Monthly Archives: March 2008

Mar292008

Stop! I’m Going to Have to Put You on the Cardboard Game Grid!

Okay, so it seems that the hot new fad sweeping the InterWebs is “sweded” movies, i.e., ultra-cheap homemade re-creations of well-known films using cardboard, tin foil, and household items as props and costumes. The inspiration behind this phenomenon is apparently a Jack Black comedy called Be Kind, Rewind (which hasn’t even been released yet) in which a couple of dim-bulb video-store owners accidentally erase their entire inventory of VHS cassettes and then start replacing those movies with their own half-assed reproductions. Which of course their customers love more than the originals, causing the two to be elevated into folk heroes or something.

Yeah, I know, it doesn’t sound very funny to me either, but I guess this is the sort of thing the kids are going for these days. And to think our parents didn’t get Yahoo Serious! Oh, wait… neither did I.

Anyhow, the aesthetic at work in these “sweded” flicks — the term comes from one Be Kind, Rewind character’s BS explanation that the replacement movies are the Swedish versions — seems to be “the cheesier, the better.” And oh, god, is this stuff cheesy. Not just cheesy, but cheez-ee. I’ve seen a lot of amateur movies in my time, and even been in a few, but these things strike a new low in sheer painfulness. There is, for example, a sweded version of Star Wars that consists of people wearing cardboard X-wings and TIE-fighter panels chasing each other around a lawn while somebody hums the theme music. I couldn’t even finish that one, it was so embarrassing. Click that link at your own peril.

I’ll be honest, I think the whole sweding thing is just plain dumb. But for every rule, of course, there are exceptions. The following video, sent to me by my buddy Chenopup, is so audacious, so ambitious, so well-done, that I simply couldn’t help but sit in awe as it played for the first time. It’s the lightcycle scene from Tron, completely redone in cardboard, Saran Wrap, and stop-motion animation… and it is frakkin’ awesome:

 

Just for reference, here’s the original scene:

I’m amazed at how close the sweders got their version to the original… of course, now I want to go watch the real Tron again. Look, it’s The Dude in a funny hat!

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Mar262008

Iron Man-Hulk Crossover Coolness

One element that has so far been missing from every major film derived from a comic book is the sense that the titular hero shares his world with a whole bunch of other superheroes. For example, Spider-Man-the-film gave no hint that Spider-Man-the-character was only one of a vast pantheon of characters who all live in the same world. Superhero movies to date have all been entirely self-contained and, so far as the novice viewer can tell, each tells of the only super-powered person on the planet.

That’s not how it is in the comics medium, where the world is lousy with super-powered people and creatures, and any character who is owned by a particular publisher is likely to show up in any other character’s book at some point. This is especially true in the case of the so-called Marvel Universe, the shared setting of all the titles published by Marvel Comics, so it is somewhat surprising that all the films based on Marvel titles — and that would be most of the superhero flicks of the last ten years or so, including X-Men, Daredevil, The Hulk, Ghost Rider, and The Fantastic Four — have not so far included any crossovers between them. (Actually, I guess it’s not that surprising, since crossovers would be meaningless — if not actually confusing — for the average viewer who sees only one of these films a year and doesn’t know anything about comics.)

But now, in a summer that’s going to see two major movie releases based on Marvel titles, it looks like the powers that be are going to throw in the sort of thing that comics fans have enjoyed for years: according to this blog, Robert Downey, Jr., who is playing the title role in the much-anticipated Iron Man, will have a cameo appearance in The Incredible Hulk. There is also some rumbling that another big name who is supposed to star in another upcoming Marvel-licensed flick — the rumor mill says that it will be Samuel L. Jackson playing the character Nick Fury — will appear briefly in Iron Man.

I think this brilliant, a nice gesture to comics fans and a good marketing ploy to promote the other movies based on the same universe that will be released around the same time. Now, if they could just somehow get all the movies to meet the same standard of quality…

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Mar262008

Has D.B. Cooper’s Parachute Been Found?

I have a real affection for unsolved mysteries, the kinds of stories that forever fascinate people so long as we never definitively learn what actually happened. Did Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan run out of fuel, crash in open water, and drown, or did they manage to set down on some uncharted rock somewhere and live as castaways, at least for a time? Were Butch and Sundance killed in a shootout with government troops in Bolivia or did one or both of them manage to slip away and return to the U.S., where they assumed new identities and lived to be old men? Was Brushy Bill Roberts really Billy the Kid, as he claimed, or was he just crazy? The possibilities are invariably more exciting than mundane (and frequently very grim) fact, which is why I always find myself rejoicing a bit when some new piece of evidence in these cases raises more questions than it solves.

Consider, for example, this story about the discovery of an old parachute in southwestern Washington. In a nutshell, some kids found a ‘chute partly buried in the woods near where the notorious hijacker D.B. Cooper is believed to have jumped from a 727 way back in 1971 with $200,000 in cash, and there’s some speculation that the ‘chute may have been his.

That’s pretty cool on its own, but here’s the interesting thing about today’s news: Some of Cooper’s money was found on a beach near Vancouver in 1980; the official theory has long been that Cooper did not survive his jump and the recovered cash had washed down the Washougal River to arrive on the beach. But if Cooper came down in the area where this parachute has been found, there’s no way that recovered cash could have naturally ended up in the Washougal. In other words, Cooper may have survived his landing and somehow lost some of his dough miles away, or else somebody else found the money and later dropped some of it in the Washougal. Either way, it’s a far more interesting thought than the image of a dead hijacker hanging in a tree somewhere with a broken neck and his ill-gotten booty falling into a river. (For the record, I like to believe that Cooper survived, eluded capture, and lived it up somewhere. I also like to think that Butch Cassidy returned to the States and visited his sister in 1925, just as she claimed. What can I say? I’m a romantic with a thing for lovable rogues.)

The FBI is currently examining the parachute to determine if it’s the right type and age to have been Cooper’s. I hope it is, for the sake of a good story…

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Mar252008

So, About All the YouTube Clips Lately…

I know LOLcritters aren’t to everyone’s liking, but many of them amuse me, and this one seems really appropriate given the nature of my last several posts:

***IMAGE MISSING***

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Mar252008

The The Impotence of Proofreading

In case you missed a memo, let me remind everyone that I earn my meager wages working as a proofreader. That means I’m a professional nitpicker, or, as the various people who are beholden to my demands would say, “a big pain in the ass who holds up the process over minuscule stuff that nobody cares about and who doesn’t understand the aesthetics of the piece.” Yeah, whatever. Adding a comma or making the capitalization in that heading consistent with how it’s done in all the other headings is not going to affect your precious aesthetics; on the contrary, I think consistency will make the piece more pleasing.

You’ll forgive me if I come across as hostile, but the sad truth is that I don’t often feel very appreciated by my coworkers, and no one outside the biz is ever impressed when I tell them what my job is. Hell, few people understand what it is that proofreaders actually do; some even go so far as to wonder why we’re necessary when Word has a perfectly good spellchecker built right in. As an answer to that argument, allow me to present the following explanation of why spellcheckers can’t yet replace a real, literate human eye, and most probably never will unless there’s some kind of major breakthrough in AI tech… which I’m not too worried about:

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Mar242008

I Love Public Transit

Yeah, this is pretty much what my commute home tonight was like. Only instead of a cute little puppet, I was being eyeballed by a scruffy guy who smelled suspiciously like onions and cheap bourbon…

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Mar242008

A Shat Sampler

For my own tribute to The Greatest Thespian of Our Time — and I’m only being somewhat facetious here, because I honestly do think William Shatner is much better than most people give him credit for, at least when he’s really trying and not just collecting a paycheck — I’d like to present some of his finest moments in front of the camera.

Continue Reading…

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Mar242008

Happy Seventy-seven, Bill!

The Shat is

Ack! I am ashamed to admit that I’ve been remiss in my fanboyish duties: I forgot to observe The Shat’s seventy-seventh birthday on Saturday!

Luckily, E.E. Knight was on the ball; to honor the One True Kirk, he posted up a photographic tribute to the lovely ladies of the original Star Trek. I could be a little nitpicky with some of these choices — several of these ladies were Spock’s, Scotty’s, or even Chekov’s love interests, not the captain’s, and some of them were simply there on the show and not any kind of love interest at all — but that would be churlish. It’s a fun entry with some nice eye candy (well, it’s nice if you like 60s-style women, which, as it happens, I do).

Each lady gets her own poll question — the adolescent and somewhat misogynistic “would you hit it?” — but many of the answer options are funny, especially the bizarrely meta-textual ones. (My favorite is the first option for Elinor Donahue: “I’d hit it until Robert Young told me to stop hitting it for medical reasons. Then I’d ignore him because he only plays a doctor on TV.” You see, Elinor played Robert Young’s daughter on Father Knows Best, and Young played the title character in Marcus Welby, M.D., so that one’s funny on something like six different levels. At least I think so. But then I really am a geek…)

Anyhow, click on over to Knight’s tribute, and join me in wishing Bill a belated happy birthday. Let’s hope there are many more to come!

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Mar212008

A Peek at the New Wolf Man

One more quick item before I shut down for the night:

Stephen Sommers, who scored big with his goofy-fun remake of The Mummy and then flopped even bigger with the dismal Van Helsing, is once again looking to the classic Universal monsters for inspiration. This time, it’s The Wolf Man getting an upgrade. I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t too crazy about this idea when I first heard it. I don’t usually care for remakes, Sommers has a spotty record, and the 1941 Wolf Man with Lon Chaney, Jr., has always been my favorite of the Universal monster movies.

But then I heard Benicio del Toro would be playing Lon Chaney part, and my interest level rose a hair. Then I heard the legendary Rick Baker — who brought An American Werewolf in London to life, among many other projects — would be doing the make-up effects and that he intended to remain true to the look of the original, and my interest level climbed a bit more.
Then I saw a photo of del Toro in Baker’s make-up:

Benecio del Toro as The Wolf Man

Holy crap! Is that not way-cool? Suddenly, I’m actually looking forward to this project. Let’s hope it’s a lot more like The Mummy than Van Helsing, though…

Via. Another pic of del Toro’s make-up, as well as one of Lon Chaney for comparison, can be found here.

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Mar212008

The Original Futurama Theme

Ah, the awful work day is over. Let’s talk about something a bit more uplifting, shall we? How about television?

The late, lamented Futurama has always been something of a conundrum for me. It’s a show I really wanted to like: an animated science fiction/comedy series created by the guy who brought us The Simpsons, a spoof of and loving homage to all the futuristicky space crap I’ve always loved, a niche thing that appeals only to a particular elite (read: cult) who actually recognize all the subtle nods to the big SF films and TV of the last 40 years. Oh, and it features the voice talents of the lovely Katey Sagal, a.k.a. Peggy Bundy from Married with Children, one of my guilty pleasures for years. How could I not love Futurama?

I don’t know, but somehow I don’t. The overall design of the show — the look of the environment, the Galaxy Express spaceship, the characters — amuses me, and I occasionally snicker at the sociopathic robot Bender or the frankly bizarre Dr. Zoidberg, but I don’t very often laugh deeply, not the way I do at The Simpsons or some other sitcoms. Hell, I find Two and a Half Men a lot funnier than Futurama. (I don’t know if that says more about Futurama or me, though, and I don’t know that it’s something I ought to be admitting, either…).

I do, however, love Futurama‘s opening credits. Like the title sequence for The Simpsons, this sequence is a tour of the world in which the show takes place, set to a catchy, somewhat goofy theme song. Also like The Simpsons, the opening credits for Futurama feature a gag that changes every episode, in this case the text under the main title itself. Here’s a typical example:

***VIDEO MISSING***

But’s here’s an interesting bit of trivia for you: that theme song is apparently based on a much older piece of music. Naturally, somebody out there on the InterWebs has tracked down that piece of music and made it available to the entire world… click through for more!

According to this guy, the original piece is something called “Psyche Rock” by Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier, an early experiment in electronic music that was recorded in 1967. Here’s the video, which even boasts some similar imagery to the Futurama opening:

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

 

Funny, I always thought the Futurama theme was a variant of “Louie Louie.” Shows you what I know…

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