PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

TwinLUG visits GMLTC at Brickmania

TwinLUG got invited by Dan Siskind to bring Micropolis out to Brickmania and set it up for 3 of their monthly open houses. Local LEGO train clug GMLTC has their train layout set up there. There's a second, smaller, train layout, a play area for kids and a store to buy things. We set up the layout on a bunch of tables that measure about 5 by 15 feet. And we've filled up nearly the whole space.

 

There's about 150 stuructures and they are all sorts of buildings, some small and some large. There's a some water and a bluff and a lot of activity. Here's some more pictures over on Flickr.

Friday Night Movies 335

 

The Warrior's Way is a 2010 film by first time Korean director Sngmoo Lee, who also wrote the script. It was made in New Zealand and produced by Lord Of The Rings producer Barrie Osborne. It stars Jang Dong-Gun, Kate Bosworth, Ti Lung, and Geoffry Rush. Dong-Gun is an assassin that didn't kill the last living member, a girl child, of the rival clan. He takes the child and goes to America, in the wild west days, to find a friend of his. His clan follows to kill him and the child. Ti Lung leads the clan's gang of assassins. Geoffrey and Kate are some of the people in the little desert town that has fallen on super hard times. Many of them are from a failed circus, including Tony Cox as 8 Ball. There's a partially finished ferris wheel dominating the end of the town's main street. There's nothing going on in the town and it seems like a good place to hide. Eventually the sand from the desert would cover you up. Dong-Gun opens the laundry that his long gone friend left behind and he and the little girl find a place to live. Unfortunately there's some bastards who like to ride into town and terrorize it. Kate was shot and her parents were killed by the head creep, Danny Huston, in a flashback. She'd thrown a pan full of boiling oil and potatoes in his face while he was raping her in the kitchen and now he wears a stylish leather mask. The bad guys and the assassins hit the town about the same time and it's east meets west as the bullets fly and the swords slash. I thought it was really entertaining. It's very stylish and it has a pretty darn good sense of humor. It's very colorful, almost surreal, and occasionally compared to Fellini. It big colorful skies refer back to some of the old Technicolor westerns I saw as a kid some ages ago. The movie didn't do very well, the critics didn't like it very much, and the public didn't rush to the theater. It barely made back a quarter of it's $42 million cost. Oh, well, not too surprising, a lot of people wouldn't know what to make of it, it's a bit off the norm and a lot of people sure don't have that much imagination. Our second movie is even further off the beam.

Bad Biology is a 2008 movie directed by Frank Hennenlotter. He's the guy who directed the three Basket Case movies, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker. His movies are a nice mix of horror and comedy and they are not mom approved. I particularly like Brain Damage with it's parasitic slug that eats brains. This new movie, Frank's first in 16 years, is about a gal with a mutant vagina and a guy with a steroid pumped, drug addled, weiner that has a mind of it's own. Literally. At one point it runs away when it's unhappy with the guy. There's a lot of nudity and sex, including some good amount of manass. It gets pretty crazy and people die. A lot less people are going to want to watch this movie than the previous movie. It's fairly well made and produced, there's even some stop motion animation to depict the dick running away, and the script is fairly good. That's some goofy shit, that wiener punching holes in people's walls and floors, it sure made me laugh. Don't go looking for this one unless you have a good sense of humor or you'll be havin' one of those WHF moments that you hear about.

30015 Jet Ski

 
I thought this was a fun little set to get. It's got 24 pieces for $3.99. There are a couple of minifigs in the package and both of them have printing on the both sides of their torsos. It might be a TRU exclusive around here but I'm not sure. I haven't seen them at any other store. Judy, a local AFOL who works at the LEGO store, says every retailer wants an exclusive. Makes it harder for people to find stuff they might want. It's one of the only reasons that I stop in at the Toysrus, most of their prices are higher than the LEGO store just down the road, they don't have any sort of rewards program and most of the sales they have, the sets I want, like Harry Potter, aren't on sale. On the other hand they have exclusive poly bag sets, so, occasionally, I shop at the TRU in Bloomington and see what's there. This time they have a couple of poly bags that I bought. The Jet Ski is a nice design but there isn't anything too exciting about it and most of the parts aren't ones that I would use that often. I was more interested in the pair of minifigs. A guy and a gal. The guy has a nice torso print of a wetsuit and the gal has the colorful tank top. I think you could take the gray arms off the guy and put on some black ones, change the legs to black and you have a nice black outfit. Put on some red arms and you  have a nice jacket. I liked the torso so much that I wound up getting two of them. It's actually the  second time that this torso has been used. It appeared on the alien minifig from Space Police 5982 Smash 'n' Grab. They didn't even change anything. I wonder if they had some torso's left or it was planned all along. Hard to know. Still I am happy to have the torso, now if I only get back to building minifig scale stuff. Oh, well, it won't go bad sitting in a box somwwhere, huh.

7808 Yellow Airplane & 7803 Jeep

  

I got both of these in the Fun Favor Pack that was on clearance at Toysrus. I missed them earlier in the year when they were even cheaper. I bought one and built the little plane and jeep. You get 4 of each set for a total of 308 parts. List price was 20 bucks and I paid$13. Not the best discount, but it is TRU, and they suck on price. There's nothing special about these sets, other than the average part is just under a nickel. The bags have coupons for a free kids admission to LEGOLAND when you buy an adult admission. The couple is repeated on the instruction sheet next to a reminder that you should join the free LEGO Club. The sets aren't much of a reason to buy them and the coupon is useless to me. Not sure why I did buy them. Oh, well, I can always use the parts and they were cheaper than normal price. Some are small and there are 13 cheese slopes in the plane, white, yellow, trans red and trans black. No part's a waste of space, but some you can just down right have too many of, like wheels and propellers. Now I have 8 more sets of wheels and 8 of these wheel well parts and four more propellers. I rarely make cars or planes. Maybe I'll think of some use for them. Maybe not. At least I can blog about it.

Spartacus

I borrowed the first season of the Rob Tappert and Sam Raimi produced Spartacus. It was for the Starz cable channel. It's pretty naughty and violent. Maybe somewhat more than HBO's Rome. In one of the interviews in the dvd Special Features someone said that Starz wanted the producers to make sure there's a lot of male nudity in the show. Sure enough, there's plenty-o-manass. Mind you, there's rashers of nudity in the show in general. Seems like there's a naked lady every time you turn your head. Lots of humping too, they are a randy lot those Romans. I guess it fills in the time between murdering and being murdered.

The Thracian who became Spartacus and the men of his village are soldiering for a Roman General. They rebel when he tries to force them out of the area, they want to stay and protect their own villages from some other threat, and he burns their village in retaliation. Spartacus gets condemned to die in the arena and his wife is sold as a slave. Spartacus chops his four opponents into pieces and the blood flows. The crowd loves a good slaughter and the top guy commutes his sentence and sells him to John Hannah. Lucy Lawless, real life wife of Rob Tappert, and star of Xena, The Warrior Princess, plays his wife. They are a vile social climbing couple with little feeling for anyone but themselves. They plot and scheme to gain power and status. When Spartacus finds out tht John is responsible for the death of his wife he vows to get revenge and that slave revolt is born.

I enjoyed parts of the show, some of those naked ladies, but got tired of the interpersonal melodrama at times. Most of the characters are just awful people, no problem with them getting theirs at some point. They make the worse decisions and everyone dies, including them. The show looks pretty good, not quite as opulent as Rome but not too bad. There isn't much location shooting, most of it inside on a soundstage, which is then added to with some CGI backgrounds and sky. Not something that I'd bother to buy now that I have seen it and a good reason for NetFlix.

Science Fiction Sunday 142

I have the last two Star Trek dvds to watch this week. I know I went to see Star Trek V: The Final Frontier in the theatre when it came out but I sure didn't remember anything much about it when I stuck the dvd into the player. I might not have seen it since it came out in 1989. It was ok to watch but it seems a step down from number 4. William Shatner is directing and he does a fairly good job but it looks too much like a tv show, lots of close ups, and not so cinematic. Some other company, not ILM, is doing the effects and they're about average. The script is pretty uneven, some parts better than others, and the humor isn't too good at times. Everyone's on break while the ship is being rebuilt. A vulcan has kidnapped some ambassadors on a remote planet. Federation sends Kirk to see what's up. The vulcan turns out to be Spock's half brother and a guy the other Vulcan's tossed out of their society for being too passionate. Turns out he's crazy too. He wants to go to the center of the galaxy and find some god guy. They get there, being followed by a Klingon Bird of Prey, and pass through the barrier. No has before. Turns out to be some evil alien or something. It's more like a jazzed up episode of the tv show and that works in it's favor. There's some talk about god but I don't think they had the budget for that. There's some commentaries but I haven't looked at them. I watched the featurettes and they were about average. Now onto the 6th Star Trek movie.

I also went to see Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in the theater and again I don't remember much about the movie as I watched the dvd. You'd have thought I would have remember that three breasted cat woman in the space bar. Maybe I've just seen too many three breasted women in the movies. Here's a list of them for those that aren't at work right now. Nicholas Meyers took the director chair again and he did a good job on the movie. It looks better and it's got a more complicated story while keeping that tv episode feel. The Klingon's blow up one of their own moons and their planet will die in 50 years. Ooh, time to make peace and get some of that Federation help. Some people don't want the peace, they try to sabotage the talks between the races. There's a lot of aliens in this movie, more than most of the previous ones, and some of them look better than others. Kirk gets set up, he and McCoy get tried for killing David Warner, found guilty and get tossed into a frozen mining prison. There's a lot of escaping and rescuing before the end of the movie. The saboteurs are exposed and arrested after a pretty good space battle. Peace comes until the next pain in the ass shows up. More fun then the previous movie. Now that I have these dvd's I'll probably watch them again. Not sure when yet. Not for a while.

Friday Night Movies 334

We had a couple of alien invasion movies with young people learning to use their super powers on the menu tonight. Joe brought I Am Number Four and we watched that first. I have to admit, I was curious and I'm always interested in seeing a science fiction film I haven't seen before. I could just barely remember the ads for the movie from early in the year. Alex Pettyfer, whom we thought looked pretty old but turned out to be about 19 when the movie was made, plays John Smith. He's an alien from Lorien and he's hiding out on our Earth with Timothy Oliphant. Tim is a warrior entrusted to protect the boy from the Mogadorians. They are the aliens, led by Kevin Durant, who destroyed Lorien. Kevin has all the best lines, all the funnest scenes, and some nice tiny pointy teeth. He's got two big monsters he keeps in a truck. They leap like jack rabbits, fly through the air like flying squirrels, and their arms end in sharp pointy spikes that are good for stabbin'. Alex has a glowy leg problem that blows his cover. Tim and Alex run from their home in Florida. Instead of laying low in their new place in Paradise Ohio, Alex goes to school and starts making friends, and enemies. It all goes bad, one thing after another, and people start to get murdered. It's a pretty dower movie, not too much fun, people gettin' all emoty. It seems longer than it's 109 minutes, mostly because nothing much happens for long stretches, and the characters do all the wrong things, which is very annoying. Not keeping a low profile gets a lot of people killed. Alex has some sort of super powers that Tim doesn't tell him enough about before he's killed by one of the Mogadorians. Now Alex is on his own, except for the human's he's made friends with. He wins the day and the movie ends with a bit about how he's got to find the rest of the Loriens. Director D C Caruso did an ok job though I thought some of it is pretty cliched and predictable. Mostly it's an action thriller with science fiction trappings. We spent a lot of time talking and complaining about the story elements and the plot holes and inconsistencies. It's a movie that I won't bother to pick up now that I've seen it.

 

Gantz is a Japanese science fiction movie based on a Manga. A couple of young guys get hit by a subway train and they wake up in a white room with a few other people and a huge black ball. The ball tells them their old life is gone, the ball will tell them what to do, and that's the way the cookie crumbles. All the people in the room have died. Now they are here. There's a lot of that staring into space and stoic face time like you expect to see in a Japanese film. The ball pops open. It's got a human hooked up to some wires and a shit load of guns. There are fancy leather body suits to wear. The ball sends them on a mission to kill an alien that eats onions. They kill the alien but sadly it turns out to be the possible son of their real target. Many of the team are slaughtered. It's mostly their own fault for not working together and not shooting their guns. That was an annoying thing about the people, they wouldn't fire their weapons even when they were in danger. Not sure who is responsible for that plot element but it's highly annoying. They kill the alien eventually and return to the white room. There's a lot of teleporting, using a nice effect, and most of the CGI wasn't too bad. The suits and weapons are all fun. It's just way too long and dull. More people are introduced to the white room and they get sent to the slaughter. It seems an inefficient way to fight the aliens but on the other hand there's a never ending supply of dead people. During the teams hang time between missions they get to freely wander the city. Mostly that's all boring. There are points rewarded for killing the aliens. If you get 100 points you can get ressurected and leave the game or return a dead player to the team. It ends with a To Be Continued. I somehow don't think I'll be seeing the sequel Gantz: Perfect Answer anytime too soon. It would have been a much better show if they cut about about a half hour of overdone character development but that's the way it goes. The movie isn't out here yet but Amazon lists a dvd/BluRay set coming out the end of August. There's a 26 episode Anime series that gets a pretty negative description on Amazon. I'm certainly not going to pick those up.

4194 Whitecap Bay

 
This was another set that was on clearance at Target a couple of weeks ago. There's a fair bit of a playset with a tall lighthouse tower and a bit of a building on the side. Speaking of sides, there is just the one. The whole thing is just the facade. It's pretty empty back there but for the net cannon. It's hidden behind those nice brick built doors. It slides out and fires a net. It works ok. The set has 746 parts and sells for 80 smackers. I wasn't planning to buy one but at 30% off it became more attractive. Much better cost per piece at that price, huh. There are a half dozen minifigs including two of the newly sculpted mermaids. They are pretty nice and one of the better reasons to pick up the set. The trading card depicts one of the fishy gals. She looks sad. Probably in love with Captain Jack. He's a heart breaker, he is. Or he stole some money from her. It could go either way with that guy. There's a giant poster which I didn't think was anything too special. I'd rather have more bricks. There are 2 black rowboats and 49 tiles. I can always use the tiles. So smooth. Tiles rock! There are a nice bunch of accessories; a couple of those new bottles, a flintlock pistol, some swords and scabards, a couple of those nice new buckets, a couple of nets, 3 dark brown telescopes, 6 trans flames, and a light brick. There's a large amount of dark blay, several dark tan plates, and some good reddish brown parts. There are 20 of the 2x2 facet brick and a dozen of the 3x3 facet brick. All in the dark blay. Actually about a third of the parts are dark blay, if you include the Technic parts, and I do. So, plenty of good stuff for the Castle or Harry Potter builders.

     

I put it together just to see it fall apart. The lighthouse tower has break points built in and you can tumble the top half down pretty easily. The large reddish brown barrel has a tipping mechanism. You tip it and the top pops off. Some black 1x1 round bricks spill out. They are supposed to be oil. Probably a good thing that they replaced the oil with bricks. There have been Mega Block sets with goo in them.

         

There's another Captain Jack and some guy named Philip Swift. The third guy is Gunner Zombie and the last guy is called Scrum. A good looking bunch of rapscallions. They have some good costumes and faces.

    

Those are some scarey ass mermaids there, huh. Their other faces are less angry. They look good in their sand green and sand blue tails and the printing is very nice. There's even more printing on the back. Good hair pieces too. So mostly a good set with a lot of useable parts, at least for me. Be nice if this set got some serious markdown action after Christmas. Be nice to get lucky, huh. Start saving your money, keep hope alive.

Those naughty Romans of ancient Rome

 
Someone had lent me the complete two season dvd set of HBO's Rome. I hadn't seen them before and was interested. I watched them over a couple of weeks. That's really my favorite way to watch a series. There are 12 episodes in the first season and only 10 in the second. The first season covers Ceasar's rise to power from about 49 BC to the eventful March day in 52 BC when he recieved that fatal dagger up the strap. Season two depicts the fight between the reigning houses and the eventual defeat of Mark Antony by Octavian. They were a right bunch of muderous bastards back then and they liked their shagging and swearing too. Oddly, a lot of the characters seem to talk like they're from England. It's an HBO show that was partially funded by the BBC and made in Italy.

      

That's Ray Stevenson in the middle, he plays Titus Pullo and Kevin McKidd, in the picture on the right above, plays Lucius Vorenus. They are vaguely based on some real Roman soldiers and they fit right in. We follow them around a lot as they try to adapt to their changing lifestyle. Inevitably they fall back on what they know and stab people. They interact with Caesar and Mark Antony and even Cleopatra. Lots of people get stabbed. The story plays pretty fast and loose with the real history of the time and place. Several people die in different ways than they did. Often in a much more showy way. Mostly it was done for dramatic effect, and occasionally, it was to compress the events in the story. There's a lot of violence in the show, lots of people get stabbed, slashed, hacked, beheaded and just plain fucked right up. Some people might not want to watch it. There's as much nudity and sex as there is violence. It seems every few minutes someone is sticking something into someone.

It certainly looks great. All the costumes and props and sets are top notch. There's a huge cast and lots of extras. Often many of them are naked. They spent a couple of million bucks on each episode and there's a lot up on the screen. Just not a lot of clothes. There's lots of intrigue in the story, it was an exciting time, lots of double crossing and back stabbing and butt stuffing. They are an awful lot of horrible people with little or no concern for human life. I sure wouldn't have wanted to live back then. Probably would have gotten stabbed. There are a lot of pretty naked ladies and a more than generous amount of manass for the ladies. Our main characters grow and change, especially Titus. I really enjoyed Ray Stevenson's work but at times his Brit accent and slang were a little too noticible. Worth a lot for the most part but be warned it's often unpleasant.