License plate spotted today: EA75HT. My brain turns that seven into a T and the five into an S. You figure out the rest. This was on a fairly recent Mustang, and just after another one (probably the Cobra variant) had peeled out in front of me into a convenience store parking lot.
Here I am, having watched a number of movies and said nothing about them. Where are my manners? I think I left off with Platoon, which was probably the most conventional Vietnam war movie I've watched in the last month. But I wouldn't watch it again before Full metal jacket, but definitely before tackling Apocalypse now again, redux or not. Following that was one of history's forgotten spoof movies, The big bus of 1976. It's meant to be a rip-roaringly hilarious send-up of the disaster movie genre with its exploding buildings, quaking earths, crashing airplanes and sinking boats. It had a couple jokes, but more of its absurdity came from the lengths those responsible went to make a joke that fell flat. Surviving movies like this makes watching ZAZ spoofs like Airplane! and Top secret! so much better, as they pull it off so much more gracefully. In the middle of the bus's carnage is a fresh-faced Rene Auberjonis as a faith-questioning priest. I couldn't help but recall the last mess of a movie in which Rene played a man of the cloth, Altman's M*A*S*H, which is by far considered to be a better movie despite being an absolute mess. A mess with better characterization and more subtle joking, though.
Continuing the transportation theme was Von Ryan's express with Frank Sinatra and a bunch of recognizable people whose names nobody remembers. That reminded me of Burt Lancaster, the name everybody knows but not the face, who starred in Frankenheimer's The train. I watched that a week or so ago and bring it up primarily because its also a WWII movie about hoodwinking the Germans about a train. Both are decent though neither is a classic. Other than that, the two aren't much the same at all and I'm just going to move onto the next film.
I'm skipping over the previous paragraph to talk about Robert Altman again. On skippy's recommendation I borrowed Gosford park. Like many of the movies I've seen by the "greats" (Scorsese, Altman, Kubrick, et al.) I can recognize it for its technical merits but I cannot fall in love with it. I enjoyed a goodly amount of it, though, and it was fun to try to recognize actors I've seen in few other roles, the Clive Owenses and (Trainspotting's) Kelly MacDonalds here and there. I know that I confused the sisters and the kitchen maids (with each other, not the others). The authenticity is very convincing (though I didn't watch the supplements discussing such) and remains accessible, but in the end I'm not so sure I need to see Altman re-imagine the whodunit. I'd much rather see what he can do within the constraints of the genre, how he can elevate a conventional film out of the box, not put it in another one altogether.
Whatever. I know that it will be funnier the next time around, and then I'll be able to better spot the red herring(s? It's a possible plural) and more of the jokes, but I'm not in a hurry at present. After all I have such "great" films as Scanners, one of David Cronenberg's goriest, to slog through. Somehow the flick just didn't do anything for me. I'm no fan of gore, and to have a film bookended with an exploding head and a gooey, decomposing corpse with mainly filler in between to justify them doesn't turn my crank. I think somebody should put together a reel of his and Paul Verhoeven's exploding heads just to settle the matter once and for all as to who is the master of the blown-up cranium. And then the two of them can go on with making their subversive films that are so much more worth the time.
So that's what I've been watching lately. And I finished reading Houellebecq's Elementary particles; for a book by a Frenchman it cleansed my literary palate of the remnants of "France's greatest philosopher" Bernie Levy's Who killed Danny Pearl?. As far as the book cover is concerned Houellebecq's no philosopher, let alone a great one, but the writing's eons ahead of Levy's for philosophical musings and brutal humanity. Yadda yadda yadda I can blather on all night about books and movies, but instead I want to sit back and watch the rest of the second half of Trainspotting. I don't think Kelly MacDonald's aged a day since then.
In an odd turn of events, I just noticed that my toothpaste tube has a cap that can both be flipped open and screwed off. I know this only because it says so in little letters right on it. My only question is, "Why?"
I lied. I have more questions:
And in other news, I made it through the library's entire stock of Transmetropolitan, and enjoyed it thoroughly. My forays into graphic novels have been somewhat limited, but this time around Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson really impressed me. It's funny, it's witty and intelligent, and ultimately optimistic for the future. Sure, Ellis paints a pretty oppressive picture of The City and its downtrodden inhabitants, but also reveals that they are somewhat avid readers, and also that acid rain has been eliminated entirely. Not too bad, really, when one thinks about it.
My personal vision for the future (at least one that I'd try to write into a poor imitation of Blade runner) is of illiterates who rely entirely on spoken and pictorial communication. This is not a new idea, though the way I envision it happening is new and edgy: Say the media producers of the world are really trying to capture the youth and 18-24 year old male markets. They shrewdly turn to the video game industry, whose designers and artists have long littered visual displays and scenery with pseudo-language gibberish. Broadcasted video is littered with these meaningless hieroglyphics interspersed with real information but to a varying degree until the real information is wiped off the screen and only the gibberish remains. It looks cool, though, and without needing it to watch TV nobody gets around to learning how to read, since books have long since been replaced by video media. Of course the e-book makes an appearance, but only as a stepping stone to having some dullard just read the damn thing out loud. Surprisingly, nobody complains.
Anyway, while you can still read, pick up some volumes of Transmetropolitan. And if you notice some recurrent graffiti, say, "FREE STEVE CHUNG", you can search the internet to find out what it means. At least, I did.
And speaking of revelations, apparently the proper term for screwing off the cap of a toothpaste tube is "twisting". So now you know.
I noticed two odd coincidences today, though neither really counts for much of anything. First of all, today whilst walking to the library with my wife we discussed excitement and the things that excite me. I can't remember the context of any of it save for the fact that I said that not much excited me. I think that it was something about food or something like that. Anyway, not five hours later I had some cause for excitement. Popping into Half Price Books to sell some magazines I stumbled across a small cache of Criterion Collection laserdiscs for rather low prices. Surprisingly the only one that I already owned was The big chill and the other ten or so were new to me. As I flipped through more and more of them I started to get excited at the prospect of finding something really good, and lo and behold I had in my hands a copy of one of my holy grails, The Fisher king. It was marked down to a mere two dollars, even better! But just as I got my hopes up I noticed that it felt a little lighter than two discs should feel, and in the next moment my hopes sunk. Somebody had lost the second disc, the one with the ending, the deleted scenes and all the good supplemental materials. I was mildly crushed (well, very crushed) until I noticed copies of both Dr. No and Goldfinger.
Now it was once common knowledge that there were a couple different versions of the Bond Criterions. I knew that the earliest pressings had some extra features that the studios demanded struck from the rest. I didn't really know much more than that, though, and would have bought both were it not for a little sheet explaining the whole situation nestled in with the Dr. No disc, and it mentioned that the missing features were primarily a commentary with the filmmakers, including demigod production designer Ken Adams. So No was a bust, but Goldfinger did indeed list such a commentary on its back cover. I was sold. I bought it (for a measly eight bucks; it goes on ebay for over fifty) as well as the first half of The Fisher king for a dollar, Mike Leigh's Naked of which I know little but am willing to discover more for a few dollars more, Kasdan's Silverado and Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, both of which I know little about but again am willing to discover more. I might even go back for some of the others, though they could well sell in the next few days. The autographed copy of Repossessed wasn't there this time, after all.
Oh, and the other coincidence? Just yesterday I'd been wondering about The Fisher king and thinking I should replace my non-Criterion version of it soon. Little did I know that I would be halfway there the very next day.
It is not without a little sadness that I report that my original web presence, the "Page of Original Content" has disappeared from the web. ACORN has taken down its personal accounts server and with it my pages from the mid to late 1990s. Somehow I never got around to archiving them, and unfortunately neither did Google or the Internet Archive. So, barring some other massive cache of bits and bytes appearing, it would seem that what was there is lost forever. It almost brings a tear to my eye.
Except that it isn't really gone, per se. All of the content that mattered (that is, the stupid jokes and bad poems) has long since been assimilated into this very site, and all that is really gone is the address and the original layout, complete with its hand-drawn two color background image. So why cry? I no longer have my bragging rights. I cannot say, "Look, I was here; I did this." and moreover I cannot show anybody how I once had a horrible eye for layout just like the rest of the early webmasters. Really, it was awful. I even had the little icons of the Netscape and Microsoft banner boxing with (gasp!) an animated gif.
What it really means, though, is that I have failed in my quest to archive everything digital I have ever done. My packratting instincts have failed me, and I won't have those pages to kick around any more. After all, I have a copy of every single image that has graced my desktops at home and at work (I think) as well as ever paper I've ever typed (including those done in DOS Q&A) and so on and so forth. If it were anybody else's work, it'd be an obsession, but somehow being only mine it just seems a shame. I miss my page.
I think there might even have been an "under construction" image there too.
Now that you have all commiserated with me, go out and find what "Free Steve Chung" means. Now, and stop that damn sniffling.
Today I have nothing at all to say, not even a pointless rant. It snowed, though, and that's nice, I guess.