your eyes peeled. You need to see this if you've ever been a Turtle fan. I give it eight thumbs up. And now the waiting to begins to see what Nickelodeon does with the franchise. link talk nerdy to me

Undertaker Begins [Nov. 14th, 2009|12:45 pm] [ Tags | movie, wrestlecrap, wtf ] WHYYYYYYY?!! WWE Films Prepares Undertaker Film So, immediately after reading this, I shot an email over to RD Reynolds of Wrestlecrap to see if he knows about it. Oh, I'm sure someone has it on the forum already, but I'm too lazy to go look. Apparently, they're going to set it in the old west. Why? Well, if you remember what the Undertaker looked like when he first debuted in the WWF back in 1990, he looked like an old west undertaker. He even put his opponents in coffins. At first, they would just rent coffins from actual funeral parlors, but later on, WWF manufactured their own wild-west-style coffin props for the character, including the famous "double-wide, double-deep" coffin that they made for Yokozuna and, I think, Kamala. They definitely refurbished it a couple times and used it in story arcs where the opponent wrestler was normal sized. ...but I digress. The character started changing about halfway through the 90s. He had always been portrayed as being vaguely supernatural, but he started doing wackier things things toward 1995, like summoning lightning and teleporting. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. I know I've seen episodes of Raw where he's teleported. He absorbed Kwang's green mist and spat it back at him. He was kind of this weird comic book character for a while, and it became harder to justify watching it to people. After that, he was a satanic cult leader for a while, and he crucified other wrestlers. I don't know much about that era, because I was not watching at that point, but it looked pretty stupid. He was doing even more supernatural things. And then that fizzled out entirely and he turned into an "American badass" biker, for no apparent reason. He had this catch phrase about soup bones or something. I don't know why, but WWE has this weird thing about combining American patriotism with death (see the All-American "Dr. Death" Steve Williams). Nothing says you're a proud American like being a supernatural zombie wrestler who can teleport and shoot lightning. And that's not even the full range of the Undertaker's history. He has a brother Kane, whose history is equally filled with insanity, if not more so. I'm not going to go era-by-era with Kane. All that needs to be said is that he's a childhood burn victim, thought to have been dead but later turned up alive, masked, scarred, and mute, all of which would be later contradicted, including one storyline which revealed Kane's awkward adolescence, where he accidentally killed his first love in a car crash because he didn't know how to drive stick. I'm not making any of that up. Oh, and he raped the corpse or something, which was painfully recreated before a national audience by Triple H. They even wrote a book about it, laughably trying to harmonize the ridiculous history of Kane. I'm pretty sure that the book doesn't have Kane, the brother of the Undertaker, being born in the Old West. This movie, should it go through to fruition, will add just another layer of absurdity to the entire Undertaker mythos. If you're a comic book nerd or a Star Wars geek, and you're prone to trying to make sense out of story lines that are woefully rife with contradictions, prepare to stand in awe of the average wrestling fan. Continuity in wrestling is a comedic goldmine. link 7 smartass remarks|talk nerdy to me

Some things I never need to see again [Nov. 2nd, 2009|07:40 am] [ Tags | dvd, humor, movie, podcasts, rant ] Man, people are douchebags. I got ambushed by a YouTube video of some animal trainer getting his arm bitten off by a crocodile. I forget what country it was from, but it was some kind of seaworld-like show, where this guy in a wetsuit is doing a "trick" with the croc, which promptly snaps his jaw shut while the guy's hand was in its mouth. And then it starts doing the death roll. I am one person who does not like gore. Fortunately, most of the gore was not in the video, since the majority of it was either cut or the guy with the camera stopped shooting after the crocodile started rolling around. Still, I have one image burned into my brain of the crocodile shaking its head back and forth as it's ripping the arm off. Thanks. I needed that like a tumor. And then a couple weeks later, I see the same footage on a commercial for one of those "astonishing videos" programs. It was the footage of the guys getting his hand chomped and the beginning of the death roll. ON THE COMMERCIAL! That still gives me the heebie-jeebies. Although, I have to say that, while I should be more grossed out by the guy getting his arm ripped off, I'm having a hard time saying whether I'd rather watch Two Girls One Cup over watching a croc bite. That is one video I don't EVER need to see, even though, technically, it should be less disturbing. I didn't even like the Crocodile Hunter, even though I knew that there was zero chance of seeing anything gross. Still, I don't need to see people interacting with dangerous animals. I fucking hate that we have these programs now where these guys camp out in bear or lion territory. I like the old nature programs where the camera guys would film from a safe distance, so that I could watch from the even safer distance of my living room. I can watch a gazelle getting attacked by a crocodile, but not a person. Oh, and that's another thing. Why is it that the people who can watch this sort of stuff are often also the same people who have dry heaves if they see a bucket of KFC? "Oh my god! Animal bones! I think I'm going to be sick. Oh wait, did that guy get his leg bitten off by that alligator? Awesome!" WHAT THE FUCK?! What planet do I live on?! How come I can eat a bacon double cheeseburger without a guilty conscience, and I'm the one who gets sick at the sight of gore? Something's wrong here. I didn't even laugh at the guy who got eaten off the toilet in Jurassic Park. I was too busy sinking into my theater seat, trying to distance myself from the fake animal on the screen. The only reason I don't flinch at that anymore is because I've seen it at least a dozen times. And there's no graphic mutilation, which also kind of helps. It also helps that I didn't believe for a second that the animals would behave that way. I'm going digress here for a second, but one of the things that always bothered me about the Jurassic Park movies is how aggressive the animals are. How many times do they need to eat in one night? That T-rex ate a goat and a lawyer, and it was still chasing the heroes in a Jeep. They even brought this up in Jurassic Park 2. After two T-rex adults ate Richard Schiff, they said that the animals won't hunt if they're not hungry. Apparently, they didn't see the first film. But that franchise is another rant in itself. I can't watch most horror films, because of how squeamish I am about people getting disembodied and torn apart. I don't need to see people's eyes getting gouged out or fingers getting cut off. Hostel. Saw. See No Evil. I never need to see these films. I won't even watch Faces Of Death, even though I know that movie is fake. I am that much of a pussy when it comes to human mutilation. I'm not a total wuss, though. I can watch the average action film, like Die Hard, and never be bothered by people getting shot or trailing blood. I don't want it to sound like I'm horrified by the majority of action films out there, because I'm not. Even Star Wars doesn't bother me, and that's a movie franchise notorious for heads and arms getting chopped off. Again, it helps that you never see dangling piece of flesh. I think that's what it can be reduced to; I can't stand the sight of torn human flesh. There's just something about the mutilation of the human body that I cannot stand, and I don't think I ever want to desensitized to that. =================== On a brighter note, I saw something else this morning that, in retrospect, I didn't need to see. See, I was up early, due to Daylight Saving Time fucking up my sleep schedule. Hello, 4am. Anyway, I saw that Rollerball was on Impact, so I quickly booted up the Rollerball commentary from DVD PodBLAST and synced it up with my cable. The commentary was great, but I think I may have a new official "worst movie ever seen", because this movie was fucking AWFUL. It may not be worse than Dude, Where's My Car, but I never saw that film to completion. I walked out on it fifteen minutes into the film. To date, it's the only film I ever walked out on. Although, if I had seen Brothers Solomon in theaters, I'm pretty sure I would have walked on that one, too. Actually, Brothers Solomon may still be my candidate for worst movie ever. I came close to walking out on Blade and The Matrix. More so Blade, because I just fucking hate Wesley Snipes and everything he does. The only reason I don't like The Matrix is because I fucking hate solipsism. And yeah, I know I'm oversimplifying the movie, but it still has that element of "your mind exists, but everything around you doesn't." To me, this is ham-handed philosophical masturbation. Poo on that, I say. Anyway, getting back to Rollerball, I should have known just from the cast that this was going to hurt. LL Cool J and Chris Klein. Right there is a solid argument against anyone who ever wants to see this film. Actually, I'll go a little easy on LL Cool J, since he appears as though he just hasn't gotten a good break, and he dies in the film. Chris Klein, on the other hand, just can't act, and no matter what facial expression he makes, he always looks like a tool. In fact, Chris Klein has the most unconvincing face stubble ever in this film. Seriously, it looked like they colored his peach fuzz with Just For Men beard dye. It was also the most perfectly groomed stubble you'll ever see. Apparently he didn't have time to shave, even though it looks like he took the time to trim it so that it wasn't halfway up his cheeks, like normal stubble would be. Or maybe they just carefully applied Moss-Man-like fuzz to his face, since his skin is like that of a baby's bottom and thus incapable of growing hair, aside from whatever hideous haircut he happens to have. This movie is incomprehensible. It's some kind of roller derby thing where the combatants skate around an arena and try to score by lobbing a metal ball at a target. Apparently, the rules are non-existent enough that you have one guy riding a motorcycle around the arena, but there are still penalties. I don't get it. And if that isn't enough, there's like a ten-minute chase scene in the movie that is filmed entirely in night vision. Why? I don't know! The PodBLAST commentary suggested that they may have just run out of money or didn't want to light the scene, so they did it in night vision. I'm guessing they were trying to do something fresh and edgy, but it's so random and unnecessary. It doesn't even suggest to the viewer that these guys are in near complete darkness, which would be the only reason for doing a scene like that. The only redeeming thing about this movie is that you get to see Rebecca Romijn's boobs, and I'm not even sure if I would say it was worth it for that. There were also a few WWE cameos in this film. Shane McMahon appears in one scene, and ECW promoter Paul Heyman is the play-by-play announcer throughout the film. It's without surprise that WWE would be involved in this film, because now that I think about it, this movie has about the same plot as No Holds Barred, the Hulk Hogan film, in which Hulkster takes on an evil television producer, who is sponsoring a UFC-like promotion against the more mundane wrestling program. (Strangely prophetic, no?) Even the ending is kind of similar, where the star breaks free from the arena and goes after the promoter in the control room. I can't believe I'm saying this, but No Holds Barred is actually the better film of the two. And SPEAKING of No Holds Barred, it's a shame that it never came out on DVD, because that's one movie I would have enjoyed getting the PodBLAST treatment. Actually, DVD PodBLAST never did any of the Hogan films. What the fuck is up with that? I know they could have done Suburban Commando, Mr. Nanny, or 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. I would rather watch any of those than Rollerball. On a final note, it does seem as though our worst fears have come true. The DVD PodBLAST website went down last month, and I just had an email exchange with William Koenig confirming that the website is gone for good. I know they said that they'd stop at 100, but they teased the possibility of one more for the hell of it at some point. Looks like that's never going to happen. So, if I ever want to see funny movie commentary again, it looks like I'm stuck with Riff Trax. Yay. In retrospect, I think I could stand to watch Chris Klein getting mauled by a crocodile. Maybe their mutual awfulness would just cancel each other out. link talk nerdy to me

Muppets From Space, another look [Sep. 21st, 2009|09:40 am] [ Tags | movie, muppets, review, youtube ] Okay, I didn't give Muppets From Space a fair shake. I really did shut it off within ten minutes of starting the video, and I had never seen the rest of it until yesterday. I have to say that it isn't that bad, actually. Steve Whitmire does a decent enough Kermit, but most other Muppets that Jim Henson and Rich Hunt had voiced are silent throughout the movie, with the exception of Beaker. Scooter talked once, voiced by Richard Hunt's brother. Maybe that's for the better, actually, because I'm a pretty hard sell on replacement voices. I hate when new actors step in and try very hard to impersonate the old actor. This drives me nuts, because it would work so much better if they would try to approach the character fresh. At some point in the future, I'll have to go into further detail into this theory of mine, but not now. Although, I have to give Eric Jacobson a lot of credit. He picked up virtually all of Frank Oz's old characters, and he does them so well, that I can hardly tell the difference. The man sounds like he swallowed Frank Oz. There are only brief moments where his Frank Oz impersonation breaks a little, but it's very rare. This, however, is the exception. So, the movie features pretty much the best of everyone who was left in the group up to that point. Frank Oz had not yet retired, and he's joined by Steve Whitmire, David Goelz, Jerry Nelson, and a few new guys whose names I don't know straight off. What that means is that Rizzo is once again elevated to supporting character status, because Rowlf and Dr. Teeth can't talk. I never quite warmed up to Rizzo. He's always been a B-list Muppet to me. Pepe's in it a lot, too, and I don't know what to make of Pepe. People really like him, but I'd rather have Scooter and Sweetums. Call me spoiled. The movie was surprisingly funny to me. I've sat stone-faced through Muppet material that was produced after Jim Henson died, and this one is actually ain't too bad. At the same time, it feels very empty. I hate seeing all of these puppets that I know belonged to Jim and Richard, because I know they're not going to say anything, or if they do, it's just going to be wrong-sounding Muppets. The weird thing about that, however, is that they have this one Muppet in the movie called Bobo the Bear, and I swear he sounds like one of Jim Henson's more gruff-voiced characters, like Rowlf or Dr. Teeth. And I'm thinking that whoever this actor is who's doing this voice, he ought to be bringing these older characters back to life. Have they not noticed this? You know what else bugs the piss out of me? There are no original songs. They have all of these shitting cliche songs that you've heard on a million other soundtracks. Seriously, Celebration is in this movie. That song sucks! I should never have to hear that song outside of a wedding reception, goddammit! Why does this movie have a soundtrack largely comprised of songs from the 60s and 70s, anyway? Why aren't the Muppets singing their own songs? They even had a few good celebrity cameos in this thing. Jeffrey Tambor is the main antagonist. He's pretty funny. Ray Liotta and Kathy Griffin also have bit parts that are pretty funny. But did anyone besides me pick out the voice of Gary Owens in this movie? That was fucking cool! Leave it to me to recognize the voice of the guy who did Powdered Toast Man. There are some really awful celebrities in this, too. Like, why is Rob Schneider in this? Derfy-derf-dee-derf! Rob Schneider is...rectally violating a Muppet! And this movie also has not one, but TWO former WCW World Heavyweight Champions in it. The first being Hollywood Hulk Hogan, who breaks the fourth wall by admitting that he's a bad guy now. Who's the other former champ, you are asking? Well... Oh, come on! You saw that coming. All things considered, it wasn't too bad. But it wasn't The Great Muppet Caper, either. link 1 smartass remark|talk nerdy to me

The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made [Sep. 19th, 2009|03:30 am] [ Tags | movie, muppets ] This isn't exactly news. I think we've known for a while that Disney had plans to resurrect the Muppets. The new movie sounds somewhat, especially in contrast to the films they made during the 90s. I can hardly believe it's been ten years since Muppets From Space. What a coincidence. It only took me ten minutes to shut it off. Okay, I'm a little cynical. Without Jim Henson and Richard Hunt, the Muppets franchise died a long time ago for me. Oh! In case you don't know who Richard Hunt is, he is THE voice of the Muppets during the golden age. I know, you think of Jim Henson and Frank Oz when you think of classic Muppets, but Richard Hunt was kind of the Mel Blanc of the classic Muppet performers. He provided voices for Sweetums, Scooter, Janice, Statler, Beaker, Junior Gorg, half of Sesame Street's Two-Headed Monster, Forgetful Jones, Gladys the Cow, and just about any funny voice you would hear in the background of The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and Fraggle Rock. He was a stand-out voice in any Muppet wallah, and as soon as you know his distinctive voice, you will come to the immediate realization of just how all over the place his voice was in the 1970s and 80s and how sad it is that he's gone. In fact, you should listen to Muppetcast's tribute to Richard Hunt. Anyhoo, the new Muppet film sounds promising enough. The premise is that Gonzo blows the budget for the film on the opening credits, so for the remainder of the film, the Muppets have to use just one set, moving things around to represent different settings. Hilarious, right? Well it ought to. It was one of Jim Henson's own ideas. I want to like the idea, but just the fact that they have to go back to Jim Henson's drawing board doesn't sit well with me. For me, the performer is more important than the character, and I don't like this idea that companies like Disney have, which is that you can just replace the performers and get the same magic. For me, it was always about Jim Henson's sense of timing and humor. Without him, it's just someone else trying to sound and act like him while missing everything that made the original performance so magical. When I was a kid, I loved The Muppet Movie. The jokes were funny. The acting was great. It was just a fun ride the whole way through. By the late 90s, it had been some time since I had seen the film, and when I sat down to watch it with my nephew, I was in for quite a surprise. Suddenly, there was a whole new layer of humor that I had missed as a kid. I immediately started laughing at the Hare Krishna jokes, which had gone over my head as a kid. Long before Shrek, Jim Henson was dropping parent jokes into a kids movie, and it is an entirely new experience to see this film as an adult. And this continues on as you make your way through The Great Muppet Caper and Muppets Take Manhattan. Usually it's Janice who gets the best lines in those movies. (Oh, Richard Hunt, how we miss you!) I didn't get that same giddy feeling from any of the later Muppet films. There are a few elements that are missing, and those elements are these same two goofy men, Jim Henson and Richard Hunt, who always brought 110% to their performances. I guess I just don't understand why this is being done. I have no interest in seeing Kermit again. It's not going to be Jim as the voice. It's not going to be Jim's humor. If it's funny on its own merit, then maybe I'll go see it. I have nothing from which to draw any expectation, though. We'll see... link talk nerdy to me

Weekend At Bernie's 1 and 2 [Sep. 17th, 2009|01:30 am] [ Tags | movie, review ] The Gods of OnDemand have blessed me so! I just saw two* stupid movies tonight! I'll explain the asterisk in a minute. Weekend At Bernie's is so delightfully stupid, that I can barely keep a straight face just describing the premise. It's a big stupid buddy flick. Two dumb guys on a wacky adventure! It's so absurd, that it's got immediate immunity to any possible criticism. It's like Double Jeopardy. I can't spit up my drink after seeing a stupid scene, because the fact that it's stupid had already been established by the premise. You can't condemn this movie twice for the same crime. Here's the premise: Two idiots discover that their boss is dead and have to pretend that he's still alive, so they can escape from a hitman, who they don't know isn't trying to kill them. See, this is so stupid, it's great! Bernie put the hit on the two protagonists, Larry and Richard, because they discovered an embezzling scheme where they worked, which, much to the ignorance of our heroes, was perpetrated by Bernie himself. The mob boss decides to call of the hit and put the hit on Bernie. Bernie dies, but not before accidentally recording an incriminating phone conversation on his own answering machine, on which he tells the hitman not to kill the boys while he's around, because he's stupidly invited the two idiots to his beach house in the Hamptons, where the murder is supposed to take place. Hearing the recording, Larry and Richard fail to realize that they are no longer targets and attempt to escape back to the mainland by pretending that Bernie is still alive. Hilarious hijinx ensue. Everyone on the beach knows Bernie, and they all want to stop and talk to him. Nobody realizes that he's dead. They're either too drunk or too stupid to put it together. And poor Bernie looks more ragged the more the movie goes on. Our own protagonists don't even figure it out for at least ten minutes. Thinking that he's asleep, they simply lift the corpse out of the chair and plop him down onto the sofa. And even when they figure it out, they come up with a lot of really stupid reasons to not immediately call the police. There's also a love interest in this movie, but I've purposely left her out, because the story can be told without her. In fact, she's not even in the sequel. She's just there in the first movie. to add a layer of discomfort to poor Richard, who wants to bone her from the beginning of the movie. Now, the second movie is where that asterisk comes in, because I think I only made it about forty minutes into the movie before simply falling asleep. Still, I saw enough of it to know that it sucks. In theory, you should be able to watch these two movies back-to-back, since the second film picks up at the end of the first. However, this movie commits a horrible crime for which it shall be condemned. Now, earlier I said that the first movie was immune due to Stupid Movie Double Jeopardy. Like Jaws The Revenge, you can't complain that it's stupid, because it's already been established ahead of time. Weekend At Bernie's II commits another crime. That crime is jumping the shark. And unfortunately, that shark did not follow (and beat) our heroes to their island paradise, where it could stalk them and everyone they're related to. It just didn't need to happen. I had seen the first movie back when it came out in 1989. I long suspected that it never deserved a sequel, and any sequel made would have the unenviable task of topping one of the most absurd movies ever made. It doesn't do it at all. Instead, it kind of goes the Ghostbusters II route of making fun of itself when the first movie already did a well enough job. See, a witch doctor plots to reanimate Bernie to help locate a treasure that he buried somewhere on the Virgin Islands. And that's all I really need to say. It's just an unfunny reason to drag Bernie out of the morgue and transport him to the Virgin Islands for more wacky seaside adventures. And if that wasn't unfunny enough, a botched voodoo ceremony grants the Bernie corpse the power to dance when it hears music. I'll give this movie props for heaping on the stupid. Rich and Larry plot to break Bernie out of cold storage so that they can get some fortune of his out of a safety deposit box. Now, the first movie put them into a situation where finding a corpse and then not calling the cops was at least sort of plausible, if you assume that they just have no common sense. This is just plain insanity. Oh, and for some reason, they have Barry Bostwick following them around, because their new boss suspects that they had some role in Bernie's scheme and is trying to prove it. Beyond that, the film just time-warps back to the first movie with the boys trying to pretend that Bernie is still alive...except now the corpse can dance. The first movie is great. The second sucks. Don't see the sequel. link talk nerdy to me

Random Stuff [Aug. 22nd, 2009|05:50 am] [ Tags | comics, movie ] Editing... editing... editing... A comic artist's job is never done. The Crossoverlord is always in constant flux. Even if it seems like you can predict what's going to happen, in reality we're constantly rewriting the thing behind the scenes. In the past couple days, we've been kicking the script back into shape, since there were a lot of plodding scenes coming up. We do it all for you. So I'm sitting here having breakfast. Why are there blue triangles in my Apple Jacks? Is there someone whose job it is to decide what arbitrary nonsense they can put in this cereal? I want that job. Where do I apply. Oh, and something else that just occurred to me. If, by any chance, Spielberg ever decides to do a reboot to Jurassic Park, they need to get Hugh Laurie to do the role of Ian Malcolm. And if you've ever read the second book, you will totally understand. And yes, I stole that joke from This Week In Geek, but I consider it a reciprocation, since they did an "I'm Dave" reference on the show. link talk nerdy to me

Movie Review: Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen [Jun. 24th, 2009|02:00 pm] [ Tags | 80s, cartoons, movie, rant, review ] a.k.a. Transformers 2: Electric Boogaloo a.k.a. Transformers 2: The DaVinci Spark a.k.a. Transformers 2: There Won't Be A Transformers 3 I just watched a 2 and a half hour toy commercial. I can't believe I'm saying that, especially since critics said that about the 1986 film, but it's true! ( Caution: SPOILERS AHEAD! ) link 4 smartass remarks|talk nerdy to me

Movie Review: POSSUMUS WOMAN!!!! [Nov. 2nd, 2008|03:30 am] [ Tags | humor, internet, movie, review ] Movie Review: Possumus Woman Year Released: 2008 Medium: Digital Download What do you even call this? It's not a B-movie. Heck, it's not even a C-movie. It's somewhere in the Q or R range. Still, Possumus Woman is one of the funniest movies to come out this year. And you know what? You don't even have to pay to see it! That's right, it was produced, written, and directed by console hack master, Benjamin J. Heckendorn, and you can just download the bloody thing from his website! This movie is actually a sequel to the 1995 film, Possumus Man. Funny thing about the title of this movie is that whenever Ben would talk about this project on his podcast, I thought he was saying "Posthumous Man" and Posthumous Woman". I kept picturing it as some kind of bizarre zombie horror flick. Of course, now that I know that the actual title of the movie is different, that means I can use the term "Posthumous Man" for my own purposes, as I find the name rather amusing. ( Anyhoo, on with the review! ) link talk nerdy to me

GODZILLATHON! [Oct. 27th, 2008|01:15 pm] [ Tags | dvd, movie, rant ] James Rolfe is the fuckin' guy. I don't know of anyone on the internet who emphasizes more the notion that "Geek is chic". He exploded into popularity as the "Angry Video Game Nerd" and has since taken on a cult status of his own. I think what makes him so endearing is the way he so reflects us thirty-something-agers who grew up the 80s. He mirrors virtually every geeky passion of the day. This October's Monsterfest was a marathon retrospective of the Godzilla franchise. A Godzillathon, if you will. All 29 Godzilla films, including the 1998 shitfest American remake, are reviewed on YouTube. I strongly urge you to go check it out. Okay, first of all, since I've actually run into people who think it should be called Gojira instead of Godzilla, let me stop right here and say that you people can go die in a fire...after being pushed down a flight of stairs. It's been fifty years. Toho has entirely embraced the American pronunciation. Eat a dick. Okay, so James just wrapped up the Godzillathon up with his review of Final Wars. Toho celebrated Godzilla's 50th Anniversary by giving us a monster brawl, the scale of which had not been attempted since Destroy All Monsters. Classic foes like Rodan, Ghidorah, Mothra, and Gigan all make appearances. Most shockingly of all, though, the American Godzilla even shows up in this film, complete with CG rendering in all of his shitty non-fire-spitting, asexual glory. Or is it "her"? Oh, I don't know. Just watch James' video... Now, back in 2001, I believe (It was definitely before Dasien), I had posted a Geocities page in which I basically pleaded with Toho to produce a Godzilla movie in which the true Japanese Godzilla destroys the American remake Godzilla. It was one of the earliest pages I'd ever posted to the internet. For the sake of authenticity, I demanded that this movie MUST feature the guy in the rubber Godzilla suit beating the shit out of the CG monster. Three years later, Godzilla: Final Wars is released in Japan, and the film delivers with the satisfying end of the rechristened "Zilla" within twenty seconds of the two monsters meeting. Apparently, director Ryuhei Kitamura, who is fluent in English, renamed the creature this way, because it had taken "the God out of Godzilla". Now, it would be arrogant of me of presume that Kitamura actually saw this page and got the idea exclusively from that my humble words, as I'm sure plenty of people were crying for Toho to retcon Tristar's monster so as to differentiate with the REAL Godzilla. In fact, for years, the monster had been referred to as "Gino" (Godzilla In Name Only), meaning that virtually no one accepted that this creature should be regarded as Godzilla. Still, it makes one wonder, seeing as Kitamura more or less executed my idea verbatim. I was so happy the day that someone tapped me on the shoulder one day and told me that Toho had actually done this. From the perspective of a Godzilla fan, this was vengeance, pure and simple. This ugly half-iguana/half-Trex deserved getting the atomic breath roast he got after crashing into the Sydney Opera House. On the other hand, it also somewhat delighted me to see Toho adopt this monster and give it its own persona. In some way, it's actually cool that the United States got to contribute to the Godzilla franchise. ...Even if Zilla is the weakest of all the monsters and could probably even get his ass handed to him by Minilla. Watch more of James' videos rightchere. link talk nerdy to me

The Dark Knight [Aug. 19th, 2008|07:00 pm] [ Tags | movie, review, superheroes ] Well, money kind of tight these days, so I don't get out to see a lot of movies. Still, since I'm due to appear on the Webcomic Beacon in a couple weeks, I figured I'd go see The Dark Knight, in the fear that I might be the only one who DIDN'T see it at the time of the recording. Plus I had won a free ticket and a gift certificate for free snacks, so that kind of helps. Nothing better than FREE! Okay, so what did I think of it? Well, it was a VERY good movie. Lots of action and suspense, and Heath Ledger was freakin' awesome. I know I'm merely repeating what everyone else has said, but this only makes Ledger's death all that much more tragic. It was also very long, but it didn't drag like a lot of other big releases, like Transformers or Lord Of The Rings. (That should earn me some hate letters.) As a whole, I would like to see far fewer movies that cross the 2-hour mark. This one proves that they can be done well, though. I often facetiously talk about the Dasien movie. If, by some miracle, such a project ever occurs, I will insist upon a 90-minute running time. No more. Anyhoo, the movie can be broken down to a commentary on how society reacts to negative stimuli. Do they face extreme threats with nobility or crumble under the pressure? It is the movie's best (and worst) aspect, and I'll go over this more when I put my recorded commentary online. Yes, I had an audio recorder with me to and from the theater. The commentary suggests that individuals will break under immense pressure and compromise their principles. In fact, Batman does this on a number of occasions, the most notable of which ends in a moral confrontation between him and Morgan Freeman's character, Lucius Fox. And that's fine. I've long since abandoned the idealistic mindset that we can't compromise our principles in extreme situations. It is far more important that we resist extreme reactions to negative stimuli from becoming acceptable. However, there's a darker aspect to this, and it involves the entire final act of the movie. After Joker has been captured and Commissioner Gordon's family is saved (that's as much as I'm going to spoil for now), Batman decides, all by himself, that what's best for society isn't necessarily the truth, because he doesn't want to let the Joker win. I'll go into it more in detail in my recorded commentary, since I can safely warn you in advance of any spoilers in that medium. It was, in my opinion, the worst part of the whole movie. I could have lived with an ending that simply stated that the Joker essentially won, because, regardless of how the ending is justified, the Joker made his point. He took a good man and brought him down. Batman's entire worldview is crushed by one man who proved that we can't necessarily have heroes, because the best of us can fall. But Batman reacts to this by retreating into denial. LAME! I would have been satisfied with that. That's all the ending needed to be. Despite the last five minutes, it was a good movie. Certainly better than anything of the Burton/Schumacher era, and probably better than any superhero movie thus far. I just didn't care for the moral at the end. But then, this sort of underlines why it is that Batman is FAR from being my favorite superhero. link talk nerdy to me

HEY! LISTEN! [Aug. 17th, 2008|12:20 am] [ Tags | cartoons, comics, crossoverlord, dasien, movie, podcasts ] After being unable to wrangle my friends (OH MY FRIEEEEENDS!) into a room to do a movie commentary podcast and having even less luck trying to rip on Flash Gordon, I've decided that my first commentary outing is going to be an episode of The Legend Of Zelda from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. If you don't yet have the DVD, you need to get it. And don't worry, I'll be sure to pick an episode that has a live action sequence in it. Like, maybe the Inspector Gadget one. And then later, I think I'm going to get Jenny to join me for The Lion King: Anniversary Edition, so we can wince at the horror that is the song "Morning Report". Oh, if you haven't seen it, it's not good. Basically, they took a song from the Lion King Broadway show and put it in the movie. The scene not only adds NOTHING to the film, it actually takes away some of my favorite jokes. They were corny jokes, mind you, but I liked them! They stuck it into the movie in place of Zazu's awesomely terrible puns, such as, "Cheetahs never prosper.", and "I tried to tell the elephants to forget it, but THEY CAN'T!". C'mon, Disney! What the fuck! So, when I'm sure that I can have absolute silence around here, I'll sit down and do this thing. As for right now, I have a commission to finish and a few Crossoverlord pages to draw. And maybe... just maybe... a slew of Dasien updates. link talk nerdy to me

Mentioned on Wrestlecrap Radio, BROTHER! [Aug. 15th, 2008|06:10 pm] [ Tags | crossoverlord, dasien, internet, movie, podcasts, rant ] Once again, I got an extended mention on this week's Wrestlecrap Radio. You can hear the show here. Blade and RD talk about a cameo in an upcoming comic, but they don't mention that it's actually the Crossoverlord in which this takes place. Blade erroneously states that it's a wrestling comic, but it's actually a wrestling SCENE. The scene I have scripted is a parody of a wrestling storyline, and that's as much as I'm going to say. Expect LOTS of wrestling-related jokes, especially if you happen to be a fan of Bobby "The Brain" Heenan! I've always wanted to do a parody of a wrestling storyline, and now I get to do one. Thanks again, RD and Blade! In other fun news, I picked up the paper today and saw a rather nasty review for the Clone Wars movie. HA! Take that, George Lucas! That'll teach you to make another movie called Clone Wars! There already was such a feature, produced by Genndy Tartakovski, which everyone LOVED. It had lots of death, no Jar-Jar, and Anakin actually wasn't a pussy in it. For some reason, though, Lucas decided to that what the Clone Wars needed was a stereotypical sassy and overtly competent teenage female character who chides everyone throughout the movie. WHY?! Why does George Lucas have to rewind history and tell another story of how Anakin is a bitch. Now he's taking shit from a kid! And what's worse is that the character in question is that one really ugly race of alien, to which Shak-Ti belonged. Ugly! Ugly! Ugly! It's as if George Lucas watched Genndy's "Clone Wars" and said, "You know what? There's way too much of this concise story-telling and not enough tediously dull scenes of pointless banter. There need to be more video game tie-ins and pointless scenes that only serve to make the Jedi look stupid! Genndy, you're fired!" Seriously, George. You need to throw the master copies of this new Clone Wars into the fiery abyss, where you also keep the masters of the Star Wars Holiday Special, and forget that it ever existed. The original Clone Wars was fine. Learn to quit while you're ahead. link talk nerdy to me

The Three Faces of Dasien [Jul. 24th, 2008|04:25 pm] [ Tags | artsy fartsy, comics, dasien, movie, youtube ] This little project is a warm-up drawing I did this afternoon to get me ready for a long night of artsy fartsy Photoshoppery. I took the three actresses upon whom Dasien's appearance is most based, and I separated them out to see who would look the most similar to Das. Not surprisingly, Charlize Theron ends up being the one, although she still looks a little off. (Probably because she's not as stylized.) Basically, this came out of a short exchange that Al and I had about character facial appearances. Interestingly enough, Al bases his Dasien on Jessica Alba. In some of his later pages for the Crossoverlord, this becomes rather apparent, and in a good way! I'm really a fan of individual artist interpretation. I love watching a bunch of artists draw the same thing and find out how each of them approached the subject. If I thought I was a big cheese in the webcomic world, I'd stage a Dasien draw-off. Oh, and on an unrelated note, this guy kicks ass... link 2 smartass remarks|talk nerdy to me

Watchmen trailer! [Jul. 21st, 2008|07:15 pm] [ Tags | movie ] Silk Spectre makes me feel funny in my pants. At long last, a scantily-clad superhero vixen is going to represented properly in film, instead of wimping out. In fact, she may be dressed even skimpier than she was in the comic! ...Oh, and I guess the rest of them look great, too. link 1 smartass remark|talk nerdy to me

New Ventures: Onward and Upward! [Jul. 19th, 2008|06:45 am] [ Tags | dvd, movie, podcasts ] So, I've been thinking about doing this for quite a while now. I'm going to have my own podcasting show. But instead of doing a webcomic show, I'm going to do a movie show. Specifically, I'm doing a movie commentary podcast. The kind where you sync the DVD to the mp3 file and let hilarity ensue. That being said, it probably won't update that much. I don't have a Netflix account (although I probably should consider getting one), and I'll need to wrangle the gang together so that I'm not doing these by myself. I don't think I could do one of these without the benefit of another person to feed off of. You'll get to meet all of my wacky friends at last, including Desolate Sky Mike, Yangus, Lahm, Tom, and Jen. Maybe a few others, depending on who I can wrangle and where we record these. My main goal is to get my own commentary of Transformers: The Movie out there, as well as The Muppet Movie, Iron Giant, The Lion King, Blazing Saddles, and other fun movies. I'm also gonna do some rather god-awful movies, because that's where the big laughs are. Dino Delorentiis, you have been targeted, my friend! And, if nothing else, you'll get to hear my golden tones at long last, on the internet! link talk nerdy to me

Special Announcement [Jun. 11th, 2008|07:00 pm] [ Tags | celebrities, movie, religion ] Soon-to-be movie star Bill Maher. Man of the Year. link talk nerdy to me

Animation Review - Robotech: The Movie! [May. 23rd, 2008|06:25 pm] [ Tags | anime, dvd, movie, review, wtf, youtube ] I heard this was bad, but I had no idea just how bad. Harmony Gold, in its Borg-like ways, tried to assimilate Megazone 23 into a chapter of Robotech. In doing so, they added in a bunch of boring scenes from Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, also known as the second saga of Robotech, to beef up the action so as to appease the distributor, Cannon Films. For those of you who don't remember, Robotech was Harmony Gold's attempt in the 80s to extend the saga of Super Dimension Fortress Macross beyond its original 36 episodes, due to a stipulation that required a minimum 65 episodes for a syndicated animated series. Episodes from Southern Cross and another show, Genesis Climber Mospeada, were added to the overall story arc to create a monstrous and disjointed saga with a very indicative wall of separation between "chapters". For obvious reasons, you never see Rick Hunter and Scott Bernard in the same episode. The only character that technically exists in more than one saga is Dana Sterling, but anyone with even a hint of an attention span will be able to see that the baby in Macross is not Dana. By mining scenes out of the Southern Cross TV series, we're basically treated to about twenty minutes of scenes that we've already seen before on television. And since Southern Cross was the shortest saga of Robotech, it's significantly hard for Harmony Gold to hide this fact. They simply dubbed an entirely new script over old footage to tell us a story of a small group of Robotech Masters who have come to retrieve data from a computer system that had crashed on Earth. Yes, the whole plot is that aliens from another planet want to back up their hard drive. So to do this, they make a clone of Col. B. D. Edwards of the United Earth Government. Col. Edwards is seen being kidnapped by the aliens, but nobody questions when he (or rather his clone) returns under mysterious circumstances and immediately orders the secured alien data to be beamed to a non-functional satallite. Hilariously, an unnamed character comments about how long it's going to take to upload literally millions of megabytes. Seriously, MEGABYTES? Oh yeah, this was made in the 80s. I guess gigabytes and terabytes hadn't yet become part of the vernacular. The kidnapping of Edwards sets the tone for the rest of the movie, as far as the American producers trying desperately to insert plot points by having characters make reference to stuff happening off-screen. In this case, the kidnapping of Edwards is entirely unseen by the viewers, because no such event happens in the footage. This plot point is a post-hoc invention of Carl Macek in order to tie the events of the Earth defense forces attacking the aliens to the events that take place on Earth. By now, we're in Megazone 23 footage, and it's rather obvious, because the character designs are radically different. And, if we were watching a high quality print of this (as opposed to web video), we'd notice the stark contrast between Megazone's 35mm print and Southern Cross' 16mm print. The contrast between the two films, had you been the very few who were unfortunate enough to see this in theaters, must have been mildly comical. So, with seemingly (or literally) no connection to this alien plot, Mark Landry (our hero?) gets a call from his friend in the military, who stole an experimental motorcycle. No real explanation is given as to why this motorcycle was pivotal to the story, but that's Robotech. So Mark gets the bike and has it painted red. And then a bunch of boring stuff happens. Mark soon finds himself in contact with an artificial intelligence being known as Janice Eve, who is sort of like a female Max Headroom. Since she's a rendering, she only appears on TV, and luckily there just happens to be one on the bike. Eve tells Mark about the wicked and vile plot of the aliens to back up their hard drive. She emplores him to stop it, because once the upload is complete, the aliens plan to destroy the planet. Unfortunately, Eve's cover is also that of a pop singer, so we're once again treated to the pain of having Robotech characters sing to us. It's hard to say whether or not Eve's songs are more irritating than Lynn Minmei's, but it doesn't matter, because we get dose after dose of horrible 80s Casio-laden pop music. By the end of the movie, you will be stabbing your ears out with sharp, point objects, either way. Meanwhile, wave after wave of stock footage from Southern Cross depicts Earth forces repeatedly (and secretly) attacking the alien vessel. The reason why these have to be secret attacks is so that the movie doesn't have to explain why none of this is affecting the storyline taking place on Earth. Aside from this yawn-inspiring side-story, whenever you see the aliens, they're basically looking at a computer screen of a progress bar and the Windows "busy" hourglass, as they continue to download their lost data. In a completely different story, Mark attacks the "Robotech Research Center" to stop the alien transmission. Somewhere in this mess, he learns that the bike can transform into an exosuit. This is an important detail, because in the process of attacking the Robotech Center, he gets blown out into space. Err... actually, he gets blown into an "anti-gravity simulator", which is Robotech's piss poor attempt to hide the actual plot of Megazone 23. See, in Megazone 23, the story doesn't take place on Earth at all. It's a ship in space that is mimmicking Earth's atmosphere, and the government is covering it up. That's the real plot of Megazone 23, but Robotech doesn't want you to notice that. It's kind of hard not to, though. So after Mark escapes from the "simulator" (nudge-wink!), I actually blank out, because he's allowed to get away, and I don't remember what happens next. But there's a hilarious telepathic exchange between Edwards and the aliens (telepathic, because there's no footage of characters from the two entirely different shows interacting) in which they say that Mark is no threat to them at all anymore, but he must be eliminated! Way to contradict yourselves in back-to-back sentences. Oh yeah, so there's this entire subplot that barely exists here, due to the amount of footage that was cut from the original Megazone 23, in which Mark's girlfriend wants to be in a movie. ...or something. So, this friend of Mark's girlfriend has footage of Mark's top secret robot motorbike. At some point, Edwards remembers the bike is important, so he has some government goons go and retrieve the footage of the bike while killing this girl who barely appears in the movie at all. You know, I'd remember the names of the characters, but this movie is so chopped up that there's no character developement at all, and so every time the scene changes, I'm like, "Who is this, again?". But, they had to add so many scenes from Southern Cross that a lot of Megazone was simply cut from the film. How much so? Well, according to Amazon (I don't have a copy of the original Megazone on hand), the original running time for Megazone is 81 minutes. Robotech: The Movie clocks in at 84 minutes. There's definitely way more than just three minutes of Southern Cross footage added to this film, plus there's a new fifteen-minute ending exclusive to this feature, so that means that quite a bit of Megazone 23 was left on the cutting room floor. Gee, no wonder none of this makes any fucking sense! There's also an amusing sequence in which the Earth government apparently catches wind of the plot to back up alien hard drives, and so the project is ordered to be shut down. Edwards immediately (and easily) overthrows this mighty government, which apparently houses itself in some rural mansion. Naming himself the new Prime Minister, he orders the upload to continue. Now, this is hilarious, because in a later scene, we have one of the Southern Cross characters blathering on about how Edwards would never betray the government. HE JUST OVERTHREW THEM! I know these people are in a completely different cartoon, but how could they not notice?! The aliens lose their faith in Edwards, because the transmission stopped for a mere moment, so they decide to unleash an all-out attack on Earth. After all, they're just about done downloading their long lost NES ROMs, anyway. So the aliens are like, "We have all of our patched J-RPGs and j-rock MP3s backed up, so now we will BURY YOU, EARTH MAN!" So one final boring assault is made on the alien vessel, only time time, Eve takes control of all of the ships and hovertanks so that the humans don't lose anymore. Meanwhile, in another movie, Mark confronts Edwards and gets his ass kicked. And this would actually be where the Megazone 23 ends, as this was to be continued in a second installment of a series. But since Robotech producer Carl Macek didn't want the movie to end on a sad note, he commissioned a new ending to be tacked on, in which Edwards is trying to stop some scientist character from escaping at the airport, for reasons that I'm unable to recall. So Mark finds this new ship (and subsequently, a new mecha) and kills Edwards in one of the single stupidest and non-sensical sequences I've ever seen. Literally, I had no idea what the hell was going on. With the aliens defeated and Edwards dead, Mark's cocktease girlfriend shows up at the airport and the two embrace as yet another horrible Eve song swells and the credits roll. Everyone sing along... THE FUTURE IS NOW! Oh god... I swear I will never make fun of the Transformers: The Movie soundtrack ever again. This was so much worse. Vince DiCola, I'm so sorry for ever mocking your score. Now, there is no VHS or DVD release of Robotech: The Movie movie anywhere in North America. Mercifully, both ADV and Streamline Pictures released an uncut dub of the movie, and both exist on DVD. Conversely, Robotech: The Movie had only a small VHS release in various non-US markets, and the initial full theatrical release was abandoned after a failed test market in Texas. That means that if you want to see this movie, you're going to have to download it. And as luck would have it, I found it recently on a Japanese YouTube-like service. So if you really, really want to see a bastardized rendition of Megazone 23 and love hearing terrible dubs, I recommend popping yourself some popcorn and sitting down for the most excruciating 80 minutes of your life. Now, if you watched this entire movie and regret it as much as I did, then there is a consolation. There's an episode of Destroy All Podcasts DX dedicated to the film. While it won't erase the pain, it will provide some post-cinematic giggles as they provide their own coverage of the horribly bad alien plot to download stuff from their old hard drive. Enjoy... http://www.collectiondx.com/node/2070 link talk nerdy to me

Jackie Chan is Awesome [May. 6th, 2008|06:30 pm] [ Tags | movie, youtube ] James Rolfe provides yet another tribute to Jackie Chan. By the way, if you're reading this RIGHT NOW at 6:30, tonight is the airing of the episode of Wheel Of Fortune I attended. You can't see me in the audience, though. link talk nerdy to me

Rocky Jumped A Park Bench [Apr. 30th, 2008|05:25 pm] [ Tags | movie, video games, youtube ] There are only a handful of people on the entire internet I'd actually like to meet. James Rolfe is one of them. Everyone knows him at the Angry Video Game Nerd, but when he's not taking a dump on old NES cartridges, throwing hadokens at old consoles, or harassing the Wally Bear hotline, he's actually one of the most astonishingly pleasant people I've ever seen. Even not having met him in person, I'm amazed everything I hear him interviewed or see him unscripted on the internet. He's almost bashful when confronted by his adoring fans. It's rare that we get to see the real James in a video, but every now and then, he lets his guard down and gives us a moment where he is the one acting like a fan. Check out his recent tribute to Rocky. link talk nerdy to me

Ben Stein Crushed Under THUNDERFOOT! [Apr. 22nd, 2008|07:00 am] [ Tags | humor, movie, religion, science, youtube ] Okay, yes, I still have a monsterous bug up my ass about this movie, even though it did absolutely nothing over the weekend. Watch as our old pal Thunderfoot lays to waste any doubt that Ben Stein, co-writer of Expelled, has absolutely zero understanding of the subject matter. How is it, that in 2008, we STILL have people in this discussion that don't know the fundamental differences between biology, cosmology, and chemistry? You'd think it would be very easy. The etymology alone should reveal the obvious blunders in Ben Stein's amazing stupidity. Biology=life. Cosmology=the cosmos. Chemistry=chemicals. Ben Stein=idiot. See? A third-grader could figure this out. Now, while Thunderfoot does make a valid argument about the slimey way in which Ben Stein and Mark Mathis went about getting interviews (essentially to gather sufficient footage from which to quote-mine), he failed to produce the single biggest trump card against Ben Stein's claim, which is simply that they had decided upon the name Expelled long before the interviews began. This can be proven by simply going to Who Is and typing in expelledthemovie.com. What you'll see is that the site was registered on March 1, 2007. Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, and Michael Shermer were all interviewed later that same year. Changed the name of the movie, eh? Bullshit. You had the title before you even interviewed any of the major biologists featured in the film. The only thing that keeps changing is the story that Mathis and Stein give to the media regarding this issue. To throw your own question back at you, Ben, what are you so afraid of that you have to hide something? Anyone? Anyone? Why do people get angry at creationists? Only creationists don't understand why. link 25 smartass remarks|talk nerdy to me

Like a fart in church... [Apr. 20th, 2008|05:50 pm] [ Tags | humor, movie, religion, science ] A visual metaphor of Expelled's weekend performance. Far from the projected $23 million that the executive producer forcasted, Expelled, the movie that teachers a new generation of creationists that ad hominem arguments are acceptable discourse, barely broke even at a measley 3.4 mil. To answer the belligerant question, "What are you (Darwinists) so afraid of?", the answer is, obviously, not Expelled, although I'm still worried about America continuing to wallow in the intellectual stupor that even allows such a movie to break even. Don't worry, Michael Moore, your record is in absolutely no danger. Not that you were worried about it, as you're probably just rolling out of bed right now. Actually, the movie didn't do too terribly bad, considering its budget. I mean, even for such a poor showing, the movie may actually yet thrive on the same principle of minor success that keeps food on Uwe Boll's table. That is to say, low budgets means that even low grossing movies can profit. Still, once all the money is divvied up, nobody's going to get rich off of this thing. Better start praying to the DVD fairy, Mathis. Actual attendance shown of a weekend screening of Expelled Okay, so it was in the top ten movies this month. But when you consider that it beat out the new Owen Wilson movie, that's not saying much. This is the dead season for movies. If this had been July, Expelled would have been eaten alive. If the movie even tops $5 million, that would be shocking, as the movie will inevitably begin its rapid slalom down the playbill. I give it another week before it's naturally selected out of the theaters and rendered extinct. Hey, Ben! America says... link talk nerdy to me

Expelled flunks in reviews [Apr. 18th, 2008|02:25 pm] [ Tags | movie, rant, religion, science ] Ah, there's nothing like the sweet, sweet sound of intelligence coming from movie reviewers across the nation: The New York Times: Resentment Over Darwin Evolves Into a Documentary Chicago Tribune: Ben Stein Monkeys With Evolution Chicago Sun-Times: Stein's Case Bad Beyond Belief E! Review: "Anyone? Anyone?" Salt Lake Tribune: Stein Shuns Intelligent Debate in Dishonest "Expelled" Star Tribune: Propoganda piece "Expelled" Flunks Baltimore Sun: "Expelled" Failing To Make An Argument The Flick Filosopher: Nazis! It’s all about Nazis! The single best commentary on the film comes from Maryann Johanson from the Flick Filosopher: "In a parallel universe even crazier than our own, Ben Stein is making a documentary about how the Nazis utilized the controversial theory of gravity to make bombs that fall from the sky to the earth, and so the theory of gravity must be wrong." Exactly. Of course, the opinions of various movie reviewers are largely irrelevent, especially when the movie already has a built in "teh media is ebil" clause. There are better resources for knocking down Ben Stein's wall of lies, damned lies, utter stupidity, and jaw-dropping ignorance. But it does feel good to look through the reviews and see that America is not so easily duped by nonsense. The scientists are doing a pretty good job of fighting back, but there is one thing that's kinda pissing me off about the way the scientists are handling this movie. They're all pussy-footing around the notion that someone could get fired over intelligent design. Damn it! You don't have to apologize for that! Any scientist who tries to publish a paper that says, "This system is too complex, therefore it was designed by a supernatural being", SHOULD BE FIRED! Any university professor who shows gross incompetence and/or outright lies to his/her students about the nature of a scientific theory SHOULD BE FIRED! Anyone who circumvents the review protocols of a publication for the sake of publishing something that is not appropriate for the theme of that publication SHOULD BE FIRED! We're talking about people who are paid to contribute to the education of tomorrow's thinkers and the improvement of society in general, and we're worried about whether or not they were fired for clearly not doing their jobs. Damn it! You don't need to pay someone to say "God did it". There are people who do that for free on SUNDAY! FIRED!!!! But I'm not going to let that spoil my feel-good buzz, because now I hear that the film makers have also drawn the wrath of Yoko Ono, seeing as they chose to use the John Lennon song Imagine without permission. Get 'em, Yoko! Sing at them! Make them beg for mercy. Unfortunately, I'm still sure that this movie is going to blow the doors off the movie theaters this weekend, but at least we can rest easy knowing when they're putting together the design for the DVD jacket, they'll have to stick to review quotes from religious organizations. There won't be any regular media quotes to put on the jacket. That is, unless they quotemine the reviewers the way they quotemine the scientists. "This ... is ... a ... movie." -Chicago Tribune link talk nerdy to me

Pogo For President! [Apr. 9th, 2008|07:15 am] [ Tags | comics, movie, youtube ] A few posts back, I went on one of my fan-enduced rants about how great the original King Kong is. The movie is a marvel of stop motion animation, even by modern standards. Sure, it's not as polished as the stuff we have today, but it was way ahead of its time. With he election season upon, how could I nearly forget one of my favorite stop-motion animated features of all-time, Pogo For President?! (a.k.a. I Go Pogo) If I'm not mistaken, I believe it was an adaptation of an earlier body of work by Pogo comic artist Walt Kelly, who was long dead by then. However, I've never seen the actual comic story this is based on. And not to show my age or anything, but this movie is so old that I actually remember video taping it off of Spectrum, a Chicago-based subscription TV service that worked by descrambling a broadcast UHF signal (Channel 66) during a time that Chicago didn't have cable services. Such a service is absurd by today's standards. Even then, it wasn't tremendously difficult to descramble analog pay channels. In fact, the TV in my bedroom was notorious for defeating scrambled channels. Hey, it wasn't like I modded it! I just noticed one day that I was picking up Wrestlemania for no apparent reason. It wasn't until some time later that I mentioned it to my dad, who, of course, didn't mind watching a few free movies every now and then at the expense of HBO, Showtime, and whatever pay-per-view service we had. But I think I'm digressing. The point is that this was the early 80s, and it was back in a day when shit like Gumby was what you had for stop-motion animation. I hate Gumby so much. In contrast, this was incredibly animated, and all you needed was one viewing to spoil you for life. It is impossible to watch Gumby after watching Pogo For President. Pogo truly set a standard that would later be matched (and then surpassed) by Wallace and Gromit. The voice work was top notch, too, featuring most prominantly the voices of Vincent Price and Jonathan Winters, the latter voicing two roles. The features a number of great actors with whom I'm not fully aquainted, but one that stands out is Arnold Stang, who some of you children of the 80s will remember as the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee. The movie had a very peculiar theory of color. Like the comic, it didn't use a lot of primary colors. For a film that takes place in a swamp, you very seldomly see the color green (aside from ol' Albert the alligator!). The trees were a very peculiar color, and the folliage was almost blue. Back in those days, I didn't realize that the animators were trying to copy the arresting style of the comic, so I tried in vain to adjust the tint on the TV, much the annoyance of my folks. You could tell that there was care put into this film so as not to dishonor the source property. Sadly, this was the 80s, and despite all creative attempts to keep this pure and wholesome, there was some 80sness that crept into the picture. Namely the music. While the music, for the most part, stayed in context with the southern setting, it did occaisionally creep into 80s pop by playing a number of irritating songs that had nothing to do with the story. All of a sudden, there'd be a Pogo music video in the middle of the movie. Also unfortunate is that there are no good videos online of Pogo For President, aside from this clip featuring Porky Pine voiced by Jonathan Winters. It doesn't really do the feature any justice, though. If you've never encountered Pogo before, you're in for an initial shock. The dialogue is almost entirely done in local color, meaning that everyone talks with a drawl, and the ignorance of the characters is played for comedy. You actually have to stop and think sometimes to figure out what subject matter they're muddling before you get the joke. For some time, I didn't even realize that Pogo was a comic series. That is until Bill Watterson, author of Calvin & Hobbes, mentioned Walt Kelly as one of his inspirations. It took me some time to track down an actual Pogo comic, and to this day, my own comic collection is sorely lacking. But, I do make an occaisional trip to the library, so I've been catching up on Pogo and his hilarious band of pals. Incidentally, Pogo did return to the funny pages, although obviously with new artists behind the strip. Almost universally panned, I didn't mind it so much. The new stips are of the same stylistic quality that has been lacking in newspaper comics since the 70s, even if Walt Kelly himself isn't doing the strip. In recent years, I've also learned that Pogo For President wasn't the only animated feature based on Pogo. There was another special, entitled The Pogo Special Birthday Special, animated traditionally by Looney Tunes veteran Chuck Jones. The cartoon predates its claymation counterpart, and, naturally, all the voices are completely different. Still, it was a pleasant surprise to find this. And thanks to Youtube, we now have the ability to see it... What petition do we have to sign to get these two pieces of animation on DVD? Together, even! No sense in releasing them separately. I'd pay for it. Editorial Note: Hey, wait a minute! I ran some system updates this morning, and Ijust noticed that the YouTube videos no longer have that annoying "Click to activate" thing anymore. Did Microsoft finally pay off whoever it was that was making them do that? At last! link talk nerdy to me

Kong Lives! [Apr. 7th, 2008|12:30 pm] [ Tags | movie, rant ] I had a chance to watch the 1976 King Kong for the first time last week on TCM. What can I say? I was totally unimpressed. Even for the era, the effects were laughable. Star Wars was only a year later. The movie was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, who later went on to create the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, a film studio that released such time honored classics as Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure, Maximum Overdrive, Evil Dead 2, and my all-time favorite, Transformers: The Movie! The film's idea of bringing Kong to life was to put a guy in a giant monkey suit. And no, I don't mean that he was dressed for success! I mean, it was really just a guy in a big hairy suit with all the believability that you'd expect from a Godzilla movie. (i.e., none whatsoever) King Kong himself couldn't really emote. He could be angry and he could be happy. ...and if you use your imagination, he can also look sad. The contrast between these emotions are extreme. When Kong is angry, he looks like death. His eyes are recessed into his pits, and his teeth are all yellow. But when he's happy... oh boy... suddenly he's a fucking Care Bear! I shit you not! He's all sunshine and lollypops for Jessica Lang. The only actual cool effect was when Kong was washing all the mud off of Jessica by dipping the already scantilly clad woman into the waterfall (Thank you Dino De Laurentiis!), and he blows her dry. His cheeks get all puffy and his lips pucker. That was the only time that I thought, "Oh wow, that's actually kinda cool.". Oh yeah! Jessica Lang really was the only good part of the movie. A very young Jessica Lang in tattered, revealing clothing, that is! *POP!* *BOI-OING!* I can't say much for her "acting", but she was making that movie very watchable. The movie also stars Jeff Bridges as some eco-hippie anthropologist (because Hollywood hadn't yet invented COOL scientist characters, like Alan Grant or Dr. Eleanor Arroway) and... *yawn* ...Charles Grodin as the stand-in for Carl Denham. Charles Scrotum's character was some oil tycoon who wanted to exploit the island's resources, even at the expense of robbing the natives out of their land. Oh jeez, all I want to do is watch a movie about a giant gorilla, but I have to sit through all this whiny crap about oil and capitalism! What, did Michael Moore and Al Gore jerk each other off while writing this hunk of turd? This movie also has the annoying trend that was carried over into Peter Jackson's version, where Kong is played much more sympathetically, even to the point where the human characters are expressing moral outrage at Kong's exploitation. Not that I enjoy seeing animals exploited, chained-up, and mistreated, but it's such a deviation from what happens in the original 1933 version. I'm just tired of people pretending as though there's an Ann/Kong substory/relationship in King Kong. In the original Kong, the human characters could really have cared less about Kong. Yes, the point of the movie was that well enough should have been left alone and that Kong was happier and safer on his own island, but there never was an element of sympathy from ANY of the human characters. Even as Kong risks his life to save Ann from various dangers, she's desperately trying to get away. She pretty much screams throughout the entire picture any time Kong's near her. She and Jack even participate in the exploitation of Kong that takes place in the theater scene. Neither she nor Jack even react when Kong is shot off the Empire State Building, and it was even Jack's idea to shoot him down. The character sympathy for Kong in 1933 was much more in retrospect, and it only really comes to light in the sequel Son Of Kong, but the less said about that movie, the better. All I can say is that I guess Merian C. Cooper wanted some redemption for the Carl Denham character, since he's basically a caricature of Cooper himself. The original film will always be my favorite of three for various reasons. For one, it's a 1930s flick, which means you get that nice snappy 1930s dialogue that I love so much. It's also a bit more of a fantasy film. The island doesn't require any explanation, and it doesn't need one. For some reason, there's an island of dinosaurs with a giant ape. End of story. Peter Jackson's film thought that Kong deserved some implicit biological explanations, so he inserted shots of Kong skeletons into the mountain top scene, and he even evolved the dinosaurs beyond their prehistoric counterparts. Now come on! The whole point of having dinosaurs on this island is so that we can see Kong take on a T-rex. Not that lame "V-rex". (Besides, shouldn't those therapods have feathers, Pete?) Oh, that reminds me! The one element totally absent from the 1976 Kong was danger on the island. There are no dinosaurs ANYWHERE! The only other sign of life on the island is this giant rubber snake that comes out of nowhere and attacks Jessica Lang. It's the only lucky break that allows for her rescue. Otherwise, you're left to assume that Kong is the only other lifeform on the whole fucking island. In fact, when the humans do a radar sweep of the island, they actually get a lone red monkey-shaped blip, indicating that Kong is nearby. Actually, the blip on the radar kind of looked more like Donkey Kong. Sadly, the cement factory stage was still nowhere in sight. I purchased the original King Kong on DVD when it was released in a 2005 box set with Son Of Kong and Mighty Joe Young. Alternatively, I could have gotten Kong by itself in a special tin case, but since it was the exact same price, I figured that the benefits of having two extra movies far outweighed that of having a lousy tin case. And here's a useless piece of trivia. (Trivial trivia, if you will!) The 1933 King Kong is the first movie to ever receive a commentary track. Sadly, the track originates from the laserdisc version and wasn't transferred to the current DVD version. (Not that I mind getting a commentary track featuring the legendary Ray Harryhausen!) Having seen all three renditions of Kong now, that leaves only the colorized 1933 version to see. Not surprisingly, it hasn't made the transfer to DVD. I understand that most people, including myself, prefer black and white movies to remain in black and white, but I've always found colorized films to be worth watching at least once. Even though most of those colorized films from the late 80s look as though they were colorized in crayon. I have seen clips of it, and while some of the coloring is mildly laughable, it's not entirely bad... link talk nerdy to me

Zelda Movie Trailer [Apr. 2nd, 2008|12:35 pm] [ Tags | humor, movie, video games, youtube ] I love April Fool's Day... http://movies.ign.com/dor/articles/863515/legend-of-zelda-movie-trailer/videos/legendofzelda_filmtrailer_040108.html link talk nerdy to me

Transformers "Soundtrack" [Mar. 24th, 2008|08:15 am] [ Tags | dvd, movie, music, rand, transformers ] Just for shits and giggles, I went to look up the Transformers movie soundtrack on Amazon. No, not the GOOD one from 1986. I mean last year's three-hour (or so it seemed) abomination about humans who beat up robots called Decepticons and a bunch of useless robots called Autobots who help them. (ugh... do I really have to get into that again?) So I'm listening to the samples they got there on Amazon, and I'm actually shocked that it's as bad as it is. Soundtracks are notoriously crapfests, but this one is particularly offensive as it skews extremely teen in it's target audience. For some reason, the producers though that the perfect soundtrack for a Transformers film would be emo. Why? That doesn't even seem to fit in with Michael Bay's smash-cut style of male egoism that made it impossible for him to have anyone other than the Marines be the stars of a movie about giant robots. It's pretty bad when Disturbed is the best act on the soundtrack. They're not anywhere near being my favorite band, but on this album, they might as well be Stan Bush. Everything else is just garbage. In all, there are only three other bands on here that I've even heard of. You got Smashing Pumpkins, but it's not even a good Pumpkins song. ...even though that might potentially be oxymoronical. Linkin Park: SUCKS. Goo Goo Dolls: SUCKS. The rest of them are all bands that I've never even heard of. You've got bands like Taking Back Sunday, Armor For Sleep, Idiot Pilot, and Julien-K... Who ARE these people? And get this, about a third of this album wasn't even in the movie. The producers simply threw extra songs on here and called them "inspired by", as if that's even true. Inspiring lousy musicians to write crappy songs And that's kind of irritating, because there were at least a few good songs in the movie, but since they were all written prior to 2007, I suppose that's why they were left out. The worst song on the album, though, is the Transformers theme by Mutemath. Oh god, why is it so hard for bands to cover the Transformers theme right? It's a single chorus line. There aren't even any verses. I feel like one of those old men who get get all upset whenever R&B singers do the national anthem. Even the 1986 Lion version, as terrible as it was, was not nearly as offensive as this one. Mutemath sounds like he's sedated, like there's this war going on with alien robots, but there's nothing to get excited about. Goddammit! This soundtrack should be exciting! You know who would do a great Transformers theme? Iron Maiden. link talk nerdy to me

LG Super Blu [Dec. 22nd, 2007|11:45 am] [ Tags | dvd, movie ] This is fucking cool! It's the first ever HD-DVD/Blu Ray player on the market. This is precisely the gadget that I've been waiting for. Too bad it's $900 (The video gives a different price, but that's because it's old). Oh well, I can wait a little bit longer in joining the HD format race. Eventually, this thing will come down in price, or someone will make a competing model that will be cheaper. Taking a cue from the great video game console wars of the 90s, I've learned to not be hasty in selecting the format of choice. On the other hand, there are films on both HD and Blu Ray that I wouldn't mind owning, and thus getting a hybrid player is rather tempting. Unless a whole pile of money lands in my lap, I'm not going to own one for a while. link talk nerdy to me

GOD FUCKING DAMN IT, Transformers sucked! [Dec. 20th, 2007|10:00 am] [ Tags | cartoons, dvd, movie, rant, transformers ] ( Bitch bitch bitch bitch! ) link talk nerdy to me

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