March 2009 Archives

Even though I watched it faithfully, I was always somewhat frustrated by the TV series Angel. The show had some very cool ideas at the core of it -- I especially liked the notion that Los Angeles is full of supernatural beings who go about their business right under the noses of we oblivious humans -- but it never really seemed to find its footing, even after five seasons on the air. Sometimes it was like a detective series with monsters instead of criminals, sometimes a variant of Highlander in its focus on immortal angst, sometimes a dark, apocalyptic fantasy about the fast-approaching end of the world, and sometimes it was a satire of all of the above. While Angel's parent series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was also a mish-mash of different elements and story types, Buffy gelled into a coherent whole more often than not. By contrast, I never got a clear sense of what the spin-off was actually supposed to be. I kept tuning in, though, because I liked the characters, the thing that keeps me coming back to a lot of shows that really aren't all that good (and keeps me away from some, arguably, that are; in the final analysis, a big reason why I never warmed to Ron Moore's Galactica was the fact that I disliked his characters).

Anyhow, one of Angel's more memorable characters was a gent named Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan, a.k.a. Lorne, a gentle-souled, green-skinned, telepathic demon who owned a karaoke bar and could psychically "read" others when they sang. My understanding is that he was originally intended as a one-episode plot device, but, like so many other secondary characters who go on to steal a show, Lorne proved popular enough that he was brought back for an encore, then became a semi-regular and finally a full cast member with the actor's name -- Andy Hallett -- in the opening credits. Andy would appear as Lorne in 76 of Angel's 110 episodes.

I was shocked and saddened this morning to learn that Andy Hallett died on Sunday at the far-too-young age of 33. According to a story on NPR, Hallett's been suffering from congestive heart failure for five years, basically ever since Angel wrapped production. Hallett's entry on IMDB indicates he appeared in only three other projects, the last of which was a voiceover job in 2005. What a damn shame... even my grandfather, who died young of heart failure and has always kind of been my personal benchmark for these things, made it to 37.

There was another round of layoffs at work today, a big one. Looking for the positive aspects, it did take out a couple of people who've been thorns in my side, but also a few more friends, which really sucks. As before, I remain reasonably confident that my own job isn't going anywhere any time soon. However, watching the slow parade of the unfortunate march one by one into the HR office and then back to their cubes to collect their personal effects with a blank-eyed escort hovering nearby... well, I can think of grimmer sights but I prefer not to. The worst was seeing a sweet, soft-spoken man in his fifties struggle to control his tears as he took down his Ghosts calendar and laid it carefully into the top of a packed bankers box. I didn't speak to him, didn't say goodbye, and I wish I had. I was oddly embarrassed, as if I personally had done something to him merely by not getting my own phone call from HR. I think I can imagine what he was thinking, though. At his age -- not quite old, but a long way from the eager-eyed hipsters fresh out of college who swarm through our industry like goldfish in a pet store -- he was probably imagining how he's going to look in a blue smock with "Welcome to WalMart" printed on the chest.

Not quite as iconic an image as that famous portrait Dorothea Lange captured 73 years ago, but it haunts me just the same...

Since writing about the Warner Archive DVD-on-demand service the other day, I've been thinking about which currently MIA movies I'd most like to own in the form of a shiny silver disc. A few of them are pretty obscure, a couple are somewhat less so (i.e., I'm willing to bet my readers have at least heard of them), and four of them are beloved classics that simply have no good reason to be unavailable, aside from intransigence and the nonsense that so often just seems to happen in Hollywood.

In no particular order:

Yesterday over on Facebook, I was tagged by Kelly -- better known in these parts as Jaquandor -- to do a meme about my life as a geek. I of course complied immediately, because, well, it's a meme. I'm reposting the results here, with some tweaks to the formatting and a few comments that I've reconsidered:

As you all know, I'm no fan of Ron Moore's reimagined Battlestar Galactica series. I honestly did try to appreciate it on its own terms, but it just never hooked me and I gave up on it midway through the first season. Still, I have followed some of the online commentary about the show over the years, and I was curious today to see how things wrapped up in the series finale last Friday night.

Apparently, aspects of the conclusion left a lot of people scratching their heads. From what I gather, the show ended with the ragtag fugitive fleet arriving at Earth -- our Earth -- some 150,000 years ago, and discovering the place inhabited by spear-carrying hunter-gatherers. The weary colonials ultimately decide to abandon their ships and technology and blend in with the primitives on the planet below. Some of the comments I'm seeing out there question this, as well as Starbuck's ultimate fate and the revelation of, for lack of a better word, "angels" who were overseeing, and perhaps guiding, everything. A recurring sentiment seems to be "what the hell was that all about?"

Well, this aging fan of the much-disparaged 1978 version of BSG is chuckling his head off right now, because these elements are all right out of the original series. Recall the opening prologue from the original: "There are those who believe that life here began out there... far across the universe with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Toltecs... or the Mayans... or the Egyptians..." By "going native," Ron Moore's colonials are simply living up to the "ancient astronaut" underpinnings of Glen Larson's Galactica.

The angels and Starbuck turning out to be some kind of spirit-being who knows the way to Earth have their precedents in the original, as well. In the original-series episode, "The War of the Gods," the Dirk Benedict version of Starbuck, along with Apollo and Sheba, encounter the Ship of Light and the highly advanced beings who dwell within it, angels, for lack of a better word, who declare that they are watching out for their "younger brothers and sisters." They seem especially interested in Starbuck, and tell him that, "as you are, we once were; as we are, you may one day become." When he and his companions return to the Galactica, they bring with them subliminal impressions of Earth's location. Sounds to me like Ron Moore was perhaps a little more faithful to the original series than I -- and the young fans of the new version who've always been so nasty about the old one -- really understood.

Now, as I said, I didn't watch the new BSG, so it's possible I'm completely misinterpreting what I've been reading about the finale. But I gotta tell you, I'm feeling some degree of vindication right now. I think I'm going to celebrate by cracking open a bottle of fine ambrosia and seeing if I can rustle up some mushies...

I've been trying for over a week to find a suitable entry point into a touchy subject, to craft some kind of narrative or something, but everything I've tried has turned out sounding glib or melodramatic or was otherwise not the right approach. So I'm just going to get straight to the point.

You may have seen the recent item about two female junior-high-school teachers in Bountiful, Utah -- that's a sleepy bedroom community just north of SLC, for our out-of-state friends -- who were arrested for allegedly having sex with one of their students, a 13-year-old boy. Stories like this are not uncommon these days and I usually just tune them out because they seem to me more like a topic for The Jerry Springer Show than legitimate news. But in this case, my ears pricked up because, as it happens, I know one of the accused.

Valynne Bowers is an old classmate of mine. Bingham High School, Class of '87. I used to ride the bus with her, back when she was a teenage girl named Valynne Asay. I shared classes with her. I saw her only 18 months ago at our 20-year reunion. I consider her a friend. And because she is my friend, what I'm about to say will probably be dismissed as misguided loyalty. Take it that way if you wish. But the truth is Valynne's situation brings together a lot of thoughts I've had over the past decade or so about America's neurotic attitudes toward sex and young people.

Valynne has pleaded not guilty, and I choose to believe that until it's proven otherwise in court. But even if there was no question that she did it, I could not bring myself to condemn her. And no, it's not just because she's an old friend. It's because I believe people have reasons for doing what they do, even the things that society frowns upon, and especially when those things involve sex. Sex is complicated and irrational, tied up in equations of self-esteem and power that aren't always as black and white as we like to pretend.

For all the thousands of movies that are available on DVD, there are many more that languish in the studio vaults, mostly forgotten or "smaller" films that are deemed too obscure to justify mass production. In other words, the studios don't want to take the chance of getting stuck with a bunch of unsold discs because there wasn't enough demand for a particular title. That's business, and it's completely understandable.

Still, it seems that just about every movie ever made has somebody who loves it, and it's a real drag when something you love has been consigned to the Memory Hole because of brute economics. Bootlegging is an option, and I'll admit to having occasionally resorted to it myself in certain cases. But I've always been somewhat less than comfortable with bootlegs, for various reasons. I'd prefer to have the real deal, i.e., a legitimate, professionally made DVD, if only one were available.

I've just learned that at least one movie studio has finally come up with a workable solution for this problem. Jaime over at Something Old, Nothing New has pointed me to The Warner Archive, a new service that allows you to special-order catalog films which are then manufactured on demand. There are more details here, but the bottom line is that for only $19.95 each, you can get these obscurities on a genuine, professionally made DVD with a presentation quality equal to any other Warner Bros. title.

Jaime notes that:

Most of the titles they have at the moment can be described as minor films of major stars: lots of not-yet-on-DVD movies by popular stars with huge filmographies, like Cary Grant, Norma Shearer, Clark Gable. There are a bunch of films that were released on VHS but never made it to DVD, and some real curios...

In other words, stuff that's not likely to appeal to the average consumer. However, browsing through the 137 titles currently available (I understand there are more coming), I see at least four movies that I might be interested in owning: Countdown, a space-race drama starring a young James Caan; The Rain People, which was Francis Ford Coppola's first movie; Oxford Blues, an early-80s Rob Lowe vehicle that was filmed on location in Oxford, England, and helped fuel my own interest in traveling to England; and Wisdom, another '80s trifle with Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore. None of these are great movies (well, I haven't seen The Rain People, but I'm guessing there's a reason why it more widely known), but they do have their pleasures, and I'm delighted that they're finally going to be available for psycho collectors like myself. I hope the other studios launch their own versions of this service as well...

The way the economy's been lately, I wouldn't be surprised if these end up being worth more than good old-fashioned dollars:

Starbuck by `diablo2003 on deviantART

They're certainly cooler looking than U.S. greenbacks. The design was apparently created for a Star Wars convention that was held a couple years ago, according to the artist's notes. I don't know if it was ever actually printed in faux-currency form or not; if it was, I wouldn't mind having a couple for my collection, so if anyone knows where I can get some, give a shout, okay?

Via Boing Boing, of course...

Courtesy of Lileks:

...neon is the most entrancing and civilized form of signage ever invented - and... the 30s and 40s style was adult and sophisticated in a way nothing has touched since. But for an adult culture, I suppose you need lots of - what’s the word? - adults.

Anyone care to discuss?

Here's something fun for your St. Patty's Day, a trio of ads for a New Zealand TV network's upcoming airing of the execrable movie Alien vs. Predator (not to be confused with the excellent four-part comic-book miniseries Aliens versus Predator, which was published in the early '90s). The movie stinks, but I love the clever ads, especially this one:

As always, click to embiggenate.

Via the Bad Astronomer, who dubbed the campaign "beyond awesome." Total agreement here.

Like the title says, "Blarg." I feel like I've been dragged sideways through an old-fashioned keyhole, then shaken out and tossed over the back of a chair like a pair of unwashed Levi's. Which is my colorful way of saying that the past week has been unusually rough. I'm utterly drained, in just about every way you can think of: physically, intellectually, emotionally. Soon to be financially, too, thanks to that tax situation I mentioned a while back.

So what's been going on that's so terrible? Well, for one thing, there have been a couple of items in the news this week that have hit me like a solid fist to the belly; they'll be getting their own blog entries when I get the chance to write them up. I've also had to contend with my semi-annual journey into the Black Hole of Depression; it hits every year around this time, probably as a result of the gloomy, final sputters of winter, as well as the usual annual reminders of things I prefer to keep to myself. Let's just say that every so often, I notice I'm a long, long way from being the man I used to believe I was, and the life I used to think I was destined to live. I can't help but imagine my 21-year-old self would be incredibly disappointed in my 39-year-old self, and that really gets me down.

The big problems this week, however, have been health-related. The Girlfriend and I have both been sicker than dogs, and, in her case, things got bad enough to require a trip to the emergency room.

"Oh, how I love the future. How else would I be able to relive my past?"

--Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer

You know, there's something curiously satisfying about listening to dusty old CDs while you do long-neglected household chores...

Here's one of my rediscoveries, Bonnie Raitt performing "Angel from Montgomery," a beautiful, sad, authentic song I loved back around 1990 or so and then somehow forgot about until today:

It's a huge cliche, of course, but they really don't write 'em like this anymore. At least, not that I ever hear.

A health-related PSA seen on a placard on the train last night:

Breathe Easier
Get Screened

Their is a good chance it will save your life.

Their is a chance? I can't tell you how much that hurts...

This is kind of incongruous, coming as it does on the heels of yesterday's remark that I really don't like living here in the future, but I was somewhat excited this morning to have my first in-the-wild encounter with one of those Kindle electronic-book gadgets everybody's been talking about. It was in the hands of a well-dressed older woman sitting a few rows ahead of me on the train.

And why, you may be asking, would a self-confessed semi-Luddite late-adopter like myself be thrilled to glimpse a device that signifies yet another step away from my precious Way Things Used to Be? Well, partly it was just the novelty of actually seeing an object that I've heard so much about but which has been, up until now, only an abstraction. That whole experience of "oh, there's one of those things!" That's always fun. But what really pushed my buttons was a fleeting sense that I'd somehow stumbled into a Star Trek episode. Seriously. Even though I've seen plenty of photos of the Kindle (obviously, since I identified it easily enough; I even recognized it as a Kindle 2 instead of the earlier model), I'll be damned if my first thought wasn't, "Hey, that woman is looking at one of those thingies Picard was always using on Next Gen!" I've been saying for years that the world seems to be inevitably becoming more like Star Trek; here we have another piece of evidence in support of that theory.

So, to review, I don't like living in the future because I'm a nostalgic bastard who prefers the past, but I was excited to see a futuristic device because it resembled a prop seen on a 20-year-old television show that was set... in the future.

Yeah, I'm confused, too. Welcome inside my head.

Just reposting a couple of things I saw out in the 'sphere today that resonated with me.

Mark Evanier lists those who were not included in this year's "in memoriam" video at the Oscars:

Patrick McGoohan was in some pretty good movies and George Carlin was in more than you might think...but neither was included. Nor was Eartha Kitt. Nor was composer Neal Hefti. Nor were Harvey Korman, Earle Hagen, Mel Ferrer, Alexander Courage, John Phillip Law, Irving Brecher, George Furth, Beverly Garland or Guy McElwaine. There were several studio execs and one publicist included but not Bernie Brillstein.

But the startling omission, of course, was Don LaFontaine, who not only became a superstar of movie trailers but also served as the announcer of the Oscars several years.

I noticed LaFontaine's absence myself and thought that was deeply weird; I honestly did not remember that many of the others Mark mentions had died in '08. I wonder why people get left out of these things? I imagine there are time constraints that prevent the listing of everybody who passes on during any given year, but what determines whether someone is worthy of inclusion? It can't be because the missing stars aren't big enough. Lots of people would know Patrick McGoohan, George Carlin, and Harvey Korman, surely...

Sometimes, when everything is grim and the world is going to hell around you, the best thing to do is just try and regress back in your mind to the age of about fifteen or so. I find that looking at pretty girls helps (specifically, non-trashy-douchebag-loving girls). If there aren't any real, live pretty girls in the vicinity (or if they all happen to be of the TBL variety that was infesting the mall yesterday), I tend to prefer some old-fashioned pin-up art, the sort of thing that goes by the name of cheesecake or "good girl art." Here's a nice example I picked up in my blog-reading:

I have no idea who this character is -- she apparently comes from a comic-book called Airboy, which I am totally unfamiliar with (although it sounds like the sort of thing I'd probably groove on) -- but I like the drape of her jodhpurs. This sketch is by Gene Gonzales, via Michael May. Gene's got a lot of other fun pieces over at his blog, including a nifty refutation of George Lucas' odd notion that there aren't any foundational undergarments in his far, far away galaxy...

Ah, girls. I feel better now...