PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Himeji Castle

We were watching You Only Live Twice and there was an arial shot of this castle. Himeji Castle is also know as Hakuro Castle. It appears in some of the Godzilla pictures. It was built in 1601 and is one of only 47 castles left in Japan. Here's some guys trip report which includes some nice pictures. Here's a virtual tour of the castle. More stuff here. There are ton of nice photos here. Parts of the lower castle structure remind me of the southwestern work by Frank Lloyd Wright. He was heavily influenced by Japanese architecture. This place has a nice slide show. The site is in Japanese but you can figure it out. Here's a papercraft version of the castle.

You could stab a guy with that bus.

I haven't a clue. What the hell is that bus for? Can a guy drive safely in that head gear. I wouldn't think so. That bear looks pretty fucked up, doesn't he? What's he got to laugh about? I can't make up my mind if it's offensive or just bad. It's one of those gray areas.

Friday Night Movies 106

It was time for the 5th James Bond movie. You Only Live Twice. It's from 1967, and a script by Roald Dahl. It starts with the death of James Bond and one of the poorest Bond songs ever. Something by Nancy Sinatra, I don't care to know the title, sung over the credits. It's pretty lame. Someone has a space craft that swallows the American and Russian 2 man orbiters and takes them back to a crater on a remote Japanese island. The volcano has a fake lake surface with a retractable roof for the secret rocket launching pad below. It's also filled with color coded jumpsuited minions, most of whom will be mowed down in the big fight at the end. The Russians and Americans blame each other for their missing spacecraft. Knock it off or it's war, they yell at each other. We don't even know who's behind it. Then we find out it's that cat fondler guy. What a creep, he's working for some other country. After Commander Bond's burial at sea, his body is picked up by a sub. It belongs to M. It's not a war sub, it's an office sub. Cold war, bigger spy budgets in those days. Tiger Tanaka, the Japanese secret head of the secret police or some such, has his own subway car to get around secretly. He has nice digs. James is unzipped from his waterproof burial wrappings, given his instructions by M, flirts with Miss Moneypenny, and gets fired out of a torpedo tube. All in a days work. Back on land, he's met by some lady who takes him to Charles Gray. Charles has gone  somewhat native. Too bad, if his house hadn't had paper walls someone might not have stabbed him through the wall so easily. There's more running around and more revealed about cat fondler's plan for what ever the hell it is he's doing. Bond, helped by a cute Japanese lady in a white bikini and Tiger Tanaka, attacks the secret base and all hell breaks out. There's a volcano at the end. Sometimes the Roald Dahl script is pretty goofy.  The scenery is pretty, the rear projection car work is pretty poor, and the dialoge often embarrasing. "Aww, man." Say that while shaking your head. I think it makes you feel better to get it off your chest.

Pelts had Meat Loaf pulling the skin off his chest. It's a present for the woman he loves. She's a stripper. He doesn't shoot very high, that Meat Loaf, he's a smelly animal fur vendor and furrier. When I was a kid my old man worked in a tannery. The smell stuck to his clothes. A sick rotten smell of decaying meat. Pelt's is one of the Masters Of Horror series on showtime. Directed by Dario Argento, it's a 57 minute film adapted from an F. Paul Wilson story. A really old John Saxon and his son trap some racoons. They want the pelts. These are really nice pelts. They shimmer and undulate. Off the animal. They must be from some magical racoons. People start killing themselves once they come in contact with the fur. In various gory ways. One woman sews her lips and eyes and mouth closed, a guy cuts open his chest, the son kills John Saxon and then chops off his own face with a huge trap. Meat Loaf Aday gets his hands on the magical pelts and makes a coat out of them. He wants to get rich and famous from those magical pelts. It all goes to hell. The pelts are from magical racoons alright. There is a lot of gore and not much story. Magical racoons who make you kill yourself for touching them isn't very scary. Seeing how old John Saxon had gotten, that was scary.

The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm

Months ago I was reading The Sea Of Trolls. It's a wonderful book by Nancy Farmer. I showed it to Sandy, a woman at work who reads young adult fantasy, and she said her son Zack had read another Nancy Farmer book 5 times. Five. It was The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm. Someone reading a book five times sounds like a pretty good recommendation to me. When I was in Winnipeg I found a copy of it at Chapters. I just finished it. I really enjoyed it. The book is set in Zimbabwe about 200 years into the future. Some kids, the children of the country's Chief Of Security, lead a rather sheltered life surrounded by robots and absent parents. They never go out and about like kids should. As their rather stern, stick-up-butt, father later said, "I didn't even teach them how to go to the store to buy rice." Fathers and Mothers are often failures and for the simplest reasons. There's an older boy and a younger boy and a middle sister. The older two are, 13 and 11, and Boy Scouts. The young boy is four. He's trouble. I like him. Using the house "Mellower" to fool their parents into giving them passcards, the trio of children set out across Harare to earn a merit badge. They get kidnapped within minutes. Isn't that what always happens. Soon they are left in charge of a large lady who rules over some people who live in a waste dump. They earn a living there, harvesting plastic and ancient treasures to sell, in their tight little community of criminals and tossed away people. The children are made to work and from that comes an education like they haven't had. Later a quick escape takes them to a city within the city, a natural place, where the old ways are preserved. They don't fit in to well so they leave with a baby that was going to be killed. Sometimes the old ways are not so nice. Practical sometimes means killing your children. Seeking safety at the house of they "Mellower's" mother the children are betrayed. All this is taking some time, a year passes from the start of the book to the end, and the parents are desperately seeking their children. The father, a man of military might, calls out the police, in force, but to no avail. The mother inlists the trio of detectives named in the title. Each has a power like their name might indicate, except The Arm. He has long arms, thus the name, and he has long legs and a long skinny body to go with those arms. His power, other than reach, has to do with his ability to pick up people emotions. It's a bit of a drawback, especially around large groups of people. All three of the detectives have some hangups, but they are decent men, and they live in the poor part of town. It's a good contrast to the highly upscale life of the three kids and family. The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm set out to find the children. Working with the father's police contacts they keep getting closer and closer. Always a step behind they keep running into road blocks. Crashing through them, our heros arrive to confront our villians for the climactic battle on top of a mile high skyscrapper. Who can't like that. The writing is good. There is lots of personal growth, interesting moral issues, great places to go, the troublesome people are punished and everyone comes through pretty well. This book is a keeper and I plan to re-read it. Maybe not 5 times, I'm not as young as Zack, but certainly again and again, and maybe again. So, thanks Zack.

The Maltese Falcon

Just a bit of a reminder to watch The Maltese Falcon periodically. It's good for you. I know I watch it every couple of years. I watch The Big Sleep about the same time. Often followed by The Fountainhead. The latter I have been seeing often. I kept trying to make a nice dvdr from Turner Classic Movies but something would happen and screw it up. I finally got an ok copy only to find a dvd is on the way. It's out now. I still haven't bought one. I do have dvd's of the other two.

One of the reasons I like TMF is the faithful adaptation of the book by writer-director John Huston. The book is pretty darn good. Well worth the read, and for some of us the re-read. Some of Dashiel Hammet is the best, and not just in the detective genre. Besides a good story of greed and corruption there is that amazing slice of life and morality that goes on in Sam Spade's world. The Thin Man is more fun, it's mostly booze and murder. If you can only read one, read those two, they're short. The Continential Op series are good reads too.

The Big Sleep in one of the best of Raymond Chandler's books. I have read most of them and a lot of his short stories. "Farewell, My Lovely (1940); "The High Window" (1942); "The Lady in the Lake" (1943); "The Little Sister" (1949); "The Long Goodbye" (1953); "Playback" (1958). All good reads.

That statue is supposed to be the 2nd of the 45  pound lead versions. You can see a small dent in in the bird's right hand shoulder. This is where Sidney Greenstreet dug at it with his knife. Only to find it's fake. So sad, a murdering scumbag doesn't get what he wanted. Then he probably goes to jail, but we can only imagine that. The bird used in that scene went to William Conrad as a gift. The movie was made in 1941. He got it shortly after that. The bird was sold after he died in 1994 for $398,500. It has a current day value of about $2,000,000. It's a great looking statue. I like it. There are replicas. Some guy has one on ebay for $110.00 as a Buy It Now. The triple bird shot is from that ebay guy. It's a great place, ebay, to harvest photos of things from. It's so much easier, and takes up so much lest space, to have a digital version of something. Less dusting too. That's a Google project right there. Scan the world and everything in it into a digital folder. Everything you have is in your Google folder and you can share with other people if you want. I wonder how many ways that could go wrong. 

Gray

Sure is gray looking.

Bad Company Out Cold

FX ran Bad Company today. It's a Chris Rock movie that I hadn't seen before, and I'm a fan. I have a vague memory of seeing the trailers on tv. I looked it up. It came out in the summer of 2002. It was held up after 9-11. Several movies had that happen. I never saw it in the theater, I don't go much, and I didn't pick it up on dvd. Then, I forgot about it. Here it is on tv. Chris plays twins. Separated at birth. He's never known his brother and now he's dead. Ain't that a bitch. Our reluctant hero is a small time hustler, he plays chess in the park for money and scalps tickets. His girlfriend is none too happy that their relationship is still in the same place it was three years ago. Chris is asked by the CIA to play Chris. Chris was a spy and is a sophisticated mo'fo. Chris got some learnin' to do. H'mm. Luckily that first Chris is dead. It could be confusing if they were both alive and in the movie together. What with havin' the same name and all. Chris pulls it together and the action begins. Some punks are after his ass. The shoot outs are pretty good for the most part. The cast is ok and there is the delightful Peter Stomare as the main bad guy. He gets shot in the head. Oops. Then there are the real bad, bad guys. They are the ones that kidnap Chris's girlfriend and use her to lure him into a trap. They need his eye to open the computer, which has the codes that set off the bomb. Oh, yeah, there's a bomb! There's a big ass countdown clock too. You can see that countdown clock over in Jersey. It's that big. But, and there's always a big but, Chris saves the day. 12 seconds to spare. Damn! That was close. Everybody happy now. It's was a fairly good movie to come out of Joel Schumacher. I'm not a big fan. I did like his 8MM from a few years ago. BC was a bit predicable and you've seen the fish out of water before. But Chris and Anthony Hopkins make a good pairing. In better hands...but there you go. Joel. What're you gonna do? I took a chance and it only cost me 28 cents. That's the cost of a dvdr. You can usually find a fifty pack on sale for $12.99. With a bit for the gov, it's 28 cents. That's not much to take a chance.

I took a second chance while I was at work. I recorded a copy of Out Cold. It's a snowboarding comedy with Jason London and Lee Majors. I don't have much Jason London work. He's been going steady since 1991 with over 50 listings on IMDb. I only have Dazed and Confused and Poor White Trash. I like both of those movies. A lot. Out Cold is ok. It has some great cast members. David Koechner, Zach Gilifanakis, Willie Garson, Thomas Lennon, Flex Alexander, A.J. Cook and Caroline Dhavernas. Lee wants to Aspenize a small Alaskian town, take all the charm out of it and package it all up nice for the cash cows he wants to attract. He wears a cowboy hat. The useless but fun guys all band together and get drunk. One guy gets his weiner caught in the jet opening of the hot tub. I bet that hurt, huh. I laughed. I don't think it's just me, but it's always funnier when someone else hurts their wee-wee. I do have some sympathy. Admittedly, not much. It's not something I would do, but. I understand. Guys will be guys, and they will stick their weiner's into the worst possible things. I bet there's some website devoted to this problem. Maybe there's grant money. Back in the movie there is some kissin' and yellin' and snowboardin' goin' on. There are a lot of g's missing from that last sentence. If I get some time I'll look into that. They save the town and the right people wind up with the right people and there's some more falling down a mountain and the movie was over. 

Dogs With Wigs

This is from a page by a guy named Gabriel who lives in Albania. He posts pictures of dogs and cats with wigs. He can't seem to tell the difference and his English is a hoot. Made me laugh. I got the link from The Presurfer, another time waster. This dog is so funny looking. He's the spitting image of my neighbor's dog. That is an unattractive dog at best and pimpin' him up doesn't help in any way.

Ascending

Some guy did 5 of these Escher drawings in Lego. They are pretty good. I was an Escher fan back in the 70's but I got past it. Read, review and move on. 

Bad SF Art

I don't know who did this piece but it sure is funny.