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I've been watching the new trailer for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I think it's great, especially the scene with a much younger Dumbledore, who's still over 100, and a 10 year old Tom Riddle. Riddle will become Lord Voldemort. There's a great whoosy scene with some fire. You can see the trailer everywhere I bet. HPANA has a page of links to all sorts of video options.
I took some pictures of these LEGO Puppet heads. I'd had them since the early 80's. They have been on these plates for most of that time, sitting in various places around the house. Currently they reside under my tv. I like repetition. The red ones are the girls and the blue ones the boys. I like their smiley faces.
Back about the same time as these guys were assembled I was playing around with shapes and color. I made this.
An old friend really liked it, so I gave it to her. She also glommed onto one of the yellow space guys that I had. He got stuck on the cube and eventually some other parts got added. After she passed away, it came back to me. I have had it on my desk since the early 90's. I like it.
I took one of my earlier MOC's apart yesterday, then I used some of the same pieces to rebuild it. Death's Coffee Break version 1 was finished back in January. I kind of overbuilt it. It had big thick walls and four of them. Originally I thought of building a huge Mansion for Death. I wasn't that happy with it either. It unbuilt pretty quickly. I got lots of bricks left over then I was done. I counted the bricks as I put them on and it was about 2350. I don't count the pieces anymore, it's too much trouble. I don't take so many pictures anymore. I took 120 on the first version and 9 on the second. Here's one now.
That's Death having a cuppa in his kitchen. That's his cook, Mrs. Crabtree. I figured Death might like to have a nice bright kitchen, and I seem to like making tile patterns on floors. Not sure why.
You can see the original on a post from last January here, and the MOCpages post here.
Only one movie this week. I had to get ready to go the TwinLUG meeting over in St Paul. Psyclops is another Brett Piper film. He's a low budget film director that makes fair to good films. Psyclops is in the better part of that range. There's a guy who makes amateur films. He finds a tape that shows an inventor guy who was born and died in the middle of 18th century. The guy was a rich robber baron inventor. He made a device that let critters into our world from some other place. They are critters that kill you. Nice, huh. The film maker thinks that the house in the video still exists. A group of people travel there. They find the device, nicely preserved, and fire it up. Some whacky stuff happens and the film maker gets intergrated with his camera. How often have I seen that? Three times? Doesn't matter, it's more fun than perfect. You can't expect much when a guy makes a film for $10,000. Brett doesn't have much money, so there's not much to share. Still better than I could do. Brett also does the stop motion animation. I mostly enjoy his films and some of the actors, though not great, have come to grow on me. Better to Netflix than buy, but you could do worse.
First up, American Zombie. It's a 2007 mocumentary by a young Asian woman named Grace Lee. She plays herself in the movie. She, reluctantly, teams up with a crappy film maker named John to make a documentary about the growing zombie population in the US. They interview zombies and visit the zombie convention LIVE DEAD. It was fairly funny at times and sad at others. Zombies in this universe are trying to fit into society. One guy works in a convience store and has a live girlfriend. She only dates zombies. A woman makes funeral arrangements and slowly rots away, worms leaking out of her unhealing wound. Another guy leads a zombie advocacy group. The zombies start fresh after they die. Their past is gone, they don't know who they are. When they re-animate they gain varied amounts of brain function. There are some good running gags, like the void joke and the "are they eating human flesh" joke. There's not much action, it's mostly talking to people. It gets vaguely weird at LIVE DEAD, which is like a dead man's low rent Burning Man. No humans allowed, except for the filmmakers, and a strange trio. It gets weirder and more violent in the last third, but it's never that gorey for the most part. It's a fun piece of work by someone who has seen some zombie films. Her previous film was The Grace Lee Project, it's mentioned in AZ, a look at many of the Grace Lee's out there in the world.
I had seen National Treasure 2 - Book of Secrets before. I still liked it a third time. It's a nice fun piece that has lots of greats sets and scenery. Nick Cage returns as Ben Gates. John Voight, Diane Kruger and Justin Bartha return and they are joined by Helen Mirren as Ben's mother. She hates Ben's dad. The movie starts with Ben telling the story of his grandfather's murder at the hands of Knights of the Golden Circle. Ed Harris claims that his great grandfather has a page from John wilkes Booth's diary that proves Ben's grandfather was a Lincoln conspirator. That bad news starts the race to find Cibola, the City of Gold. There are lots of clues to follow, puzzles to solve and some little bit of danger. I don't mind that the movie isn't all murdering and bloodshed. It's nice you can make a fun action movie for the whole family. I had heard of Cibola before. Scrooge McDuck found it in a 1954 Uncle Scrooge story by Carl Barks. It stayed hidden when Scrooge was done.
Joris Blok, a guy who makes LEGO stuff at a ferocious rate, has a contest over at MOCpages. It's a UFO contest. Here is my entry. Some aliens have landed in Wisconsin and they are there for the same reason everyone goes to Wisconsin. The cheese. They just love the cheese. They also stock up on Hostess Ding Dongs. They say the creamy filling reminds them of their mother.
I got another idea for a Mr. Frenke vignette, and this time it's a real vignette. Mr. Frenke is Dan Church's creation and one of the better characters you see over on MOCpages. I also really like that face. It makes me laugh. I got this idea on the way to work this morning and had to wait all day until I got home. I need to make more small things. You can finish them off while watching a single episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Tonight I watched San Francisco International. It's a humdinger, if by humdinger you mean a boring piece of made for TV crap. Still the boys on the Satellite of Love were funny and that's why I still watch the show. By the time I get through dubbing all the episodes to DVDR I can start watching them over again. Anyway, there are some more pictures over at MOCpages.
I thought this picture of Trolls at the beach was just a hoot. Sure made me laugh. I love those trunks on the large troll. Trolls have become popular, at least in my house. See pictures of Pirate Trolls on Sir's MOCpages site.
I spent most of the day saturday watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes and building this scene from the first Harry Potter novel. In the book Arthur Dursley takes the family away from their house in LIttle Whinging. He's trying to avoid Harry's Hogwart's letter. They race around the countryside, looking for some place that Mr. Dursley thinks will be safe from contact with the Wizarding World. He fails. Hagrid shows up and brings Harry the letter that changes his life.
Even though the book only mentions one fireplace I took the liberty of adding a second. It's going to be cold out on that rock in the sea. Why do people live out there? Punishment? I can see the need to get away at times. I worked on the rocks, tore them apart, and started again. I wish I had seen Rocks 101 the tutorial by Eggplant, or Brian in the real world. Be sure to check out his castles. Nice.
I spent the whole day saturday building and never got around to mentioning what we saw on Friday. I Am Legend was up first. Sperhauk had borrowed it from the CD store he hangs out at. Free rentals. Nice, huh. I was glad to see it. Before I might have bought one. It's ok but it's not great. It's 91 minutes and it seems to take much longer. Will Smith is ok, and the dog is pretty good. I liked the look of the city and the action is snappy but the story is lacking something. It's been pared down too much. There's little left. The infected, they too are lacking definition, of the visual kind. Most of the shots of the infected are CGI, and it often looks pretty bad. What would have been wrong with using guys in make up. It would have looked better, if done right, and they would have some better presence in the movie. Now that I have seen it I won't bother buying one. The movie is based on Richard Matheson's book I Am Legend. I read it decades ago and long since got rid of the book. I have book purges and whole writers disappear from my shelves, or more realistically, out of the boxes in the closets and attic. There was a 1964 adaptaion with Vincent Price, called The Last Man On Earth. I like that movie, unfortunately there are no good copies around. I did see The Omega Man ages ago, but I don't have a copy. I probably won't get that one either.
Soul Plane, I might get one, if I could find it for a couple of bucks. Joe paid $3 for his, I can do better than that. I did get several laughs out of it. I like Tom Arnold, he plays a great goofy guy, usually with some heart. He's that guy here. He's travelling with his new girlfriend and his kids. They get bumped from the airline they had tickets for and wind up on the first flight of Kevin Hart's new airline. That plane has 84 inch rims. Those aren't cheap or easy to come by. I like Kevin Hart, he's grown on me from seeing him in the 3rd and 4th Scary Movie. Snoop Dogg is the pilot. The pilot "on weed." The jokes were a mixed bag, some funny and some less funny. It depends on what sort of jokes you like. Some of these are pretty politically incorrect. Just like people. I didn't care for the body function jokes so much, but I did like the two security ladies ripping on all the customers. They were funny, but only to watch. Experiencing them in person would be a nighmare. There were plenty of jokes, if you didn't like one, another was on the way real soon. I enjoyed this more than the first movie but only because it made me laugh. And that's good. You need a laugh once in a while.