Monthly Archives: May 2014

May292014

SpaceX Unveiling Dragon 2.0 Tonight…

The headline pretty much says it all: SpaceX, the commercial spaceflight company that’s leading the pack with its amazing Falcon boosters and Dragon spacecraft, plans to finally reveal its human-rated version of the Dragon in a live webcast this evening at 7 PM Pacific time. This variant of the existing Dragon design will reportedly have seating for seven astronauts, a major step up from the three-person Soyuz capsules that have been ferrying personnel to and from the ISS since the space shuttles were retired three years ago. And it couldn’t come at a better time, either, considering the impact that the current diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Russia is having on our joint space operations.

spacex_dragon-v2_announcement

I confess, I still miss the sight and the runway-landing concept of my beloved shuttles — as an aside, I’m looking forward to the first orbital flight of the shuttle-like DreamChaser being developed by Sierra Nevada Corp., currently planned for 2016 — but those guys at SpaceX have become heroes of mine with their rapid string of successes. Remember that this company designs and builds most of its own hardware in-house, and that it’s only been around for 12 years. In that time, it’s gone from square one to operating a field-tested, reusable, reliable spacecraft and booster system, a pretty remarkable achievement any way you look at it. And Elon Musk, the company’s founder, seems to have a strong and audacious vision for the future, with talk of sending humans to Mars and the company’s exploration into landing spacecraft on their tails like the old-fashioned movie rocketships of the 1950s. This is all potentially very exciting stuff… we may still get that spacegoing future we once believed in…

 

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May242014

Notes to Myself: Summer Movie List

This is one of those entries that’s more for my own purposes — specifically my increasingly unreliable middle-aged memory! — than you guys, but perhaps one of my Loyal Readers will see something here you weren’t previously aware of and think, “Hey, thanks, Bennion, for letting me know about that!”

Memorial Day weekend traditionally marked the beginning of the summer movie season back in my days as an usher and projectionist, so here are the upcoming (and a couple of already-playing-that-I-haven’t-gotten-to-yet) summer movies that have caught my fancy:

May 16

Godzilla

Because, well, why not?

May 23

X-Men: Days of Future Past 

There seems to have been a re-evaluation of the X-Men series over the past few years, and the popular opinion now holds that these movies — which I recall being highly praised (at least by the geeky community) when they first came along — aren’t very good. Nevertheless, I still enjoy them, especially Hugh Jackman’s performance as Wolverine, and this one looks especially promising.

May 30

Maleficent

Honestly, this one only makes the list because Anne wants to see it — I really don’t see the point of a live-action retelling of an old Disney cartoon, nor do I get the appeal of all the recent fairy-tale-based properties in general (Wicked, Once Upon a Time, etc.). But I will say Angelina Jolie looks utterly fabulous as the title character, and also like she had the time of her life playing this role.

A Million Ways to Die in the West

I’m not a big fan of Seth McFarlane’s humor — okay, I’ll be frank: I think Family Guy is the most painfully stupid, vulgar, tasteless, and unfunny garbage ever foisted off on an unsuspecting public in the history of, well, anything — but the trailer for this actually made me laugh a couple times. I liked the gag with the bottles. And Liam Neeson lends coolness to everything he touches. So… we’ll see.

June 20

Jersey Boys

A biopic about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, directed by Clint Eastwood? Yes, please.

June 27

Boyhood

This coming-of-age project from writer/director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) begins with a fascinating gimmick — he filmed it intermittently over a twelve-year period so he could use the same child actor throughout the story as he ages from six to 18 — but it also just looks like a really good story. Linklater has become one of my favorite filmmakers, a consummate observer of the human experience.

July 2

Tammy

And then there’s this, which I’ll probably regret even admitting to having any interest in. But I like Melissa McCarthy and I love Susan Sarandon, and the two of them have demonstrated really great chemistry on McCarthy’s TV series Mike and Molly. God help me.

July 18

Jupiter Ascending

Mila Kunis discovers she’s some kind of long-lost interstellar princess in yet another live-action anime from the Wachowskis (The Matrix trilogy). If nothing else, it looks like some excellent space-opera spectacle.

August 1

Guardians of the Galaxy

Here it is, my number-one can’t-wait gotta-see of the summer. The next entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe looks utterly goofy, but everything in the two trailers (trailer #1, trailer #2) released thus far mashes my happy buttons hard. Trailers lie, true, but from what I can tell, this is something akin to The Fifth Element (a favorite of The Girlfriend and myself), an eye-popping visual feast with its tongue firmly in cheek. Exactly my kind of movie. I never in a million years imagined I could be this excited for a movie that so prominently features a machine-gun-toting badass berserker raccoon… but damn, I am excited. Don’t let me down, Marvel-ites!

Get on Up

Another biopic of a musical legend… James Brown, in this case. These flicks all tend to follow a formula, but I love ’em anyhow… the music, the period settings… love ’em.

August 8

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Twenty-four years ago, The Girlfriend and I went our first date. I took her to see the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the one where the heroes wore rubber suits with animatronic faces. And we loved it. (Of course, we didn’t go another date for three more years, but that’s unrelated.) Now comes a reboot directed by trashmeister Michael Bay and starring Megan Fox, whose main talent, as far as I can tell, is outbitching everybody else. I have very low expectations, but a lot of morbid curiosity.

August 15

The Expendables 3

Stupid stuff-blow-up-good movies, but I love seeing all the decrepit old heroes of my youth back in action. And this one includes Harrison Ford! And, rather incongruously, Kelsey Grammar! But hey, Harrison Ford!

August 22

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

I have very mixed feelings about the first Sin City movie… I thought it was a beautiful-looking movie with an utterly unique visual style and an unbelievable cast that brought life to a graphic novel in a way no other movie has ever done… but the story was one of the ugliest, most nihilistic things ever written. (I’m not a fan of Frank Miller.) Now here’s a sequel which looks like more of the same… I’ll see it, but I expect I’ll be equally as ambivalent as I was the first time around.

And there you go… what are you planning to see at the cinema this weekend?

 

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May212014

TV Title Sequences: The Goldbergs

One of the more pleasant surprises of the TV season just ending has been The Goldbergs, an ABC sitcom predicated on nostalgia for the late, great 1980s. I wasn’t sure about this one at first — the pilot episode was a queasy mismatch of mean-spirited snark and treacly sentiment that had just enough laughs to bring me back for another try. Fortunately, the showrunners saw the problem and modulated the yelling and sarcasm in later episodes, allowing the show to develop its own quirky flavor that’s a lot less Married… with Children and a lot more The Wonder Years.

The Goldbergs actually echoes The Wonder Years — that landmark coming-of-age series that ran in the late ’80s/early ’90s, but was set 20 years earlier — in a number of ways, which I suspect is probably intentional. Like The Wonder Years, the show is built around a family of five familiar archetypes: grumpy dad, kooky mom, moody older sister, bullying lunkhead middle brother, and cute youngest brother, who serves as the protagonist of most stories. The Goldbergs also adds a sixth character to the recipe, a swinging-single grandfather who is winningly played by veteran character actor George Segal.

There are other similarities to The Wonder Years, notably a voice-over narration supplied by an adult version of the youngest brother, as well as the show’s use of original music from the period to comment on and enhance the storylines. (The season ender last week deployed Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” in a way that was simply sublime. If any Gen-Xer watching that episode didn’t end up with a lump in their throat and a big old grin on their lips, they need to catch the first time-traveling DeLorean back to the ’80s and do it all over again.)

However, one big and very remarkable difference between The Goldbergs and The Wonder Years is the way they respectively handle time. While the latter show identified each season as representing a specific historical year, as well as a specific school year/grade level for its young protagonist, The Goldbergs takes a more… post-modern approach. We are informed in the voice-over each week that the show is set in a generalized “1980-something.” This gimmick — which I think is actually pretty funny — allows the producers to include familiar pop-cultural landmarks, fads, clothing styles, and news events from all over the decade without smart-alecks like me pointing out, for example, that there were five years between the release of The Goonies and the advent of the Reebok Pump basketball shoe, two ’80s icons that have both figured prominently in recent episodes. This approach gives the show a slightly absurdist tone, but in a weird way, it helps to better capture the sense of the Awesome ’80 than a show with a more persnickety focus on detail might. We end up with something that feels true rather than strictly factual. Kind of like the jumbled, middle-aged, increasingly unreliable memories of the Gen-Xers who surely comprise the show’s target demographic.

(It also occurs to me that perhaps this “1980-something” trope says something about how we Xers recall our youth versus how the Baby Boomers who made The Wonder Years saw theirs. They were all about earnestness and bittersweet poignancy, whereas — if a sitcom can be said to be representative of a generation — we’re a lot more irreverent about our formative decade. That’s not to say The Goldbergs is never poignant — I frequently get a little something in my eye while watching — but it lacks the self-consciousness and self-importance of its predecessor. To follow this through to the grossest overgeneralization I’ll ever make based on a half-hour sitcom, the Boomers wanted to change the world; we Xers just wanted to have fun with it.)

The Goldbergs‘ theme song — if a composition only 30 seconds long can really be called a song — has a similar post-modern, mix-and-match origin. Performed by a band called I Fight Dragons, “Rewind” is a mixture of pop instruments and vocals with something called “chiptune,” electronic music and other sounds originally synthesized by vintage computers and video games. The result, like the show itself, is weirdly effective at evoking the feel of the ’80s without really being much like an actual TV theme from the era. I’ll warn you now before you click “Play”: it’s insanely catchy.

I love it.

I recently tweeted I Fight Dragons to ask if there’s a longer version of this, and they actually responded… it won’t be on their upcoming album, but they will “definitely be doing a full-length version soon.” Something to watch for…

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May142014

Happy 70th, Uncle George!

george-lucas_singapore-01-2014I remember a t-shirt I saw once, years ago in the fall of 1980… the fall after The Empire Strikes Back came out, the fall Ronald Reagan was vying against Jimmy Carter for the White House. The shirt was worn by a kid at my middle school, and it read, simply, “George Lucas for President.”

It seemed like a good idea at the time. That was how much we loved the bearded man from Modesto, California, the creative genius (or so we used to think) who’d given Generation X such a bountiful gift, an entire universe in which to let our imaginations roam, and who upended virtually everything about the way movies were made, distributed, marketed, and merchandised. To us, he was like Walt Disney must’ve been for our parents, a benevolent wizard who fulfilled fantasies we hadn’t even known we’d had and changed the world while doing it. We felt like we knew him, and we revered him. He was our hero.

But that was a long time ago… before the Great Disillusionment and the Fanboy Wars. These days, Lucas is routinely dismissed by many, and especially by the most passionate fans of his creation, as a hack… a greedy, no-talent megalomaniac who somehow got tremendously lucky, and whose only interest all along has been in selling the action figures we were all too eager to buy… and that we continue to buy, even as we curse the name of this master mesmerist who’s cast such a powerful spell over us that we can’t stop ourselves from reaching for our wallets.

None of that is true, or fair, in my estimation. As far as I’m concerned, the man still deserves our respect for creating the Star Wars universe (not to mention Indiana Jones), even if we (collectively) don’t especially approve of where he chose to take it.

Look, I’m no apologist. I feel a lot of frustration toward George Lucas, most notably with his obstinate insistence on suppressing the pre-1997 editions of the original trilogy. I’m frankly disappointed by many of the creative decisions he’s made, and many of the things he’s said, over the last 17 years. But at the same time, I cannot condemn him for the sin of being human. For getting older and revealing his limitations. For not taking his creation as seriously as we fans always have. For not loving Star Wars in exactly the same way we do. For feeling bitter at the fans who begged him for more, but then turned on him so viciously when they didn’t get what they expected. I disagree with him on many points, yes, but I also have a lot of sympathy for him. He really is just a guy from Modesto, a guy who created this crazy thing that grew beyond anything he ever could’ve dreamed.

So in the spirit of compassion for a one-time hero who turned out to have feet of clay, but who nevertheless must be given credit where it’s due, I’d like to raise a glass tonight to The Great Flanneled One, the Maker himself, George Lucas, on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

If it were possible for me to speak with him for a moment, I wouldn’t give him shit about Greedo firing first, or about Jar Jar Binks. I wouldn’t even hit him up about getting the real original trilogy on BluRay. Instead, I’d just say, “Thank you, George. Thanks for contributing to my happy childhood, and for providing me with so much pleasure and so much to think and talk about over the years.” Because in the end, no matter where the Star Wars franchise goes in the future, no matter where it is right at this moment, that’s his great achievement, and his legacy. And that’s worth celebrating.

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May142014

And One from Mark Twain…

I’ve already posted this on Facebook and Tumblr, so sorry if you’re getting bored of it, but I really like this quote:

mark-twain_travel-quote

And the photo is pretty cool, too!

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May142014

Three Frightening Quotations from Sylvia Plath

Frightening, that is, in how much they resonate with me…

Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

 

…

 

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

 

…

 

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

That last one, in particular… yeah. I’ve often said that one of the big appeals, for me, of the movie and television series Highlander is the “what-if?” idea of immortal people being able to live many different lives down through the ages. The idea of having time to be and do many different things. I struggle almost daily with the knowledge that there just isn’t going to be enough time for everything I want to do in this world, all the places I want to go and things I want to accomplish, and that so much of the time I do have gets eaten up with mundane bullshit like household chores and paying the bills and commuting.

And that middle quotation… I struggle with that too. The sense that the potential I was always told I possessed is unfulfilled and my powers and chances are fading…

I think maybe it’s time to go for a walk in the sunshine…

Source.

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May132014

She Moves in Mysterious Ways

I was driving to the train station on my way to work this morning, driving into the blinding sunlight of a new day as it poured over the Wasatch Range that borders the valley on the east.The air outside was a bit on the crisp side, following a downright chilly night, but I could tell from the quality of the sky that we’d have pleasant springtime temperatures by afternoon. “Mysterious Ways” by U2 had just started to thrum from the speakers, and I was feeling good… if not yet fully awake. Mornings have never been my best time.

Traffic was moderate as my Mustang dropped into the broad gully known to locals as “the river bottoms.” Until just a few years ago, this was a strip of undeveloped wetlands that formed a natural boundary between the east side of the valley and the west, but subdivisions and office towers are sprouting even here now, and the modest two-lane roads that used to cut through the bottoms with an almost apologetic air have swelled into four- and, in some places, six-lane highways. The posted speed limit is 50, but nobody pays much attention to that; my speedometer needle was edging toward 60 as the downward slope leveled off and my car started to blast across the flat center of this valley within the valley

And then I saw the deer standing on the far side of the road. It wasn’t a huge specimen, probably a doe or a young male, but I knew it was still big enough to cause a lot of damage if it were to have a close encounter with a car traveling at 60 mph. I let off the gas pedal and kept my eyes locked on the animal, feeling, as always, a spark of adrenaline and wonder at encountering a wild creature in a place that feels more and more tamed with every passing year. I found myself thinking of the time when my friend Jeremy clipped a deer in his Grand Am, and ended up needing to replace his entire front fender, and the wheel on that side as well.

Maybe I detected some flicker of increased muscular tension or a certain twitch of the ear. Maybe it was some inscrutable vestige of a sixth sense, some holdover from our distant ancestors’ hunter-gatherer days. Whatever it was that tipped me off, I knew, somehow I just knew, that the deer was about to make its move. And then it was in motion, bounding across the westbound lanes at incredible speed for a mere animal, the SUV coming in my direction braking hard enough to drop its nose toward the pavement. The deer made it to the center island and I tried to telepathically tell it to just stay put… but my Spidey-sense was still jangled, and I knew it was going to stand there only a fraction of a second before continuing on its way across the eastbound lanes… into my lane…

I saw, very clearly, that the animal’s speed was perfectly matched to intersect with my own course. I knew I couldn’t stop in time, and the image of Jeremy’s ruined fender was replaced in my mind with a picture of the deer impacting my beloved Mustang dead-center, rolling up across my hood, crushing in my windshield, falling into the cab with me…

My instincts took over. I was still thinking about what it would look like, what it would feel like, to have Bambi come crashing through my windshield, even as my foot mashed the accelerator to the floor. My Mustang boomed forward, closing the distance to the interception point. My fingers tightened on the steering wheel and turned it to the right, swerving the car into the emergency lane, trying to give the deer a little more space to have to cover before it hit me. My laggard imagination now pictured the animal’s broad chest plowing into my driver’s-side door….

And then I was clear, drifting back into the lane where I was supposed to be. I saw the deer in my rear-view mirror finish his (or her) run across the road with a final bounce that carried it over an embankment and down to the marshy riverbank below the level of the road, safely out of the human machine-traffic and back in its own realm. I kept my eyes peeled for another one as my car climbed the opposite side of the gully, but I saw no more.

The road carried me forward, past car washes and fast-food franchises and restaurants and grocery stores and strip malls. I got lucky and coasted through green lights the whole way. I turned into the park-and-ride lot and locked up my trusty ragtop and walked across a field of asphalt to board a gleaming white train. The same gleaming white train I ride every weekday morning into a downtown of concrete and skyscrapers and hemmed-in civilization. More and more tamed every year… but not entirely tamed just yet.

That thought makes me smile.

 

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May132014

Best Anniversary Present… EVER

And this ad is pretty fun, too…

Written and directed by Bruce Branit, a visual-effects artist whose credits include the TV series Lost, Breaking Bad, Revolution, and Fringe. He was also one of the cats behind that incredible short film 405 that went viral a few years back. And get this: According to Gizmodo, this ad was done as a spec for his portfolio. On his own time, essentially for the hell of it, in other words…

We live in astounding times, when you think about it. We’re able to realize our fantasies (visually anyhow) to a level of realism we could only dream of only a couple decades ago… and it’s so economical that people are doing it on spec and just for fun.

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May092014

Friday Evening Videos: “Love Somebody”

rick-springfield_walk-of-famePhoto: Courtesy of Mercury News

Turning now to cheerier topics, my main man Rick Springfield is having quite a week. On Sunday, May the Fourth (a.k.a. “Star Wars Day”), he appeared in a College Humor video as “Rick Forcefield” (little-known trivia fact: Rick is a sci-fi fanboy who owns an extensive collection of Star Wars action figures… “One of us! One of us!”). His first novel, Magnificent Vibration, was released Tuesday and has been garnering some good reviews (my copy is already waiting on the “to read” stack). And just this morning, he was honored with his very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His fellow ’80s pop artist Richard Marx probably said it best during the ceremony today: “He’s arguably writing the best songs he’s even written in his life right now, plus now he’s an accomplished author, he’s still acting up a storm all over TV, and he’s still that good-looking… which, if I didn’t like him, would be really freakin’ annoying.”

In light of all that, I think it’s all entirely fitting to end the work week with a selection from the man of the hour. His signature song “Jessie’s Girl” is of course the obvious choice for a Friday Evening Video… which is exactly why I’ve chosen to go with something else. Because I’m contrary that way.

“Love Somebody” was a top-five hit from the soundtrack of Rick’s 1984 feature-film debut Hard to Hold, a mediocre flick that’s mostly remembered these days by middle-aged women who were teeny-bopper fans at the time, and who fondly recall those unfamiliar tingling sensations they experienced following a brief glimpse of Rick’s bare butt midway through the movie. (Rick mentions this moment in every single concert performance just before launching into this song.) The video is typical peak-period MTV: a quasi-narrative that mixes footage from the movie with live concert clips and an out-of-left-field fantasy sequence that includes a hot chick with big hair, a wind machine, fog, and breaking glass. It doesn’t make a lick of sense… but I love it. And I love this song, which I’d probably rank second only to “Jessie’s Girl” in my personal all-time Rick canon, thanks to its catchy melody and chorus, and that really mean-sounding guitar-thing at the bridge…

And with that, I bid you all a good Friday…

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May092014

Points of Clarification

My previous entry inspired a few remarks over on Facebook, suggesting — gently, of course — that it’s disingenuous of me to complain about people bitching about the Star Wars prequels considering how much bitching I do myself on various other topics (like, say, people bitching about the prequels!), and also that I’m griping about people prejudging Episode VII while doing the same thing myself through my comments regarding JJ Abrams. I’d like to quickly address these points.

First, on the subject of Abrams, it’s true: I don’t care for the man’s work to date and I’ve been pretty outspoken about it. And I am genuinely concerned about what he’s got in mind for my beloved Star Wars franchise. But I hope I haven’t given the impression that I’m already condemning Episode VII before I see it, simply because his name is going to be on the one-sheet. I really am hoping for the best outcome here. I’d like nothing better than to see a brilliant, wildly successful Star Wars movie that’s true to its roots, respectful of the huge legacy that comes with the title, moves the saga forward in some interesting and relevant way, and causes me to rethink my whole opinion of the film’s director. I’m not holding my breath on any of that… but I am trying to remain open-minded while also being honest about my misgivings.

The commentary I was reading last week, on the other hand, did condemn the movie sight unseen (at least that’s how I interpreted it), based entirely on one narrowly defined parameter and the scant data provided by the cast list. And that rubbed me the wrong way, so I felt compelled to rub back. If, by so doing, I contributed to the general sense of outrage that seems to permeate fandom these days — the very thing with which I am so fed up — then I sincerely apologize, because that’s the last thing I have any desire to do.

Now, as to the prequels, it was further suggested that I’m tired of hearing them criticized only because I happen to like them. Well, yes, I do like them, at least more than most people seem to. But what I was trying to say in that previous entry really has nothing to do with whether or not I personally enjoy those three movies. I’ve just gotten tired of the fact that it’s impossible these days to even raise the subject of Star Wars — any aspect of the franchise in general — without kicking off this whole big thing. I’m tired of the franchise being such a contentious subject. I want to talk about it, I just don’t want to risk another tiresome overheated dialog about it, and I fear that every time I open my mouth or set my fingers to the keyboard, that’s inevitably where it’s going to end up. Maybe I am adding fuel to the fire by even mentioning it… if so, that really pains me. Because I just want Star Wars to be fun again. More precisely, I want it to be fun to be a fan of Star Wars again.

Maybe that’s not possible. Maybe what I’m missing is actually the innocence of childhood, or at least of young adulthood. Nevertheless, that’s what I want…

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