Last weekend saw my oft-delayed Warhammer 40K weekend come to pass at last. A couple of times a year, I reunite with former Champaign friends Donn and Tonya, plus Tonya’s brother Dan, for a weekend of dakka-dakka tabletop warfare.

The four of us posing in front of the Games Workshop store near Dan’s apartment. Left to right: Dan, me, Tonya and Donn. Donn is uncomfortable with having his face on the web, so he shall remain incognito. The store itself was a nightmare of loud, jostling youngsters and all-too-eager sales clerks, so we didn’t stay long.

A densely-packed urban landscape was our environment of choice for the weekend’s games.

Donn’s Lictor hangs out.

The Sisters of Battle motorcade wends its way through ruined city streets.

Tonya’s Dark Angels and Donn’s Imperial Guard pour over the bridge.

Donn’s custom, cowboy-themed Imperial Guard transport.

Dark Angels overwhelm my unlucky Seraphim.

Dan’s Necron Monolith dominates the battlefield.

Initial deployment of my 2,000 point Sisters army.

Tonya’s Terminators invade our stronghold.

Blood in the streets!

More Dark Angels arrive via Tonya’s impressive, completely scratch-built Drop Pod.

A solitary Priest, armed with a chainsword, successfully destroys an enemy tank that attempts to run him over.

My Exorcist tank bursts through the wall of the Cathedral just in time to win the scenario!

Dave Games

The FCC has issued a report to Congress seeking to regulate TV violence the same way they do indecency. And the scary thing is that there’s plenty of bipartisan support for this sort of thing, which is funny, because many of the most violent shows on broadcast TV are also the most popular. How will folks feel when all of their crime procedural dramas vanish in one stroke?

Dave TV

Last night Vic and I attended a local book signing by former Survivor contestant Rupert Boneham, who was so popular with fans of the TV series that they overwhelmingly voted to award him with a million dollars at the conclusion of the “All Stars” season.

We had pretty much given up on Survivor after the first few seasons, but on a whim we tuned into the first episode of the pirate-themed “Pearl Islands” season back in 2003. We were soon introduced to the self-described “hairy, scary” Rupert, who found himself with an opportunity when the two teams of contestants were pushed off a boat and washed up on the shore of a local village, where they were instructed to barter for whatever they wanted. The other team removed their wet shoes and placed them in a box which they set next to the bedraggled Rupert. He looked over at the shoes, said “I’m a pirate,” and happily carted off the box to barter it away. We instantly fell in love, and wound up watching both “Pearl Islands” and “All-Stars.” And yes, we were among those who voted for him to win a million bucks.

We enjoyed having the opportunity to meet with him in person. It reminded us of our encounter with Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood some years back. That may sound sacrilegious, but hear me out. Like Fred, Rupert appears to be exactly how he appears on TV, a truly sweet and likable soul. In addition, Rupert professes a devotion to young people, and has used his winnings to set up a non-profit, Rupert’s Kids, which provides mentoring and vocational training to at-risk teens, and teaches them how to make a legal, responsible living.

One more way in which he was like Fred is that both of them brought out a happy, young-at-heart look in Vic that I love to see.

Rupert gave a good talk, shared some behind-the-scenes dish on his Survivor days, and spent as much time with each fan as they wanted, signing books, taking photos and generally chatting away. What a cool guy!

Dave General

While Vic and I don’t collect the U.S. state quarters for ourselves, we do keep an eye out for new releases on behalf of her mom. For my part, I enjoy seeing new coin designs; it’s nice to have something different than the standard Washingtons, Jeffersons and Roosevelts jingling in my pocket.

However, both of us were disappointed in Illinois’ entry in the series. Before the final design was announced, Vic joked that all our Lincoln-obsessed state would have to do is smash a penny into the rear of its quarter. Sure enough, the eventual design had a big, ol’ Lincoln smack dab in the center. (With just a smidge of lip service paid to both farmlands and Chicago in an attempt to please everyone.)

Now, we’ve got nothing against Lincoln. We’re totally down with his slave-freeing, theatre-going ways. It’s just that he’s already all over our money, and his image is pretty much inescapable to anyone in Illinois. We’d hoped that someone could come up with something a bit different to represent our fair state. (Vic wanted Michael Jordan.)

That said, I feel that we got off lucky compared to the folks of Montana. Here is their state quarter:

A freakin’ cow skull. Okay, yes, it’s technically a bison, and yes, it’s a symbol oft-used by Montanans. But at the end of the day, Montana had the opportunity to make a statement about themselves and they collectively declared that the best they have to offer is dead cattle.

New state tourism slogan: “Come To Montana, Where The Sky Is Allegedly Larger Than Yours, And The Buffalo Do Not Roam Because They’re All Pushing Up The Daisies, That Is If We Had Any Daisies Instead Of All These Damn Rocks.”

Dave General

Last night, Vic and I completed our trifecta of movie rentals with a viewing of Mike Judge’s future comedy Idiocracy. If you’ve never heard of it, there’s a good reason for that: it sat on Fox’s shelf for a couple of years before being dumped into 100 or so theaters with no marketing whatsoever, presumably to fulfill a contractual obligation. You’d think that a studio might behave more kindly toward a director like Judge, whose history includes the bona fide hits Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, and the cult film classic Office Space.

In one sense, I can understand their treatment of the film. Not that it was at all bad, but because it would have been tricky to market a flick whose core premise thoroughly insults the majority of the movie-going audience.

Luke Wilson stars as a completely Average Joe (named, er, Joe) who is the subject of a U.S. Army hibernation experiment. Both he and a prostitute played by Maya Rudolph are frozen and forgotten, only to be released in the year 2505.

In the intervening five centuries, mankind has devolved to a species of half-wits. As a voice-over explains, the smarter members of society put off having babies while the Wal-Mart crowd impregnated each other like beer-swilling rabbits. Modern medicine overcame natural selection, and the stupid inherited the earth. Somehow, this idea seems all too plausible in stridently anti-intellectual 21st Century America.

Joe awakens in a world whose inhabitants are barely able to take care of themselves. The few remaining skyscrapers lean on each other for support, and in one clever landscape shot, are seen to be lashed together with cables. Carl’s Jr. (new slogan: “Fuck you! I’m eating!”) dominates the corporate landscape, and the most popular movie is “Ass,” which features a 90 minute closeup of a farting ass, and won the Oscar for Best Screenplay.

Our average Joe finds himself hailed as the smartest man in the world and is made Secretary of the Interior with an expectation to fix the world’s problems, starting with the nationwide dust bowl. He quickly realizes that the crops are failing because they’re being watered with a sports drink, but because the drink manufacturer employs half the country’s population, he creates an economic crisis when he tries to switch the farms over to H2O.

There are a lot of funny moments in Idiocracy, but man, it is hard to feel any sympathy for the knuckle-dragging dullards of the future, and listening to them blather like perpetually-stoned morons for more than a couple of minutes is rough.

Still, it’s good satire, and there are many amusing visuals, including a miles-wide Costco store and a White House briefing table spanning two rooms courtesy of a roughly smashed hole in the intervening wall. It has some good, simple messages, extolling the virtues of reading and the need to embrace smart folks even if they sound “faggy.” Finally, it suggests that while an average man can’t change the world, he can get the ball rolling.

Dave Movies

Episode three of this season of Doctor Who was entitled “Gridlock,” a word which invariably causes me to recall an old Saturday Night Live bit featuring Dana Carvey as Ross Perot and Phil Hartman as his running mate, Admiral Stockdale. It was right after Stockdale’s infamous debate appearance, and Hartman played him as a doddering crazy prone to shouting “Gridlock!” Which has nothing to do with Doctor Who; it’s just one of those things that I can’t get out of my head. I can’t remember my dad’s birthday, but I can remember “Gridlock!”

Anyhow, “Gridlock” (not “Gridlock!”) was a quirky tale set on the far, far, far future world of New Earth, involving automotive passengers trapped in a perpetual traffic jam in the underground of a massive city. Sure, it’s beyond mere exaggeration to present a society in which decades pass trying to reach the next interchange, but anyone who’s ever been forced to park on the expressway can relate to the inspiration of the story.

I gave this episode big props for several reasons. First, for breaking out of the alien invasion/end of the world box which modern Doctor Who frequently inhabits. Yes, there were monsters, but they weren’t behind the situation, and nor were they even the central issue.

Second–and this is a big spoiler, so beware–for having the cheek to feature a reappearance by an almost entirely-forgotten foe from the lost, black-and-white episodes of ’60s Who. I can’t imagine anyone ever expected to see the crablike Macra again, of whose original appearance only a lone publicity photo survives. This was one of those times I really wish that I’d stayed spoiler-free, so as to fully enjoy the punch-the-air moment of fan service. And while I suspect that this decision on Russell Davies’ part was little more than “I need a monster, so why not the Macra?” it’s the sort of thing that delights the fanbase while remaining transparent to new viewers.

However, now that the roll call of obscure Doctor Who creatures has been invoked, I think it only reasonable to call for the return of the Rills, the Fish People and the Taran Beast!

Dave Doctor Who

Vic and I thought about going to the movies this weekend, but the only thing out either of us had much interest in was Blades of Glory, and after Talladega Nights we’re starting to think that rental might be a safer bet when it comes to Will Ferrell comedies.

Speaking of rental, that’s just what we did. And it’s been so long since we’ve set foot in a video store that there were actually quite a few films that appeared to be viable choices.

Oddly enough, the first one we watched was actually something we’ve had stored on the TiVo-Like Device^TM for months, the lost-in-the-woods comedy Without a Paddle. While predictable and lazy at times–and featuring more of Seth Green’s pale skin and tighty whities than I really care to see–it generated some solid laughs. (Vic and I both loved the scene in which Green was carried off in the mouth of Bart the Bear.) Plus, I thought it was refreshing to see stars such as Green and Matthew Lillard, who have appeared in any number of youth-oriented flicks, acknowledge that they’re well past their teen years.

Next up was The Notorious Bettie Page, in which we learned that there was really nothing all that notorious about the heralded ’50s fetish pin-up. While it seemed a little unlikely that the real-life Page could be quite as blithe about the implications of her soft-core porn career as she was depicted here, it struck me as a fairly accurate portrayal overall. It’s just that, without the corsets and ball gags, there was really no story there. Girl backs into the seedier side of “glamour photography,” girl has a genuinely good time, girl ultimately gives her life over to God. However, it must be said that Gretchen Mol was a remarkable lookalike for the mysterious Miss Page.

Later that night I treated myself to a recent horror film, Feast, about which I’d heard good things. The subject of the final season of the TV show Project Greenlight, Feast was a low-budget tale about a bunch of stereotypes who walk into a bar…and are promptly attacked by ravenous monsters.

The film revels in its clichés, never giving its characters anything other than descriptive nicknames, and cleverly introducing each with a graphic detailing their role in the film and their “life expectancy.” Yet, it immediately begins to defy those conventions, and two of the first characters to die were ones previously said to have had the best chances to survive. An obvious hero is promptly slaughtered, and his putative replacement unexpectedly goes down before the final act. The only cast member to die exactly in the predicted manner is the one said to perish horribly 70 minutes into the film, though it was actually 68.

And while it’s a spoiler, I have to share my favorite moment. A second act subplot has the characters attempting to commandeer a truck in the parking lot to make their escape. When the first try fails lethally, they concoct an improbable scheme to slip one of their own number past the monsters. She succeeds in reaching the truck…and promptly drives away, never to appear again.

Plus, you gotta admire the audacity of a film that casts actor Jason Mewes (the “Jay” of “Jay & Silent Bob” fame) as himself, then rips his face off in the first reel.

It was by no means a masterpiece; it well exceeded my tolerance for slime and maggots a couple of times, and the editing was at times so frenetic that I occasionally had to scan back to see just who had been killed. Still, I was happy to watch a monster movie during which I could never be quite sure what would happen next.

Dave Movies

I’m just curious…does anyone who doesn’t personally know me read this blog? As I write it mostly for my own amusement, post infrequently, lack a clear focus and do nothing to promote it outside of my immediate circle of friends, it would not surprise me one bit if the answer is “no.”

I don’t have comments or a guest book because I don’t want to become a forum moderator–or frankly, to be forced to defend my views in public–so the only feedback mechanism is the e-mail address in the menu bar to the left. If I’m wrong and there really is someone else out there, drop me a quick note at that address.

You won’t win a prize. As I mentioned, I’m just curious.

Updated: The answer, surprisingly, is “yes.” Hi, Tina!

Dave General

Last weekend’s installment of Doctor Who was entitled “The Shakespeare Code,” and naturally enough, it was all about Francis Bacon. No, just kidding. For all the Doctor’s time-traveling and historical name-dropping, it’s odd that it’s taken more than forty years for his first on-screen encounter with the Bard of Avon.

I enjoyed the episode well enough, but it didn’t wow me as much as the previous week’s outing. I’m not sure how much of that was due to the plot: Yet Another Alien Horde That Wants To Break Through Into Our World And Eat It, this time via the power of rhyming couplets. (No, I’m not kidding this time.) I do think that New Who overdoes the threat to Earth angle; there are plenty of ways to make the stakes important without putting Life As We Know It on the line week after week.

Honestly, I think that my real problem with it was all the Shakespeare.

Confession time: I react to Shakespeare in much the same manner as my wife reacts to The Beatles. I get a little tired of hearing that Shakespeare is the pinnacle of human artistic expression. Certainly, every futuristic science-fiction show brings him up at some point. I always thought that was at least in part because 1) everyone’s heard of him, and 2) all of his work is public domain. But whatever the cause, in the fictional worlds of the future, it’s all but inevitable that even in centuries to come, it’s all downhill after “Henry VIII.”

I have enough self-awareness to realize that most of my reaction to Shakespeare hinges on the fact that I simply don’t get it. I’m lacking whatever background is necessary to appreciate how his use of the word “bodkin” is superior to that of every other late 16th Century playwright. I wouldn’t know a pentameter–iambic or otherwise–if it leapt up and went for my spleen. What I do know is that I can’t understand half of what he’s saying, and that I lack the patience and interest to look it up. I’ve long suspected that the whole Shakespeare thing is just a trick played by academics upon the rest of us.

So, when it’s revealed that Ol’ Bill is such a fucking genius that he’s the only person in the history of time and space who isn’t taken in by the Psychic Paper without special Torchwood training, and that his iambers are so pentamastic that they can open gateways into the Void, I get a little “Oh, really?”

For that reason, some of the in-jokery in “The Shakespeare Code” reached the level of obnoxiousness that Rose Tyler achieved during last year’s episode “Tooth and Claw,” when she beat the “We are not amused” gag into the ground during an encounter with Queen Victoria. A little bit of that is to be expected when a historical figure is thrown into the mix, but I think that they played the gag of Shakespeare stealing his lines from the Doctor’s quotations of his own work a couple of times too many.

That said, I loved that it was really J.K. Rowling that ultimately saved the world. “Expelliarmus,” indeed. And the notion that at some point the Doctor popped forward in time to read Book Seven is pretty funny.

Wonder if he knows the ending of Lost as well?

Dave Doctor Who

This afternoon, I made the horrible, horrible mistake of taking Vicky to see Grindhouse , the pastiche of bad ’70s cinema by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarentino. To say that Vic disliked Grindhouse would be to stick a mere pinky toe into the seething cauldron of bile this movie inspired in her. I will be paying off this karmic debt for years to come. On my deathbed, she will undoubtedly remind me of the time I wasted three hours (three and a half, counting the commercials and seven[!] trailers that preceded it) of her life seeing Grindhouse.

Granted, her reaction was not entirely unexpected. She went along–despite her reservations–so that I wouldn’t have to go alone. (I gave her the Ol’ Pouty Lip.) I knew that she was pretty dubious about it, but on the other hand, I’ve subjected her to all manner of cheesy cinema, from Glen or Glenda to Snakes on a Plane, and she’s generally enjoyed them.

What did surprise me was just how much I agreed with her. This should’ve been straight up my alley; indeed, I’d been anticipating it for weeks. About 10 minutes into the second feature–Quentin Tarentino’s “Death Proof”–I turned to her and said, “I am so, so sorry.” Unfortunately there was still over an hour to go.

The trouble with pastiches is that they so often simply become the thing they’re sending up, and that goes doubly for intentionally bad films. Unintentionally bad films can be a lot of fun; jaw-dropping madness can ensue when both talent and self-awareness are lacking. But when the awfulness is calculated, much of the joy is artificial as well.

That’s not to say that there weren’t things to like about Grindhouse. The opening feature, Robert Rodriguez’ “Planet Terror”, is–despite what you may have read in the ridiculously positive reviews–the more enjoyable of the double-bill. Certainly, Rose McGowan and her machine-gun leg are awesome, though you’ve already seen the best bits in the commercials.

However, there were a couple of aspects of it I didn’t care for. One is that it’s a little too goopy for my liking. Yes, it’s a zombie splatter film, but above and beyond the usual blood and entrails is an awful lot of pus. I have a low tolerance for oozing, spurting blisters. And I should never, never have to see Zombie Quentin Tarentino’s diseased and melting penis, or Naveen Andrews’ collection of pickled, severed testicles.

Second is that it’s ultimately unnecessary. There have already been a number of good zombie flick pastiches in the past few years, from Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later to Slither and, of course, Shaun of the Dead. This really isn’t adding anything new to the mix, either in terms of scares or silliness. Even the weapon-as-prosthetic limb gag is cribbed from the far superior Evil Dead 2. (Rose McGowen soooo needs to team up with Bruce Campbell.)

The best thing about Grindhouse is the selection of fake trailers that serve as its “intermission,” including ones for the slasher film “Thanksgiving” and the barking mad monster epic “Werewolf Women of the S.S.” (starring Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu!). And I think we’d've both felt a lot better about Grindhouse if we’d left after the intermission.

Unfortunately, we stuck around for “Death Proof.” I gather that it’s meant to invoke Steven Spielberg’s Duel, slasher films and a variety of women’s revenge pictures. I’m not as familiar with the tropes of the latter, so I’m not certain how on the mark it was. But I would hope the original films didn’t spend the first ten minutes listening to a bunch of women in a bar talk about nothing. That’s a lot of tedium to absorb at what is really the two-hour mark of a three-hour-plus experience. (Both features could and should have lost twenty minutes each.) And because these chatty Cathys die–murdered by Kurt Russell’s “Stuntman Mike”–it means another fifteen minutes introducing an entirely unrelated second group of women. Talking. In a bar.

This later quartet are refugees from a film crew, and so they blather on about movies that Tarentino himself happens to like. After this directorial circle-jerking, they “test drive” some guy’s ’70s muscle car and use it to play a reckless game which involves one of the women–a real-life stuntwoman portraying herself–riding on the front hood with only a couple of leather belts to hold onto. Homicidal driver Stuntman Mike, who has been stalking the foursome, chooses this moment to attempt to force them off the road. And it must be said that the ensuing old-school vehicular stunt sequences are pretty cool. But they’re not enough to save the film

Again, I’m not all that familiar with women’s revenge flicks, but I believe that usually something bad happens to the women in question before they go on their own payback rampage. Not so here. Stuntman Mike’s attack not only fails, but leaves them barely shaken. They are, after all, hard-drinking, tough-talking babes out for a good time, so it’s all just a laugh.

And yet, within moments, they decide to murder him in turn. With a hoot and a holler, they’re off in mad pursuit, endangering dozens of other drivers and giggling all the way. Am I supposed to root for them? If they’re out for fiery vengeance, why are they so damned happy about it?

Grindhouse wants to evoke run-down, inner-city theaters of the ’70s. Most of “Planet Terror” looks as though the print has been stomped on by the spiked boots of the Werewolf Women of the S.S., with plentiful scratches, juddery sprocket holes and even a “missing reel” (right in the middle of the sex scene, natch). Oddly, Tarentino’s film is mostly intact, with only a few audio synch problems and another missing reel, which makes me wonder if directorial hubris ultimately won out over the desire to emulate the grindhouse experience.

Finally, there’s a basic disconnect about all of this. For all the vintage intermission film clips and bad hairstyles of days gone by, the films themselves are clearly set in the present day, with copious use of cellphones and even a reference to Osama bin Laden. And both features use directorial techniques and modern effects technology that would never have been employed by exploitation filmmakers. It’s cheating.

When it was all over, I wanted nothing more than to get in my own car and chase down Quentin Tarentino, or at least to revoke his video store rental card. At some point, it might be nice if this directorial wunderkind found his own voice rather than sticking his movie geek obsessions in a blender and splashing the results on the screen.

Vic, do you forgive me? Vic?

Dave Movies