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Wednesday, April 15th, 2015 

Tuesday, April 14th, 2015 

Monday, April 13th, 2015 

Perfectly bleak.

Sunday, April 12th, 2015 

Saturday, April 11th, 2015 Spartans is a documentary about Yvan, a mixed-martial arts champion who grew up in the projects of Marseilles, France, coaches boys and girls from his neighborhood with the hope of teaching them enough discipline to keep them in school and out of trouble. It starts out promising, but by the middle of the film I’d already had enough of Yvan’s lectures and tough-guy talk. I guess I have to accept that “If you don’t stay in school and respect your mother, I’ll tear your head off!” can be effectively motivating to somebody, because it seemed to be working on these kids, but it got old pretty fast. Way too much of Yvan talking, not enough of Yvan getting results.

Spartans | 8:11 am CDT
Category: entertainment, festivals, movies, play, vacation, Wisc Film Fest | Tags: WFF2015
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Friday, April 10th, 2015 I feel pretty lucky that My Darling B talked me into going to see Uncle John, the second film we saw at the Wisconsin Film Festival this year. Uncle John is a heartwarming story about death and murder and the grim determination to hide your dark secrets no matter how many people you have to kill. And family. Togetherness. New love.

Really a well-made movie, it was shot mostly in farm country just north of Madison and looked it. The cinematography was top-notch, the casting was superb, the story was intriguing and suspenseful and the writing was engaging. Rarely does a movie as dark as this one hold my attention any more.

Uncle John | 7:49 am CDT
Comments Off on Uncle John I feel really awkward about not liking Results, the first film of the Wisconsin Film Festival. I was so bored with it that I came close to walking out on it two or three times. Then the audience would laugh at something they thought was pretty funny but went right by me, and I’d sit there wondering, Now why didn’t I get that?

And they did that a lot. It didn’t all go over my head. There were a few moments where somebody did something that made me smile. For the most part, though, it was like watching a crowd. People came in, they did stuff, some of it was interesting, occasionally it was funny, and then they left. I like people watching. I do it all the time. And I have to say that it’s more interesting than this movie was. I think that’s because people-watching is supposed to be random, but I think this movie was trying to tell a story. Or maybe not. I could be wrong about that.

Whatever. Not my cup of tea.

Results | 7:40 am CDT
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Thursday, April 9th, 2015 

Sunday, February 8th, 2015

We watched Snowpiercer last night. It got good reviews – a lot of good reviews – and it features a lot of good actors. Turned out to be a muddled mess of a movie, though.

Set in the not-too-distant future after an attempt to control global warming goes wrong and plunges the planet into a deep-freeze, Snowpiercer zooms in on what are presumably the only survivors of the climatic catastrophe, a couple hundred people locked inside a train that’s been careening along unmaintained tracks at hundreds of miles per hour for eighteen years.

Still interested?

The most pure-hearted of the survivors live in the cars at the back of the train. You can tell they’re the nicest people because they wear raggedy clothes, live in squalor and eat greasy-looking “protein bars” that the evil people in the front of the train, who wear fine clothes and lock the door as they go, deliver to the ruffians every so often under armed guard. Pretty subtle imagery, eh?

The people at the back of the train naturally resent being kept out of the front, being fed slimy goo, and having jackbooted thugs wave guns at them, so they revolt. They’ve done this before and they’ve been cut down in their tracks before, but this time they’ve apparently got a fool-proof plan that will get them all the way to the front of the train so they can take over and make everything better.

I’m guessing that the people up front, as evil as they may be, know how to keep the lights lit, the heat on and the train moving, and I’m also guessing that nobody in the back end knows how to do that, so taking over the front of the train really doesn’t do the rebels much good, but never mind. Minor plot hole. Pay it no heed.

Tangential thought: Why is the train moving at all? Seems to me that if you’ve got one of the few shelters on earth that’s impervious to the cold and has an apparently limitless source of energy, you’d just park that thing so you won’t have to fret about running off the tracks or getting buried in a snowdrift. But that’s probably a stupid idea. For some reason. Minor plot hole. Pay it no heed.

The rest of the movie is a video game: In each new scene, the rebels open the door to the next car where they have to solve a mystery or meet and overcome a foe that’s seemingly impossible to beat. One car is a single open room where row after row of six-foot-tall axe-wielding jackbooted thugs wearing kevlar vests wait for the ruffians. Hmmm. Wonder who wins, the evil thugs or the pure-hearted ruffians? Tough call.

I experienced a brief flash of hope in the first ten or fifteen minutes, about midway through a stern talking-to Tilda Swinton gave that I couldn’t help smirking over, that maybe, instead of a gloomily serious movie about a dystopian future, this was going to be a whacky comedy. The scene continued with comedic touches but, alas, the movie soon slipped back into gloom and dystopia, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a comedy. Everybody in the movie, with the exception of Alison Pill and maybe Ed Harris, was pretty damned earnest, especially Chris Evans. Wow, can that man furrow his brow. So I’m going to have to go with gloomily serious movie about a dystopian future, and I’m going to have to stay with muddled mess. See it at your peril.

Snowpiercer | 1:21 pm CDT
Category: entertainment, movies, play
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Monday, January 19th, 2015

When rating movies on a scale of one to five, I figure that a three is an average movie that doesn’t feel like a waste of my time, and a four would be a movie that I would recommend.

A five, though, is a rare movie that I would not only recommend to you, I would urge you to see it. No, I would argue that you should see it. I would happily pay for your ticket, and I would show up at your doorstep to chauffeur you to the theater if you couldn’t get there any other way.

Selma is a five. There’s nothing about this movie I didn’t like.

selma | 10:50 am CDT
Category: entertainment, movies | Tags: Selma
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Everybody else’s take: Greatest Television Show Ever Broadcast.

Looks great: The new fighters look cool!

Saturday, January 17th, 2015

Best Songs Of The Seventies, Part One
(because I’m pretty sure I’m going to think of lots more for a Part Two right after I hit the “post” button)

Bee Gees: crickets. These guys dominated the seventies and eighties. I’ve never been able to figure out why. No one’s ever explained it to me in a way that made sense, either.

Boston: That One Song. You know it. It was on the radio all the time. You can air jam to it so hard! What the hell was it called?

Elton John: Bennie and the Jets. Did you know this song had words to it? Besides “Bennie and the Jets” I mean. No, really! It did! I looked them up a few weeks ago and discovered it’s got two whole verses! I wish we’d had the internet in the seventies so I’d been able to sing more than the chorus. Still, best Elton John song ever.

Hall & Oates: nothing. I have literally no love for any of the songs that Hall & Oats cranked out. I know y’all think they’re the greatest pop duo of the seventies, but everything they did irritates me. And it’s a totally irrational irritation; I can’t explain why I don’t like them, just that they rub me the wrong way. Sorry, Hall & Oates.

Jackson 5: I Want You Back. It’s not as hard as you think to declare this the best of all the music recorded by the Jackson 5. It’s got a great beat, not the least of all because of the heart-pounding bass line, and the melody is catchy as hell. Sometimes I get hung up on the message in the lyrics; after all, “those pretty faces always made you stand out in a crowd” isn’t exactly the most endearing thing you could say to a woman you were trying to woo back into your arms. Still, boss song.

Journey: Any Way You Want It. THAT’S the way you need it. ANY way you want it. DAH duh dah de dum dum dum dum DUM DUM DUM DAHHMMM!

REO Speedwagon: Roll With The Changes. Nothing better. Nope. Not gonna hear it. This is their best tune ever. Don’t care how big a fan you are or what you say about any of their other stuff. This is it. Talk to the hand.

Rod Stewart: Maggie Mae. Duh. I mean, did the guy even record anything else? It’s all Maggie Mae. Be honest. You can do it.

Queen: Somebody To Love. You thought it was going to be We Are The Champions, didn’t you? That song is the most overrated Queen song. Literally anything else they recorded was better than We Are The Champions. Actually, it was a tough call between this and Don’t Stop Me Now, but memories of me singing this at the tops of my lungs in the car tipped the balance. Best Ever.

Simon & Garfunkle: Trying To Keep The Customer Satisfied. Everybody who grew up in the seventies had a copy of the Bridge Over Troubled Water album. Everybody. And this was not only the best song off the album, it was their best song ever. I like everything they ever recorded, except – it has to be said, sorry – El Condor Pasa, and I sing along whenever their tunes are on the radio, because if you don’t show everybody that you know all the words to every Simon & Garfunkle tune, just go home, but this is the song that I crank all the way up to eleven. Try it. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Steve Miller: Jungle Love. I remember Steve Miller was on the radio all through the seventies. The man could crank out the pop tunes. This one, though – this one’s got a beat that leaves all the others behind. And it’s got that whistling thing. Whatever that is, it was so much fun to do in the car.

Tony Orlando and Dawn: Who’s In The Strawberry Patch With Sally? I just have to mention this one because it’s so goddamn much fun to sing at parties. Not that I go to a lot of parties these days. Probably because I sing this song. Please invite me to your party so I can sing this song.

favorites | 5:04 pm CDT
Category: daily drivel, entertainment, music, play
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Saturday, December 13th, 2014

Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise-Emily Blunt team-up movie in which Cruise time-travels back to the same day over and over again a la Bill Murray in Groundhog Day to kill invading aliens, was a lot more fun than I ever suspected it would be. I don’t like time-travel movies much any more; they’ve pretty much been done to death. Edge of Tomorrow is an enjoyably surprising exception.

Unlike Bill Murray, who wakes up every morning on Groundhog Day, Tom Cruise jumps back in time only when he gets killed. This happens to him a lot, the first time after an alien bleeds acid on him, and after that by being shot, immolated, exploded, crashed upon by a transport aircraft and run over by a truck, which, by the way, is something you don’t want to miss even if you’re the half of the world who thinks you can’t stand Tom Cruise in big or small doses.

Each time Cruise dies, he wakes up on the tarmac at Heathrow Airport where Bill Paxton flashes his smarmiest grin at Cruise and gives him a lecture about the virtues of battle that would make R. Lee Ermey weep with joy. Paxton gets blown out the sky the next morning but, thanks to the wonder of time travel, we get to see him over and over and over (repeatedly tormenting Cruise, by the way. Really, Cruise-haters, it wouldn’t kill you to watch this!).

Shanghaied by the general commanding the last-ditch invasion to crush the advancing alien scourge, Cruise realizes that he can not only remember what killed him last time, he can avoid it. Of course, then he gets killed by something else, but he remembers that, too, and avoids the first two things, then gets killed by the third thing. And the fourth thing. And so on, and on, and on.

This would all be too much if, in the middle of the invasion, he hadn’t met Emily Blunt, a woman so badass that she doesn’t shoot aliens with the ray guns everyone else is using because she’s got a machete. A BIG machete. She agrees to show Cruise how to kill aliens with the help of her killer robot alien droids that can, and often do kick Cruise’s ass, or at the very least break his arms and legs, forcing Blunt to shoot him in the head so they can start over. Yeah. She knows he can time travel. She used to do it, too.

Together, Blunt and Cruise set out to redo the invasion as many times as it takes to figure out how to defeat them, and I’ve got to say that Blunt is every bit the kick-ass action star that Cruise is. I can’t think of a single movie off the top of my head that I’ve seen her in outside this one, but I hope she can find more movies where she gets to match the strong male lead the way she did here, because she’s terrific at it.

And of course they beat the aliens. No spoiler there, I think. It’s only a matter of figuring out how, right?

Edge of Tomorrow | 3:49 pm CDT
Category: entertainment, movies, play | Tags: Edge of Tomorrow
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Thursday, December 11th, 2014

“Of course,” he answered with a smile.

Wonder how Tim likes it?

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2014

Thank you, Dave Addey, and your Typeset in the Future blog! I haven’t been served up so delicious a serving of Alien minutia in a long time!

I swear, I thought all that crap about the “Weyland-Yutani” corporation was just jibber-jabber made up to fill the pages of tech-spec books, that it wasn’t even thought of until the third or fourth movie in the series, but there it is, plain as day on one of the ship displays in the Act One, Scene One of Alien: (Credit for all images to David Addey, TypesetInTheFuture.com)

If you ever wondered why Ripley wasn’t able to shut off the self-destruct mechanism in the first Alien movie: Ripley follows the French instructions with her finger, not the English ones from before … And this is where it all goes horribly wrong.

Let’s take a look at those French instructions in more detail:

Exécutez INSERTION/BOULON No 1 a la cale No 1

Hmm … something something “NUCLEAR BOLT” … something something “SÉCURITÉ” … it certainly sounds plausible. But how do these compare to the English instructions we verified the efficacy of earlier?

For the first three steps, all is bon. But from instruction four onwards, things take a definite turn for the worse.

Thanks to this truly awful piece of translation, Ripley fails to abort the detonation process in time, and the five-minute countdown to total detonation continues …

all is bon | 7:48 pm CDT
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Thursday, November 27th, 2014

Sunday, November 9th, 2014

Monday, November 3rd, 2014

I checked out Gravity from the library while we were visiting yesterday morning. When My Darling B saw what I had in my hands, she said something like, “Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you,” or she sing-songed, “You’ll be sorr-eee!” or something like that. She thought it was a stinker after the first teaser.

And oh my, was she right. This movie had exactly one thing going for it, and that was the pretty pictures of my home planet. Except for that, it was one long snoozefest. I didn’t see one moment of the nerve-wracking tension that the critics raved about. (I can’t believe this got a 97% on the Tomatometer! I think I may never believe Rotten Tomatoes again!) Every scene was entirely predictable. Good example: There’s a third crewman in the background of the very first scene with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. Third Crewman speaks with what sounds to me like an Asian accent. As soon as I heard that, I thought, Well, he’s a dead man. They didn’t even bother to show his face until after it got bashed in by space junk.

Also, the dialogue was idiotic. Not awkward, not “could’ve been better,” just flat-out stupid. After Bullock drifts away from the space shuttle, Clooney calls to her on the radio: “Where are you? What’s your location?” Duh. She’s in orbit over the planet. There aren’t any reference points up there! What the hell’s she supposed to say to that? “I’m over North America! Right over Ohio! Cincinnati, to be exact! Wait, no, now I’m over Columbus. Hurry it up, will ya? I’m gonna be in Philadelphia soon.”

There was a whole bunch of stuff wrong with the way people and spaceships moved in orbit, and what the hell is it with movie astronauts that they can’t keep their helmets on? I may be wrong, but don’t you think Lesson One in Astronaut School is, When the spaceship is getting hit by space junk, keep your goddamn helmet on! (Amended for movie astronaut school: …unless you’re in a movie, then take it off so the audience can see your terrified expression.)

Finally, and I know this is a minor thing and I’m just piling on now, but goddammit, the 3-D gimmicks, like making the actors jump at the camera in every scene, just look like gimmicks when the movie’s not in 3-D.

Should’ve listened to B. One star, but only for the pretty pictures of my home planet.

Gravity | 5:54 am CDT
Category: entertainment, movies, play | Tags: Gravity
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Sunday, September 21st, 2014

I had tickets to see Pomplamoose last week at the High Noon Saloon. Too bad I didn’t get to see them.

Oh, I was there. I got there early. Tickets said the show started at eight, so I was there with my hot date at seven-thirty hoping to score a couple of seats close to the stage. Turns out the High Noon doesn’t do seats close to the stage. They don’t do seats anywhere near the stage. You can stand on the open floor around the stage, or you can try to wrangle a seat in the balcony. We managed to wrangle a seat in the balcony behind some motormouthed dude who apparently paid the fifteen-dollar cover charge so he could spend the whole time yammering to the other people at his table what a great show it was. Or something. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, only that he was making a lot of noise.

To be fair to the motormouth, everybody was making a lot of noise. Here’s a tip: If you want to hear what one of your favorite bands would sound like as background music, go see them at the High Noon Saloon, where the customers pay for tickets to see a band and then stand around jabbering while the band plays. Made my head explode. Twice, because there were two opening acts: John Schroeder, a blues singer who might’ve been pretty good if only I could have heard him over the crowd noise, and Danielle Ate The Sandwich, a kind of folksy singer who might’ve been pretty good if only I could have … oh, you know.

I bugged out before Pomplamoose came on stage, for two good reasons: I didn’t want to get arrested for jumping up on the pool table and yelling, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE WILL YOU DUMBSHITS SHUT THE HELL UP?! And also because it was late. I’m old. I go to bed at ten o’clock. To see my favorite band I’ll make an exception, but not after they keep me waiting for two hours, and not when the crowd is going to keep on gossiping about the dumb shit that happened at work that day. So I didn’t get to see Pomplamoose. Sad face.

Here’s one of my favorite Pomplamoose songs, just so you know why I’m kinda bummed that I didn’t get to see them:

Pomplamoose | 5:06 pm CDT
Category: entertainment, music, play, yet another rant | Tags: Pomplamoose
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Friday, August 29th, 2014

Tuesday, August 19th, 2014

As I was saying, the biggest thrill of the weekend was the mouse that came up the stairs into the kitchen on Sunday night. I’m not kidding. Don’t judge us. We don’t get out much.

The little booger literally came up the stairs. I’m almost one-hundred percent certain of this because when I turned on the lights to go downstairs Friday night, there on the second-to-the-top step was a mouse, frozen in mid-step. Hm? Where was I going? Me? I was, ah, just going to the bathroom! Yeah! That’s the ticket! The toilet downstairs is backed up, so I was going to use the one upstairs, if you don’t mind! Yeah! What? You do mind? Well, then, heh-heh-heh, I guess I’ll just go back downstairs and piss in the corner again. See yah!

When I spot a mouse in the house, my reaction is just a little manic. I hope nobody ever records it, because I don’t want it to be immortalized on YouTube for the rest of recorded human history. But here’s what it sounds like in print: “I SEE YOU! I SEE YOU, YOU LITTLE BASTARD! I’M GONNA STOMP YOU! YOU CAN RUN, BUT I’M GONNA GET YOU!” It goes on like that for pages as I scramble around, huffing and puffing until I have to stop to catch my breath. I’ve never caught a mouse this way. Really, there’s probably nobody who spends more energy on not catching mice than I do.

But if I have a cat as my wing man, then I can get things done. Boo spotted the little invader Sunday night after it tried to sneak under the stairway door into the dining room. She happened to be ambling by, headed for a bite of kibble from her bowl, which was probably what the mouse was thinking of doing, too. Boo let us know what she’d found by leaping into the air, scrambling back and forth across the floor, and finally sticking her face in the crack between the base of the oven and the linoleum, snorfling up more air than a Hoover vacuum cleaner. Subtlety is not Boo’s way.

When we went looking for the mouse to see if it was, indeed, trapped, My Darling B spotted it between the oven and the fridge before it scurried to relative safety behind the oven. So we worked out a way to catch the little vermin: I would sweep under the oven with a stick while B made sure that Boo wouldn’t wander away. Her attention span can be a little short sometimes.

But it didn’t take long to flush out the mouse. One or two quick sweeps with the stick and the mouse popped out from under the oven like it was shot, straight past Boo and through B’s feet. That’s when she squealed like a girl and jumped back three feet. I thought that was something that happened only in cartoons. Her reaction wouldn’t have surprised me more if she’d lifted the hem of her petticoat, jumped up on a chair and squeaked, Eeeek! A mouse!

The mouse made a hairpin turn to the right and I thought at first that it headed for the stairway door and the safety of the basement, but for some reason it went instead into the living room where Boo chased it back and forth across the floor like two of the Three Stooges. Whoo-woo-woo-woo! and Why I Oughta! would’ve been the perfect caption to the photo I didn’t get a chance to take, because I chased after them, making sure that the mouse couldn’t find another hiding spot. I had to move one piece of furniture away from the wall so Boo could get behind it, and twice I had to play goalie, slapping the mouse back into play with my foot when it tried to run for the hallway, but Boo did most of the work, finally pinning it down by the front door, the perfect place for me to slap a plastic tub over it. It was late and I didn’t want to keep it overnight, so I suspended our usual no-kill policy and that particular mouse went on permanent sabbatical.

Boo can move pretty fast for such a tubby cat. She’s usually the epitome of a princess-like cat, mincing across the floor in carefully measured steps, but when she saw that mouse, she went batshit crazy, and she scrambled across the living room like a maniac. It was hard not to be impressed.

yelp 2 | 6:07 am CDT
Category: Boo, entertainment, housekeeping, Life & Death, O'Folks | Tags: mice
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Sunday, August 17th, 2014

If you don’t see any other movie this summer, you’ve got to see Guardians Of The Galaxy.

Why? Talking raccoon, that’s why. Talking tree, that’s why. Soundtrack that includes Hooked On A Feeling, the oogah-chagah version by Blue Swede. That’s why.

Full disclosure: The soundtrack also includes Escape (The Pina Colada Song) by Rupert Holmes, so you’ve got to weigh any revulsion you feel toward that one song, and I can only hope you are as nauseated by it as you should be, against your desire to see a fun summer movie. I can offer the consolation that a prick of a prison guard gets cold-cocked while he’s listening to the song I cannot mention a second time. So there’s that.

Okay. Back to Guardians Of The Galaxy. I don’t know where this came from. I used to read comic books (well duh) and back in the 80s there was a special edition comic book called Star-Lord, featuring a guy named Peter Quill, same as in this movie, but this movie and that comic book look nothing alike. I asked the Google if it could explain, but it could not; it could only show me comic book panels of a guy who was called Star Lord but didn’t look like the Star-Lord that I knew, or like the Star Lord in the movie.

I’m happy to forget about trying to figure it out. The movie, as it exists on its own, is a lot of fun. Star Lord is some kind of Han Solo/Indiana Jones hybrid who gets a bunch of space pirates (the talking raccoon, the talking tree, a walking five-hundred pound tattoo and a green-painted Zoe Saldana) to help him steal an orb from Ronin, a guy who can hit you so hard your unborn children will say “ouch.”  That’s all you need to know. You don’t need to know why the space pirates would help Star Lord, you don’t need to know what the orb is — it’s all just  background. Watching these guys chase Ronin across the galaxy for the fun of it is all you need. That, and you need to buy the soundtrack. They really want you to. I did. It’s good.

Guardians Of The Galaxy | 6:04 pm CDT
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Saturday, July 19th, 2014

Word Crimes | 4:26 pm CDT
Category: entertainment, music, play | Tags: video treat
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We watched four episodes of Under The Dome before we lost interest. It’s not a terrible show, but it’s not a good one.

I admit I was predisposed to hate it. I thought the idea was dumb when I read the review of the Stephen King book it’s based on: A dome appears over a small town. It wasn’t built there, it just appeared. It’s transparent to light, it stops sound completely, and when cars drive into it or airplanes try to fly through it, they’re smashed as if they hit an indestructible wall. Everyone in the town is trapped there, with no idea how long this will go on. If that seems to you like something that could happen, then you might like this story. It sounds dumb to me, so I figured I probably wouldn’t.

To my surprise, the first episode was not all that bad. It was mostly about introducing the main characters and hinting at the intrigues they were involved with. The dome descended and most of them reacted in ways that seemed believable, so we kept on watching. Over the next couple of episodes, though, it pretty much fell apart. Why did they spend so much time on screaming girl? One or two scenes were all we needed to establish that she was trapped by psycho boy and that she could scream like a Wagnerian diva, but they kept coming back to her every five minutes. See, she’s still trapped down there, and she’s still screaming. Man, that girl can scream, can’t she? Let’s listen to her scream for a few more minutes before we cut away. Surprised they didn’t have some crystal wine goblets on hand for her to shatter with her piercing voice.

Weirdest to me is that, after four episodes, which works out to about three or four days, nobody has set up a way to communicate with the people in radiation suits waving Geiger counters at the dome and the soldiers standing guard around it. Although they can see each other, only one person has thought to write a note and press it up against the dome for someone outside to read. That was in the first few minutes after the dome fell on the town; after that, the people inside spend hardly any time at all trying to get the attention of the people outside, and the people outside literally act as if the people they can easily see inside the dome aren’t there.

All those grunts standing guard is a bit of a mystery, too. If they were there to prevent people on the outside from getting too close, that would make some kind of sense, but most of them are facing the dome, as if they were trying to keep people in. What the hell is that? And even though they’re standing at port arms all day long facing the dome, they don’t taunt or tease the people inside, never flip them off, don’t leer at the pretty girls. “You could strip naked and they probably wouldn’t react,” the rugged-looking ex-Army guy tells the gorgeous young journalist. Oh, please. She could strip naked and the soldiers wouldn’t bat an eye? Which army were you in?

So we’ve had enough of Under The Dome. Time to move on to something more believable, like maybe an Adam Sandler movie.

Under The Dome | 11:07 am CDT
Category: entertainment, play, television
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Tuesday, July 8th, 2014

We checked out the Superman reboot Man Of Steel and watched it the other day.

What can I say about Superman that hasn’t been said a million times already?

For starters, I peed more than I’ve ever peed during a movie before, so thank goodness I waited to see it on DVD because I would have missed at least thirty minutes of it if I’d seen it in the movie theater. Not that I’m implying that the movie made me pee. It didn’t. At least, I don’t think it did. No, I’m pretty sure it was the beer. That stuff usually makes me pee and I’ve heard it affects just about everybody else that way, too.

It was a very dark movie, literally dark. Every scene seemed to be shot through a lens that made everybody and everything look like cold steel. Cold, green steel.  Maybe copper would be a better simile here. Cold, green copper doesn’t quite have the same punch as steel, though, does it? I think I’m gonna stick with steel.

Henry Cavill, the guy who played Supes (he lets me call him Supes), was just dark and brooding enough to fit in with the rest of the cold, dark rebootedness, but he was not so brooding as to be unwatchably emo. Also, I could easily believe he could hold up falling oil rigs with his bare hands. That man is ripped. I’m pretty sure he has muscles in his turds.

And thank you, Kevin Costner, for a wonderful Jonathan Kent. I still think that Glen Ford’s performance is the one to beat, but you made a great showing. Bravo.

Well, that’s about it. I didn’t get all torqued off about Supes killing General Zod in the finale, the way the fanboys did, because I figure after their big fight knocked down half the buildings in Metropolis the two of them must have killed, easy, five thousand innocent bystanders. So he killed Zod. It’s a movie. An action movie. This isn’t an Ingmar Bergman flick. Get over it.

Man Of Steel | 9:38 pm CDT
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Monday, July 7th, 2014

Sunday, July 6th, 2014

I have the pop song Afternoon Delight stuck in my head. It ought to be Muskrat Love, the song I was reading about when one of the commenters to the online article noted that it was one of those schmaltzy pop songs they couldn’t help but love, like Afternoon Delight. For some reason, my brain decided to obsess on the latter instead of the former.

I, too, am one of those people who have to shamefacedly admit I love schmaltzy pop songs like Muskrat Love and Afternoon Delight. Even though earworms like these will eventually drive me to sing The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island in self-defense, I am right now tapping my toes and humming along as Afternoon Delight is echoing over and over deep within my cortex.

Footnote: I did not know that Muskrat Love, specifically the version I know by the Captain and Tennille, was a cover of a song called Muskrat Candlelight by Willis Alan Ramsey.

skyrockets in flight | 8:36 am CDT
Category: entertainment, music, play
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Sunday, June 29th, 2014

Orange Is The New Black has a rockin’ theme song by Regina Spektor with lyrics that start, “The animals, the animals, trapped, trapped, trapped til the cage is full …” But I wasn’t listening at all to the words the first two or three times I heard it, so it only half-registered on my consciousness as “The Alamo, the Alamo, trapped, trapped, trapped in the Alamo.”

B thinks this is about the goofiest thing I have ever said.

Round about the second time I heard it, the thought half-registered on my brain that it didn’t make much sense for her to be singing about the Alamo, so I wondered what else it could be and actually thought of “the animals” but then I thought, c’mon, why would she be saying that? And I moved on to much more credible possibilities, such as “pie a la mode” and “Los Alamos.”

Then I remembered I had the internet on my phone and I just looked it up.

The Alamo | 6:08 pm CDT
Category: daily drivel, entertainment, play, television

After a dinner conversation that revolved around movies featuring Robert Downey Jr., we shifted to the living room to scan the movies with Downey in them that were available for streaming and settled on Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang because we were in the mood for a comedy.

I think My Darling B was the first to say, “Well, that was weird,” after we finished watching it. We all said it, but she was the first out of the gate. I think I just agreed with her. Tim’s version was a little more specific: “The weirdest thing about it was how much I liked Val Kilmer’s part.”

Val Kilmer played the detective; Robert Downey Jr. was Kilmer’s bumbling sidekick. Sort of. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what Downey’s part in the film was. He started off narrating the film, which always forces me to wonder about every narrated scene: Would this scene be okay without the narration? Ninety-nine percent of the time, the answer’s yes, and that held true here, I think. There were a couple of throwaway visual jokes that depended on the narration, but I got the impression that they had Downey narrate mostly because Kilmer was a detective and Downey pretended to be a detective.

So, narration, because detectives. But a snarky kind of narration, so not a run of the mill detective film. And the film ended with Downey doing a quick recap of events from his desk in the style of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that I really can’t explain.

In summary, a couple of fairly good chuckles, Val Kilmer was surprisingly good but mostly it was confusing. If you can come up with a more coherent summary of the film than that, please let me know, thanks.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang | 3:16 pm CDT
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Monday, June 9th, 2014

I was listening to tunes while doing some mindless, repetitive paperwork the other day when “Don’t Walk Away” came up as a random pick. My phone’s shuffle option tends to favor modern pop tunes and the Dave Brubeck best-of album I bought a year ago. It almost never plays the one-off tunes in my collection even though it’s supposed to be random, so I practically never hear older songs like “I Want You Back” or “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin'” unless I flip through the list and poke it by hand.

That’s one reason I was startled enough to stop what I was doing and sit up in my chair when “Don’t Walk Away” came around on shuffle. Another reason is, the song opens with the raw, ragged voice of Toni Childs all but shouting the title of the song, followed by a brace of trumpets blasting out two quick bars before Childs repeats her demand. It’s an introduction that grabs you by the lapels and holds on.

But the most personal reason I had to stop and listen to “Don’t Walk Away” is that it’s my breakup song, the song that perfectly captured my utter wretchedness at the moment my heart had broken. Those three words and those blaring horns were a top ten hit when I was dumped by the one and only person I couldn’t live without.

After I heard this song on VH1 or MTV or whatever I went straight out to the store, was strangely relieved to find they had a copy of “Reunion” on cassette tape, paid whatever they asked for it, popped it into my player as soon as I got back to my dorm and replayed it so many times I’m surprised to this day that my roomie didn’t strangle me in my sleep. He gave me a pass only because he and everybody else in the whole world could see what a wreck I was.

That summer, Toni Childs barked out the words I needed to hear. I still get the chills listening to this song, same way I get all warm and gooshy inside when I hear Basia Trzetrzelewska, another singer you’ve never heard of, croon “Time and Tide.” What a year that was. What a song.

Don’t Walk Away | 8:42 pm CDT
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Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014

Last night’s movie here at Our Humble O’Bode was the romantic comedy-slash-not quite time travel movie About Time (I know there aren’t enough dashes. I ran out. Sue me).

It was quite definitely a romantic comedy. It was not quite a time travel movie because, although Tim Lake, the guy narrating the story in the manner of Hugh Grant, could travel back in time, the way he did at one or two crucial moments of the film did not make sense to me – and before you make the very salient point that just about every time travel movie ever made did not, upon further reflection, make any sense at all, I have to point out that other time travelers did not move through time by climbing into a wardrobe (or, in a pinch, any dark, closet-like cubbyhole), clenching their fists and making the face other people make when they’re about to get slapped by a woman they’ve just made a drunken pass at. This is not, in other words, time travel as we have seen it in other movies. There is no flashing, whirlygig of a time machine and nothing especially remarkable happens except that Tim finds himself wearing the clothes he wore on the day he imagined himself going back to, and then he tries to act nonchalant as he climbs out of the wardrobe.

Tim uses his awesome time-traveling powers to do what any teenaged boy would do: Go after the girls. If he muffs the New Year’s Eve Party Kiss, or if he sploots a bottle of suntan lotion all over a pretty girl, no problem – he just clenches his fists, makes the funny face, and gets a do-over. It doesn’t help him get any girls, by the way. Oops, spoiler alert. But he does get a lot of practice.

When Mary finally enters the picture, they have one of the most charming first dates ever filmed (and possibly one of the oddest, because you can’t see it) and Tim doesn’t resort to time travel even when he does muff his lines or stick a spoon full of chocolate mousse in her eye. They have a delightfully lovely first date, she gives him her phone number and he wanders back to his apartment in a haze while an acoustic guitar plays an appropriately romantic number.

Back home, he learns that his landlord, a playwright, has just endured one of the most terrible opening nights of his career. This is the part of the movie where Tim learns the consequences of changing one thing with his awesome powers. He goes back to the beginning of the evening, goes to the play with his landlord and fixes everything that went wrong so the play is a huge success. BUT – if he spent the evening at the play, he couldn’t have met Mary, so her phone number vanishes from his possession and she has no memory of him.

For some reason, and this is the part that doesn’t work for me, Tim doesn’t ditch the playright, run off to the first dark closet he can find and do the clenchy-fist thing so he can have the most romantic first date ever filmed instead of helping his landlord. He just lives with the heartache of having to grope around the city blindly trying to find Mary again. And against all odds they meet again, but in the clumsiest, most contrived way conceivable, and again a third time (clench, grimace) in a not so clumsy way, but it still wasn’t the most romantic first date ever filmed.

And it doubly didn’t work for me when later he figures out how to use time travel to fix his sister’s awful relationship with her dirtbag boyfriend, then returns to his own time to find that his year-old daughter is not the daughter he had before. It’s still his daughter, but now she’s a brunette instead of a blonde. Rather than just accept that this is the consequence of using his awesome powers for good, as he did with his landlord, a guy he barely knows, he rewinds his life, effectively killing off the brunette daughter he just created, and lets her sister have her ruinous relationship with her dirtbag boyfriend so he can have his blonde girl back. Kind of a douche move, if you ask me.

But it’s not an awful movie. It’s actually kind of cute, if you don’t think about it too much and just enjoy the bits where Bill Nighy does what Bill Nighy does.

About Time | 6:02 am CDT
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