PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Science Fiction Sunday 56

Sometimes serendipity puts two things together that belong. I was looking for something sci-fi-y to watch this morning and while digging in the I box I pulled out I Robot. I had just been thinking of it last saturday when it got mentioned at the TCLUG meeting. I thought it had been a while since I had seen it. It's a 2004 movie and I bet I haven't watched it since I got the dvd. So this morning it came out of the box and right next to it was the first movie I watched on this weeks Sunday AM double bill.

 

I Love Maria doesn't sound like a movie that would go with I Robot but it sure does. Both are cop stories that have robots that are trying to kill people and robots that fight each other. ILM is a 1988 low budget Hong Kong film by Tsui Hark. He co-wrote, co-directed and acts in the movie. Seems some criminal types are using a 8 foot tall robot called Pioneer 1 to rob places. The cops are as helpless as the gang is ruthless. John Sham plays a police inventor who is trying to think of a way to combat the robot. He's not having any luck. Then he stumbles upon an inept newspaperman, played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai, and a low level gangster named Whiskey, who's played by Tsui Hark. The three of them team up to win the day. The gang introduce their second robot. A robot named Maria. Maria is the spitting image of the woman who is second in command of the gang, as well as looking a lot like the robot in Metropolis.  There's lots of mayhem as the police battle the robots and the robots battle each other. There's plenty of people on people action too. There's a lot of slapstick comedy, with lots of slappin', and lots of yellin'. There's lots of smashing into stuff, like walls, and breaking things, like cars and buildings. The robots look pretty good, especially Maria, who's played by Sally Yeh. Sally plays both Maria and the gangster lady. Maria is captured by the cops and Sham reprograms her to help them fight the gang. Sham and Whiskey fall in love with Maria and she keeps on blasting them with electricity. They return for more. They are idiots. It's reminds me some of the Japanese anime Lum. Because of the electrical blastin', which happens a lot. There's a lot of yellin' in that series too. Very noisey. The action in ILM picks up with the arrival of the Pioneer 3. There's a lot of stuff going on all the time and the movie is a hoot. I always have something to laugh about.

 

That's Sally in the pics above. The guy is Tsui Hark. Hark is an interesting guy. He got some film education at a couple of universities in Texas before returning to Hong Kong to turn the film industry on it's ear. That's not much more dramatic than it really was. He sure was a shot to the head. I enjoyed many of his early movies from the mid 80's to the late 90's. After that I had lost some interest in the Hong Kong film industry. I'd seen pretty much seen all the good stuff. Hark's Peking Opera Blues, Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain, and the first three of the Once Upon A Time In China series with Jet Li are favorites of mine. All worth seeing if you haven't. Most of them can be had fairly cheaply from Asian dvd stores and internet sites.

Alex Proyas's I, Robot has some elements in common with the Isaac Asimov stories. But the main one is robots. Lots of robots. It's not actually based on any one Asimov story, it uses his concepts like The Three Laws of Robotics and parts of his stories like Little Lost Robot and The Evitable Conflict. That sort of adaptation doesn't bother me, though there are some haters over at the IMDb message boards, the movie stands alone. Will Smith is a cop who's all robophobic. He's got some guilt about a 'bot pulling him out of the river instead of a young girl. She died. He's sent to investigate the death of a robotic scientist. A scientist he knew. Did the guy kill himself or was he murdered? Will thinks a robot might have done it. Everyone laughs and calls him crazy. Robots try to kill him. Who's crazy now?  Will looses his gun and then his boss takes away his badge. His boss is Chi McBride. I always enjoy that guys work. Things get weirder and weirder for Will as he unravels the clues to the murder. Will is joined in his quest for answers by Bridget Moynahan and a robot named Sonny. Like the first movie, it's a trio, one of whom is a robot. Neither of the humans falls in love with the robot in this movie. They do like him though. The three of them team up to win the day. The stunts are bigger in this $120,000,000 Hollywood blockbuster than it's poor Chinese cousin and the sets complex and vast. The CGI is pretty darn good. It's another movie to watch occasionally. Proyas is also responsible for Dark City. That's an interesting one. Well worth checking out, though not for everyone.

Atlantis Set 8058 Guardian of the Deep

     

 There's not a lot other than a large shark and a diver. He's named Diver 2 and he has a two sided head. You get 144 pieces (plus 7 extras) for $14.99, which isn't too bad. Though a lot of the pieces are quite small some are interesting and useful. There are those pointy teeth/claws in both black and white and the tail has a nice 10x1 curved slope. There's a slightly curved technic part with fins on them too. Neither the 10x1 curved slope or the fin are on Bricklink yet. The shark isn't too bad. You can open his mouth and stick the diver in there. But even that doesn't make this set too exciting. Probably wouldn't buy another, prefering to put my money in other places.

  

Friday Night Movies 248

     
Sperhauk had read good things about Trick 'r Treat. I hardly read much about up coming films anymore. I used too. Ate up too much time. I just look at what floats by, occasionally poking something with a stick. I read up on the ones that I see when I blog about them. People seem to like the movie. I did. It's the first movie from director Michael Dougherty. He'd written a couple. Maybe you'd seen them. Xmen 2 and Superman Returns. I liked the first and had mixed feelings about the second. T'rT is based on a short animated film Dougherty did in 1998. It's on the dvd also. It stars Sam. A little guy who is out to get some candy on Halloween. A serial killer stalks him. It turns out bad for the serial killer. Sam is the guy in the poster and the guy who ties all the different character story arcs together. He's not really a guy, he's all supernatural and death dealing. We meet a bunch of characters and see what happens to them and the people who's paths they cross. People are calling it an anthology but it's not the traditional type where one story ends and the next begins. The streams are all mixed together. There's nothing new about the individual stories but it's got a lot of humor and that's why people seem to like it so much. You might too.

   
I don't think you'd like The Avenging Quartet. There's a goof bit of the avenging going on but there's only one chick on a motorcycle with an automatic weapon. Disappointing to say the least. Joe had picked up a copy of this 1992 Hong Kong action flick on dvd from somewhere. It was cheap, 5 bucks, and he thought he'd take a chance. I'd seen it back in March 1997. I used to rent Hong Kong movies on tape back then. I knew where most of the Asian video stores were. I saw hundreds of movies over a three to four year period. Me and Joe used to go to the Asian movies every saturday morning at the Riverview. Saw some good ones. We might have seen The Avenging Quartet there but I don't remember. I did remember that it had Moon Lee in it. She's a cutie. She was in a lot of Hong Kong action films through the 80's and 90's. I just read that she retired from the movie business to open a sucessful dance studio. Nice. TAQ has some people all fighting over an ancient painting. There's a complicated melodramatic story line with too much romance and too little action. There are better HK flicks that can be seen. Not one I need to pick up myself.

LEGO ATLANTIS 8056 Monster Crab Clash

 

There are three new Atlantis sets out and when they showed up at the LEGO store early in the week I picked them up. This one was  the first one I built. I waited to build all of them until Thanksgiving Day. Nice day off, a bunch of new sets to build, and a series of Fred Astaire Musicals to watch. I hadn't seen some of them before. There are 68 pieces and the set is $6.99. The crab isn't too bad, as giant crabs go. I'm just guessing, maybe that's how big regular crabs are in Atlantis. I don't know. You get a human in scuba gear to battle it.  That's the guy. He's got a second face on the back of his head. He looks a bit terrified. The guy has a speargun, what's he got to worry about? Must be those big crab legs. They'd scare me. I do like the scuba gear. It could be used for space mocs. The green visor is pretty neat looking too. That disc is the iconic treasure that the humans are looking for, or at least that's what I figure from the box. The crab has some good black parts. I especially like the large tooth/claw/blade. You get a half dozen for the feet and a half dozen of the small orange spikes that stick out of the legs. Nothing super special, just a good small set.

     

Song of the South

 
For some reason Disney hasn't had a nice dvd release of Song Of The South yet so the bootleggers will have to do if you want to see this 1946 film. You can find copies all over the place. Most seem to be from the Japanese Laserdisc or the British DVD. Someone gave me a copy of what I think is the British DVD. You can find a copy here, here's a place that has it for $7.99. Perhaps someday Disney will do up a nice disc and we can buy that too. It's a tough one, people are unhappy no matter what you do. I'm prefectly happy to watch the one I have right now, but I'd sure like a nice Platinium Edition 2 - dvd set that had lots of production art and the like on it. It could happen. I know it's a hot potato, but once you explain how to handle them, they aren't so dangerous.

It's post Civil War and Johnny and his Mom go to live with his Grandmother who lives on a nice plantation in the south. Lots of black people live on the plantation, working as share croppers. Johnny takes a likin' to Uncle Remus and his stories but mom thinks the elderly man is a bad influence on her son. It gets worse and worse and Johnny is knocked down by a bull. It's sad but he'll be ok. Uncle Remus can fix it with a dose of Brer Rabbit. Johnny makes friends with two local children, both of them poor, one black and one white. You can read a more detailed synopsis of the movie at Christian Willis's site. There's a puppy in there too. It's sentimental melodrama, and I got a tear at the end. It's pretty to look at and the animation is some of the companies best. I even like the songs by Johnny Mercer.

    
That's Uncle Remus in his cabin with the three kids, then it's Johnny, Toby and Ginny. They're all pretty cute. Uncle Remus tells the Brer Rabbit stories to illustrate a moral lesson. The kids learn. There's some conflict with Johnny's mom and just about everyone else. She'll get over that eventually, fixed by singin' and story tellin'. I like stories.

    
 
I really developed an affection for the Brer Rabbit that Paul Murry drew in Walt Disney Comics and Stories. Murry drew a ton of art for Western, all kinds of characters and stories. Western Publishing was the company that made Disney Comics from the 1930's to the 1970's. Disney tried doing comics back in the 1990's but it was a failure. I'm mostly interested in the old books. That's Dell Four Color 129 from December 1946. That's pretty old. It adapts some of the animated parts of the Song of the South. You can read the rest of the tar baby story plus another whole story here. The inking is by Carl Buettner. I really have a great respect for both Murry and Buettner. They created some very entertaining stories and some really nice artwork in their comic stories. For me Paul Murry is right up there with Carl Barks as a comic creator.

Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant - Illustrated by Andrew Colanga

   

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant

Andrew posted this 2 part YouTube video and I took a look. I used to listen to that song a lot back in the 70's. It's enjoyable and there's a good melody and chorus. Andrew has illustrated the song with a shit load of black and white drawings. They are pretty enjoyable too, a nice compliment to the song. It's a long song, over 18 minutes, and there are a lot of drawings. Took him a month. I'm getting tired thinking about it. I see Arlo revisited his song 30 years later. I'm kind'a missing the hat. Great job, AC. Have a crime free Thanksgiving everyone. 

Creator Christmas sets 30008 & 30009

 

That's nearly the packaging for the two sets that seem to be only available at ToyRUs right now. They are impulse sets available at the checkout counter. They cost $3.49 each and come in a plastic bag. I think that's a great way to package a set. I've always had a soft spot for the impulse set. I don't normally shop much at TOYRUS since the LEGO store is so close. Then there's TRU's prices. Higher. I went in to TRU to pick up the free Santa keychain that they were giving away with a $5 off coupon. I learned about it from Reasonably Clever Chris's Flickr page. People seems to like to post pictures of all the odd little bits of the LEGO life style and I like it. That was Nov. 17. I used the coupon that day and took the Santa keychain home. Here's picture of the keychain and the coupon from Chris. Not too bad. If you pull the keychain apart you've got a red minifig with black hips which you can't change. The minifig is glued together. I got the chain spike out of the two I wound up with and the hat is not glued to the head. Some of the ones I have dismantled in the past had the hair glued to the head. The beard is fine, and so is the head, but the hat has a hole in it. If you make Castle or fantasy MOC's then you need some beards.

 

You had to buy 20 bucks worth of LEGO to get the 5 bucks off. While I was waiting for the lady to find the keychains I noticed the two Creator sets hanging on a rack next to the checkout. That's where the sinister snowman came from! People had been talking about them on the internet. Well, two guys mentioned them on Flickr. One guy bought 12 of them. Jameson42 just couldn't resist, then he took a picture of them. To put up on Flickr. I know what that's like, sometimes you need several sets to achieve nirvana. Then you have to tell someone. Maybe it's some sort of validation. "Am I crazy yet? Here's a picture. Let me know." I like pictures. That's a picture on the right lower from Moctagon Jones Flickr page. Don't those snowmen look sort of sinister?

    
 
The snowman lists 44 pieces on the bag it comes in but with the six extra pieces you get 50 total. Same with the tree, 47 on the bag but 50 inside. Seven cents apart doesn't sound too bad but many of the parts are small. Still the ones that you get are useful and in some cases valuable.

 

That's the sets that I bought and built sitting on the dirty end of my work table. Some day if I ever get it cleaned off I can flip the wood over. You can see that they both have some pretty good parts. The snowman has 6 cheese slopes, an orange cone, a brown profile brick, a large round plate, 4 black robot arms, and 6, in white, of those new interesting 1x1 white bricks with the stud on one side. People have been talking about these. This is first set that the part has appeared in. You can do the same chore using a 1x1 technic brick with a pin in the hole but this stud doesn't rotate in the hole like the technic version does. There's only one guy on Bricklink that is selling them today. He only has three dozen and they are 59 cents each. One other guy has the light gray ones from the new Power Miners set that just hit the LEGO Imagination Center today and he wants $1.94 each. Wow! There's nothing so valuable in the tree set but it has lots of nice green, some silver and gold 1x1 round plates, a large white plate, a white jewel and a lance. Not as exciting but still welcome. I don't feel that tree would do me harm.

Science Fiction Sunday 55

Regular readers might remember that I am a big fan of 50's science fiction films. Good or bad I like seeing them all, at least once. It's getting harder and harder to find one I haven't seen. Finding two in one week was a special treat. The Twonky is a 1953 film by Arch Obler, who's the director and writer. He's also the writer/director of the first post apocalypse movie, Five. Before writing and directing some movies Arch was a radio play writer and producer. In 1937 he wrote the Chicken Heart episode for Lights Out! which Bill Cosby paid tribute to in his 1966 album Wonderfulness. When I was a boy in the late 60's me and this other kid used to listen to those Bill Cosby albums over and over. We had that Chicken Heart story memorized and we'd tell it over and over to anyone who would listen. We were nerds even then. I wonder what happened to that kid. If you were that kid, let me know. That same week TCM ran The Twonky they also ran Riders To The Stars. Even though I had seen them both recently they made a nice double feature and something I could also sort LEGO too. I was transfering some stock to different containers. Just a bit of a clean up.

The Twonky is based on a Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore story that was published under the Lewis Padgett name in 1942. I remember having a Kuttner story collection back in the 70's that had that story in it. The movie ran recently on Turner Classic Movies. Happily I noticed and snagged a copy. Hans Conried is a professor who is being left home by his wife. She's left him a new tv to keep him company. He's not too interested until the tv starts acting rather oddly. It can light his cigarette with a bolt of lightning. A small bolt. Soon it starts telling him what to do and zapping his mind. All sorts of whacky stuff starts happening. I've always been a Hans Conried fan and here he's pretty entertaining. His hammy style fits the tone of the movie quite handily. The movie is pretty silly story wise but fun to watch. TV was pretty new at the time and people sure treated it differently. More special. I don't think we got a tv until around 1960. I should ask mom, she'd probably remember. The effects are pretty low budget but they get the job done. A good edition to the collection and a movie that I will certainly get around to watching again.

 

Riders To The Stars is a 1954 space travel movie directed by science fiction and horror movie star Richard Carlson. You'd know him if you watched those 50's SF and Horror films that I like. He's in a bunch of movies. Some science guys are brought together to man the first space ships. Their secret mission? Catch an asteroid and bring it home. It's pretty low budget and they're aren't any monsters. Just human emotions and the dangers of space travel. I like the scientist hero genre even when there's nearly no action. The Brits did some nice ones like the Quatermass series. RTTS has effects that you wouldn't say are too bad for what little money they spent. I didn't laugh out loud the second time I saw the space ship explode or the skeleton floating in space. The acting is fair to good and the screen play by Curt Siodmak is ok, though awash with science errors. Ivan Tors, of Doktari and Flipper fame, is the producer. The three ships blast off and one is blown up trying to catch an asteriod. Number two goes space crazy and heads off into the blackness. Will our hero get his rock and make it home to the waiting arms of Martha Hyer. I'll never tell though I am sure you can guess the outcome. Worth a glance, not one that I'd feel the need to watch too often, not with so many other great flicks asking for a moment or two of my time.

Friday Night Movies 247

Sperhauk had a copy of Samurai Princess floatin' on top of his suggested viewing pile and we watched it. It's a 2009 Japanese movie called Samurai purinsesu: Gedô-hime  which translates as Samurai Princess: Devil Princess. It written and directed by Kengo Kaji, who wrote Tokyo Gore Police and Uzumaki. He'd directed a tv show and three made to video productions in 2006. It's a whacky anime like story set in some sort of alternate universe Japan. You can read a fairly accurate version of the story in this link to the only review of the movie at Amazon. You can see the trailer at YouTube. It's a gorey low budget goofest. Lots of blood sprayin' and limb loppin' going on. Our princess is attacked by some baddies, then left for dead. A mad science guy puts her back together with mechanical parts. A buddist lady puts the souls of the 11 friends who were killed at the same time as the princess. They all talk to her. You might guess that she's got some issues, which can only be worked out with more limb loppin' and blood sprayin'. The princess wants revenge against the baddies and other people want to kill her because she's part machine. The Shogun wants all human/machines chopped up. There's a bunch of characters all running about The Forest of Infinity hacking and slashing when they meet. Joe figured The Forest of Infinity, wouldn't be so, especially in Japan. You get some backstory in the form of continious flashbacks. Some of them work better than others. I didn't care much for any of the characters but the situations often were silly and they pretty much all die. It's a movie definately trying to be as over the top as possible. It's kind of like a later Troma film, like Tromeo and Juliet. Glad I seen it, but it's another that I don't feel I need to own a copy.

I've had Guy Ritchie's 2005 film Revolver loitering in my bag for the last few months. He wrote and directed this film with some help from French film maker Luc Besson. I had liked Ritchie's first two films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, so I thought I'd take a chance when I saw the dvd pretty cheap. I tossed it into my Friday Night Movie night bag and it's been waiting to surface. I usually have a stack of old and new dvd's in reserve. NetFlix hadn't turned up anything this week so we watched Revolver and it turned out to have some plot elements in common with our first film. This happens pretty often. It's a revenge film, at least on the surface. Jason Statham has been wronged by Ray Liotta. He was sent to prison for 7 years and he'd like some payback. Who wouldn't? A couple of years after Jason gets out of prison he meets up with Ray at Ray's new casino. He gambles with Ray and beats him, taking a huge pile of money. Ray, thinking Jason might be more trouble in the future, sends out a hit man to eliminate that trouble. Jason gets some help from a couple of loan sharks and the hit is a failure. The loan sharks, played by Andre (3000) Benjamin and Vincent Pastore, lead Jason on an adventure. They pit Ray against the Asian Drug Lords and the dangerous but elusive Mr. Gold. Lots of people die. The movie spins off into some weird psychological territory and there's a lot of discussion of the Ego, con games and the nature of man. Much of it comes from the narration provided by Jason's internal monologue. I enjoyed this better than the previous film. Ritchie's a better film maker and I'm more attuned to the crime genre. It didn't do too well at the box office, people were complaining it was too complex. The US edition has been edited from the Brit edition. I'd be curious to see that.

TwinLUG meeting 11-15-09

 

We had a nice size crowd this month, one of our biggest. Beside me there were 15 people who signed in and a couple of guests. From left to right, Stacy,  Steve D, Gary, Tam, Erik, Michael, Max, Brian, David, Dave, Roy, me, David's brother and dad. Matt and Judy came pretty much at the end of the meeting. There was some brick trading, chattering amongst the rabble, mocs to look at, a short video on LEGO from some TV series in the 1980's, and virtual tours of our collections from me, Dave and Stacey, Brian and Steve D. People seemed more organized than me. More plano boxes and the like. It's nice seeing where people build. Gary returned from his trip to Germany with LEGO Pirates Advent calendars for those who were luckily enough to make the list. He brought 8 spares back. Nice, huh. Me, Gary, Erik, Roy and Alice went over to Pizza Luce for food. Max provided the pictures above. He took a few more that you can see over at his Flickr page where he goes by the name of Bisonfuehrer.