Monday the 11th

Techno was the word of the day.
9:59 am	Sneaker Pimps - wasted early sunday morning
10:03 am	Capsula - zero one blues
10:12 am	Basshunter - I'm Your Bass Creator
10:18 am	U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday (live)
Comment:	from "Under a blood red sky" 1983
10:22 am	Chelley - Text message
10:25 am	Jerry Fels and the Jerry Fels - I don't want to share my toys
10:28 am	The Sunny Era - Head in the sand
10:32 am	Anvil - Axe to Grind
10:37 am	Tiesto - Feel Me
10:41 am	Daft Punk - Alive
10:47 am	Shallow Grave Satanic - Blagojevich 666
10:48 am	Weezer - Falling for you
10:53 am	The Tramps - Feels like I've been living on the dark side of the moon
11:02 am	The Japanese Popstars - If I were boy (Beyonce remix)
11:04 am	Phish - Joy
11:09 am	John Lennon - Watching the wheels
11:12 am	Bette Midler - Married Men
11:20 am	Twin Atlantic - Lightspeed
11:20 am	God Module - Forseen
11:26 am	Chores - Super Car
11:31 am	Pansy Division - Twinkie Twinkie Little Star
11:31 am	Pansy Division - That's so gay
11:34 am	Gladys Knight and the Pips - Every Beat of my Heart
11:35 am	Gladys Knight and the Pips - I had a dream last night
11:39 am	Funk Agenda - No one listens to techno
11:43 am	Adam Lambert - A loaded smile
11:52 am	Symphony of science - the unbroken thread
Comment:	symphonyofscience.com
11:56 am	symphony of science - we are all connected

Peter Lorre is yellow

"Think Fast Mr. Moto" (1937) stars Peter Lorre.  This is the first of eight films with the Japanese detective played by a German with a thick German accent that Lorre only kind of hides.  Lorre is also slathered in bronzer to play the detective.

Lorre is trying to break up a smuggling ring in China so he follows clues from San Fransisco to Shanghai.  There are fights, romance, a blond vixen, and a dumbass who falls head over heals for her.  There's betrayal, loyalty, murder, deception, and an exotic location----ooooooooooooooh, impressive.  This yarn, and it is a yarn, has everything one could want in a detective story.  

This a fun black and white pic with good acting, good action, and an okay story.  Some of the dialogue is cheesy and is done better in other pictures. Peter Lorre is sublime and naturally creepy so his performances always impress me.  I could watch him talk about how much he likes a white wall, I find him that interesting.  He IS a good actor but his looks give Lorre more to work with as an actor.   They allow him to stand apart from his peers.  the movie is also short, clocking in at 70 mins so sitting down for this like watching a prime time drama.

Mark Lindquest minds his nirvana

Some more books for you, things I've read this past month that I picked up at the library.  "The King of Methlehem" (2007) and "Nevermind Nirvana" (2000) by Mark Lindquist, a relatively handsome guy from the Seatle area. 

NN is about a lawyer who was once a lead singer of a band that made one album.  He is about 35 and is stuck between adolesence and adulthood and must confront his musical past by prosecuting a member of his past for date rape. 

KOM is about meth maker/dealer and a cop trying to bust him, again the lead charecters confronts issues that involve growing into adulthood.  The dealer and the cop share similiar attributes and it's interesting because meth is such a dirty drug---here you get to see how and why it's smoked.

Mark's books are generational.  They are about a people with specific values, not about the human condition or emotions that are translatable from person to person.  There is disillusionment that is often the trademark of my generation.  The books take place in and around Seatle, WA and include many references to grunge related pop.  The charecters are sharp and developed and Mark keeps his stories moving.  He doesn't mince words and there are not flowing passages of prose.  These are novels that are somewhat brutal and abrupt in their language in order to maintain their sceptical and gray imagery.  The charecters have flaws, make mistakes, and try to find a bit of happiness in a world they aren't sure they want to join---not because adulthood sucks but because they haven't seen it done well enough to engender a desire to join.     

        

Make Room Make room!! It's not soylent enough

Make Room!  Make Room! by Harry Harrison.  It's a book!!  It's a dystopian novel!!!  It's the book that Soylent Green was based upon!!  (Yummers!!!!) Talk about a find, I was searching the library to find something readable and I spotted this gem, well....it's almost a gem.  1984 it isn't, but few things live up to that level of literature. 

The plot and the book are drastically different but one thing remains the same.  Earth is severly overpopulated, nature has been destroyed to house mankind, and natural resources have run dry.  The book takes place in 1999 and America's population is 340 million which is pretty close to where we are now.  We sit at 300 million.  There's a detective, a murder, an old roommate, a foxy lady, and tons of sad images about an overcrowded world. 

Harrison effectively communicates his vision of a cramped, dirty, violent, wasteland of a future where most people live off of soylent burgers and wafers (only the climatic scene of the movie isn't in the movie nor is it explicit that the earth is dead.  The movie tells the audience that the world is one inch from death).  The future is bleak and the world is almost about to come crashing down but the leaders still fight over mundane things like birth control as water rations cause riots.  The old man is Harrison's voice and expels his philosophy while the scenery is Harrison's vision. 

Harrison 's prose is nothing fancy but he communicates his vision without being preachy, mostly, and he does it well by constantly repeating certain facts over and over again about the heat, the dust and dirt, people in every available inch of space.  The plot is mostly an excuse to communicate his ideas which isn't a bad thing but I'm just pointing out that a million stories in his fictional future could have communicated his vision just as well which to me means that the plot isn't the most important thing, it's the message.  That being said, it's still a great mood affecting read, not as depressing as The Road by any stretch of the imagination but still good. 

Nims Island

Nim's Island (2008) stars Jodie Foster, Gerald Butler, and Abigal Breslin.  Butler and Breslin are father and daughter on a remote tropical island.  Butler gets lost at sea, Breslin, through coincidence, is talking to her favorite author, Foster, and invites her to help her find her father and defend her island against tourists from a cruise ship. 

The movie is a children's movie that does't rely on making the adults into dumb idiots although it isn't exactly smart either.  It follows a predictable plot that at times descends into a Home Alone spoof as Breslin defends her island against a horde of fat tourists with homemade traps.  Foster (as a fish out of water author---see Romance and the Stone) and Breslin (who can't really act but does 'cute' very well) each carry their own weight, Foster as an agoriphobic author who leaves to help the child, and Breslin the child who should be (but isn't really) wise beyond her years.  Butler isn't very good here.  He's fantastic at being violent and sneering at people he's about to murder but as a loving father, no (call me crazy).  The movie is cute, harmless, and won't make you gag.  Not every children's movie can be smart but not every children's movie doesn't want to make the adults vomit.  I left this movie feeling fine (except I kept expecting Butler to kill someone or something).    

A bad sequal and a great original involving a stone and a jewel, and Turner!

Romance and the Stone (1983) and The Jewel of the Nile (1985) stars Mike Douglas (also producer), Kathleen Turner (such a silky husky voice, mmmmm), and Danny Devito (Rhea Pearlman's husband).  The idea of the first movie is that Turner is a romance writer and she has to go to Columbia to rescue her sister.  She's a New York City shut-in so it's a fish-out-of-water story.  She meets Douglas and together they get into trouble and along with Devito as a crook, they compete to get a famous emerald.   The sequal has Turner and Douglas in a tropical location (because of course they shack up) and she decides to take a break from them and goes off with a dictator of an African nation.  Since he's a dictator he's an ass, goes without saying (right?) and Douglas and Devito decide to rescue her and seek out the mythical jewel at the same time. 

RATS is the better movie and if you pick one of the two, this is the one to watch.  It is from a firs time screen writer who hit the script out of the park.  Diane Thomas declined to write the second one and it shows.  (She died shortly after the sequal was released.)  She is the one who made action movies with strong female leads a thing.  Without her there may never have been action movies with female heroes.  It also helps that she wrote real charecters that are relatable and believable and it helps when your script is helmed by pre-Back to the Future Robert Zemeckis although he isn't really an auteur as much as he's a really good everyman's director.  His, along with Diane's abscence from the sequal are noticed.

JOTN has a lot of dancing and scene fillers.  There's still plenty of action but there's a lot more scenes when nothing happens.  At best those scenes could be called mood setters but it's likely they are filler to stretch the movie out and cash in on the success of the first movie.  The one bright spot is (spoiler alert) the clown they hired to play the jewel (he's a mystic).  The actors do what they can with the script which isn't bad but there wasn't a lot to do with these guys that wasn't done in the first one.  This, along with Beverly Hills Cop 2 showed Hollywood that audiences don't want more of the same, which is what this movie is, more of the same. 

Kudos to Kathleen Turner.  What a sexy voice!  She could melt butter just by speaking. 

Zack and Stella....fuck fuck fuck

You're a fucking piece of shit.  You suck.  God you're dumb.  Why are you reading this?  What's wrong with you?  Stupid audience.

Mmmmm, delicious insults.  They make for awful art which is why I'm surprised two comedy dvds I recently watched featured comedians insulting their audience.

Zack Galifinikas: Live (2006) and Stella (2008) are both an hour long and they both feature comics being mean to their audience.  Maybe I'm a little old fashioned at the ripe old age of 29, but it seems rude and....well....mean. 

Zack's dvd is half stage show and half garbage, and garbage is being nice.  Zack has good and witty material when he can be bothered to perform the material.  The dvd is a mixture of an "interiew" with his "twin" brother, Zack without a beard, and footage of Zack driving around in a VW van doing nothing.  He can't even bother to be funny while "travelling." I shoudln't be surprised since he doesn't try to be funny while performing his show.  He hams it up a lot for the cameras, insults his audience in what is supposed to ironic (and people actually laugh!  By yelling profanities at his audience Zack is saying that words don't have power.  I respectfully disagree.)  He lies around the stage floor for a bit, flubs his lines many times, and generally avoids doing his routine.  When he does his act, he's fucking brilliant, why he chose to muddle his act with what I'm sure he thought was inspired brilliance while stoned, but is actually shit in the day of light, is a mystery to everyone and I'm including Zack too.

Stella, starring three of the guys of the 90's sketch comedy show "The State" and "Stella" tv show is like watching an ameteur troupe at your local college, maybe slightly better, maybe not, and this surprises me because I love the State and generally whatever those guys make.  I'm a fan of their movies, of the tv show Stella, but this was an uneven performance going between insulting and good (never great or genius but good).  The show got off to a slow start which made me want to turn it off, had Michael Ian Black insulting the audience (irony doesn't extend to vulgarity) and was generally lackluster.  The performance picked up steam and they got more orginal and state-like until they showed a video, basically an extended Stella clip.  Even though the video was funny, I think that's laziness on their part even though other reviews say that the video is a staple of their live act. 

And regarding both the comics propensity to swear, Bill Cosby is right, swearing by a comic is laziness and cheap.  I never thought I'd dislike swearing but when that's half of or most of your show, you've ceased to have anything to say and get off the stage.