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For some reason I have been looking at Brickshelf more of late. I found that Jabba picture on a guy named Vader's page. There are some other fun things there. I'm not too big on the Star Wars sets anymore, so I usually just pass a glance at anything in that theme and move on. Jabba made me laugh then it was time to move along.
The Band family has been making low budget films for many years. Charles Band produced over 230 films, most of which you luckily wouldn't have seen. His son Albert Band wrote, directed and produced many bad movies, some of which I have seen. His brother, Richard Band, wrote music for many of those same movies. There are some other kids who work in the business, but you'll have to follow that trail yourself. This morning I am watching Arena. It's an 1989 movie about a space station in 4038. It's home to The Arena and it's brutal interspecies fight club. It's the same in the future as now. Lots of money is riding on the space boxing so you know there are bad guys who need their share. Our hero Steve Armstrong, played by Paul Satterfield, is a short order cook in a small lunch counter. There's some trouble and he gets fired along with his waiter pal Hamilton Camp. That guy's got some interesting credits in his career. Our hero, all blonde and and buff, is in need of some space money. He takes up the challenge to fight in The Arena. Claudia Christian plays the fight manager. Some of you will remember her as Commander Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5. There are a ton of aliens, most of which aren't too well made up, but they tried. The spaceships aren't very good. The acting is all over the place, the better actors stand out, the poor ones stand in the way. This was made in Italy, where the Band's have worked a lot. There's the usual double dealing and eventually the bad guy is brought down. There's lots of fighting and our hero wins and exposes the cheaters. It's not great by any stretch of the imagination but I have come to like it. One of the few Band movies that I have ever watched more than once. This hasn't gotten to dvd for some reason.
Assault on Dome 4 is another low budget sci fi movie that there is very little reason to have. I found a vhs tape cheap and picked it up because it has Bruce Campbell in it. He's a murdeous scumbag who breaks out a gang of villians from Mars jail. He's going to Dome 4 to steal some stuff and wanted some company. Our hero is visiting his wife on Dome 4 at the same time. Jack Nance and Brion James make brief appearances. I always enjoy those guys and I miss seeing them in new stuff. Bruce takes over Dome 4 and starts building a large stockpile of weapons material. He threatens the Earth Chairman with it. Bruce wants his own planet. There's a place he likes that has some low intellect creatures that would make him appear to be a god. The dialog is pretty bad but Bruce pulls it off. I only watch this because Bruce is in it. It turns up on the SCIFI Channel occasionally. It hasn't ever come out on dvd that I could tell.
We watched two movies that just didn't quite get there. There being really good and entertaining. The first, Rogue was mostly well made, and certainly the better of the two. There are nice shots of beautiful scenery and the effects are pretty good. It's directed by Greg McLean, who directed Wolf Creek, which I didn't see and probably won't. That 2005 movie is a stuck in the outback with a crazy guy who kills and tortures people story. I don't need to see that. I like my monsters to be more not-human. A giant crocodille attacks a boat full of tourists in a river in Northern Australia. Radha Mitchell plays the tour guide who drives the boat. I thought I had seen her before and sure enough her IMDb page says she was in Pitch Black and Man on Fire. At least that's the only stuff I had seen. It's beautiful, the outback, but there are dangers. Crocs...they'll bite your ass, then drag you under the water and stuff you into their tenderizer for easier chompin' later. Nice, huh. Makes you want to stay home in what ever safe town you live in. Of course, the normal danger of Mr. Bitey is ramped up bein' as we are watchin' a movie. The croc is huge and when the boat is lured into his territory by some flares, he attacks. The boat is sinking so Radha rams it into a bit of an island. Sadly that island is going to be covered by water soon enuff. Then were are you going to hide from the croc.? You aren't. He picks a few people off, but the majority of them make it off the island to get rescued. The movie is a slow one, perhaps reflecting the lazy pace of the place. After the opening scene, where a water buffalo gets pulled under by a croc, there is a long trip up the river. Lookin' at the scenery, killin' time until we get to the island. Once there, they stay for quite a while and there are long lulls between the action. We don't see much of the croc. Not a big complaint. When we do finally see him, he looks pretty darn good. The story is nothing new. People react to a monster, poorly. Then they die. The characters are well played by the actors. Make it shorter, tighten up the yakkin', and add a bit more rushing about. That might make the movie more entertaining.
It would take too many changes to make our second feature more entertaining. Moon Zero Two is a 1970 Roy Ward Baker film that just boggles the mind, and that's right from the opening animated credits. Was Roy just so high he couldn't see what he was making or did he think this was great stuff. It's not that he hasn't done some better work, it's just that his best is still not at the top of the list of really good things. I like The Saint and The Avengers, he directed some of those, and they were mostly pretty good. He directed Quatermass and the Pit, or Five Million Years to Earth and that was pretty entertaining for a British Science Fiction movie in the 60's. But that wasn't space opera and MZT is. It's literally cowboys in space. They even wear guns strapped to the legs of their multi-colored space suits. It's a colorful movie, but a bit slow, it took 18 minutes to get to the first woman with green hair. Lots more outragous haircolors followed. There are great miniatures of the various moon bases and vehicles. The story is pretty much standard fare, not too complicated. An evil rich guy wants the independent space pilot to grab an asteroid full of space saffires and plonk it down on the moon so they can salvage it. All hush hush and against the law. The pilot is going to get a big pile of moon dollars and he doesn't care much for the establishment even though he is sleeping with the sheriff. Besides you need a lot of them moon dollars there on the moon. A rocket fuel cocktail at the western themed moon saloon is 35 of those moon dollars. I'd hate to think what a sandwich would cost, especially with space cheese. Idle chatter with a moon moron is still free. There's a girl, who shows up looking for her brother, and quickly falls in with the pilot. Now she's wrapped up with the bad guys too. While the miniature sets and moon bugs look pretty good, some of the effects are pretty poor. They lack specialness. In one shot a moon bug vehicle is blown up. They cut from the rolling moon bug to a shot of the same place with debris. The idea is to cover the transition with an explosion. The explosion is small enough and off to the left enough that before it's done exploding you can actually see the shot of the debris. It's not covered up enough with the explosion. Then there's a very bad scene in the bar. It's a poorly done version of the standard western bar fight. Worse than 1950's tv fighting. Oh, and it's in slow motion. Our pilot turns off the artifical gravity and everyone starts moving in slow motion. I guess it's to represent 1/6th gravity. It's just embarrassing. That coming on top of the movie science making you dumber. It's just not a good science fiction movie. Slightly more entertaining than out first feature MZT doesn't need to be watched by anyone, but you might get a laugh out of it's poor qualities.
That's a piece by DARKspawn called Boulder-Trap. I saw it over on his Brickshelf folder. Pretty funny, and I always like the bats. I like the guys humor, and there's a nice bit of it in his work. The other piece is called Crabs and who doesn't like a guy getting his ass pinched by a crab.
I did finish a couple of buildings during the building of the Death Ray. I think that looks pretty spiffy with the black streets and white crosswalks. Hopefully the TwinLUG members can build a bunch more and we can fill the groups display cabinet in the LEGO Imagination Center in the Mall of America with a tiny cityscape. It will hold 16 modules or 4 small square blocks. I think it should look pretty good. I've had a bunch of stuff in there for a while and it would be nice to get some of it back. I have to admit I like hearing that people liked seeing what I made, and I laugh everytime I hear that someone really wanted to know where they could get that Harry Potter set or an elephant. "Sorry Dude, you've got to build it out of your imagination."
There is a LEGO fan blog called Reasonably Clever by a guy named Chris Doyle. He does a comic using LEGO parts and minifigs. He has contests once in a while and right now he's got a contest titled Brick Science. He's looking for creations. There are prizes and judges. This is my entry for the evil scientist in the large build catagory. That's Professor Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve III and his new Death Ray. He has a secret lair in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. That's Timmy, his assistant.
It's a nice lair, picked up for a song from a super secret organization that had to close down when gas got too expensive. If I told you who it was, you wouldn't believe me. You can see a few more pics over at MOCpages.
Sunshine is directed by Danny Boyle. He's the guy who made a splash in 1996 with Trainspotting and 2002 with 28 Days Later. I've seen them a couple of times each but they just aren't favorites. Here he's taking on a science fiction story. It's 50 years in the future and the sun is going out. The nearly frozen earther's send a ship with a sun starting bomb. It failed and no one heard from it again. Seven years later they are repeating the bombing run. A bunch of science guys and astronauts are 16 months into their trip. They hear a distress signal from the first ship. It's sitting out of their way. They decide to go over and get that bomb as a back up. Not a good move, you'd think. The guy doing the piloting forgets to keep the ship out of the sun and it's damaged. You were right. The ship has a big shield that faces the sun, keeping the crew and engines safe from buring up. It must be huge but the shots of the ship don't give me any feeling of how big. Pretty though. The bomb is made up of all the fusionable and explosive material on the earth. It's supposed to be a chunk the size of Manhattan. Certainly it would be a drop in the bucket of the sun but there's some magical science goin' on and that explosion is supposed to get sol's motor runnin' and things will get brighter on earth. The science is pretty dubious, the writer Alex Garlan and director Danny Boyle had the idea, then they went and got a real science guy to make some stuff up about a new particle that might be eating away the sun from the center out. A lot of bad things happen on the trip and it looks like the mission might be doomed. At the last minute they pull it off and the people on the frozen earth wake up to a nice brighter day. I sure didn't like the movie that much. Not for the bad science, I can over look that. I didn't care for many of the characters, but I can overlook that too, though I did think they were an ill suited bunch. What bothered me was the style, I just often wasn't liking the images, all jittered together, fightin' for screen time. You might like it more than me, but now that I have seen it I don't feel any need to go out and buy a copy.
Sadly, I have a copy of Johnny English. I hadn't seen it before I bought a two pack dvd. It comes with Bean the Movie and it was cheap at Target. I liked the Bean series for the most part. I thought the Bean movie was fair and would watch it again. I thought I'd take a chance. Turns out I didn't care for the Johnny English character very much. He's not as likeable as Bean. He's a pompus ass, who lies to cover up his own stupidity. The story is one dumb thing after another and not much of it very funny. John Malkovich plays the villian. It's kind of embarrassing to watch him play a Frenchman. He's got the worst accent and his plan to take over England is just absurd. The Law is adjusted to fit the story in this movie just like the science is adjusted to fit the story in our first movie. I wouldn't mind if it had been funnier. I hardly laughed and I wasn't alone in the not laughing. And if you're not laughin', you're thinkin', an that's not good when you're watchin' a comedy. It was like I had super vision I could see those jokes coming from miles away. So I had plenty of time to look them over and find them wanting. Oh, well, better luck next time.
I haven't built much that I could show of late. Workin' on my biggest MOC yet. At the last TwinLUG meeting Max brought a couple of pieces that were of interest to me. That's the Heller Building. It's very black. It's on a 12 by 12 base. I liked the scale which is 1 brick high equals 9 feet. One stud is 7.5 feet. The other picture is of the D.
Dante Memorial Park. I liked 'em and the scale. For the last couple of months I had been thinking that it might be fun to build a small city. Minifig buildings take up a lot of space, if you have a lot of them, and why would you just have one. Small buildings mean you can make a nice city block on a small space, even with sacrificing some detail. For the last few months I had been thinking of small cityscapes. You see a few people like Shannon Young building Shannonia's out there, but they are smaller scale. There are not to many people doing them. I was thinking that slightly larger buildings would be better and had been lazily thinking about a scale. Max showed up with it all ready thought out and in 3D. Roads were added and the base became 16 x 16 which now represented a quarter of a city block. In cities were 16 blocks equals a mile, like most of Minneapolis where I hang my hat, a block is 330 feet. At 7.5 feet per stud it's a bit smaller than a block but it can be cheated perfectly well. 16 x 16 module is also easier to work with, than say, a 21 x 21 module. Unless LEGO comes out with a 7 x 7 or 7 x 14 plate, then I might reconsider. Here's Max's reworked Heller building. Improved! Now with roads and alleys. Make sure you notice the blue dumpsters in the last pic. I thought they were cool.
The base is made up with a plate/brick/plate combo. There is a 1 by 2 single hole technic brick on each end. They sit on the 3rd and 4th studs in from the corner. Roads are black, sidewalks are light gray and alley's are dark gray. Roads always take up the outer two rows of studs. There should be a sidewalk between the building and the road. I like the white crosswalk at the corner. It adds a nice bit of zip. So now the goal is to make a 4 square block layout for the TwinLUG case at the LEGO Imagination Center at the Mall of America. That's 16 modules. I have been hoggin' the case since everyone took their stuff and went to Brickworld. I wanted to fill the case next with a five story Mansion build but this small city idea seems more fun and much easier to do. I'm already workin' on my first building. We'll see how it goes. I was always a big architecture fan and that was one of the reason's I liked LEGO as a building material. That and the no painting. I love the no painting.
Mike brought the new episode of Cinematic Titanic so we watched that. They were talkin' over The Wasp Woman. Us too. It's a 1959 Roger Corman movie set in the exciting world of woman's cosmetics. A science guy gets fired from his job studying bees. Or at least that's what he was supposed to be studying. Instead he was studying wasps and experimenting with royal jelly from the queen. I don't think people want to put that on their toast. He used it to create a rejuvination serum. It makes small animals younger. They demonstrate this by turning a guinea pig into a rat. It's not a great film, it's Roger at his low budget best. And by best I don't mean best. Wait until you see the wasp woman's costume, you'll know what I mean. That poster image is a lie so big I couldn't lift it. Since science guy is looking for a new gig he turns up at Susan Cabot's cosmetic company. Sales are slipping and the company is looking for a new product to invigorate the company bottom line. Susan is looking kind of old, she's supposed to be 42. That's what her poor makeup is supposed to tell us. She hires the science guy and starts taking the first injections. There's a lot of talk and office politics to fill up the time. It's not very interesting. It's over 40 minutes before the wasp woman turns up and kills the first person. More stuff happens and everything goes wrong and more people are killed by the wasp woman before she's swatted with a rolled up newspaper. The most interesting thing about the film, at least to me, is Susan Cabot herself. She had a life of major up and downs culminating with her death. She was bludgeoned, in her sleep at age 59, by her insane dwarf son. Doesn't get better than that. Here's the IMDb bio page with lots of interesting tidbits. You can read an interview with her and see a picture of her son here. You can watch the whole movie here. Here's a page with lots of pics. The CT jokes were funny at times, but they were times that were few and far between. I've been watching the 4th season of MST3K of late and those shows were funnier on average. The Joel and the 'bots pieces between the movies were much more fun than the breaks that Mary Jo and Frank have. Glad I saw it, yea Mike, but don't feel I need to run out and order one.
Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome is a 1947 movie with Boris Karloff as the title villian. Joe picked up a copy of Alpha Video dvd, which turned out to be a nice print. I have a copy from Total Video Magazine's 40 movie pack. It was offered as an incentive to get you to subscribe to the film magazine that came with a dvd every issue. It failed after a few issues. This is the fourth in a series of Dick Tracy films and DTMG turns out to be ok, mostly because of the great actor as the villian. Boris is delightfully evil. He's just out of prison. His old pal gets him in on a robbery that he's working on. They have a nerve gas that temporarily paralyzes anyone who breathes it. They use it to rob a bank. Luckily Dick's girlfriend Tess Truehart is there, isolated from the gas in a phone booth, so she can tell Dick what happened. That puts him on the road to Boris and gang. There's lots of runnin' around, some stock footage, some jokes, some murder, some bad acting, some good acting and a great chasing the cat scene. That made me laugh. You can see the movie on YouTube. You can see some pics here. It's worth a look, especially for free.
In his search for interesting soundtracks Sperhauk picked up the cd for A Perfect Place. Turns out the bonus dics is the whole short 25 minute movie. It's a slight bit that's mostly ok. Three guys are playing cards and guy one is cheating. A second guy hits him with a handy bass. Thinking he's dead the two live guys panic a bit and decide to get rid of the body. The third guy borrows a car from the old lady next door and they drive the body into the woods. While they are digging the grave the dead guy wakes up and they two run off leaving him out in the country. It's black and white and stylish enough. Made me laugh a couple of times and the music was ok.
The New Policeman - Kate Thompson. I picked this up on a whim and it turned out to be really quite good. This kid in Ireland likes to play music. He finds out his great-grandfather might have murdered the town priest. He's troubled by this and starts looking into the story. His mother, and everyone else in the town, complains there seems to be less time as each day goes by. Two mysteries are just the start. The new policeman of the title seems out of place and he holds the key to the door to the fairy land Tir na n'Og. The land of fairy and eternal day. The fairies are still there but they seem to be having a problem with the eternal part. Time is slipping in from earth and it's about 5 pm. This could mean the end of both places. So. That kid has got some serious world saving to do. The writing is good and I liked the characters. It's a great rich story with a good ending. I'm going to keep it and re-read it again.
The Last Slice of Rainbow - Joan Aiken. It's a short book with a bunch of short pieces. Some were funny. I didn't keep it.
The Famous Five - Five on a Secret Trail - Enid Blyton. I had become a fan of Enid Blyton's Adventure series when I was much younger. There are 8 books in that series. After I had been reading Harry Potter for a while I had at one point thought fondly of that old series. While in Winnipeg for a visit I picked up copies of the Adventure books. They are hard to find in the US. After enjoying those books I started looking for more Blyton books and found this one somewhere. The Famous Five are four kids and a dog. They have an adventure with bad guys looking for buried treasure. There are a pair of twin boys that are the comic relief. This is the 15th of 21 books in the series. It was ok, but I still like the Adventure books better.
- Gail Carson Levine. This was recommended to me by Simba. I found a copy a few weeks later and read it right away. I sure enjoyed it. It's sort of the Cinderella story and it's been made into a movie, which I have not seen. Ella is a great character and the writing is really nice. Such a pleasure to read. I wanted to follow along and find out what happens. There's lots of humor and other fun characters. Well, worth the time and the shelf space. This one is going to be a keeper. There are more Levine books. I will be sure to keep an eye out for them.
The Ogre Downstairs - Diana Wynne Jones. I found this copy for 25 cents at Half Price Books. It was in the clearance section. I bought it to pass along to someone else. I read it first, it was just sitting there and I wanted something I could read in a sitting. I had read most of Jones books before. This is one for the younger crowd but it's still a good story. Some kids have a new dad. He's all crabby and stuff, thus the name. Mom has three kids and dad has two. They don't get along to well. Dad brings home chemistry sets for the two older boys from each parent. The sets are pretty special and the chemicals let you fly, shrink and other things that get the two groups of kids in some trouble. It all works out for the best and the two groups are united. Dad turns out not to be so great of an orge. I've liked all of the books by DWJ I've read. I always feel good recommending her books. They always have such great stories, and the writing is delightful.
Pendragon 3 - The Never War - D. J. MacHale. The third book has our time and space jumping guys in 1937 New York City. They meet a fellow traveller named Gunny. He's the doorman at a hotel. They crash there while Saint Dane screws up that universe. The Hindenberg features in the story. That's the famous airship that blew up. There's gangsters and a lady flier and Nazi's galore. It's still a series that I don't care for, and mostly for the writing. I'll get through the ones that I have and get rid of them. This one has a better cover than any in the series. I'll be glad to keep a copy in my pc. Virtual books take up so little space and virtual covers, even less.
Children of the Dragon - Rose Estes. This was disappointing, not a very well written book. I just shouldn't buy a book because it's got dragons in it, but I'm such a pushover. It's the start of a story that has no ending. There are some kids in a time ages ago who are the children of the guy who takes care of the local dragon. The dragon is old and dying. There are dragon's eggs and some bad men wanting power. They kill the dragon, the kids father, and destroy all but one egg. They would have killed the children but there's a secret passage that they escape through. With the last egg. There's some running about and then the book ends with lots of cliff hangers. There might have been more books but Estes stopped writing right after that. If her other few books, mostly those multi-path adventure books, were as poorly written as this, I could see why.
Fairest - Gail Carson Levine. Another wonderful read by Levine. This one is sort of a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, at least there's a magic mirror and an evil Queen of sorts. Our heroine is a young woman, rather big and homely, who has a beautiful singing voice. Singing is very important in the kingdom. Her parents own an inn, where she was abandoned as an infant and after being adopted by the family, where she grew up. Circumstances bring her to the royal castle and she gets a job as the Queen's lady in waiting. More story follows and it was enjoyable. I like the cover of the book.
Pendragon 4 - The Reality Bug - D. J. MacHale. This time our travellers are in a world where all the citizens are jacked into a simulated reality. They spend all the time they can in this happy place and the real world suffers. That leaves it easy pickin's for Saint Dane. More people die and Saint Dane pretty much destroys this world. I don't care for this cover very much.
Heartlight - T. A. Barron. This was the first of the Kate Gordon books. She travels with her grandfather to another planet and has an adventure. Lots of weird aliens. Not a bad book, but not a keeper.
Pendragon 5 - Blackwater - D. J. MacHale. Done. This is the last of the books that made their way into my house, at my hand. Now I've held them and gotten all their secrets. Time to go.
Cirque Du Freak - A Living Nightmare - Darren Shan. It's the first of a series and the last one that I'll read. I took a shot and missed. A couple of teens go to see a Freak show that has supernatural beings as the freaks. One of the kids, Steve, wants the vampire to turn him. The vampire won't and the kid leaves vowing vengence. The other kid is Darren Shan, and he's telling his own story. He also stays behind, unknown to Steve and the vampire. He overhears Steve's secret desire and learns that the man with the cool performing spider is a vampire. Wow. He decides to steal the spider. He thinks he can blackmail the more than a century old creature of the night into leaving him alone. He's going to tell the cops the guy is a vampire. Of course that goes wrong and that's the first fault I found with the book. The main guy is so stupid, I want to bite him. I have no respect for him. No sympathy for the guy, more for the vampire. That's important to me in a story. Do I like the guy and want to hear his story? Not this time. I don't mind if a guy makes a mistake, but this one is really stupid, there should have been a better reason to get drawn into the spider's web. It's my other problem with the book. Not a well written novel. Maybe by the time Shan gets to the end of the series, book 12, he'll be a better writer. I'll never know.