November 2010 Archives

So, it seems that Doritos and Pepsi Max are co-sponsoring this contest called Crash the Super Bowl, which invites all you clever video and film people out there to make a commercial and submit it to a website for judging. The makers of the top five videos for each product (ten total) will receive cash prizes, and then the top three videos for each brand (six in all) will air during the Super Bowl, whereupon the lucky winning filmmakers will be granted outlandish fame, vast fortunes, irresistible sex appeal, and a puppy.

Okay, not really, but the filmmakers will have the thrill and professional exposure of having their work appear during the biggest televised sporting event of the year. My friend and occasional co-conspirator Mike Chenoweth is hoping to get a piece of that action with a clever commercial that combines pitches for both products in a single concept that required, as he puts it, "15 Family-sized Doritos bags, 60 Pepsi Max cans and an amazing cast / crew!!!!"

His video is now up on the Crash the Super Bowl website. I can't embed it here, unfortunately, but you can have a look at it by clicking this. If you're amused, please consider voting for him, if for no other reason than so I can bask in his reflected glory...

DSC_0498_e, originally uploaded by jason.bennion.

Here's what it looked like today at the old Bennion Domicile, gateway to the fabulous Bennion Compound, following three days and nights of more-or-less continuous snowfall. Thankfully, I haven't had to be out in it much at all until now. I don't do Black Friday, and I didn't have to go back to work this morning, either. I've got a lot of unused vacation time that I'm trying to burn up before the end of the year. It's use-it-or-lose-it, a deeply silly policy that's supposed to encourage workaholic ad-men and -women to actually take vacations, but considering that the warm, vacation-y months are usually our busiest times, what happens is that everybody puts it off until they can't any longer, and then tries to figure a way to take it all at the end of the year. And thus the office ends up looking like a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie during November and December. That is, the place becomes very quiet, very cold from the lack of heat-generating lifeforms, and more than a little spooky. But no less hectic for the poor slobs who are present.

And I get to go back to that tomorrow... Sigh.

Black Friday, the day on which I must finally accept the inevitability of the Holiday Season, and stop muttering under my breath every time I hear a Christmas song on the radio. It's here now, so I may as well grit my teeth, hold on tight, and ride this bronco through to the end.

In the spirit of sucking it up and doing what you can to get by, here's a silly little something I threw together over at JibJab. Some of you may have already seen this on Facebook, but I think there's enough diversity in my audiences here and there that I'm going to risk repeating myself, because this one really amuses me. The music is provided by the awesome mash-up band Rock Sugar, and in a nice bit of synchronicity, the photo of my face that I used was taken at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last month... enjoy!!

Okay, that last entry was a major drag. I apologize for getting carried away like that. As I said, I have a difficult time with the holidays, and I do tend to get overwhelmed with anxiety and ennui as they approach. I really would like to just run away from them. I guess I've turned into my father after all.

That said, however, I do try to enjoy them. inasmuch as my particular form of social retardation allows. So in that spirit, I'm now going to do what I've seen so many other bloggers and Facebookers doing today and list off a few of the things for which I'm thankful on Thanksgiving. Well, maybe not actually on Thanksgiving, which is of course just another stressful damn holiday, but in general. You know what I mean...

Ah, Thanksgiving again, the portal to the madness and melancholy of the holiday season, the signpost warning that another year's end is coming up fast and you're going too fast to make the turn.

Via the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Facebook feed, I've been reminded that today is the 19th anniversary of the death of Freddie Mercury, due to complications relating to HIV/AIDS.

DSC_0495_crop, originally uploaded by jason.bennion.

Ah, Utah... a land of eccentricity no matter which way you look... in the people, certainly; in the landscape, unquestionably; but perhaps no place more than in the weather.

Last week, people were walking around in light jackets, and even shirtsleeves during the warmest part of the day. Then came a couple days of unnervingly strong and temperate winds, followed by torrential rains on Saturday night and then, with a temperature drop so abrupt it almost makes The Day After Tomorrow seem plausible -- well, okay, not really; nothing could actually do that -- the first big snowstorm of the year. I woke up yesterday morning to nine inches of the white stuff on my deck. There were good-sized tree branches down all over the valley, shattered by the weight of sodden snow caught in unshed autumnal leaves. The Girlfriend had an entire tree come down just outside her apartment, narrowly missing her bedroom window.

The state's official slogan is "Life Elevated" -- no, I don't know what that's supposed to mean either -- but I think it really ought to be "Like Drama?"

I know this is supposed to be funny, and it is, but there's a poignant little kernel of truth at the core of it, too. I can easily see myself grappling with these exact issues should I ever father a child...

Yes, the exact same issues. Times are different now, more complicated than when we were kids. Oh, how I can relate to this statement:

"We do not watch the Special Editions of the original trilogy in this house."

Remember a year or so back when I was so amused that the writers of the TV series Castle had inserted a metajoke about Firefly, the series that Castle lead Nathan Fillion had previously starred in? Well, they've done it again.

Feast your eyes on this awesome photo from Astronomy Picture of the Day, preferably while listening to the theme song from Cosmos:

That's astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson relaxing in the International Space Station's cupola, the big observation port that was mounted to the ISS earlier this year. This image is so similar to the cover art of many of the sci-fi novels I read as a kid that I'm frankly a little weirded out by it. I'm experiencing deja vu for a sight that only became possible a few months ago. A strange feeling... but a lovely sight indeed.

Click the image to see it larger, or go here to see it really large...

It occurred to me this morning that Van Halen's immortal hit song "Jump" -- which my Loyal Readers of a certain age will recall was released in 1984 -- is now as old as Chuck Berry's immortal "Johnny B. Goode" was the year "Jump" itself came out.

I don't know about you, but I'm having a hard time with that little factoid. How the hell have we all managed to live so long? I'm going to go lay down and ponder that in a minute, but first...

I imagine "daunting" must be a completely inadequate word for what actors experience when they take on roles that were made iconic by larger-than-life personalities like Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher. However, the cast of a local production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, currently showing at the Midvale Main Street Theater, show little sign of having a legendary Hollywood classic looming over them as they run through the story of a stubbornly individualistic man struggling against the petty institutional authority that wants to control him.

The Girlfriend and I were in the front row tonight to support our friend Geoff Richards, who has the part of Cheswick, one of the mental patients whose outlook is changed by the arrival of a rabble-rouser named McMurphy. Playing McMurphy, lead actor Garrick Dean does occasionally channel Nicholson's distinctive delivery, but honestly, I don't see how anyone couldn't in this particular role, and he never allows himself to fully lapse into a distracting impersonation. Lead actress Eve Speer is hissibly evil as Nurse Ratched, one of the all-time great villains of screen and literature, while Rog Benally, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is heart-breakingly effective as Chief Bromden. There were a few opening-night bumps -- the gentleman playing Dr. Spivey seemed to be having trouble recalling his lines and some recorded audio in one scene was a little too quiet and possibly mis-timed -- but overall, this was a thoroughly entertaining evening with a story that means a lot to me personally, and which I've not revisited in far too long. As Anne said, it's a surprising mixture of grim and uplifting. Hey, that's how they did it in the '70s, babe!

Oh, as for the most important thing, Geoff did a fine job -- he's really improving with each new role, and I'm not just saying that. If I can say this without sounding too awkwardly sentimental, it's been exciting to watch his progress over the past couple of years as he's gone from a total neophyte just beginning to investigate a new interest to a seasoned thespian with several plays under his belt.

Cuckoo's Nest has a fairly short run, only five more nights -- tomorrow and Saturday, and then the 18th, 19th, and 20th next weekend -- so if any of my local readers are interested at all, I advise them not to hesitate. You can order tickets online and save a couple bucks, or get them at the door. The venue is the former Comedy Circuit on Midvale's historic Main Street, if that helps at all. Man, I could tell a few stories about that place as well as its eccentric owner Spin, who just happens to be my neighbor these days...

I've been dubious of a sequel to TRON -- one of the touchstone films of my childhood and a minor classic in my book -- ever since I first started to hear whispers about the project a few years ago. I don't quite understand what's motivating it after nearly three decades, and the emphasis in the early promotional materials on the awesome new effects and the 3D presentation did little to ease my mind. TRON: Legacy has always smelled more like a unnecessary remake than a proper sequel, and y'all ought to know by now how I feel about remakes to movies that still work for the sake of flashy new FX. However, my resistance to T:L has been weakening with each new trailer, and with today's release of the third and final one before the film opens next month, I am feeling cautiously optimistic:

Maybe it's just my sentimentality for beloved characters getting the better of me, as it likely did when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was coming out, but this looks like it might be all right after all. I got a big old grin when I glimpsed Flynn's Arcade, and the ENCOM touch-screen control panel, and the familiar silhouette of the dematerializing laser rising into position behind Flynn's son Sam. And of course seeing Bruce Boxleitner and Jeff Bridges in this universe again delivered an exquisite little zap of pleasure... I'm really hoping Boxleitner gets more to do than just the expository scene we see in the trailer. Perhaps Alan Bradley's alter ego, the movie's namesake character, puts in an appearance somewhere in the computer world? And if Cindy Morgan cameos as Lori and/or Yori as well... but that's probably too much to hope for.

To be honest, the movie does appear to be aping the major plot points of the original, but I'm willing to overlook that if it's otherwise done well. (Referring to Indiana Jones again, Last Crusade was in many ways a remake of Raiders, but I enjoyed it just about as much as the original.) My biggest concern right now is that TRON: Legacy looks like it takes itself very seriously, maybe too much so. The original was pretty light in tone, for the most part, but I'm not seeing a lot of wonder or humor in this trailer... and this is the most fun-looking of the three! Filmmakers these days seem to mistake thoughtfulness for grim broodiness, but like the title character in Sullivan's Travels, I've come to see the value of escapism in difficult times, and I'd really rather just revisit the Game Grid without some big heavy (but ultimately superficial and unsatisfying) theme being ladled over my lightcycle races. At least the Apocalypse Now angle that would've had Flynn playing an around-the-bend villain along the lines of Brando's Colonel Kurtz seems to have been nothing more than a rumor. I hate it when characters who were heroic in an earlier film turn bad in a sequel; it's not dramatic, it's lazy sensationalism, and it's a slap in the face to fans who grew up admiring the original vision of the character.

Anyhow, TRON: Legacy is set to open December 17, if it looks like your sort of thing...

I wish there was some way of making clear to the account people I work with -- despite what they seem to believe, I don't actually work for them -- that the time I spend on the phone with them updating them on the status of their projects is time I could be, you know, working on their projects.

I'm just sayin'.

Not to belabor the point, but this is a tremendous pet peeve of mine. I know my job; I know the schedule. I know they've got people above them calling every fifteen minutes, probably because those folks in turn have people above them who are calling every ten minutes. But I also know that account people have a nasty tendency to make promises their butts can't keep, rather than setting realistic expectations, and that they also tend to think that their projects are the only ones that matter, indeed the only ones that even exist in this whole big corporate universe. Well, sorry, kids, but here's the score: you are not the only account person sending me work, and everybody says their particular job is urgent. It's all urgent, okay? So just take a number and chill; I'll get your project done. But I'll get it done a lot faster if you quit bugging me all the damn time...

[Ed. note: This review has already appeared in a slightly different form on my LibraryThing page as well as on Facebook. Just in case you're keeping track of every place I appear on the InterWebs.]

Blockade Billy is the latest work from Stephen King, perhaps my single favorite author; it's an uncharacteristically slim volume comprising two novella-length works.

The title story is narrated by an elderly baseball coach as he relates the tale of a (deliberately) forgotten player from the 1950s, a rookie catcher who was brilliant at the game but harbored a terrible secret. King pulls off the improbable trick of keeping a reader who has no interest in sports (me) turning the pages through descriptions of plays that would have been tedious, if not incomprehensible, in another writer's hands. However, the mystery at the heart of the story doesn't build beyond a mild curiosity and the big revelation at the end is a let-down, lacking the author's usual punch and suggesting this story was really just an exercise in capturing an old man's voice and the rhythms of a game that King clearly loves. In those goals, at least, it succeeds. As a story, not so much.

The second half of the volume, "Morality," has an interesting premise: Would you be willing to do an immoral thing for a large sum of badly needed money, and, if so, what would be the consequences on your psyche (or your soul, I suppose) and your marriage? Would it make any difference if you weren't religious? Or is morality something that transcends belief in God? Unfortunately, it's a premise that seemed all too familiar to me, recalling the film Indecent Proposal, among other things, and the actual immoral act the protagonists are called to perform is so random and ultimately so minor in nature that I couldn't help but wonder what the big deal was. Yes, what they do is crappy and unquestionably wrong, but it didn't seem all that horrible -- they didn't kill anyone, it didn't involve sex, and no permanent damage was done. Perhaps this was King's point, that even the smallest actions can have hugely corrosive effects, but I simply didn't buy it as it was developed. The reactions of the characters seemed overblown for what they'd actually done.

Overall, Blockade Billy is a disappointment, a minor effort from an author who can do better, but sadly seems to be growing more and more inconsistent with age. Of course, he's churned out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of words over the past 40 years, so eventually the creative well has got to run low...

** 1/2 out of *****

I don't recall exactly how I stumbled across this earlier today, but I thought it was really creative and different:

The description at the source reads:

My friend dressed up as the scroll from Star Wars. Her headband reads “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”

Hey, anybody can go to a party dressed as an Ewok...

For all the good it will do. I try not to be too sour about this and remember that we Americans are privileged to be able to cast our votes and have our voices heard, etc., etc. But I have to say, it's sometimes difficult to gin up any real enthusiasm for voting when you live in a place that's so overwhelmingly tilted toward one side of the partisan spectrum... and your philosophy aligns with the other side. Hell, the Democrats didn't even run a candidate for state-level representative in my district this year. I had a choice between a far-right Republican and a somewhat-less-far-right Republican who's running as an Independent. And on the federal level, the only Democrat who ever manages to win in Utah -- and he's not even my representative, naturally -- is so much of a Blue Dog that he'd probably be called a Republican any other place in the country, and yet he still has to fight tooth-and-nail every election against those who cry that he's too liberal.

I understand why people don't participate in the process, I really do. When it feels like your vote and your voice don't matter, that things are going to go a certain way regardless of what you think or feel or do, and moreover they're always going to go that way, well, what's the point? You may as well be farting into a strong wind for all the impact you have on the inevitable outcome. And yet I go and do it every two years anyhow. It might be because my parents and Schoolhouse Rock instilled me with a sense of civic responsibility, even in the face of utter futility. But I suspect it's something more childish, a simple act of defiance intended to show somebody, somewhere, that not everybody in this state is marching in lock-step, that there is a different opinion out there. Not that my decidedly left-of-center opinion counts one bit in Utah, of course. And so goes another election year...

I don't have anything substantive to say about that big Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert thing that happened in Washington over the weekend. As I've noted before, I'm not a big fan of irony, and I'm also not comfortable with the way Stewart and Colbert blur the already-fuzzy line between entertainment and real journalism. And when you've got the organizer of the thing, Stewart himself, saying that he only wanted people to show up (as quoted in the article I linked), well, the whole thing seems kind of pointless, doesn't it? Yes, yes, it was very cute and clever of all those people to create absurd protest signs that mock the messages and grammar of the tea-party signs, but was anything really accomplished? I don't know... I didn't attend and I didn't watch it on TV, so maybe I'm missing the point. It wouldn't be the first time.

All my grumbling aside, however, I couldn't resist passing along one particular image from the rally. If you've been hanging around this blog for any length of time, I think you'll be able to figure out why:

Nice to see my personal constituency so well-represented at the rally, even if this guy did conflate the Cylons of my beloved classic Battlestar with the slang terminology ("toasters") of the remake. Ah well. It's the thought that counts.

Here's a pretty good runner-up, also from the geek category:

You can see more of this sort of thing here, if you've a mind to. Giving credit where it's due, the Cylon photo is courtesy of Flickr user Caobhin; Xena comes from Flickr user Kyle Rush.