PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

I, Robot

Here's a robot reading I, Robot. You wouldn't think he had that much computing power. He's probably just skimming it. That's a pretty ugly robot in a cute picture. Over on the right  is this cool wooden robot. I like the fact that he's that orange color. And that he's so square and round at the same time. And he's made of wood. What kind of message is that? His look, to me, is a throw back to the robotic style of the early part of the 20th century. And he's made of wood. You can't get much more solid than that. What a stand up guy.  As a contrast, here is a robot, on the lower right, that looks pretty fucked up. What's he on? It's a rocket. A rocket filled with robotic crack, or mechanical goof balls. I liked that blue tin man robot. Man size. Old school. He looks like something you might find on a 1930's or 1940's black and white serial. Except, here he's in color. And he's man size. The trouble with making large things? They are large. Man size. Where do they go once you have them? What if you have 2, or 9? Yeah. Didn't think of that, did ya. That's based on a conversation with a real artist who was sadly coming to that realization. These few pictures are much easier to store.

It's Raining Leia's

Sperhauk sent me a link to this video of a massive pile of Princess Leia's. They are posed around a fullsize Jabba the Hut at some convention recently. The video takes a while to load but it's kind of interesting in a Leia heavy way. I started looking for some more Leia pictures off of the internet. As you can imagine there are tons of them. Especially of Leia in the metal bikini.

   

And you have to admit she's a stunner. People are still talking about that outfit thirty years later. Last friday, March 25th, was the release day of the first movie. The History Channel had a nice 2 hour special called Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed. Not so much was revealed as revered. It's being repeated the first couple of weeks in June. Check your local listings.

   

There were many people interviewed for that History Channel program. Some historians and professors I never heard of are joined by filmmakers like Peter Jackson, Joss Whedon, J. J. Abrams and Kevin Smith, educator Camille Paglia, film critic Elvis Mitchell, politician Nancy Polosi and Newt Gingrich, news people like Linda Ellerbee and Tom Brokaw.

 

One of my favorite quotes came from Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. " Star Wars came out and we went to school the next day unable to explain to our friends how everything was different now."

 

It was that shot above that captured me, like a fly in a spider web. Princess Leia in her bikini pales in comparison to the image of Leia with a gun.

 

Now that's sexy.

Carrie Fisher sure is pretty.

More Leia stuff coming up.

That's a linen postcard. It has to do with the linen like finish that the paper has. They still make linen finish paper today. They don't make cards like that today. I really came to like these old cards. I have a nice couple of binders full of sheet protectors with the ones that I saved. I bought a bunch at a local postcard and stamp shop. I don't go there very much anymore. I like cards with interesting old buildings on them. Here's another one from Milwaukee and a plain one from Kansas.

King Kong

That's the old Aurora model on the left and a finished model from the new movie. I don't know when the Aurora kit is from, but I would guess the 1960's. That ape looks nearly retarded in the old model. There's something wrong with the new Kong too. That's life, huh. Here's a great Lego Kong.

 

   

Friday Night Movies 110

Hellraiser: Hellseeker is the 6th film in the series. It came out in 2002 and there have been none since. The director Rick Bota, who we though had a good name, didn't do such a great job. He's mostly a camera guy. He did direct two Hellraiser video games in 2005. Not much else. I saw the first three of the series but somehow managed to miss 4 and 5. Sperhauk Netflix'd this installment because he read that the actress who played the Kristy in the first two films was back. She is back. And she's killed in the first scene. After that it becomes a nightmare for her husband. He's got head aches and weirdly sexual but violent hallucinations. What the heck is going on. The cops keep buggin' him. His co-workers are buggin' him. His neighbor keeps buggin' him. Some people get dead. Lesson learned. Don't bug people. There's some more story but I didn't care all that much. I didn't like the actor playing the husband. His character was a creep too. There's a twist at the end, but I didn't care. Mike complained he didn't fall asleep during the boring parts. Ironically he'd make up for it during the next movie.

Get Crazy is a 1983 Allan Arkush movie about a Fillmore like rock and roll theater. Max is getting the place ready for the 1983 New Years show. Daniel Stern is the younger guy helping him. Max's niece turns up. She used to work for Max and she agrees to help out when Max takes ill. He thinks he's dying but it's really just indigestion. Ed Begley Jr is the badguy and former teen idols Fabian and Bobby Sherman are his toadies. They have a plan to blow up Max's theater to get the site for Ed's mega complex. There are a ton of jokes and even though I have seen the movie more than a dozen times in the last 20 plus years I still find them funny. There are some bands that show up. Malcolm McDowell plays Reggie Wanker. He's the older super star, jaded and alone, even when he's covered with naked girls. There's an all girl band, a jews blues band, some hippies lost in the time stream, ("Life's a trip, man."), and Lou Reed as Auden the metaphysical folk singer. The music is all good, from the blues and funk to the punk and rock. Unfortunately, it hasn't come out on DVD yet. According to some people on the IMDb it was seen letterboxed on Showtime last year. I have a studio issued tape but it is so heavily copyguarded that I couldn't get a good dvd out of it. It's watchable but the light areas break up sometimes. It didn't do that well when it came out but it sure made us laugh, except for Mike, who was asleep.

I was looking for some other image using Google image ripper and found this picture of a toy that appears to be of a cartoony plane suspended between two cartoony buildings . Then I found this story from 2004 on the WFTV Channel 9 Orlando website. Some lady bought a bag of toys and candy for her some grandson. This toy was one of the selections in the bag. She was upset at that toy. There is a  slide show at the news site which has some pictures of toys like a cell phone with Osama Bin Laden in the picture window. The pictures are in a flash slide show so I couldn't down load them. I did find another picture from Joe's Blog. I don't know who Joe is but his blog had a picture of the bag the toy came in. It's got some candy in it and the buildings appear to be different colors. The slide show on the news site has another building toy with a guy hanging between them. The toys and candy came from the Lisy Corp,who bought them from L&M Imports, who didn't find the toy offensive at all. I don't know that I do either. It just looks stupid. Plus we don't know what the toy does. That green button could make the plane spin. Yeah, spinning uncontrolably before it crashes into the building. Plus those buildings just don't look like the WTC at all. There was some complaints about the toy on this blog and some guy tried to sell one on ebay, the bid was over 5 grand, but he got shut down. The Osama figure with the burning World Trade Center is much more blatant. Somebodies always got to hate someone, or their toys. 

That's Hermione Granger

She could kick your ass.

I never see this

I was once on Lombard Street in San Francisco. I walked up it. Seemed like I walked up every hill and took the bus down the other side. There were no naked people. I never see any naked people. I keep looking. My brother has seen naked people. He saw people having sex behind the bus bench on the side of the street near where Logan splits off of the Disraeli Freeway. This was in Winnipeg, back in the 70's. It was a wild town back then. That freeway is only one mile long. There are two bridges as part of it. One over the Red River and the other over some buildings and rail lines. A truck broke part of it last year. I never saw that accident. My mother told me about it. It got fixed. It's an ugly freeway. I found a small picture out on the internet. I don't know if I have any myself. I doubt it. That picture makes it look better than it is. Oh, wait. I had a thought and went and looked. It turns out that I do have a couple of pictures of the area. These are back from 2001. It was the last time I took a bunch of pictures when I went back to Winnipeg. Sometimes taking pictures is hard. Here's one looking down the freeway. I was riding with Mike and Susan. We were coming back from a visit to Brian and Annette's place out near Lockport. I didn't think it was 6 years. Luckily I suppress the passage of time. I'd feel worse if I didn't. The other picture is of the bus stop. That's a new bench, I think, and I believe it was turned 90 degrees to face the street thirty years ago. Wild town. Filled with naked people. I'm just not seein' any. Especially from Minneapolis. Mind you I never see any naked people here. One of the guys at work said he saw people having sex in the woods but he had to use binoculars. I know a guy who saw some farm guy pushing a cow. At least that's what they thought he was doing. I wonder what happened to that farm guy. I bet the cow got eaten.

Brutal Stuffed Toys

 

 

Friday Night Movies 109

DOOM stars Karl Urban and The Rock. I like both of those guys. The Rock may not be a great actor but he's got a good onscreen face, hulking body and off screen he seems nice. Karl, some of you Xena and Hercules fans might remember, played Ceasar and Cupid on those series. He was also Eomer in The Lord Of The Rings. The Rock is Sarge, the leader of a rag tag pack of Marine misfits, and Karl is John Grimm, AKA Reaper, who's got some scraggly face fuzz and emotional baggage concerning Mars. That's where the trouble is in this movie, Mars, and our guys have to go there to find out what killed the science guys. There's screaming messages to get everyone wondering what's going on. They head for Mars in a teleportation device that makes most everyone barf. Karl's sister works on Mars and she's the fiesty blonde in the drama. It's 113 minutes long, so the film makers have plenty of time to fill up. There's a lot of walking in dark corridors and rooms. I used to play the game a bit, nearly 10 years ago, and the movie is sort of like the game but it has more players. In the game you are alone and the POV is right out through your eyes. One part of the movie replicates that and this dvd has some extra footage. In the game you start killin' monsters right away, in the movie it takes nearly an hour before the action really kicks in. I don't remember what the reason for anything was in the game. I do know it's a Mars research facility that has the issues. Monsters, big issues. In the movie there's some complicated plot about an ancient civilization that died off. I used to like playing the game using cheat codes to get all the weapons. Just go around and blast monsters. I didn't like all the puzzle solving and bit collecting. I gave up playing after a few months. My arm was sort of bothering me from using the arrow keys to move that guy around. That game was on 4 or 5 of the old 3.5 inch floppies. Data in the movie is on green slabs of plastic that have dark bits in them. The storage device is new but the marines are strickly the same old same old. Slowly the Marines get picked off and the monsters turn out to be the science guys paying for playing about with stuff they just didn't get a good handle on. Isn't that always what happens. The monsters are sort of like the game but here we get up close and personal. There's a lot of disecting as the monsters are killed and brought to the main lab. There's lot's of time to fill up and that hurts the film. I don't feel I need to see it again.

This was my second watching of The Time Machine within a couple of weeks. This is the 2002 version with Guy Pearce, directed by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H G Wells. Pearce is not an actor that I see very often. I don't have many movies he's in. He's got a bad haircut here, where he's a college professor about year 1900. He invents a time machine to try to change the past. He can't. Why not? Our guy then sets off to the future to see if anyone has an answer to his question. He finds the Eloi and the Morlocks. Jeremy Irons plays the uber-morlock. He has an answer and he gets killed for it. Orlando Jones plays the digital librarian at the New York Public library. He's still around 800,000 years later. There are some cool effects when the time machine is travelling and some nice sets and locations. A fairly but not totally satisfying movie.