That guy is a doggone legend

Ok, so I never read the book. I am slightly ashamed to be reviewing this whole thing based on the information I have, but I read a comic book adaptation of the book. It was pretty good, it was by Steve Niles and I liked it pretty well. I have no idea how it turns out in the book, really.

I just read wikipedia's article on the subject and it quotes Stephen King as saying that if Richard Matheson didn't exist, he wouldn't either. Obviously Matheson has a lot more to answer for than the several poorly made attempts at filming his original vision. I suppose we can't take him to trial for creating Stephen King, but I can always dream of the day that someone is punished for that crime.

The book is pretty tense, well like I say, the comic adaptation was pretty tense. The way the main character's neighbors were on to him from the first and just waited and haunted him was a good setup. The antagonistic relationship with his former buddy on the block made me really pleased and reminded me of when I used to fight with our next-door neighbors, the Rayles. Nice kids, two girls and little boy. I can remember beating the boy up, sitting on his chest and punching him. I think he'd bitten me. Anyways, a belated sorry to Bobby Rayle and I hope that he never becomes a vampire and hangs around outside my house for revenge.

I also liked how much he drank in the book. It appealed to the lush in me. I also thought that it made a lot of sense. If all my neighbors were camping out in front of my house every night I'd probably want to get pretty trashed as well. My current neighbors are mostly Okinawan and I think that if they became vampires it'd be pretty terrifying. I'm not sure I'd be able to tell if they were vampires or not. They already hang out behind the house all night, how would I be able to tell if they were also eating people? They left a dead goat in my backyard last week. I mean, what would the signs and symptoms of vampirism be, and how would they be different. This is the sort of dilemma that culture shock brings.

My point, and I genuinely DO have a point, is that this particular movie version is pretty rotten. I liked how scary bits of it were, and I liked the first 25 minutes a whole, whole lot. But then little things started to bug me. Why was Emma Thompson in this movie? Why did the vampires look like CGI monsters? What's the satirical value of monsters that are nothing like people? Useless. And what the hell is the whole thing with the heroic value of Bob Marley? How nonsense is that? Bob Marley? Is Hollywood really scraping the bottom of the barrel for heroes or what? I have no idea what album it was that Will Smith claims is the best album ever, but since it is a Bob Marley album I have to say that I suspect he is wrong. Not only wrong, but wildly, hilariously inaccurately wrong.

There is a great scene, really scary and intense, where he is driving around and sees someone standing in the road. It's great, the whole scene that follows is wonderful. But it is ruined by the stupid CGI effects that look ridiculous, no matter how many time we see them. They look like they are Beowulf's cousins that suffer from alopecia. It's just sad.

Vern said that he waited through the whole movie for Will Smith to say something like, "Why's it always gotta be a black man gets eaten by the vampires?!" And while it wasn't quite THAT bad, I saw what he meant. I think that Will Smith, while I will always love him for his Fresh Prince shtick, both in his albums and his TV show, has kind of painted himself into a corner as an actor. It's too bad, as I think that he is pretty good, but just like Keannu Reeves always appears to be about to say, "Dude!" Will Smith always seems like he is about to try to out Martin Lawrence Martin Lawrence.

Access Woes

Have you ever used Microsoft Access? It is making me frustrated. Or, to put it another way, These Pretzels Are Making Me THIRSTY!

I'm working on a database, well on creating a database, that needs to be able to do approximately everything for an entire battalion of people. Boy, is it a pain in the tuchus. I am not the most technically proficient guy in the world. I'm ok. I have some amount of skill. I can figure things out and I used to be able to make startling leaps that denied all actual knowledge in my head. ("What does this mean, Pitrone?" "Umm, it means that when you were 7 years old you were able to stand on your head?" "How did you know that!?")

Unfortunately, as I get older I find that my ability to make ridiculous leaps is waning. So now I am relying on my native cunning and what skills I have squirreled away over the years. It is not enough.

So if you're out there reading and you have lots of Access ability and want to help out your country and your blogger, please get in touch.

HEY, INTERNET, STOP BEING SUCH CYNICAL EFFING DOUCHEBAGS BLOG-A-THON!

These are a few of may favorite thing that I am minorly, secretly, ashamed of. I know better than to love either one of them, but I can't help myself.

Andy Capp Hot Fries: These are basically plasticene rectangles with no food content whatsoever. They are of no value as food. But I love them. They are spicy and delicious. They are FunYuns for lovers of spicy food. When I was 14-16 I went to a home-school co-op in a small town about 20 minutes from my house. My Mother would pack up my brothers and I every morning and drive us out to Thompson, Oh for "Co-op." We would then get our heaping helping of socialization for the week, and we did. I made friends there that I have kept for the past 14 years, so it had real value. The day was split up into periods and we had to be at different classes at different times. All the classes were taught by home-schooling mothers. It was a good time, I learned a bit, but not as much as I probably was supposed to. I think I was probably getting too old by that point.

I'm bringing this around to Hot Fries, I promise.

There was an hour for lunch. Usually we packed our lunches, and as a not wealthy at all family, we usually had things that no one would be terribly excited to eat. But I started to have pocket money at about this time and I would walk, with my brother and our friend Alex Gardner, across the Thompson Square, to a little mini-mart, and buy Andy Capp Hot Fries. I have no idea how I originally chose these little treats. There must have been something about the packaging, thought I never liked Andy Capp as a character. (I disliked the air of spousal abuse that is such a great part of the strips humor. I know, I'm a prig.) But I just remember that I loved them. I would open the package just the slightest bit at the top. Then I'd crush down then fries into crumbs and tip the bag back over my mouth, taking half the bag at a crunchy, chewy, spicy gulp. It was delicious and it made me happy each time I did it. I would occasionally buy more than one bag, to save one for when I got home. But instead I'd always eat the other bag after the first.

To this day, when I see a bag of Hot Fries it takes all my effort to keep from purchasing them, and I frequently fail. I have never understood Andy Capp, and I think of Hot Fries as an incredibly white-trash snack, but I love them.

Zombies: Is there anything of worth about zombies? I mean, honestly, anything? I don't think that there is. They are the id of American popular art. I can't think of a redeeming quality that zombie stories have. When Pandora opened the box of troubles, there remained hope. Zombie moves begin with all hope gone, and end without hope returning. (The exception is 28 Days Later, but that isn't REALLY a zombie movie. It's a horror movie with zombie-like beings. In contrast, 28 Weeks Later IS a zombie movie. It knows that there is no chance of returning the planet to a livable status quo post-zombie. It teases us, at the start, with the idea that zombies have been eradicated, but we know it isn't true. Further, it shows that zombification is not like hypnosis, you will do things as a zombie that are against your most basic intentions as a human being. Zombie nature is the farthest form of human nature, the worst of the worst.)

But, zombies are glorified evil. They are the most base, the most evil, the least redeemable or redeemed of all the villians. In zombies we see America, we see our values, our civilization and our desires perverted and destroyed... with NO hope. That is what is rotten about zombies. (If you'll allow the pun.)

But I love them. I love them staggering and slow or lightning fast. I like to see them eat humans and tear us apart. I like to see their heads explode from bullets, axes or LPs. I enjoy everything about zombies and I harbor happy little fright fantasies about the zombie menace becoming real.

JJ Abrams created the film Cloverfield in order to create an American monster. I read an interview where he talked about being in Japan with his son and noticing the Godzilla is everywhere. (I am in Okinawa, Japan right now and I have no idea what he is talking about in this interview, but I guess it must just be mainland Japan.) At any rate, he wanted to create a uniquely American monster. A monster that we could relate to our culture, a monster that is a satire for Americanism, for our form of patriotism and our national notions. He created some damn monster, I didn't see the film, but I haven't seen it grasp anyone like Godzilla seems to have grasped Japan. I would argue that the gap he was trying to fill is already filled by zombies.

Zombies are our satirized selves. They tell us about our consumerism, our fascination with media and our ability to rationalize. They tell us that we are a hair's breadth from a terrible future.

They remind us of the need to deny our natures.

People talk about their nature all the time. They talk about being born this way or that. They talk about finding themselves. They talk about the purity of the natural state. They are talking about being zombies.

In our natural state we use everything as a latrine, we eat whatever we can get, raw. We are filthy, naked, cold, and miserable. The desire for betterment and the denial of self, the denial of nature, that is what makes humans better. In zombie movies the people who are selfless are the ones who cause good things to happen. Those who are self-centered, those who seek their own desires, those who accept themselves as they are and do not strive for betterment, those are the ones who become zombies and cause the most damage.

Zombies teach us about life and nature. Zombies teach us about civilization and the need for self-abnegation.

At least, if you think a WHOLE LOT about them, they do.

If, for instance, you are the kind of person who wants to rationalize their love of a hipster fad. If you are the kind of person who likes to talk about great zombie moments and thinks the George Romero is a great master of ideas. (And perhaps has the entire tag-poem for Monkey Shines memorized.) Then you might have a really good reason for liking something with no discernable value, like zombies.

Anyways, thanks Final Girl, for letting me write about my guilty pleasures and tell the world how much I like things I probably shouldn't.

That Old Boy

If you want to watch a movie that made Margaret gag, then I recommend this one.

This absolutely has to be the best incest/revenge, comedy/torture drama I have ever seen. What a great/insane film.

The basic premise, which starts out the bax with a bang, is that a man is kidnapped, held for 15 years and when he is released he is tortured by a Big Brother-esque villian that sees his every move and is always one step ahead of him. It's kind of like a reverse Ocean's Eleven, Twelve or Thirteen. Instead of our wildly stylish and clever protagonists being one step ahead, always out thinking and out planning the bad guys, it's the wildly stylish and clever, incredibly evil villian.

There are plot twists and there are teeth pried out with hammers. There is a wonderful fight scene with 20 guys attacking one. There is a tongue removed with scissors. It's a winner, a visceral thrill ride that is said to have inspired the Virginia Tech shooter. So, if you've been thinking about going insane and shooting up your school, this could be the movie for you.

Across The Universe

I watched this film with Margaret the other day. At least, we watched most of it. I was excited to see it because it's directed by Julie Taymor, who is one of the most interesting directors alive. She love puppetry and wild imagery, she choreographs and designs costumes and scenery. If you've ever read any of Paul Johnson's histories that speak on art you will see that set design is a major chunk of art. Many of the great landscape painters were also set designers.

At any rate, I was excited about it. I am not a fan of Rachel Evans Wood, and I kind of suspected that the film would be pretty trite. A hippy-view of the 60's fueled by Beatles covers... not the greatest plan for a movie I've ever heard. I figured that if anyone could pull it off, it would be Julie Taymor.

At any rate, the film itself.

A lot of people here in Okinawa talked the film up to us, they told us it was really good. Before we saw it they would ask us what our favorite song in the film was, things like that. I have no idea how it got such a military following, but it has one. So one Saturday we popped it in.

The first scene is the ostensible hero, Jude, (Jim Sturgess) singing Girl. It's a nice scene, understated, kind of quiet and interesting. From there you have a ten minute montage of early 60's scenes to various Beatles songs. Not a new idea, but nicely done. Hard to tell what is being said in a few places. Hard to discern the ideas that are being shown, but they are being shown so prettily that you give it a pass.

As the film goes on the pastiches are more and more lovely and more and more chaotic and difficult to decipher. But that's not an issue. I would watch a Cremaster type manic dream, if it was directed by Julie Taymor and had her majestice imagery. But the characters grow more and more self-centered and less and less relatable, until we eventually turned it off, shortly after Bono showed up and depressed us.

The film is INCREDIBLY stupid in parts. The names of all the characters cribbed from Beatles songs. There is Sadie, Lucy, Maxwell, Jude, Dr. Roberts, on and on. There are the usual sops to anti-war protests and the musical revolution of the time. There is a haunting picture of the Watts Riots, but it takes about 5 seconds and then moves into some hippy glorification.

I was incredibly turned off by the characters. I tuned them out and despised them. But over the last couple of days I have been thinking about them. I think that perhaps their point was to be rotten. Maybe their irritating self-centeredness isn't some sort of miscalculation. Maybe it was a reflection of how irritating and self-centered the time really was. Maybe it's a satire on the whole hippy/Baby-Boomer self-absorption.

I like the idea that there was an intentional argument in this film. I like the idea that Rachel Evan Wood's incredibly dull, one-dimensional performance intentionally illustrated the dull, one-dimensional character of the 60's.

I would like to ask someone who was there, was part of the "counter-culture movement" to watch the film and let me know. Any takers?

Pretty Funny Stuff