The Anti-Jackson

I had an organization board meeting on Wednesday night, and in the dark, my right-hand riding glove went AWOL and we couldn’t find it after the meeting.  So I had to ride the short bit home with just my left glove.  No big deal.

On Thursday, I went back by the meeting location and saw that someone had found my glove and set it on a brick retaining wall.  Of course, it had rained over night, so the glove was wet and maybe dirty from wherever it had fallen the night before.  So getting home, I added it to a load of laundry, and since I was doing such, added my super lightweight secondary gloves and my Turtle Fur neck wrap; they could all use an occasional wash.

Thursday night came and a committee meeting… and oh crud, all three gloves and the neck wrap was in the washing machine, not yet in the dryer.  Well, in a pinch, get a garden glove!

But, um…

• Somewhere along the line, I lost one glove from each of two pairs of garden gloves, and it was the right-hand glove missing.
• The more recent pair of garden gloves, when I got them back from the store, they had bound two matching gloves into the package instead of a pair… two left-hand gloves!

So now I had my choice of five different gloves to wear to ride to the meeting, all of them left-hand gloves.  As noted, I felt like an anti-Michael Jackson: white guy with one black glove on the opposite hand.
 

Movie Review — Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Out of all the things I could say about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, one sums them all up:

After watching this movie, I wanted to put the disc back in and watch it again.  Immediately.

That’s a pretty rare thing for me.  The only other movie that I can think of that gave me that urge was Memento, but that was because I wanted to see all the clues again know that I knew the outcome.  Mmm, and Mulholland Drive as well, again one of those films where all the threads change right at the end.  Scott Pilgrim isn’t one of those.

I’m still in the process of reading the comic book series that Scott Pilgrim is based on — I need to go pick up a reorder of vol. 5 that came in last week — but up through vol. 3, the movie is one of those ultra-close transfers from comic to film that only Watchmen and Sin City have managed thus far.  But with the comic itself a mash-up of slacker, music, and video game content, the movie version takes that a level further, mashing comics, music, and games into a whole which works amazingly.

Another of the great things I can say is that the last few minutes of the movie kept me guessing about what would happen.  That so seldom happens for me (unless there’s an intentional mystery in the film) that I was enthralled.  Of course, it’s also a plus that I haven’t read the end of the comics series yet, so it couldn’t be spoiled for me that way.

(Hmm, that’s an interesting thought for how to approach movies based on books and comics.  If you know too much of the original, you can’t enjoy the movie as a movie — you’re always picking at the inadequacies — but if you know too little, you can sometimes be lost or be aware that you are missing backstory [which is my complaint about all the Harry Potter movies after the first couple, that you could increasingly recognize the places where subplots and entire chapters were chopped out to make the content short enough to film].  For Scott Pilgrim, I knew a lot but not too much, so I could enjoy the first half due to the match ups to the source and I could enjoy the last half due to knowing enough to really be settled into the movie’s world.)

In some ways, the movie works better than the comics.  Smart screenwriters know when to avoid some of the diversions that a comic book indulges in, and when to play up things which are subtle in the original source material.  They succeed in both of these with Scott Pilgrim, for example amping up Wallace’s gay angle, while completely cutting the Stephen Stills “recording an album” plotline (with its own gay angle).

I heartily recommend this movie for anyone who has at least a passing interest in upcoming indie music, slacker culture, video games, and non-superhero comics.

Now someone explain to me: how does a film about a rock band and loaded with cool and way different special effects (unless you want to just call them updates of the 60’s Batman show) not even get one Oscar nomination in the pertinent categories?
 

What Were They Thinking? — I’m With the Band

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This ad was at a bus shelter in Taupo, New Zealand in February, 2010.

I guess they are trying to play on the second syllable of “broadband” with the stick figure playing guitar on stage, but wouldn’t it make more sense to indicate the value attached to the faster connection?

A broadband connection won’t really improve your playing, after all.  Not even in Rock Band or Guitar Hero.  Only practice can do that.
 

Overheard at 5th & Pike

Last Wednesday morning, as I was getting to work, a guy got off the bus as I walked by and loudly proclaimed:

“I love having sex with older women!”

Mind you, the Sweet Adelines International competition was happening late last week at the Seattle Convention Center, just a couple blocks away.  There were more women than usual around that day, shopping an sightseeing, many in their 50s and 60s.

I doubt it got him any, but hey.  More power to you, guy.
 

Movie Review — Shanghai Surprise

I recently bought the DVD of the 1986 Madonna/Sean Penn film Shanghai Surprise for $4 from a bin at a local drug store.  (I also bought Shut Up & Sing, Kinsey, the 2007 musical version of Hairspray, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, and maybe a couple others.  They were cheap, how bad could they be, right?)

I had to ask.  Oh, this one was painful to watch.  It involves a missionary hiring a ne’er-do-well to help her find a million dollars worth of missing opium to be used as medicine, dealing with corrupt police, gangsters, and high class prostitutes along the way.

(It was made worse by the George Harrison soundtrack.  Not much good music in the film.  I had thougth this was the movie that Madonna’s “Live to Tell” song came from — that was really why I bought it — but that was the other 1986 Sean Penn film, At Close Range.  Damn, what was Madonna thinking here?  At least get a hit song on the soundtrack, woman!)

The settings — filmed in Hong Kong and Macau — aren’t bad, but the story is full of holes and oddities like why they needed to hire someone in the first place and how Madonna’s missionary character had all the money she was throwing around (and why she wasn’t just buying opium with it instead).

Beyond that, there are two major problems with the film itself:

• It can’t decide if it wants to be serious and maybe even noir, or if it wants to be a wacky caper film.  There are a number of characters which work in one or the other, but not both.  Every time it seems to be going serious, a WTF? scene or campy character shows up (I never did figure out what Kronk’s role was, other than to kick the plot down the alley when it stalled), but all the scenes which seem aimed at wacky hijinks pull up short and end up as weird/goofy rather than actually funny.  (Most likely, the producers wanted something in the vein of Romancing the Stone, but the story didn’t have the chops for that.)
   
• The dialogue delivery is atrocious.  Of course, you can’t do a lot when the words themselves are poorly put together, but the flat, badly inflected stuff coming out of Madonna’s mouth (no, not her music!) is just embarrassing.  But you can’t just blame Madonna, since Sean Penn’s lines come off just as bad.  You’ve got to blame the director, I guess.

What salvages this DVD, though, are the extras, which were put together some 15 or 20 years after the fact.  In addition to a “Madonna in 1986” piece with a couple media mavens discussing her career up to and after that point, there is one with the writer and one of the actors discussing the film and the problems it had (including the crew nearly rebelling due to [pri]Madonna), and another with several comedians talking about their favorite and least favorite parts of the film.  If you felt embarrassed for the actors or felt guilty about mentally savaging parts of the film, you’ll find these people agreeing with you just about point for point.

Any fan of campy, terrible movies will tell you that viewing the movie as a shared experience can help salvage (rather than “savage”) it — you have others to discuss, commiserate, and moan with — and sometimes can even elevate a piece of shlock into a form of art.  (Hello, Rocky Horror Picture Show!)  This one will never make “art”, but it maybe can be enjoyable pain when shared with others.
 

Prototype for iPod commercials?

I caught this 1989 video from the Belle Stars over the weekend at a bar in Los Angeles:



Check things out between 1:50 and 2:00.  Silhouetted guy dancing wildly in front of neon color backgrounds?  Hmmm, where have we seen that in recent years?

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Updated on January 27, 2010.

Original video was gone from YouTube, had to find a new copy.

Appropriate day for an update to this, given that the iPad was announced this morning.

Movie Review — Mamma Mia!

Please don’t make Pierce Brosnan sing in a movie ever again.  Ever.

Note: I have not seen the stage version of this, so I can’t comment on how well or poorly the screenplay meshes with the original.  But I have my suspicions that a few things got dropped in the movie.

Beyond that, make no mistake, Mamma Mia! is not a “serious” movie.  It is camp.  And when it remembers that it’s okay to be campy, that’s where the film excels and sells itself to the audience, making us smile, giggle and twitter, and even sing along.  (It’s ABBA music.  You’re supposed to sing along!)

When the movie pushes in a bit of melodrama — Sophie and Sky’s tiny spat, for example — it stutters and stumbles.  (Or anytime Brosnan sings.)  But as soon as the next whoop-it-up chorus-boys-and-girls dance number comes along, all is good again.

The casting, or more the use of the cast, is spotty.  The two adult women sidekicks rip into the film with abandon, chewing the scenery and carrying the film forward.  Meryl Streep always feels reined in by uncertainty — should she just say “fuck it” and embrace the cheese, or should she hold back?  This is informed by the character she is playing, perhaps, but she never feels like she is inhabiting a movie built around ABBA songs.  The girl playing Sophie is a wide-eyed cipher; her motives and dreams are vaguely mentioned throughout the movie, but she never really projects them.  Sky is cute but otherwise empty.  All three adult male cast members seem more stunned by the film than anything else; again, while that’s part of the characters, it comes across to the viewer as mediocre acting (or poor directing).

Thank goodness for one of the men’s implied gay romance.  The confession exchange on the boat gave more depth to the two characters talking than the entire rest of the film had, and included a genuinely clever crossed-signals dialogue bit.

Also annoying was the insistence on groups of three — three adult women, three adult men, Sophie and her two girlfriends.  Sophie’s gal pals are so prominent in the first 10 minutes that their near absence from the rest of the film stands out strongly.  And should there have been a threesome (ahem) with Sky as the pivot point, to keep that balance?  Oh yes, we did see Sky, the black bartender, and one other guy together for about 3 seconds in one scene, so maybe there was such a triad intended.  (Typical story logic says that the unnamed third guy there should also be the gay fling attached to one of the adult men, but I don’t think it was the same actor.)

In the end, you have two choices with this film: sit outside it and analyze it and find it wanting, or inhabit the film’s world and burst out into song, dance, and sequins as needed.  The choice is easy; the hard part is dealing with Pierce Brosnan’s singing voice.

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Updated on January 22, 2010
 

Eht Tebahpla

You watched Sesame Street.  You know the tune.

Z Y X W V U T…

S R Q P ONMLK…

J I H…

G F E…

D…

C…

B…

A

Now you know your Z Y X
Won’t you come with me for sex?

(I put that together about a year ago, one Friday night while driving to the local bar.  Took me maybe 5 minutes.)
 

Whacko Jacko

In the long run, I don’t care if he did it.  [He = Michael Jackson.  It = sexually molest young boys.]  But some of the media hoo-hah surrounding it this time brings up some things worth commenting on.

• Is the investigation racially motivated?
  
  Pfft.  I rather doubt it.  Everything negative involving a black man is not racist.  Get off the cross, we need to burn it.  [For the sarcasm impaired, yes, that last comment is intended as a tasteless joke.]  However, it’s worth noting that since there are fewer famous blacks than famous whites in this country, we do tend to pay more attention to the stories involving famous blacks, and thus the media may give us more of what we pay more attention to.  So while I don’t think the investigation is racially motivated, the media attention may be, indirectly.
   
• Is this an attack on Michael himself?
  
  Well, sort of.  But less because he’s famous than because he’s eccentric.  Oh, and because rumors and full-on investigations about exactly this have swirled around the guy for over a decade.  Let’s face it, Mikey: it’s not like no one ever imagined that you might have done this before.
   
• Why does this happen when he has a new record release?
  
  Is this taking advantage of Jackson’s other current media attention to get this higher play?  Or the conspiratorial reverse, is this intended to distract attention from his new record and damage his sales?  These questions play into both the racial and personal attack screeds.  Frankly, when I heard that the police search of the Neverland Ranch occurred while Michael was in Las Vegas shooting a new video, it seemed apparent that the investigation probably was timed… to be done while Michael was out of town and couldn’t interfere with the search than to specifically target his fame.
   
• And finally, did he do it?
  
  It’s really tempting to say “Yes, of course, I always knew he was a pervert,” but what we “know” is largely innuendo and supposition and accusation, all supported by a media who would love to crucify him (there’s that cross thing again!).  Him or anyone else equally famous they could dig at.
  
  On the other hand, Jackson has enough eccentricities that it could be just one more.  Maybe this all truly is a fabrication of a sex-crazed media, and he really does love (platonically) children and wants to embrace his inner child so very dearly (perhaps in response to his own media-stolen childhood), and thus when he “sleeps” with kids he really does just sleep with them, cuddling them like teddy bears.  And nothing else.

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Updated on October 19, 2010

And as of summer 2009, we will perhaps never really know.