PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Diana Wynne Jones

I went into DreamHaven last saturday and Simba passed on the news that Diana Wynne Jones had died. We are both sad about that and that there wouldn't be any new books. Both of us plan to re-read her books. Last monday I saw a link to this really nice piece by Christopher Priest in The Guardian. That's a writer that I have mixed feelings about. Haven't read him in years. I was late to find Diana Wynne Jones's books, only discovering them 4-5 years ago, but you couldn't find a firmer fan. Soon as I discovered how good her books were I went about town and picked up every last one of them. Many of them new. There's a goodly number of them and I enjoyed every darn one of them. She's certainly in my top 10 authors and her books have their own shelf. Here's a list of her books from here, where you'll find more info on her series books. There are links to seperate bits of info on each book.

• Changeover - For adults 1970
• Wilkin's Tooth 1973
• The Ogre Downstairs 1974
• Eight Days of Luke 1975
• Cart and Cwidder 1975
• Dogsbody 1975
• Power of Three 1976
• Drowned Ammet 1977
• Charmed Life 1977
• Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? 1978
• The Spellcoats 1979
• The Magicians of Caprona 1980
• The Four Grannies 1980
• Time of the Ghost 1981
• The Homeward Bounders 1981
• Witch Week 1982
• Archer's Goon 1984
• Fire & Hemlock 1985
• Warlock at the Wheel 1984
• The Skiver's Guide 1984
• Howl's Moving Castle 1986
• A Tale of Time City 1987
• The Lives of Christopher Chant 1988
• Chair Person 1989
• Wild Robert 1989
• Hidden Turnings 1989
• Castle in the Air 1990
• Black Maria 1991
• A Sudden Wild Magic 1992
• The Crown of Dalemark 1993
• Hexwood 1993
• Fantasy Stories (ed) 1994
• Stopping for a Spell 
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland 1996 
• Minor Arcana 1996 
• Deep Secret 1997
• The Dark Lord of Derkholm 1998
• Puss in Boots 1999
• Mixed Magics 2000
• Year of the Griffin 2000
• The Merlin Conspiracy 2003
• Unexpected Magics 2004
• Conrad's Fate 2005
• The Pinhoe Egg 2006
• The Game 2007
• House of Many Ways 2008

I'd recommend them all for those interested in a good read. Many are young adult fantasy, some are science fiction, or a mix of both. Some are aimed at a slightly younger crowd but I still found them entertaining. She never writes down, has great composition, and always, a bit of a laugh. At times her writing is the best you'll ever see. Sad it's come to an end. Still we have all these great books to read. I'm going to start going through them soon, and I already know I'll like them.

Open Library

I'm still digging into the Open library but I'm liking what I see. It's an online project that is collecting data about every edition of every book there is. Here's the spiel from their About Us page.

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.

To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.

To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way.

Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone!

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.

That's pretty ambitious project, huh. If I already wasn't doing so much I would jump right in and log in the books I have that they don't but that's not going to happen right away. They also have a million e-books, some free and some not, some you can read online and some you can download. I'm sure some of the stuff is the same as available on Project Gutenberg and other e-book sites. I'm all for free books and some of them are actually stuff I might want to read. At it's least it can be a good resource for looking up authors. It's already helped me with links to my blog with that Oscar Wilde play Salome.

Salome

 
I noticed the 1923 silent film Salome on the Internet Archive so I took a look. This copy is subtitled in German but it's not totally annoying. It's an odd thing, very stylized, adapted from the Oscar Wilde play and the Audrey Beardsley illustrations. I haven't read that play but I could here. The 1892 Wilde play never got past rehearsals. It got banned because it was illegal to depict Biblical characters on stage. That's some backward shit right there. It did get produced privately in 1905 and finally made it to the public in 1931. The play got published in France in 1983 and following year it was published in English.

 
The movie is directed by Charles Bryant and stars Alla Nazimova. That's them up on the left. I hadn't heard of them before. She was his wife but according to the Wikipedia she was really his beard while he was in Hollywood. It was her fledgling company that made the film.

   

It cost $350,000 to make, it didn't get released for years, and hardly anyone ever saw it. That flop was end of her company. The movie isn't very exciting but there's a lot of dancing and movement. Worth a look for it's novelty and the coolness of it's minimalistic sets and elaborate costumes. There's not much to the story other than the dealings of some awful people.  You might like it more than I did.
 

Science Fiction Sunday 123

I don't remember seeing The Manhattan Project before so when I noticed it was playing on Comcast's On Demand I time shifted it and watched it this morning. It's a 1986 John Lithgow film. He's a scientist making nukes for the military. He opens a secret plutonium refining lab in a small town and then falls for his single mom real estate agent. He takes her high school age son on a tour of the secret facility, which is disguised as a medical company, to see the fancy big laser. The son figures out that something else is going on and with the help of his girlfriend, a high school age Cynthia Nixon, he steals a bottle of plutonium. Then he builds his own bomb. He's going to show it in a science fair and expose the secret lab. That doesn't go well and he winds up in the cross-hairs of the FBI sharp shooters. It's kind of a dumb premise I thought but it ends happy for those on the side of stopping weapon's labs. The movie is watchable but I sure wouldn't bother buying it. It's directed by Marshall Brickman who co-wrote four pictures with Woody Allen: Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan and Manhattan Murder Mystery. What is it with the Manhattan's? Those are all better films than The Manhattan Project.

The same day I was recording the first movie to watch later On Demand was running Space Chimps. I hadn't seen it and used it to fill the disc. I usually snag two movies at the 4 hour speed when I don't care that much about them. Just something to check out. They mostly look good enough and if they are really great I can always record them again. SC is a 2008 animated film about Ham the grandson of a famous space chimp. He's working in a circus where he gets fired from a cannon. He seems to enjoy show business. Some scientists send a probe into space and watch as it gets sucked into a wormhole. It lands on an another planet and a dickish alien uses it to subjugate his people. The scientists want to send a crew to retrieve the probe but are fearful of the effects of the wormhole on humans. They decide to send chimps and as a publicity stunt send Ham from the circus. The simians survive the wormhole and get to the alien planet. The chimps save the locals from their evil overlord and get back to earth without dying. Not too shabby. The movie is fun, light hearted and has just enough story for 81 minutes. Certainly more than the first movie. I'd watch it again sometime.

Friday Night Movies 316

First up Hatchet II with Danielle Harris. Joe NetFlixed that on BluRay and it looked pretty good. I've seen Danielle in several movies and liked her work. She played Bruce Willis's daughter in The Last Boy Scout back in 1991. That's a fun movie, well worth seeing. A couple of years later she had a good but brief part on Roseanne. I enjoyed that show when it was on but hadn't wanted to revisit it on dvd. Danielle's worked pretty steadily since then, often in the horror genre, but I haven't seen all her films. Check out Poor White Trash. That's a fun film. In Hatchet II she plays Marybeth. That character was played by another gal in the first movie which came out in 2006. Marybeth comes stumbling out of the bayou after the first movie, which we haven't seen, into the cabin of a rustic old bayou rat played by actor director makeup artist John Carl Buechler. He finds out who she is and doesn't want to have anything to do with her. He sends her off to see Reverend Zombie and then is murdered by the evil entity that lives in the swamp. Years before the movie starts some guys torched the house of a deformed boy. The boy's father, trying to break the door down with a hatchet, accidentally kills his son. The kid's spirit grew up ugly and mean. He haunts the swamp and slaughters all those who cross his path. Sometimes he uses a hatchet and sometimes he uses magical power tools. They must be magical because where would you get power in a swamp. A long extension cord from your shack? Rev Zombie organizes a party of rednecks to hunt down the evil guy and they boat into the swamp to get slaughtered. Marybeth vows she will sink the hatchet into the evil guys head. She's a feisty one that Marybeth. There's a lot of running around in the muck and ooze and the 84 minutes are well packed and move quickly. Remember those power tools? We see a guy have the back of his head removed with a belt sander. At least the chainsaw with the giant blade is gas powered. I bet it's easier for an evil entity to get some gas in the bayou. He slices a couple of people in two, from the crotch to their head, with that chainsaw. There's some comedy mixed inthere. They don't take things to seriously here and we all thought it turned out better than we imagined it would. Not sure I'd buy one but it was entertaining enough to watch. Definately for the monster chopping people up sort of crowd.

Sperhauk NetFlixed Circle of Iron on BluRay and we watched that movie next. I thought I hadn't seen it before, even after watching the whole thing, but I looked on my Watched Movies List and I had seen it in January of 1990. It's a 1978 movie that has a bit of a back story. Bruce Lee co-wrote the original script, with James Coburn and Sterling Siliphant, back in 1969 but he couldn't get it made before he died in 1973. Years later David Carradine bought the rights and made the film. There were some changes to the script. David played the parts that Bruce  was planning to play and Jeff Cooper played the character that James Coburn was to play. The original might have been a better movie but we'll never know. What I do know is there are a lot of white guys in this Asian set film. From what I read Bruce's Circle Of Iron was a pretty ambitious project with lots of international locations and more Eastern philosophy. Cooper plays a loud annoying kung fu guy who fights in a competition hosted by Roddy McDowell. He cheats and another guy is chosen to go on a quest. He follows the winner and takes over when that guy is killed by the monkey men. David Carradine plays four parts, a blind flute player monk, the leader of the monkey men, a warlord and some sort of black beast that's suppposed to be death. Cooper has to fight them to get to the Book of Enlightenment which is being guarded by Christopher Lee. It's some weird shit, let me tell you, but sadly it's not weird enough, though I have to admit Eli Wallach's crazy character slowly dissolving his wiener in a big vat of oil is pretty goofy. He's been in that vat for 10 years and his dick is a mere pimple. All that naughty stuff was distracting him and this was his way out. Just goes to show you that people will come up with some dumb ass stuff to do. There are a few lessons to be learned along the way to the Book of Enlightenment and some people get slaughtered. Jeff eventually meets up with Christopher and gets a chance at the book. It's one of those eastern philosophy tricks. It all comes from within you. Ha ha. Some of the fights are right crap, some spin kicks and some falling over, sad really. I didn't learn much more about Eastern Philosophy than I knew already and at 98 minutes it seemed a bit draggy. Occasionally there was some nice scenery. The movie was filmed in the desert around Bet Shean Isreal. There are some cool caves they shot in. Worth a gander for the most part but since I couldn't remember it twenty years on I guess I don't need to bother getting one.

nanoblock

 

I saw over at The Living Brick that Ohio Art is distributing nanoblock in the USA. Ohio Art is the company that makes Etch-A-Sketch. That's a toy I grew bored with fast. Bet there are a lot of them sitting unused.  nanoblock is a Japanese brick that I am sort of interested in. I've been hearing about them for a while but I haven't bought any yet. It seemed expensive buying them from importers. Amazon has partners listing the sets and they are pretty pricey. They have 30 sets at Amazon and TOYSRUS has 18. The sets are much better priced at TOYSRUS, like the one above being 15 bucks at TOYSRUS and 30 bucks on Amazon. That set above is a model of the Sagrada Familia. It's a famous unfinished building in Barcelona by an architect called Antonio Gaudi. He's one of a kind and his work is varied as it is wonderous. Me like.

 

There's a Himeji Castle over at Amazon. It's got 2253 pieces and costs nearly $200. Not going to get that. I did like some of the animals, especially that pig. Those animals sets were only $7.99 on TRU's website and double that on Amazon. That Easter Island set is $15 for 550 pieces. It's kind of silly but fun. The models are pretty blocky and some of the buildings lack a lot of detail but they are tiny. That pig is supposed to be 1.5x3x1.5 inches. Looks like to me that Ohio Art is testing the waters with the cheaper sets before hitting town with the big big sets. Makes sense. I should try one and when I do I'll report back.

  

 

The Great Brain

 
I hadn't heard of The Great Brain before. It's a 1978 movie based on the first of a series of novels by John Dennis Fitzgerald. I haven't read those books though I have seen them at the bookstores. I'm not sure if I would bother with them. I saw the movie posted to the Internet Archive this morning and thought I would take a chance. The narrator of the story is the kid in the middle of the picture on the left. On his left is Jimmy Osmond, who plays his brother, The Great Brain. The other boy is the older brother of the trio. They live in a small Utah town in the 1890's, so it's all homey and shit. I guess that's why they have those hats. The Great Brain is always scheming, kind of like Sgt. Bilko, but smarter and with more hair. He always comes out better on the deal than the other guy. He's a bit careless about people's feelings, so you know people kind of think he's a dick, but he learns to be a better person by the end of the movie after helping a kid who lost his leg. There are some sad parts and some some happy parts. It's mostly entertaining, parts of it made me laugh, especially the suicide scene. The quality of the copy is poor but watchable. It ends abruptly but I don't think you aren't missing much of anything. Worth a look for those that like the old timey stuff or maybe were fans of the novels. Maybe I'll keep an eye out for them.

Science Fiction Sunday 122

I actually watched Dreamcatcher a couple of days ago. It's a 2003 movie directed by Lawrence Kasdan and adapted from a novel by Stephen King. Neither of them is high on the list of novelists and film makers that I like. I haven't ever finished a Stephen King novel and I haven't tried in 20 plus years to read any more of his books. He seems like an ok kind of guy and I like his non-fiction columns from various magazines but for some reason his novels aren't what I want to read. Similarly, Kasdan doesn't make movies I want to see much either. I stuck this on my NetFlix queue because of the actors mostly, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis and Thomas Jane; and because it's science fiction. It's an alien invasion movie. Four guys, the three up above and Timothy Olyphant, are up in the snowy Maine woods for their annual hunting getaway. The movie was filmed around Prince George British Columbia Canada and some of that scenery looks pretty darn nice. The four guys all share a bit of physic power as we learn in the beginning of the movie. This was the gift of a mentally handicapped kid they befriended as children. During their trip they get caught up in an alien invasion. It's an on going thing, that alien invasion, as we learn from Morgan Freeman, the head of a secret government organization that fights those pesky intruding aliens. He's been at it for 25 years and he's a bit around the bend. Tom Sizemore is the second in command. I like both those guys for the most part. They always give good performances, even in the smallest roles. One of the guys encounters a sick hunter and brings him back to the cabin. That was a big mistake since the guy is full of alien spawn. He soon shits out a big snake like critter with a huge mouth full of pointy teeth. Yeow! It gets trapped in the toilet and eventually kills Jason Lee. He's the first of the four to get toasted. Damian gets taken over by Mr. Gray, a huge alien. That was a pretty entertaining bit of work from Damian. I don't see him in that many movies but I was really impressed with the work that he did in The Band Of Brothers. That was a really good series and one I should get around to re-watching sometime. It's been awhile. More stuff happens and the movie take a while to get to the end. At 132 minutes it could be a bit shorter and the whole sub-plot with Morgan loosing control could have been taken out and the movie tightened up 10-15 minutes. It's mostly pretty good but I'm not going to rush out and buy a copy.

 
After laundry I put A.I. Artificial Intelligence in the dvd player and watched that. I hadn't seen this 2001 Stephen Spielberg movie since the 2002 dvd came out. I remember mostly liking it when I saw it in the theater and I did buy the dvd but I hadn't been drawn to re-watch it. The movie was Stanley Kubrick's project but he was getting too old and sick to work on it. I have a feeling it would have been very different looking. We'll never know. The movie is set a bit into the future, the icecaps are melting and drowning the coasts. Humanity has grown smaller and robots have been created to help fill in. The robots look pretty much like people, they do all sorts of jobs, from the most menial task to helping you get your end away. Robots can mimic some human emotions but it's all programming. William Hurt is a robot builder who wants to build a robot child that can love back. People who want a child but can't have one might like a little robot kid. Fill a need, make a buck. He builds Haley Joel Osment and puts him in the home of a couple who's son is sick and in frozen storage waiting for a cure. It's touch and go for a while but mom bonds with Haley and things go well until the real son comes home. The real boy treats his robot brother pretty poorly and that nearly costs him his life. Dad wants to send Haley back, his imprinting can't be transferred, so he'd have to be destroyed. Mom, worrying about the family unit, cares enough for Haley that she dumps him in the woods, hoping he'll survive somehow. He's confused that mom left him. Did she not love him anymore? See what troubles you create giving emotions to robots? Haley gets picked up by robot haters who run a Flesh Fair. They play crap metal and smash robots to pieces to show how much better they are. At least at smashing things. Jude Law plays a sex'bot who helps Haley escape. That's him up in front of the moon. Damn, that's a big moon! Currently the earth is closer to the moon than it's been for a while. The full moon was big in the sky when I was going to Friday Night Movie night last friday.

Remembering the story of Pinocchio Haley somehow figures he needs to find the Blue Fairy and she can make him into a real boy and then his mom will love him. You'd think his logic circuit would override those sort of thoughts but there you go. Haley gets some help from Jude and Dr. Know. Robin Williams does the voice of the animated for pay question answerer. That's pretty good sign that humanity is on the way out, paying to get answers in a store. It's a pretty visual movie with some amazing sets and props. Nice to have a bit of cash to help keep up appearances. The actors are pretty good and there are a lot of them. Based on stuff that Dr. Know said Haley and Jude wind up in Manhattan. The city has been covered with water but William Hurt is there, waiting for Haley to show up. He tells Haley that he's the first of a new line of David's, and that getting there proved his love and desire. Haley is really disturbed he's not unique and he jumps off the building into the water. Jude brings him back only to get caught by the cops. They take Jude away and Haley returns to the depths of the ocean. This time in a the flyer they used to get to Manhattan. It can go underwater too. He'd seen the Blue Fairy, there under the sea. It turns out to be a statue in the Coney Island Amusement Park. Haley's craft is trapped by falling debris and he stays there for 2000 years. The seas freeze over and some fancy fluid form robots find him still watching the Blue Fairy. The human's have died out and the robots are all that is left. That part all looks pretty good but the sappy ending is pretty lame. The future 'bots clone mom but she'll only last a day. She has the memories of mom, and the explaination of that always makes me shutter. Plucked from the ether, my ass. There are lots of nice sets and shots but the story just isn't that entertaining. That's probably why I haven't seen it in a while. Probably be a while before I get back to it.

Friday Night Movies 315

 
Sperhauk had seen Alien Tresspass and when the BluRay got cheap on Amazon he pounced and we watched that tonight. It's a 2009 movie that's a parody of the type of 1950's science fiction movies that I like so much. In the movie's universe the studio held the film from release and now 50 years later we get to see that 1957 movie. It opens with a news reel that supplies clues to why the movie got stopped from release and an announcement from the producer before the movie starts. The movie is directed by R D  Goodwin. He's mostly been a tv producer and director, working on shows like The X-Files. That might be why the movie, set in California's Mojave Desert, is filmed in Ashcroft British Columbia Canada. The X-Files was filmed in Vancouver, which has passed for several American cities, and Ashcroft sure passes for the southwest. The sad and dull remake of The Andromeda Strain was shot in Ashcroft too.

 

It's got all the elements of the genre but with a nice humorous spin. There's a science guy played by Eric McCormack. He was that guy from Will and Grace. I never watched that show and I'm not much of fan of his. He played a really sleazy guy on Dead Like Me. They had to kill him, he was that sleazy. Robert Patrick plays a jerky small town cop and Dan Luria plays his Chief. Robert was the liquid metal guy in Terminator 2: Judgement Day and he's in many other genre favorites. Dan I don't see as often but I do remember him from The Wonder Years. I watched the first 2-3 years of that series before I drifted away. Both do a great job here and the rest of the movie's cast, mostly Canadians, do a great job too.

 

As a promo the movie put out some Lobby Cards and they look pretty nice. That's a couple of them up above. I like that space ship. That might be the one thing they get looking too good. The rest of the effects are enough like the ones you'd expect to see in a better quality 1950'a movie, though maybe a touch better. That space ship crash lands and an evil, people eatin', world dominatin', one-eyed alien, the Ghota, escapes. He can turn invisible on top of that. The pilot of the ship is an alien cop named Urp. He's 7 feet tall, very skinny, and dressed in skintight silver lame.  He takes over Eric's body to be able to hunt the Ghota freely. He's not so good at being human, fish out of water kind of stuff, some of it fun. Mostly the movie has good dialog and fun gags and film references. It's well filmed, even while mimicking the time it was supposedly shot, well put together, and the sets and cars are nice to look at.  Here's a couple more of those lobby cards. Dig that big eye, baby! AAAUUUGGGHHH!!!

 
I read Roger Ebertgave the movie 2/4 stars, asking why bother, and commenting that the movie is more for the ComicCon crowd, as opposed to the local multiplex. I think it's better than he makes out but I am part of the ComicCon crowd even if I don't go there. I mean it's crowded and who likes that shit. No matter what the trappings of the movie are it's a science fiction movie. It's going to appeal to the science fiction fan and not my mom. There are a lot of science fiction fans out there nowadays. That's who it's aimed at, it doesn't matter if it's a parody of the type, was it entertaining to me? You bet! It might be to you. You'd know. My level of likeness for a movie is based on my pleasure centers getting some positive stimulation. Sometimes I feel like an alien, but I know what I like, and I liked this movie. It's absolutely worth seeing and seeing again. The aggravating aggregated critics at Rotten Tomato's don't think so giving the movie a 35%. I quit reading reviews there. It was too frustrating. I felt like many of the reviewers were not genre movie fans and gave harsh and unknowledgeable reviews. It's hard to be objective, impossible for me, everything is colored by what I like and dislike.

  
Sperhauk almost didn't suggest The Thaw, he thought I might not like it so much. It's kind of a dark tale of parasitic bugs and I'm no big bug fan. The slithery little buggers arrive, from before the last ice age, transported by a frozen mastodon carcass, uncovered by the thawing polar icecaps. Val Kilmer plays a science guy, with a history of eco-terrorism, who's drugging polar bears for science in the Yukon. The bears aren't doing so well; the melting icecaps have caused changes depleting food from the local chain. They come across a polar bear chomping down on that mastodon carcass. The one with the parasitic bugs. They knock out the bear and look it over. It's underweight for it's age and it's infected with the parasite. That's one fast working bug. It infects everyone and Val makes the stupid decision to put the bugs into a populated area to make a statement on human's ruining nature.  Things go from bad to worse when the infected group is joined by Kilmer's daughter and a group of students. There's a pretty good amount of gore and goo as the group gets picked off one at a time. It's written and directed by Mark A Lewis. He's done some other films I haven't seen. This was pretty well shot and the landscape around Abbottsford British Columbia does well as the Yukon. It's pretty darn cool looking to me and totally isolated once they get out to the remote site. The movie reminds me of The Thing, both of them, for different reasons. There are lots of nice shots of the remote camp, tiny and isolated in the greater landscape, but no snow. No trees either, it's too far north, that's always kind of odd. The Thaw isn't as good as either of The Thing's but it's pretty good. I wasn't quite creeped out enough to make me hate it but I might not want to bother getting a copy now that I have seen it. I certainly didn't enjoy it as much as our first movie but there you go.

Hercules & Hausu

 

I can't imagine these two movies having anything much in common but somehow they wound up in my house this afternoon and I watched them. Hercules is the 1958 Steve Reeves movie. It's one of the better of the lot and that ain't sayin' much. It's still fun to watch and this is a nice widescreen version. It looks better than most of what you can download from the Internet Archive. Probably came from a dvd. Hausu I had seen recently at Friday Night Movie night. I had trouble with smaller 512kb file but the larger file was much better looking. Both are worth a look.