 Thiel-a-VisionThe personal website of David Thiel in Champaign, Illinois. It's a geek thing. |
The sea was angry that day, my friends, like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli. --George Costanza, "Seinfeld" |
Here I am in my passing-out-candy costume for Halloween. If I look a bit spiffier than usual, it’s because one of my coworkers is a costumer for the local community theatre…er, community.
We only got about twenty kids this year, but I treated each and every one to my dreadful pirate impression: “Aaaahhrr! Who do ye be, matey?!?”
Here I be Captain Morgan.
Here’s a fun Daily Show segment from Monday’s show: “Is America Ready for a FLILF?,” which includes an interview with Dennis Kucinich’s improbably hot wife Elizabeth. Now, I can understand Fred Thompson having a trophy wife, even though he looks like the unholy marriage of Dick Cheney and Lex Luthor; he’s a celebrity with a solid income of syndication royalties. But Dennis Kucinich? Look, I like the guy. I like his politics, and I appreciate the deft comic timing he showed on The Colbert Report. But for cryin’ out loud, the man should be wearing a pointy hat and standing in someone’s garden. Anyway, here’s Jason Jones trying to explain to Elizabeth Kucinich the meaning of the acronym FLILF.
Here’s something that may not be your own cup of polyjuice potion, but which tickled me: The Practical Guide to Monsters. Turns out that game publisher Wizards of the Coast has a kids’ book imprint called Mirrorstone which, among other things, publishes several series of youth-oriented novels aimed at the Harry Potter crowd. This particular volume is a sequel to their Practical Guide to Dragons, which detailed the spectrum of Dungeons & Dragons drakes.
What’s nifty about this book is that it draws on D & D‘s intellectual property without calling attention to the RPG tie-in. All of the critters within are straight out of the various Monster Manuals, but the book itself is written as if it’s something one might find in the Hogwart’s library, with an informal style and even scrawled margin notes.
I’m a big fan of “in-universe” sci-fi/fantasy reference books: volumes that appear to have been published within the fictional worlds they profile. I enjoy being pulled that little bit deeper into the fantasy.
Overall, I was very pleased with the book. Thanks to the wider variety of subject matter, it avoids being as repetitive as the Practical Guide to Dragons. While it does occasionally snitch previously-published Monster Manual artwork, most of the illustrations are new. I’m especially fond of the depictions of the creatures’ lairs; as a kid, I loved maps like that, with labyrinths of rooms to fuel my imagination.
Bonus Halloween treat: 30 Rock (rapidly becoming my favorite sitcom, and not just because Tina Fey is the hotness) has made available a free download of the full-length version of their “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” song.
Watched a lot of movies this weekend as part of my effort to jumpstart my Halloween mood. There might have been even more on this list had I not become distracted by the Sims game I picked up for my Wii.
I finished up The Invisible Man, and was generally pleased with the adaptation. I enjoyed the various gambits employed by the English police to thwart the transparent Dr. Griffin: cargo nets, spray paint and massive numbers of bobbies. And I appreciated that the filmmakers resisted the temptation to allow their star, Claude Rains, from any “visible” screen time prior to his character’s death. It would’ve been easy to give him a pre-experiment flashback or two, but it was more effective to keep him out of sight until the end.
Next up was another Claude Rains film, this time 1960′s The Lost World. This is the remake of Arthur Conan Doyle’s story of dinosaurs on a South American plateau, and when I was growing up, it was a staple of WGN-TV’s “Family Classics” movie slot.
It may be hard for modern audiences to imagine, but in the days before computer special effects, there were pretty much three ways of putting dinos on screen: 1) stop-motion animation, 2) men in rubber suits, and 3) real-life lizards with some fins glued on. The Lost World, produced by notorious penny-pincher Irwin Allen, went for the latter approach. And during his time as TV’s most prolific producer of sci-fi series, he made sure that every one of them had an episode in which the heroes were menaced by stock footage reptiles from The Lost World. Even as a kid I was distressed when the alleged paleontological expert Professor Challenger identified a rubber-horned lizard as a “brontosaurus,” but I have to admit that the photographic enlargement tricks are well executed.
On the other hand, the film does feature the worst “day-for-night” shooting I’ve seen outside an Ed Wood film. It was very difficult to stay focused on the dialogue when the characters kept talking about it being the middle of the night with a bright, blue sky behind them.
The Lost World also includes Jill St. John in a role which makes clear that she was not hired for her acting prowess. She’s supposed to be an experienced adventuress, but that’s somewhat weakened by her bright, pink pants and the purse-sized dog she brings along on the expedition.
All of that said, it was still a fun, colorful flick, and I can see why I watched it all those times, even though I knew damned well a lizard was not a brontosaur.
Following that was the first of several British horror flicks, The Abominable Dr. Phibes. It stars Vincent Price as a waxen-faced organist hell-bent on revenge against the medical team whom he blames for the death of his wife.
Make no mistake, this is one weird-ass picture. It doesn’t quite reach the level of pop-art spoofed in the Austin Powers comedies, but the production design is outlandish and Phibes and his beautiful assistant frequently take time between murders for a dance sequence. With its many eccentric deaths and the quasi-romantic relationship between its main characters, it reminded me a great deal of the old Avengers TV show; with good reason, as the director also helmed several episodes of that series.
Phibes subjects his victims to punishments patterned after the Biblical curses visited upon Egypt. The final one is meant to evoke the death of the firstborn, and has the chief surgeon operating on his own son to extract the key to the manacles holding the boy beneath a tube of acid…and all this three decades before the Saw movies.
Phibes is a strange part for Price, as his character was mutilated in a car accident and can only speak (via voice-over) through a tube in his neck that plugs into an old-timey gramophone. That he still manages to retain much of his charm despite being unable to change his facial expression is a testament to Price’s talent.
Next came Tales from the Crypt; not the ’80s HBO show, but the 1972 British flick. Exactly why the Brits were the first to adapt the infamous American horror comics is beyond me, but this is the first of two such anthology films.
This flick scared the crap out of me back in the day, not because I actually saw it. I just hated the poster (left), which I recall being on Chicagoland billboards for months. I did see the last few minutes of it at a drive-in, even though I was there for the next film of a triple-feature, and the image of a man creeping down a corridor lined with razor blades stuck with me. (Ouch!)
It holds up surprisingly well to this day, once you get past the idea that the Crypt Keeper is played by Sir Ralph Richardson, and in no way resembles a wise-cracking, puppet corpse. Instead, he’s the mysterious, humorless host of a group of folks who wander off the path during an underground tour. (It’s not much of a spoiler to let you in the cliched twist ending: THEY’RE ALREADY DEAD!)
What ensues is a who’s who of British actors in five gruesome tales, including Joan Collins as a murderess stalked by a maniacal Santa on Christmas Eve, and Peter Cushing (in a heartbreaking performance) as a sad, old rubbish-collector hounded to suicide by his rich neighbor. (It’s okay, he comes back as a zombie next Valentine’s Day and rips out his tormentor’s heart.)
There’s also an effective “Monkey’s Paw” variant which takes that story’s grisly conclusion one further, and a nasty revenge tale about the inhabitants of a home for the blind and the justice they mete out on ex-military officer turned administrator who starves them while living in luxury himself. (Remember that hallway of razor blades?)
Saturday I watched the “stills restoration” of London After Midnight, the iconic Lon Chaney, Sr. vampire film that no one has seen since the last known copy was destroyed in a fire some 40 years ago. The image of Chaney with his beaver hat and mouth full of teeth is well-known even if relatively few know what it’s from.
Using the original script and a limited number of promotional stills, the restorer did his best to piece together an approximation of the original, but it’s really hard to tell how close it comes to capturing its impact. It doesn’t help that the plot–about a police inspector disguising himself as a vampire to break an unsolved murder case–doesn’t make much sense to begin with, and even less expressed solely in title cards and still images.
Sunday saw me finally watching something from this century, the animated flick Monster House. I enjoyed this quite a bit; it had a solid sense of humor and evoked the spirit of Halloween.
It plays a little bit like the underappreciated gem Fright Night, about a young man who spies on the vampire living in the house next door. The big difference here is that the monster is the house next door: a ramshackle beast that literally eats unwary passersby.
Neither the animation nor the characters are quite up to Pixar standards, but there are some legitimate (if mild) scares and an intriguing, if odd, backstory for the possessed house.
Monster House definitely subscribes to the Anton Chekov school of writing. You can clearly see the gun on the wall in the first act, so there aren’t many surprises in the conclusion. That said, it’s still very entertaining.
Then it was back to the Brits with Gorgo, one of the better Godzilla wannabes of the ’60s. Sailors capture a dinosaurian sea monster and–having never seen King Kong–exhibit it in the heart of London. Actually, it wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the fact that Gorgo is only a baby, and mama is pissed…
The effects are better than average as mama Gorgo goes on a destructive tour of London’s most familiar landmarks, including Tower Bridge, Big Ben and Piccadilly Circus. I’m sure that if the filmmakers could’ve had it make sense, they would’ve had her trample Stonehenge and the Globe Theatre while they were at it.
And finally, I wrapped up a long weekend of movies with The Vault of Horror, the other EC Comics-inspired British horror film. It’s not nearly as good as Tales from the Crypt, though it is the reason for my fear of paper cutters. (In the final segment, Tom Baker–a year before Doctor Who–uses voodoo to cause a paper cutter to shear off the hands of an unscrupulous art dealer.)
One moment I really enjoyed was when Glynis Johns, playing the wife of Terry-Thomas’ obsessive neat-freak, is finally pushed too far. She suddenly shrieks in frustration and drives a claw hammer into Thomas’ skull. Fun times.
The unfortunate thing about the most recent DVD release of The Vault of Horror (part of a two-disc set alongside Crypt) is that it’s an edited-down PG version of an originally R-rated film which clumsily removes several graphic images in a way that greatly reduces the impact of several of the stories. (The worst example occurs during the infamous “vampire restaurant” sequence, in which the shot of a victim hanging upside down with a beer tap shoved into his neck is replaced by a still image in which the tap has been crudely masked out.)
Whew! That was a lot of movies. Still, I hope to get one or two more in by the end of Halloween!
Not that I could possibly care, but…Dumbledore is gay? Wha?
“Jo Rowling calling any Harry Potter character gay would make wonderful strides in tolerance toward homosexuality,” a Potter site webmaster is quoted. Sure, and it would’ve been an even bigger stride if she’d done it anywhere in her 4,195 pages of prose rather than a Q&A three months after the final book was published.
Just seems like it would’ve been worth mentioning.
UPDATE: Time columnist John Cloud generally sums up my feelings about the “outing” of Dumbledore, except that I’d add that doing so well after the hype of the final book died off seems uncharacteristically gutless for Ms. Rowling. Plus, by withholding this information from the text, it plays right into the fears of those who believe that closeted gays are after their teenage boys.
As has been the case for the past several years, I’ve found myself in a Halloween funk. I know that I could–and believe that I should–do more for what was once my favorite holiday, but it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm when we get so few trick-or-treaters.
That said, I’m trying to work up a bit of Halloweenie spirit by immersing myself in various old horror film DVDs. Last night I got through two-and-a-half of them, though my screening of The Invisible Man was interrupted by DVD player problems. (In years past, I’d found that most any disc that failed to work on my dedicated DVD player would play without a hitch on my Playstation 2, but just the opposite was true on this occasion.)
First up was Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in the 1935 version of The Raven. As was the case with the 1963 film starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Karloff (again), it has virtually nothing to do with Poe’s poem.
Instead, Lugosi is a skilled surgeon with a Poe fixation and a secret dungeon full of working torture devices. Urged to come out of retirement to save the life of a beautiful dancer, he falls in love with his patient, much to the disgust of her father. Lugosi plots revenge with the aid of a fleeing criminal played by Karloff who, coming to the doctor in hopes of receiving a new, kinder-looking visage, is instead transformed into the spitting image of Batman’s foe Two-Face.
Lugosi’s a lot of fun in this one, cackling with ghoulish glee as he metes out punishments on the rest of the cast. He’s certainly credible as a batshit crazy dilettante whose great joy is crushing people to death. I only wish that his accent wasn’t so damned hard to understand; it’s one of the main reasons he never became the matinee idol he believed he should have been.
The best thing about The Raven is that it’s only an hour long. I don’t mean that in a cynical manner; it’s refreshing to see a film that gets to business right away and shuffles off the stage before it has a chance to wear out its welcome.
Next up was 1957′s The Deadly Mantis, the heartwarming story of a hundred-foot-long prehistoric insect that thaws out of a glacier and flies around in search of human flesh.
While this is by no means a high-budget film, it was released by Universal and so I found it surprising just how much of it consisted of stock footage. I swear that fully half of its 80-minute running time was comprised of library film of radar stations, jets in flight, airplane spotters, anti-aircraft guns and fleeing Eskimos.
The mantis itself is pretty good for the time, though the main model–an oversized puppet–is a bit stiff. (Ironically, one of the most effective special effects shots has what is clearly a real-life mantis climbing a model of the Washington Monument.) Unfortunately, it doesn’t show up all that often before the creatures hides in a New York City traffic tunnel and is promptly gas-bombed to death.
There’s an unintentionally hilarious scene in which the military’s chief scientific adviser on the case–a paleontologist, of all things–and his girl photographer discuss the mantis while the beast itself ever so slowly approaches outside the huge picture window, the two of them absurdly oblivious to its presence until the moment of impact.
Finally, I saw the first half of the 1933 version of The Invisible Man, with Claude Rains as the transparent Dr. Griffin and Gloria Stuart as the love interest added to the otherwise largely-faithful adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel.
When I read the book for the first time a couple of years ago, I was impressed by how much thought Wells had put into the ramifications of becoming invisible, not the least of which was the need to carry out one’s activities naked, no matter the temperature. Despite Griffin’s boasts of world conquest, invisibility comes off as more of a deficit than an advantage. He has to swathe himself in bandages to interact “normally” with others, and when attempting to travel unseen, there are far too many things that give him away. Happily, much of this thought is carried over in the film.
The Invisible Man was directed by James Whale (whose not-especially-closeted homosexuality was profiled in the bio-pic Gods and Monsters), and bears some of the hallmarks of his later take on Bride of Frankenstein, including a good dose of black humor. Unfortunately, it also shares actress Una O’Connor, whose shrill, babbling housekeeper I hated in Bride, and who plays exactly the same character here.
I still have another twenty minutes to go, leaving off just as the Invisible Man makes his escape wearing only a pair of pants and singing about “gathering nuts in May.” This flick ain’t subtle.
It’s just been announced that season four of Battlestar Galactica won’t begin until April 2008. For those of you keeping score, that’s a full 13 months after the season three finale premiered. And they still haven’t decided whether the second half of the final season won’t be held back until 2009.
Way to go, SFC. Take the best sci-fi TV series–well, ever–and make sure no one gives a shit by the time it limps to a conclusion.
And one more clip: Bill Maher deals with disruptive assholes during his live talk show by personally ejecting one of them.
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