Yeah, that rain outside stinks today! It certainly slowed my productivity down considerably. Anyway, you had a REALLY crappy day at work, right? Well, I wish I’d posted this earlier…(sorry!). Anyway, here’s some Stormy Weather for you, complete with possibly the best classic tap routine on film from The Nicholas Brothers. If you’re not energized and bouncing around the room by the end of this, you may want to ring up an undertaker. Yeah, you can dance around the room, you know. Only the cat is watching and it really doesn’t give a hoot… unless you’ve forgotten to feed it and it’s looking at you funny.
Sooooo… you didn’t bite your boss like you wanted to earlier, right? So that means you’re still a bitter soul. Well, if this doesn’t cheer you up, go sleep in a coffin, Nosferatu! You still need to get out of that smelly dirt bed for Tuesday’s workload, remember? Mr. Chaplin will get you one of these days or nights with a better gag. Although this one’s hard to top for sheer amount of smiles per second.
So, you boss is still barking at you about that report, eh? You get in earlier than he does, do twenty-two times the work and you still get treated like a sled dog, hmmmm? Well, take a break while he’s out at lunch or chasing after that secretary and get a chuckle from Carl Emmy and His Mad Wags. Even if you’re a cat person, your Monday has just gotten lighter and a bit less dogged (hopefully and paradoxically)…
Spoiler:Sunshine has a “happy” ending. End spoiler. I had to put that up front because Danny Boyle’s excellent 2007 sci-fi film is a layered downward emotional spiral with some solid performances throughout. The story pretty much sets up the fact that this is going to be terminally gloomy stuff (despite the positive sounding title): the crew of the Icarus II sets out from a suffering Earth to relight a dying Sun with a massive nuclear explosion seven years after the first mission fails. Yeah, that’s not your average blockbuster summer comedy hit storyline, that’s for damn sure…
As Icarus II gets closer to its target, it’s discovered that first Icarus didn’t actually disappear as much as become something of The Old Dark House in space (minus any comedic elements). When the new ship links up with the old in order to snag its bomb and it’s discover what happened to its crew, things get more than a little strange as a few shocking elements come into play…
Imagine this as a movie idea today: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with Snow being an extremely talented exotic dancer type and those dwarfs a bunch of stuffy but eager to learn elderly eggheads she ends up hanging out with to teach them all the things they didn’t know. Once you get your eyeballs above the obvious jiggle-tease material and plentiful opportunities for modern day humor sixteen writers working together come up with, the results would probably be pretty darn terrible.
I can see the trailer now: two minutes, thirty eight or so of slow-mo cleavage shots and some special guest cameo coot rattling off one-liners, plus someone getting hit in the nether regions with a golf, basket or other ball, maybe a nice pratfall, a fart joke, a fat girl joke and some annoying music on that soundtrack that doesn’t even fit. Yeah, that’s not a movie I’d want to see at all. Fortunately, Howard Hawks’ 1941 film Ball of Fire takes the Snow White and thanks to a wonderfully funny and sassy Barbara Stanwyck helping loosen up those old guys (and an even stuffier Gary Cooper), a great script and plenty of screwball humor, it still holds up today as a total riot.
Thank yooooooou, Shout Factory (awoooooooo)! Getting Joe Dante’s classic werewolf flick The Howling back into circulation on DVD and Blu-Ray? Nice. Now I can stop telling folks I run into campfire tales of how awesome (and freakishly LONG) that wonderful Rob Bottin-created transformation sequence was while also rambling on about Pino Donaggio’s excellent score and how the film managed to be at turns scary and silly as well as packed with in-jokes and plenty of references to other films. Huzzah! That and I can stop getting picked up by the fuzz here for setting campfires to lend a scary atmosphere to things whenever someone asks me about the film. Well, and carrying an axe in public, using said axe to chop up the nearest wooden sign for firewood (I don’t go after trees, as we need them around here), scaring little kids by acting out the transformation and a few other minor offenses. Er, um… saaaay, isn’t that some nice *new* cover art on the right up there?
(“Exit, stage left!” Oops, that’s YOUR right. Damn, you Snagglepuss!)
When 2001: A Space Odyssey set the bar for visual effects back in 1968, movie studios around the globe kept trying to reach that level of polish and for the most part failed miserably. Outside of a few major and minor sci-fi hits and misses in theaters (Marooned, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun and Silent Running pop off the top of my head) and on TV (those bits of Gerry Andersen’s UFO and Space: 1999 that work), it wasn’t until the release of Star Wars that a major studio film had a visual aesthetic genre fans could glom onto almost universally for sheer “wow” factor. Granted, when Logan’s Run was in its production phase, I’m betting it sure looked “futuristic” to the very hard working teams building that huge model of the city and domes, the set and costume designers and yes, the visual effects crew, actors and director. Hell, it certainly impressed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, as a special Oscar was awarded the film at the 1977 Academy Awards. Of course, George Lucas and ILM made that award all theirs the next year in a film not predicted to do all that well by a few people (Lucas included)…
Still, that didn’t help matters much in my case, as even as a wee bairn of eight years of age, I knew Logan’s Run was going to be enjoyably junky thanks to the TV commercials and rainbow on those posters I saw in subway stations. Interestingly enough, it actually popped up on TV about a year later (an amazingly fast time for a major Hollywood film), and while I was fascinated by some elements, to my mind it still looked cheap and the story (which I didn’t know was even more edited for TV) was hard to follow. Naturally, even though I didn’t like the film much, I ended up watching every episode of the 1977-78 CBS TV series and just like what happened with Planet of the Apes on the network, it managed to be dumber than the film, but easier to follow once I figured out that nothing would happen to the leads because they needed to be around for next week’s show. But I digress… Continue reading →
No, I don’t mean “think of the little people” as you sit there twirling your mustache (real, imagined, or candy) with one hand, counting money with the other and eating finger sandwiches with the crusts cut off with the third. Yes, your boss has a third arm – not because he’s an alien at all, but because he could afford the damn surgery (yeah, he’s easily bored). I mean look at the video above of Buster Shaver, Olive and George from this Vitaphone Pepper Pot and be amazed that holy hot pretzels, vaudeville was mighty amazing back in the day. Naturally, some would call this “Reality TV” today, but I think this stuff is MUCH better than the so-called “variety” we see that’s mostly the same stuff but with battlin’ judges (boo!).
Of course, some bossy types may get a wee bit TOO worked up and consider lovely Olive being whipped around like an overworked machine part something like the “magic” they work on the employees they lord over (“Mua-ha-ha-haaaa!”). But that’s when they choke on that tiny sliced sammich and see little angels with pointy pitchforks dancing around their heads for a hot second before the maid (or the wife flipping a coin and damning her luck) gives them a Heimlich-assisted kick in the gut. Lucky bastard… we’ll get you next time…
It’s another Monday and just look at you. Sitting at that desk in that cubicle in that office in THAT building in that block on that street in that city in that zip code in that state (if applicable) in that country on that planet. Your coffee’s long gone cold and has the shape of a crazy upside down face formed from the artificially flavored creamer doing its chemical thing, your desk looks as if a small tornado fell out of your pockets or handbag and blew across it and your boss it taking the day off because he’s the boss and you’re not. Or he’s there and you were .29 seconds late and he’s giving you a look as if you drove up to his home, kicked his expensive dog as he was walking it that morning and then rolled in tardy because of it. Did I mention that your inbox just got 500 more messages you haven’t yet seen? Yeah, that’s a Monday, isn’t it? Well, cheer up.. or at least let the The Three Queens dance your foul mood into powder as you watch that video above and pretend they’re tap-tap-tapping away right next to your desk. Or on the head of your boss, if you’re one of those more stubborn people. If that’s the case, cheer up, I say. There’s not another Monday coming until next week…
OK, while I’m not quite sure The Nicholas Brothers AND Charlotte Greenwood would like you to buy a PlayStation 4, (well, it didn’t exist back when this film was shot), you get the idea here, right? Sony’s knockout E3 presentation and MUCH clearer consumer rights strategy for used games, which SHOULD still be standard issue for all companies, won the day along with some great upcoming first and third party titles. Still, it’s kind of pesky that this is the big thing people are talking about. Hopefully, this will lead to an actual discussion that will also affect the future of content “ownership” and keep it normal longer than some other companies and individuals who want it dissolved into a service-driven monetization scheme (bleh) just because it’s “simpler” and “easy to use”…
Memo to “future-proofing” tech companies: Leave us game, movie and other media collecting hounds alone and go make your money on other items that maybe SHOULD be seen as lease worthy, I say. Digital content is great and provided there’s access to it, convenient. However, as 100% of the people out there can’t get to it 100% of the time, companies that try too hard to play with our rights deserve a little less love (and Microsoft has dipped a bit on a few gift card lists, that’s for sure)…
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 