PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Science Fiction Sunday 115

I actually watched Resident Evil: Afterlife on BluRay at Sperhauk's house last tuesday. If I hadn't told you that you'd have never known. That poster reminds me that the movie was originally released in 3D. I didn't see it in that format and the dvd is 2D. Still, the BluRay looks pretty darn nice. It's the 4th movie in the franchise and it mostly takes up where the 3rd left off. In the opening sequence all the Alice clones attack Umbrella Corps Japan headquarters. Milla Jovovich plays Alice. She's got some T-virus in her and that makes her pretty powerful but not so human. Shawn Roberts plays the bad guy. He's all pumped full of T-virus too. He fights Milla and injects her with a T-virus remover. They escape a plane crash and each other. Milla flies to Alaska in a small two seater plane. The other survivors from the previous movie have gone there looking for Arcadia. It's supposed to have food and people who aren't infected with the zombie virus. There she finds a lot of planes and Ali Larter with a robot control spider attached to her chest. No Arcadia and no people. Ali goes back to normal once the spider is removed but it's affected her memory. The ladies fly to Los Angeles and find some people hanging out on top of a prison which is surrounded by an ocean of zombies. She lands on the roof and we meet a new group of folks. The zombies are trying to break in to the prison and it's just a matter of time before they gain access. It's not going to work to try to fly everyone out so they try going through the sewer tunnels. Most of them get out to find Arcadia empty. Oops! Almost empty. Here's Shawn again. There's more fighting and then the movie ends with a cliff hanger. I guess they are making a sequel, this movie was the biggest success in the series. It cost about 60 million and grossed nearly 300 million so far. It was mostly fun and interesting to watch.  The critics didn't rate it very well but the IMDb gives it a 6. It's written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. I've mostly enjoyed his body of work. He usually delivers a good genre film. I'm a big fan of Soldier, Event Horizon, and AVP: Alien vs Predator, but have enjoyed most of his other films too. I've been liking the Resident Evil series pretty much and figure to pick this up when it gets cheap at Target.

I won't be picking up a copy of Stalker. It's a 1979 Russian movie that I got from NetFlix. It's directed by Andrei Tarkovsky who also directed Solaris, and like that movie Stalker is based on a Russian novel, Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Sperhauk says the book is better. I looked it up on the Wikipedia and the movie cuts out most of the book. Not sure I'm going to get one of those books anytime soon but in the movie some guys want a guide, or stalker, to take them into the Zone. There's a room, a place of power and magic, that might grant wishes. Things happen to people who go there, including death. The stalker's wife doesn't want him to go but he needs the money. The guide and the two scientists journey there and it seems to take forever. Then they don't even go into the room to get their change on. It's a 2 hour and 43 minute movie but it seems longer. Nothing much happens, people sit motionless for minutes, hardly saying anything. Me not get too worked up over this one. 

Since I had watched both of these movies on another day I actually watched the commentaries from the 5th DVD set of Futurama episodes this morning. It's the 13 episodes that they did for Comedy Central last year, after they did the 4 straight to dvd movies. I had seen most of the episodes when they were broadcast. I bought the dvd and rewatched them. They were funny. Now I wanted to listen to the commentaries. They bring in lots of writers, directors, producers and voice talent and they talk a lot. Most of them are pretty entertaining. It's nice to see the show back and I believe it's got a 6th season coming.

Russian Mystery Science Theater 3000 intro

Mike send me the YouTube link to the intro to the Russian version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Check it out. It's pretty entertaining.

 

Ninja Death Trilogy

 

 
The Internet Archive posted the Ninja Death Trilogy last week and I watched them today. I hadn't seen them before. I hadn't even heard of them. Nice to find something new, huh. I downloaded the MPEG4 version and played them on my pc using the VLC player. They aren't the best looking, sourced from a poor vhs tape by the look of them, but they are watchable. There was a widescreen dvd release out in the US but it's out of print now. They are also available in the Martial Arts 50 Movie Pack Collection. Looks a like a lot of crap on that set. Some of it could be ok but I have my doubts. I have wrestled with these 50 Movie Packs before and taken a beating.

Ninja Death Trilogy is really one long story; each movie picks up where the previous left off. The first movie is much more comic and entertaining. There's a lot more nudity and sex than I expect from a Chinese Kung Fu movie. These were made in Taiwan in 1987. Usually there's a fight every few minutes but this one alternates sex scenes with fight scenes. It's all action I guess. In the first movie Tiger is working at a whore house and he's secretly getting martial arts training from a master who is disguised as a begger. Tiger is also secretly the son of the sister of the Japanese Emperor. Even Tiger doesn't know it. There's a bad Master, all dressed in gold lame, who wants Tiger and his mom dead. He's got Tiger's dad under a spell and he uses a flute to make him kill. Dad wears the demon mask and dresses in red when he fights. The bad Master has a lot of Ninja's working for him. They dress in black and leap about, poking people with pointy bits. When the bad Master finds out who Tiger is he goes all out to kill him. It takes 3 movies to work all that out. There isn't hardly any nudity in the second and third movies, it's mostly all fighting, intrigue or training. Tiger's old master is killed along the way and Tiger has to trust some other people who want to keep him and him Mom from harm. They help train Tiger to take on the bad Master. After freeing Tiger's dad the two of them manage to finish off the golden robed evil one. Sadly Tiger's dad dies and they bury him. Tiger and mom and Tiger's new girlfriend exit stage left. Fun for those in the mood for average chop socky fare.

Friday Night Movies 308

Sperhauk NetFlix'd a copy of Chainsaw Sally. He was hopin' that the dvd company Shock-O-Rama Cinema might have picked another good movie to market. They carry many Brett Piper films; some of which we have watched on Friday Night Movie night and enjoyed. Piper's a better low budget film maker than Chainsaw Sally writer and director JimmyO and that's by a long shot. Not sure why the credit in CS is to JimmyO but it's really Jimmy Burril, who's also married to CS star April Monique Burril. She plays Sally, the bookish librarian by day, murderer by night. She's not much of an actress and her librarian clothes just don't seem to fit well. Jimmy has directed some other 'direct to video' releases but I can't imagine I am going to bother to look for them. Bad enough we stumble onto these movie messes from time to time and are fooled by the comments on websites and pretty good dvd cover art. There's nothing as cool in the movie as that picture on the dvd. I guess the lesson is to hire a good dvd designer to make your piece of shit movie seem better. The movie gets a 4.7 on the IMDb with 337 votes. What! That's got to be skewed. If 5 is an average movie in a scale from 1 to 10 then this is not an average movie. It is way below 4.7 If you look at the voting stats 22% or 74 of them were 10's. There's got to be some ringers there. 

It's a pretty typical story, and that's not even a complaint, there aren't that many different plots, the story is all in the details. This is a crazy person murderin' people plot, if you had to think about such things, and I was. The main plot line is the crazy librarian murdering people, sometimes with a chainsaw, for minor offences. Pretty straight forward, huh. How are the details? There's a subplot about a developer who wants to built a big office, condo, and shopping complex. He'd like the piece of property that lies between the two bits he already owns. The owner of that property comes to town and deals with the developer's lawyer. She's kind of slutty. The piece of property contains the house that the crazy librarian grew up in. It was in that house, as a young girl, that she had the trouble, that addled her pate. Her dad, Gunnar "Leatherface" Hanson, is shot, in a flashback, when three crazies from the local nuthouse come calling. Gunnar lies dying, the crazies rape mom, the kids look on. Gunnar rallies and kills the three crazy guys with a chainsaw. You'd have to be crazy not to hear that chainsaw coming. Gunnar tells his daughter he's sorry to have killed those guys but they were bad men and they did deserve it. He tells her to look after her little brother and protect the family. He dies and the girl grows up. She's really fuckin' crazy, and a librarian.

The story is unclear on what happened between the murders and the current time but the girl and her brother aren't living in the house anymore. They live in a crappy house, The brother is crazier than his sister and that's saying something. She's changed her name and no one knows who she is. I which I didn't. Even though she's 'chainsaw' Sally there aren't many murders with a chainsaw. You notice that sort of stuff when you're bored. In the first murder our librarian sticks the sharp end of a pointy message holder in a guy's ear for talking too loud. Well, he was a prick of a guy. I wouldn't miss him. Neither do the stupid cops, poorly acted with crappy accents, who have insanely stupid dialog. The movie is supposed to be set in a small town in Texas but it was made in Maryland and the accents are terrible. That's ok, it goes along with the terrible acting. We started yakkin' and complainin' about the crappy movie pretty soon, there was even talk of shuttin' it off, but we stuck it out to the end. That 83 minutes seemed like a couple of hours at the 60 minute mark. We were like a group of people who have just seen some embarrassing thing. We're trying to look around and politely not say anything. Well, not so politely not saying anything. I don't mind having something to complain about, I have blog posts to fill up, and there was plenty. Bad lighting, bad photography, bad sound, bad editing, I could go on. One nice thing. Gore legend Hershell Gordon Lewis has a small part in the movie playing the happy hardware clerk who sells the librarian some tools. He was really one of the high points in the movie and it wasn't that great. Herschell has something to do with a Chainsaw Sally Show. There's a poster above. I can't recommend the movie to anyone really and I can't imagine I want to watch the tv show.

For our second feature we watched Vibes, the Jeff Goldblum and Cyndi Lauper movie that I watched for Science Fiction Sunday, and blogged about, on Jan 9, 2011. The widescreen dvd sure looked nicer than the pan and scan vhs version I had. I enjoyed it again, even after 3 weeks and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes a nice light breezy romantic comedy with the occasional murder. The writers were Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. It's fun to say their names, isn't it? They make fun movies. I bet you've seen some of them. I know I have and I've liked several of them enough to want to get on dvd.

10217 Diagon Alley

  

I was somewhat excited by the new Harry Potter set Diagon Alley. I missed getting a copy the first day it showed up at the LEGO store. The annoying thing was I almost went to the Mall of America at lunch but decided to go somewhere else instead. When I stopped in on the way home from work they were all gone, all 18 of them, sold in a couple of hours. On a visit the following week they had restocked. That was unexpected but then again so much is unexpected with that company. The demand for sets is high and the store always seems to be out of some set or another. I think that happens on the website too, but I don't shop there much. I was at the store earlier today and they were out of the Diagon Alley set again. I am sure it will come and go like a lot of those larger sets.

 
Diagon Alley is the biggest Harry Potter set so far, and the largest set I've ever bought. It's got 2025 parts, including the ten minifigs, for $150.00. That's 7.96 cents a piece, and that makes a guy feel good, even though I know that many of 'em are your smaller pieces. The set makes three different buildings and has some accessories to dress them up for the minfigs. The first things you build after the minifigs are some sidewalk displays. Owls, and a bat, hats, signs, and a couple of rather low lamp posts. Those lamps are minifig head high. Even Wizards don't usually have such low lamp posts. I do really like those owls and that dark green hat is just coming back into style.

     
Diagon Alley, for those that don't know much about Harry Potter, is the Wizard shopping street in London. There's a map from The Harry Potter Lexicon, the place I go to check out HP details. Shops, marketing goods and services to the witch and wizard, line the crooked street. It's a short street, maybe a couple of average downtown city blocks, and there's an even shorter side street, Knockturn Alley, off of that. Two of the buildings, Gringotts and Olivanders, are on Diagon Alley, but Borgin and Burke's is part way down Knockturn Alley. Hagrid doesn't recommend the place:

"Skulkin' around Knockturn Alley, I dunno -- dodgy place, Harry -- don' want no one ter see yeh down there --"

I'd probably go down there but that's me, I never listen.

 

I'd keep my Wizard money in Gringotts. That's the Goblin owned and operated bank. It's hard to rob and we hear of only two times in the books when it was attempted. There are lots of spells and enchantments to stop thieves. The really secure vaults are guarded by dragons. None of that stops our Harry Potter, of course. The set sort of comes close to the movie version of the bank but the columns are tilted differently in the set, there should be a third floor, and sadly, there are no dragons. That would be a good bit of work, huh, seeing a dragon busting through the front of the bank. Wizards, dragons, Goblins and bricks flying through the air. There's yer goddamn yahoo moment!

That's the Mary GrandPre illustration of Gringotts out of one of the US editions. I really like her illustrations, I think they fit the books very well, and I'm sad there might not be any more. The HP novels often don't have a lot of description of the places the story is set in, so GrandPre could be close to what JK Rowling was imagining, or not. Who knows? That's the beauty of those books though, they allow you to fill in a lot of gaps when you read. I think that works to the books advantage. The banks strong point is it's facade. I like the front of the building but the inside is rather barren. The banking hall is really large impressive place in the movie but all the set has is a simple desk, a large safe, and a small chandelier. There isn't as much decoration inside as outside but it looks nice enough when you open it up as a play set. I like that the set folds up into a nice compact building. There's a nice skylight there and some of the building ideas are worth knowing. The facade captures an older style of architecture quite well. I like the white and tan mix. There's some pearl gold accents and lots of tiles of various colors and lengths. Another thing that helps sell that older look is the pair of  large doors. Every collection should have a set or two. This is a new version of the door that came out last year. Now with 60% more woodgrain! It's only been in 3 sets so far. Reddish brown in Diagon Alley and the Spinjitzu Dojo and dark brown in the Battle Of Alamut set. Sadly the Prince Of Persia theme is done. I liked a lot of the colors in those sets. I don't seen the new Pharoah's Quest line quite replacing them. Low part count and silly gimmicks in some of the sets will keep me from buying them. Not that it matters, there's always too many things to buy, and a guy like me likes to go for sales when he can. After Christmas the local Twin City LEGO fans had a really good run of clearance sets at the Mall of America Lego Store, and there were many POP sets in the mix. Many of us have plenty of ostrichs now. Now to figure out something for them to do.

  
Olivander's Wand Shop has a really nice look to it. There are lots of nice sand green and dark green parts. For some reason I have come to like that brick with a deep groove. There are a bunch of them in sand green in this building and a lot more in white in Gringotts. I can't seem to get enough of the nice dark blue slopes. As the kids say, they make roofs rock!. Borgin and Burkes has that great curved skylight, more dark green parts, and 25 1x2 Glow In The Dark tiles. Both buildings have lots of nice windows. As a parts pack for the minifig scale building builder it's a windfall. Neither of the shops has a lot of detail inside. Olivander's has a counter that does break apart when you flip a lever. There are some shelves with plates and tiles and stickers pretending to wand boxes. In the book there are thousands of boxes. There's not quite as many in the set, I think there's a half dozen. Borgin and Burkes has a fireplace that rotates. It's so you can pretend that it's on the Floo Network. There's a vanishing cabinet but it's slightly different from the one in the Hogwarts set. I don't know if that should matter. The trio of buildings look fine and it would make a nice display on a shelf or space to play.

There were other sets that featured all three of these places. Those sets weren't too bad but they aren't as nice as these new buildings. They had other good points. Better, and more, printed parts, for one.

4714 Gringotts Bank was the worst. It not even a building, just some random elements of it. It's got Harry, Hagrid and Griphook in a cart on a short tiny bit of track. I guess that's the action in the set, rolling them down the ramp over and over again. There's a vault, nothing special there other than the really nice printed sign, another Goblin pushing a cart full of treasure, and an arch with a bit of a teller area. These shows up on clearance for a while and I managed to get a couple or three. It was really for the parts. The set came out in 2002 and had 250 parts for 30 bucks. It was a better deal at $15.

  
4720 Knockturn Alley was much better than the bank. It's a nice little shop with Harry and Mr. Malfoy. Harry is dressed in casual clothes and I like that sandgreen sweater. Mr. M is dressed in a nice suit. There are several good accessories in the shop, including that great hand tile, a cash register, some goofy eyes, and that wonderful brain. It came out in 2003, there were 209 parts and it was $20 in the USA. 

4723 Diagon Alley Shops was kind of an odd set. Part of a trio of similar sets, each had a cardboard back drop and a die cut window in the box. It's the only set that has Hermione out of her Hogwarts uniform. It's an odd assortment of unusual pieces and accessories in an odd selection of colors. You'd think it was a Belville set. There's a purple and a dark pink witch's hat, pale green 8x8 plate, there's books, animals, and lots of tranparent parts. It had 80 pieces and cost 10 bucks back in 2001. I missed getting them when they were new but was able to pick a copy or two later. Now they are pushing 40 bucks with a box. When I started buying HP sets I went out and looked for the female minifigs and was able to get some at a reasonable price. Now Hermione starts at 8 dollars on Bricklink.

 

I thought it was a great bunch of minifigs. Good variey of costumes that can be used for many other things than building Harry Potter stuff. Across the top you've got Harry, Olivander and Hermione. Hermione seems to have borrowed Ginny's sweater from the new HP Burrow set. It is a really nice sweater. The second row has Ron, Mr Malfoy in his Death Eater garb, and Fenrir Greyback. Malfoy is kind of evil but Fenrir is really evil. He needs killin', no doubt about that. There's a couple of goblins and a couple of twins on the bottom row. It's the first time the Weasley brothers, Fred and George, appear in a set. Most of the figures have two faces on their heads. Not Hagrid though, or the Goblins.

All in all a nice set with some great parts. The buildings have certain flaws but were still pretty much fun to build and ok to look at. I plan to leave them out for a while and I rarely leave sets built for display. I'd certainly buy more than one except for the price being what it is. Typically I like buying the smaller sets from different themes for more variety in minifigs and parts. I'd almost have liked to see the 3 buildings as three separate sets. I'd wind up buying less Gringotts than the other two. Again as a parts pack it's pretty good for the right guy or gal.

Tideland

 
Since getting NetFlix I have been dipping into their film library to catch up on all the movies that I didn't see in the theater or on dvd. I can't buy everything and really why would I. Where would I put it? Tonight I watched Terry Gilliam's Tideland. He's one of those guys that might make a movie I want to watch again, or he might make a movie I just don't want to watch that often. His first three features are the ones that I watch occasionally; Monty Python And The Holy Grail, Jabberwocky and Time Bandits. After that it gets spotty. I like Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and Fear And Loathing in Los Vegas quite a bit but they don't get rewatched very often. I think it's going to be the same with Tideland. It's not going on my list to pick one up. Once I start working my way through the store bought dvds again I'll put Brazil and 12 Monkeys on the Science Fiction Sunday list. Sometimes I need an excuse and it still takes a while to get back to seeing something again. The more serious the story the less likely I'm going to want to watch it frequently. Sometimes it's years before I'll want to see something again. It's also nice to see new things and that doesn't leave as much time to dip back into the video stockpile.

Tideland is based on a novel by Mitch Cullen. I hadn't heard of him but then I not a big fan of the mainstream novel and don't spend my time in bookstores in that section. I'm more a genre reader. SF, fantasy, mystery, a bit of horror, kids books. Occasionally I read more mainstream novelists but even then the writers tend to be on the outer edge of the field. Jonathan Carroll is one of the guys that I managed to read several of his books but slowly lost interest. He skates along the edge of the genre pond but I haven't picked up one his books in 3 or 4 years. John Irving, I tried him, gave him up after Hotel New Hampshire. Too much like The World According To Garp. I even read the Forest Gump novel. Kind of skimpy and short, not worth bothering with. It all just depends on what you like. I'm not big fan of drama movies and for the life of me I can't understand why someone would want to watch something like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. A movie about a bunch of people so horrible that they make the murderous ice storm into the sympathetic character. Go Ice Storm go!

Terry Gilliam opens the movie with him warning us that some people aren't going to like this movie. He thinks some will like it. More importantly he tells us that the story is told from the point of view of an small girl. I might not have known and thought it was something else. The novel is narrated by the little girl but I didn't think that concept was translated well to the movie. Jodelle Ferland plays the girl and she is pretty darn good in the role. I thought she was familiar but couldn't place her. The IMDb tells me she was in the pilot movie for Dead Like Me playing the little girl that George has to reap on her first solo assignment. That's a heart breaking bit of business. I have been thinking of getting out those DLM dvds and watching that series again soon. It's short, only two seasons, I can knock that off in no time. In Tideland the little girl lives with her drug addled mom, Jennifer Tilly, and herion addicted dad, Jeff Bridges. Mom croaks and they leave her on the bed and run off to Texas. It's really near Regina, in Canada, pretending to be Texas. but hey that's the movie business. It's cheaper to shoot in Canada. Dad's mom has a house but when they get there they find it's been abandoned. Dad overdoses on the first day and the little girl slowly goes off her rocker surrendering herself to some odd fantasies or some such. The neighbors are an really queer bunch and somewhat disturbed. You'd think from the novels and movies about rural America that there is nothing but crazy people out there. There's some odd stuff that happens and it just wasn't that entertaining to me. Others seem to go crazy for it. This is the sort of thing that happens with these types of stories, sometimes it's real hard to find a middle ground.

I watched Michael Gondry's The Science Of Sleep last week and people on the IMDb raved about it and railed against it. I didn't like the characters very much and I didn't find the story that interesting. Sometimes the animated parts were a distraction. I think of these oddball movies, and I say oddball with all sorts of affection, have a trigger point that throw people out of the story and they no longer buy the bit. It's all highly subjective and internal and sometimes you can only guess what the film maker is trying to say. The more off-the-norm the story, or the whackier the presentation, the harder it is to keep an audience. Your brain has to work harder to figure out what's going on and who likes that? Not me. I guess I won't bother with that movie again. I did like Gondry's Be Kind Rewind and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Even if I don't always like a movie I still like the fact that people can make their unusual films and find an audience. I can also wait and see if I like it in a few years. You never know what you'll be feeling in the future. As time passes I have come around on several movies I didn't care for and grown to dislike others I started out liking. I'm not going anywhere with this other than straight to bed. If you watch any of these let me know if you liked them.

Science Fiction Sunday 114

 

When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth is kind of dumb but I watched it again anyway. I've got a dvdr from a vhs tape that I recorded off the AMC cable channel back when Bob Dorian was still introducing movies. When I transfered the movies to disc I often kept the intros. Bob was also the voice on the tape recorder in Sam Raimi's first movie The Evil Dead. When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth came out on dvd in the US, but it disappeared pretty quickly. BestBuy put it out, and they packaged it with a G rating, only to find that they version on the disc was the one with some nudity. Oops. The put out a recall and copies are worth a pretty penny now. The copy I have isn't worth much, it's widescreen, but the nudity is cropped. The nudity doesn't make the movie any better. The movie has humans and dinosaurs living together and that's part of the attraction of this 1970 Hammer movie. They had done well with 1966's One Million Years BC, mostly because of Raquel Welch in a fur bikini. There was a second Hammer dino caveman movie called Slave Girls the following year, then WDRTE, which was followed by Creatures The World Forgot in 1971. I've seen all of those but Slave Girl. They're ok for the most part but the big attraction in When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, at least for me, is the stop motion animation by Jim Danforth. He had worked with Ray Harryhausen on some of his movies and here he does a great job of animating the dinosaurs. Val Guest wrote and directed this nearly wordless movie. The cave people speak their own language of a couple of dozen words.

  
The brunette people are sacrificing some blondes to the sun when we join the primitive people in their animals skin and alligator masks. One of the blonde women jumps into the sea and escapes. That would be Victoria Vetri, in the fur bikini, in the picture above left. She was the September 1967 centerfold in Playboy. I know I have had one of those issues but it's long gone. Victoria goes off to live on her own and is befriended by a dinosaur. That's her pal up there in the picture on the right. I wish I had my own dinosaur, especially one that got it's own food.

 

It's a different world from ours, or perhaps they are telling a sort of legend, I'm not sure. The movie starts with an announcement that there is no moon and later in the movie the moon pops up into the sky for the first time. The primitive people act surprised and scared as giant stock footage titlewaves wash over them. That was one of the poorest parts of the movie. That shot of the wave kept getting repeated over and over again, until it became ludicrous. The dinosaurs don't care about the moon, they continue hunting and eating as if nothing happened. Yay, dinosaurs! They're so cool. They shot the movie in the Canary Islands and some of it sure looks nice. There's a lot of rocks. It's all pretty silly and mostly fun.

 

When Worlds Collide is a 1951 movie produced by George Pal and directed by Rudolph Maté. It's based on the 1931 Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer novel of the same name. I read that novel ages ago, as well as the sequel which continues the story after the survivors arrive on Zyra. I thought they were pretty good but I can't remember if I saved them or not. I got rid of a lot of the old sf books that I didn't plan to reread. No matter. After the first movie Pal tried to make the sequel into a movie but couldn't get the money when The Conquest Of Space did so poorly at the box office. He more than makes up for it by producing The War Of The Worlds and producing & directing The Time Machine and 7 Faces Of Dr. Lao. In When Worlds Collide some scientists finds out that a star will hit the earth in 8 months. You'd think we need some better science guys, wouldn't you? I mean if a star was that close you'd think they would have noticed it a couple of weeks sooner or something. The scientists try to get the world to make giant rocket ships to take people to the planet that orbits Bellus. Zyra might mean that humanity will survive.

 
The world scoffs and most of them will die when Bellus comes a knocking. There's a pretty nice bit with title waves. It puts the titlewave sequence in When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth to shame. Funny how two randomly picked movies will have some odd element that they share. The movie won an oscar for special effects and they are pretty nice. After failing at the UN the scientists in the know, and their rich backers, forge ahead against public ridicule and start building a ship. I like that ship and it's huge launching ramp. They collect food, water, living supplies, critters, people, knowledge and pack that into the ship. The group draws lots to see who will go. There's a good chance for some bits of self sacrifice and selfishness there and the movie jumps right on that. Frank Cady, Mr. Drucker in any show with Hooterville in it, plays John Hoyt's man servant. He's put on by his rich and selfish boss. Hoyt plans to leave him behind and Frank pulls a gun when a chance to go comes up. Hoyt shoots him dead, reminding the group he predicted people might turn against each other when the end came near. As the ship is readied the left behinds get guns and try to get on board. They fail and the lucky ones get to head for Zyra. Hoyt was kept behind by one of the science guys who had a berth. That reduction in weight gives the ship just enough fuel to get to Zyra. They slide to a stop in the snow. Lucky for them the air is breathable. Maybe humanity has a chance to survive.

Friday Night Movies 307

 
I picked up the 2008 film Get Smart on a whim and watched it a couple of months ago. It was cheap at Target and I had just spent part of last summer watching the Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created TV series. All 5 seasons were pretty cheap from Target. I occasionally get nostalgic for some of the shows that I watched as a youngster and Get Smart was a favorite back in the 60's. It mostly turned out to be fun to watch them again. There's a lot of good and bad jokes, and sometimes Max's stupidity gets a bit trying, but overall it was entertaining. The first couple of seasons might be the best ones to watch but there are entertaining guests and regulars throughout the series. A couple of weeks ago it came up that I had bought the movie adaptation and Mike said he was interested in watching it. Tonight I brought it along and we did watch it. Steve Carell plays Maxwell Smart in the movie and Anne Hathaway plays Agent 99. Alan Arkin plays the Chief and Dwayne Johnson plays a new character, the handsome and dashing Agent 23. There are a nice bunch of good characters actors and comedians rounding out the cast. Look for some of my favorites: Kevin Nealon, Patrick Warburton, Davis Koechner, Terry Crews and Blake Clark. When the movie starts Max is not an agent yet but a Control analyst. He sits at his work station, gathering data, dreaming of passing the field agent test. He failed the first 7 times but Max won't give up. When he finally passes the 8th test the Chief doesn't promote him to agent, feeling he's too valuable as an analyst. When Control is attacked by Kaos and some data is stolen that compromises Control's field agents the Chief, lacking manpower, assigns Max his coveted agent status. He's #86 and it's the best day of his life. Max and 99 head off to Russia on the trail of Siegfried. They get attacked on the plane by Dalip Sing Rana or The Great Khali, his professional wrestling name.  He's massive. Siegfried is played by Terance Stamp. The original Siegfried, Bernie Kopell, has a tiny cameo. He's pretty much the only one of the original cast to be in the movie. Original TV series producer Leonard Stern plays the poor pilot that gets tossed out of his plane when Max and the Chief commander it. Stern is also the guy who co-invented Mad Libs and he's the Stern of humor publisher Price Stern Sloan. Bill Murray makes a cameo as Agent 13. He's stuck in a tree, all alone, and no one wants to talk to him. Dave Ketchem played Agent 13 in the 1966-67 season. There are some great shots of Moscow when Max and 99 get there. Max kills the bad guy they are investigating and blows up his bakery. Siegfried has a plan to blow up the US president and Control has to stop them. There's lots of action and some of it is pretty good. The jokes are mostly ok. It was fun to watch again. Peter Segal directed the movie and he did a pretty good job. His first movie was the third Naked Gun movie and he directed three Adam Sandler movies before Get Smart, including 50 First Dates. The movie nearly tripled it's 80 million dollar price tag in box office gross and there's talk of a sequel. Carell, according to the Wikipedia, passed on the first script for the sequel. I'd check out a sequel but until that happens I'll be happy to have a copy of the first one on my shelves.

I'll might pick up a copy of Terminator: Salvation if I can find it cheap enough. I'm not going to be in a big hurry though, it's not a movie that I would want to watch all that often. I couldn't remember if I had seen the movie until I started watching it. That's not nescessarily the fault of the movie. I looked it up on my watched movie list. Yep, I'd seen it. Back last Jan 8, 2010, over at Joe's. He'd just got his new 50 inch LG tv and a BluRay of the movie from NetFlix. I don't know if we saw the theatrical version or the director's cut. We watched the 118 minute director's cut tonight. It's three minutes longer. The movie is directed by McG. His first two movies were the Charlie's Angels movies back in 2000 and 2003. I enjoyed those but haven't seen them in a few years. He directed a couple of movies I haven't seen after the CA movies but they don't seem too interesting to me. I probably will never see them. In 2009 he's helming the 4th movie in the Terminator franchise. Christian Bale plays John Conner. He leads a group of soldiers, including Terry Crews, into a Skynet base. They find some info and everyone but John Conner gets slaughtered. It''s a tough, dark, deadly world in the future. In the opening of the movie we join Sam Worthington, playing a murder on death row, who donates his body to Cyberdyne. They pump him full of poison in the death chamber, his POV fades out, and he wakes up 15 years later in John Conner's nightmare world of 2018. He was in storage in that base that John just laid waste to. Sam crawls out of the wreckage to find that there's been an apocalypse and the robots are puttin' some genocide on the human race. There's a rag tag resistance and scattered pockets of humanity left surviving as best they know how. Sam hooks up with John Conner's father Kyle Reese and eventually John. He's got a surprise for the pair of them. There's a lot of robots and explosions and big flying vehicles. There's a lot of punching and crying and anguish. It's loud and overblown for the most part and there's very little humor. I guess I'm not as big a fan of the dark dreary future as I used to be. I didn't find it as good as the first movie in the series, or even the second. I guess I'd rather watch Get Smart again before I get back to this.

Collectible Minifigs Series 2

 

For some reason I hadn't gotten around to doing a review of the Series 2 minifigures. I figured to do one for Series 3 and it wouldn't make any sense to miss this set, even if it's a bit later than I might like. This blog isn't supposed to be timely, that would require me to stick to a schedule, and I can hardly make it to work at the same time two days in a row. My stagnation procrastination worked out in my favor for a change and tonight I picked up the individual pictures of the minifigs from Brickset. I think they came from LEGO originally. No matter, they look more interesting than the ones that they have over at Bricklink.

  
Blue is the color of two. The second bar code on the back of the pack made the question marks on the front of the pack a bit of a joke. Series 2 would be the last to have an easy to check set of unique markings. Instructions and checklist are like the one from the first series. There's 16 figures and like the first series they are a pretty mixed bunch.

    
That's the first four of the guys and gals. We have a mariachi guy, a spartan, a ringmaster and a  green faced witch. Not a crew you'd see hanging out anywhere I usually go anymore. More your Vegas crowd, and I haven't been there since the 80's. The mariachi guy has brown legs and a grey torso with dark tan arms. Without his costume he looks rather plain. I like the guy's mustache and one or two them are going into the Western dioramas for the comic con next May. I like the sombrero but I don't think the poncho looks quite right. I understand why they cut it like that, freer arm movement is my guess, but I'd have liked to see a squarer version made with some softer cloth. Something that you might see on the Man With No Name from the Clint Eastwood $ movies. The Spartans were the most sought after of the second series figures. Of course one guy made a display at Brickworld of 300 of them. It's vaguely interesting to see something like that but once you see the group for a minute or two what's the point? Admittedly I'm not much interested in the Spartans and I didn't try to get many of them. Most of them came from misreading the bar-code sheet or picking them at random without checking. I have to admit I like getting a mystery bag. It's kind of exciting! Sadly that's about the level of it in my day to day life, but then again when I talk about the thrill of the hunt, I'm usually talking about going to Target and hunting for clearance LEGO or making a safari to Half Price Books for used treasures. The spartans do have nice helmets but sometimes the generic helmet is the better choice. The ringmaster and the witch have some nice printing but I didn't feel a need to gather too many. I do like the ringmasters face. Great mustache, huh.

     

The vampire is my favorite from the set. He's got a great head of hair and a pretty good face, but the torso and leg printing is really top notch. He's got that nice high backed cape and a bat. I always like those bats, can't have enough of 'em. The traffic cop and the explorer are average figures. I didn't feel much need to have many of them. I got a few of the lifeguard for the blond hair and wound up using the floatation device in The Man In The Moat. The rest of the accessories with these four were ok but I already have too many handcuffs, binoculars and pith helmets.

     

The mime is kind of nice, good hat and torso printing. And I don't even like mimes. Parts of him might be useful down the road, like the two extra faces. Even in white they might come in handy somewhere. The weight lifter, pop star and skier are all nice and they have some new accessoriess; a microphone that looks pretty good, a nice pair of skis and poles, a great barbell and a blue toque, as we called them in Canada or ski beanie as they call them over at Bricklink. Again most of these figs aren't ones I would need more than a couple of each. Good face on the weightlifter. Nice hair on the pop star.

     
There's a disco guy with an album that we can't play. Yay! The karate guy looks great with vampire hair and a gi. He's got one of those little minifig trophies in gold color. He comes with two and for some reason I wanted a few of them, though I'm not sure what I will do with the figures. The costume is to specific to act as something else. I did wind up giving one of the karate guys to a kid I know. I changed the head and hair so he looked like the little kid. At least as close as a sigfig needs to be anyway. He thought that it was pretty cool to see himself as a minifig. The surfer has a nice surfboard and some nice trunks. His bare chest and hair will come in hand. The pharaoh guy looks pretty good but again with the limited use. Nice pearl gold snake staff and head piece.

Mostly not a bad assortment but too many of the figures have such limited use no matter how cute they are. The price from LEGO was $1.99 for these figures. That was a nice deal but it wouldn't last. Well, what does.

What I Read In November 2010

Here's another month with 8 titles. That's still not too bad, 2 books a week. It's all those movies I been watchin', that's eatin' up a lot-o-time.

Nightmare Academy 2 Monster Revenge by Dean Lorey takes us along with the kids from the first book as they finish their first year and enter their second year at the Nightmare Academy. They are being trained to fight the monsters from the Netherworld that are released into the human world when certain kids dream. There's a lot of monster fighting and lots of other stuff going on. It's a nice quick read and I liked the characters. Even some of the monsters are interesting. Lorey is a tv and movie writer. He's worked on Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday and Major Payne. On tv he's worked on My Wife and Kids, Arrested Development and Brothers. I enjoyed the first of his series enough to keep an eye out for number two. The third book is out and I am keeping an eye out for that one too. There was an announcement that the series had been picked up by Universal and Stephen Sommers of The Mummy series was attached to produce. The 2008 date came and went with nothing happening. It could be a fun series of movies with lots of monster fighting and wild settings for the battles to take place in.

Kingdom Keepers II: Disney At Dawn by Ridley Pearson is the 2008 sequel to the first novel from 2005. There's a third one but I haven't picked that up. The story is about some Disney villians who come alive through an intereactive computer program. Some kids have been scanned and their images used for hologram guides to Walt Disney World Resort. Holograms you can see in the daylight. That would be cool, huh. The real kids can't come into the park during the day without breaking their contract and getting fired from the project. Of course they are in the park for nearly the whole book, mostly in the Animal Kingdom. It's a pretty good series so far but it doesn't have the humor that the Dave Barry/Pearson Peter Pan re-imaginings have. There's lots of activity and most of the second book takes place over one day. There are lots of characters and most of them are ok. I thought the first one was good enough to look for the second and I'll be keeping an eye peeled for #3. There's talk of a movie series but nothing definite yet. I'd almost prefer to see the guy's Peter Pan come to the big screen.

The Edge Chronicles Maps by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell is a large 2 sided poster of The Edge World and a small 32 page booklet that has info about the place. It's not much of a book and it's hardly worth picking up. The poster images are kind of nice but they are the same as the illustrations in the novels. The booklet that comes with the poster has more illustrations from the book. So not much new material, lucky for me I got it on clearance for 4 or 5 bucks. It's still a bit of a waste but there you go, at least I have it and my Edge book collection is more complete. That'll be comforting on my deathbed, huh. Just one more thing for my brother to deal with.

Millo's Wolves by Jenny Nimmo is a book from 2001 and to find one you'd need to go to England, since it isn't normally for sale in the US. I got a Brit copy from Half Price books. I think they go looking for remainder books from the UK. I find Brit editions of children's books on a regular basis in the local HPB stores that I frequent. I have been enjoying Nimmo's Charlie Bone series and occasionally hide subliminal messages in this blog to get people to read them. This is a stand alone novel about some parents who announce to their 3 children that they have a long lost brother the kids didn't know about. Millo comes to live with them and brings trouble. He's been in an institution for all his life and has little experience with the outside world. There's a rather crazy, scarey guy who wants Millo to come with him. It's not what you think. Really the cover might give you a hint but I wouldn't think about it too hard. There's conflict and some good characters who work out what's happening and how to save Millo and themselves. I liked the girl who was our main protagonist. I enjoyed it and read it through quickly, wanting to find out what is happening. It's going on the keeper shelf to re-read. Read Charlie Bone!

The Beguilers by Kate Thompson is set some other place than earth with human like people. Our main character is a young girl named Rilka. She's allergic to Chuffies, a dog like critter that sucks all the emotional pain out of people, making them feel better. It's pretty normal for people to have these low level intelligent creatures around their houses. They even speak a bit. Rilka doesn't fit into her village very well. It's a very ridged and tradition bound community. People work all day and stay in all night. Nights are when the beguilers come out. They are some sort of dangerous critter that the villagers fear. No one's ever caught one and you can hardly see them. Very transparent in the light of day, beguilers glow at night. Hunting the beguilers is frowned upon, past hunters have often died or gone crazy. People will be shunned by the village for pursuing the beasties. It's seen as selfish because it isn't something for the village. Guess what our young girl chooses for her first Great Intention? That's a pledge to the village to do something important when you think you'd like to be treated like an adult. Something like getting married would be expected. Rilka is heading right for outcastville when she announces that she's going to hunt the beguilers. Sure enough, the town frowns. Even her family kicks her out. She taken in by the town's real old lady. She passes along some artifacts from the previous beguiler hunter and give Rilka hope. She does find the beguilers and it leads to an important discovery. I've mostly liked Thompson's books. Sadly they are mostly available in the UK. Still with the internet today that's less of a problem.

The Lost Barkscrolls by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell is a collection of four stories of various lengths that span the  three ages of flight. The stories add more interesting bits and pieces to the pretty expansive Edge history. The illustrations are good as usual and the stories are interesting. A welcome addition to the series. Here are the plots of the four stories from the Wikipedia. I just love all the character names.

Cloud Wolf - A story set in the time of Quint. Following a sky-battle between the Galerider, Wind Jackal's ship, and the Great Sky Whale, a formidable slave ship, Quint is given his sky-pirate name, but swears never to say it or use it until he commands his own sky-ship.

The Stone Pilot - A story told in the first person by Maugin, a termagant trog and future Stone Pilot to the Galerider, Stormchaser, Windcutter and Edgedancer. On the day before she was meant to turn termagant, Maugin releases her pet prowlgrin,out into the Deepwoods. While she is doing this, she is caught by slavers. At the slave market, Maugin was sold to a leaguesman, but rescued by Quint shortly after and discovers her passion for tending flight-rocks. Many years later, Maugin is waiting at Riverrise for her love Twig to return, all alone with the sadness of never having turned termagant.

The Slaughterer's Quest - This is the story of Keris (Twig's daughter and Rook's mother), who journeys from her slaughterer village to the Great Lakes of the webfoot goblins to discover if her father is still alive. Here she meets an enormous clam who tells her to travel to the Free Glades, where, in a caterbird cocoon, Keris finds out the truth.

The Blooding of Rufus Filatine -This is the story of Rufus Filatine, Xanth's son, who is a Freeglade Lancer cadet. Rufus wears a plain green collar instead of the checkered one and wishes  to become a true Freeglade Lancer. The discovery of the Foundry Glades being used spurs this, as Rufus longs to be a colonel in the third roost, commanded by Rook Barkwater. 

 
Freddy Plays Football by Walter R Brooks is the only Freddy book for november. I guess I didn't read much before bedtime this month. The 16th novel in the series came out in 1949 and this book has Freddy trying to prove that Mrs Bean's long lost brother is a fake. Aaron Doty shows up claiming his half of the family farm. It will take $5000 to buy him out. That's a lot of money from Mr. Bean and they have to borrow it. Freddy steals it to keep it from going to Mr Doty, who's in collusion wth Mr Garble. Both men need a good beating and they get it. From the cover you can see that Freddy takes up playing football with the high school boys. Turns out he's pretty good at the running and hardly anyone can tackle him and hang on. The school board doesn't have any reason to keep him off the team, as long as he actually goes to school. He does. Freddy enlists Cousin Weedley to help and manages to avoid being shipped off to Montana, once again disappointing Mr Garble's uncle Orville. Sad for him, huh. Still a fun read. There's a silly football game at the end with all sorts of critters playing. I laughed and I don't even like football.

 
Corby Flood by Paul Steward and Chris Riddell is part of the Far Flung Adventure series. There are three so far. I will have read another soon and by that I mean I read it in the past of when I wrote this but in the future of the post's content. That's the trouble with time shifting. I don't know how I keep it all straight. The 2 Far Flung Adventures are set in the same universe. A delightful place filled with interesting characters. There are lots of illustrations to show off their wonderfulness. Corby's dad is an engineer who had a bridge he built fall down. He's had to take a job designing umbrellas. The family is travelling to their new town in an old passenger liner that's seen better days and mostly hauls cargo. That cargo is important. It will help Corby tie together all the story threads and give many people better lives. It's a delightful book, one of the best I've read this year, and I've read some nice books. There's a lot less slaughtering in this Stewart-Riddell book than there is in most of their others, even counting all those people who died in the bridge collapse, but that was backstory and we don't see it, in print. Not that I object to slaughtering but some folks might like this a lot better. I know I don't care for slaughtering all the time myself. I have to admit I was surprised how much of it goes on in some of these young adult series. Nice to have a change. Another keeper.