Mindless Blather | drfreex.com

The Son of Bad Movie Report

It feels so much better to be typing on a full keyboard again. That tiny Anker bluetooth keyboard I use with the iPad mini on the road is nice to have in a pinch – but it’s surprisingly slow, even given my middling typing speed. I’m happier using it to edit a post already largely written, not creating from scratch. So now that I’m back in my comfort zone in many ways, let’s see if I can recall what I meant to write about but didn’t in my post-lengthy-drive haze.

The first thing will be best prefaced by what happened after my return, namely this tweet:

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Yeah, this is the sort of insipid crap I put up on my Twitter, and probably the reason I will never have a Patreon. This was followed by the equally risible

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Mort knows better, of course, but this is how Internet rumors get started, so I’d better quash this before I find myself in some sort of faux Joan/Christina kerfuffle. Of course he knows about Forever Evil. He grew up in a house with a framed movie poster in his living room. He’s just never seen it, probably at his mother’s insistence more than mine. I think she was trying to cover his eyes during the scary parts of movies up into his teens.

But he’s 18 now, and can watch whatever he wants. To his credit, he asked to watch The Seven Samurai before heading out to college last summer. But then, while he was home this Christmas, he let slip that this existed. And Ol’ Dad still knows a thing or two about finding stuff on the Interwebs:

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Truthfully, I would expect no less from my son. Except that right after the slip, he mentioned “Some Mexican movie with a werewolf” and I asked if it starred Lon Chaney Jr. and he replied “I don’t really know actors” and I disowned him. Also, he seems to be unattracted to kung fu movies, so there is obviously no relation to me whatsoever.

Well, I couldn’t let this guy claiming to be my son go back to college with just his Christmas swag (which was considerable), so I burned him a copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special to inflict on his friends. Then I realized I had been given a ton of blank DVDs in spite of the fact that I don’t use them a heck of a lot anymore, and a lot of burning of horrific stuff in my collection ensued. I felt this was a necessary thing for the son of the guy who used to write The Bad Movie Report. So I had apparently forgiven him his transgressions by that point.

The only thing he specifically asked for was Theodore Rex – for which I will eternally blame Chris Holland. Max used to be able to use YouTube to torment people with it, but ~~benevolent powers~~ the forces of evil scrubbed it from there and practically everywhere else on the Interwebs. But as I said, Dad is pretty good at finding stuff. In case you’ve been lucky enough to miss the most expensive movie ever to be released straight to video:

That was the point at which things started getting crazy, because I realized the kid only thinks he’s seen bad. So Science Crazed and Things went into the box, as did our new pal The Rider of the Skulls. There was a whole substratum of bad kiddie movies he had not experienced – Red Riding Hood and the Monsters, the New Orleans Worst Film Festival “favorite”, Seven Dwarfs to the Rescue (which Krull totally ripped off, in my estimation) (well, except for this scene:)

And I found a copy of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny at archive.org, God help us all. That’s like finding a rusty nail-festooned ball of plutonium nestled among dog-eared copies of Architecture Today. I had been asked if I was doing the RiffTrax version of it and The Holiday Special, but no. 2016 had made me hard. If these kids are ever going to survive, they have to learn to build their own riffs, like me and mine used to do back in the day, begorrah.

And yes, I also made sure he had his own copy of Forever Evil, making sure it also had the audio commentary made by myself and director Roger Evans. I did this in the spirit of hoping he learns from my mistakes, and does not try to duplicate them.

I’ve tried to continue past that last sentence, but the result is lacking; it seems a perfect sentiment to end upon. A hopeful thought for this New Year, despite all my suspicions to the contrary. Happy New Year to all, and be excellent to each other.

And please God, let those movies be the worst thing that happens to my boy this year.

January 3, 2017
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 9 Comments

Getting Bookish

Well, this past month has been rather trying, hasn’t it?

In the Top 3 for the Google Image Search “This Year Sucks”.

Oh, all right, this entire year thus far isn’t going to win any Good Citizenship Awards, but that’s speaking on a national, nay, global level. I’m actually just talking about the only level that I can speak on with any authority whatsoever, and that is the personal level.

My son turned 18 this year. He graduated high school as the Valedictorian. He is attending a good college in August on an academic scholarship. All these are awesome achievements for a kid the regular school establishment wanted held back for a year and more because of his dyslexia. I am justifiably proud of him. I also had to track down music and make a synchronized slide show for him and his graduating class. Of eight.

Oh yeah, he’s the reason my wife created a private school for children with learning disabilities. That’s eight kids who would have dropped through the cracks. Eight kids who might not have graduated high school at all. Several of them, like my son, are going to some pretty high-powered colleges. On academic scholarships.

This is because my wife is awesome.

Any achievement I want to claim for myself looks pretty paltry after that, but it’s all I got. I did pull some remarkable stuff – for me, anyway – while I wasn’t scanning photos and cursing the vagaries of projection systems. The Great Villain Blogathon, which necessitated watching and writing up six movies. The Blood Bath Box Set, which required watching four even though all four were basically the same movie.

In the Top 3 Google Image Search for “Me and Everybody I Know”.

Now here we are in Summer, and I find myself in the financial doldrums as I cast about for another writing contract or another part-time job or gee maybe a full-time job whattaya think are the chances I’m only 59 years old. Some things have to give. One of those was the overpriced-yet-still-somehow-unreliable-anyway home broadband.

My son thinks it’s the end of the world. Too much of his beloved gaming requires the Internet. This is cold turkey before you head off to college, my boy, I tell him. It will hurt less when you head off to Academic Land. He doesn’t believe me. Neither do I, really.

The book cover that glared at me from the Science Fiction Book Club flyers forever.

Watching ten movies (and that’s not counting the five at the last Crapfest) in a rush has taken the blush off the rose of movie-watching. So I’ve been using the time which was normally spent being distracted by social media to re-visit my older passion, reading. I’ve read something like nine books in the past week. This is, really, something I should have been doing all along but there wasn’t time. I was too busy being distracted. How could I call myself a science fiction fan when I’d never read isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy? I’ll probably finish that this evening. I’m enjoying it but I’m surprised that an acknowledged classic breaks so many rules; almost all the action takes place offstage, in defiance of everything I’ve ever been told. It is a tale composed of conversations, literally a story of ideas.

This brings us to the odd announcement that next week will probably be a book review. Oh, don’t look at me like that, it’s a book about movies, and it’s been quite interesting. But it’s also so dense I’ve only managed a chapter a night.

Hey, Alex Proyas! Whatever happened to this movie?

It turns out that over the years I’ve squirreled away a ton of e-books on my hard drive, and it’s pretty satisfying to finally give those the once-over. The aforementioned Foundation Trilogy. Finally read Harry Harrison’s Deathworld. I’d read Robert Heinlein’s The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag in my youth, and didn’t remember the first thing about it (I now realize there was a reason for that). I’ve read several of Basil Copper’s Sherlock Holmes pastiches about Solar Pons (a name which, while unlikely, has the appropriate number of syllables), who is even more of a condescending dick than Holmes, and I find the mysteries are rather transparent when they aren’t outright copies of other writers. Yet I cannot stop reading the things. They are the damned Pringles of detective fiction.

Back when Remo looked like Daniel Craig.

And most surprisingly, I have a number of The Destroyer novels, or as you might better know them, the basis for Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. About the time I ran out of Doc Savage novels in my teen years, these came along, like The Executioner but with kung fu and ridiculous 70s casual sex and even more ridiculous 70s casual racism. These were always very fast reads, and I re-read the first three in the same number of non-consecutive nights. The most amazing thing to me is that it took the writing team of Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy three outings to realize how essential the character of Chiun, the aged Korean master assassin, was to the success of the series. How when he was promoted from a background character to a full partner, the odd master/pupil father/son dynamic elevated it from stupid action porn to something actually interesting. Still stupid, admittedly, but interesting. The Destroyer went on to have a downright silly number of entries. Don’t ask me how many, I don’t have access to Google right now.

I’m telling myself that this is actually essential stuff to be doing. That my own writing had become rather unsatisfactory to me of late. That I had done too much writing by committee for the contract work, and I need to start writing for myself again, and to do that, I needed to get back in touch with what worked for me, way back then, when I was writing every night instead of being questionably clever on Twitter.

God knows I have the time now.

June 16, 2016
Categories: Mindless Blather, Uncategorized . Tags: books, destroyer, foundation trilogy, isaac asimov, remo williams, richard sapir, robert a. heinlein, the unpleasant profession of jonathan hoag, warren murphy . Author: drfreex . Comments: 7 Comments

So Much for Spring Break

As is apparently The Way of Things, here I am, awake at 4am on a Monday morning. Another Spring Break is over, and good riddance.

I understand that Spring Break is important. Educators and students vitally need it. I am neither, but a lot of my work is intertwined with the two, and during that week, it all goes away – and I am not salaried. No work, no pay. I try to plan for this, but being a good American, I live on the edge, and this month the edge decided to move significantly in the wrong direction, thanks to a pricey car repair. If there is one good piece of news, it’s that my son got into the college he wanted. That, of course has ratcheted up my concerns about money exponentially.

My wife, who also had the week off, noticed my depression and urged me to “stop being a poopy-pants.” Remarkably, this didn’t help.

This is probably what other peoples’ Spring Break looks like.

There was a much darker version of this post. I erased it. You’re not here to hear about my problems, or my darker musings about life. We’ll talk about this someday, maybe. Doing so right now wouldn’t be terribly constructive for either of us.

I asked the Universe for money, and it sends me some at an hourly rate. I got an e-mail last night to ask me to work an oddly-scheduled School Board meeting, two weeks out from its usual slot. In a few hours I’ll be back at my desk, editing the stories I shot before the mandatory week off. I watched movies last week, but did no writing – my brain is only now finally starting again to tease out what I want to say about them. One of the most unpleasant things I’ve learned about myself is I require some sort of outside pressure to do what I do. So this week, when I’m earning some actual coin and have commitments aplenty, then I’ll start yearning after writing about movies.

And speaking of that pressure, I got an invitation via Twitter to engage in another blogathon. I thought about the tribulations of my last one, and how other things got shoved to the side while I worked on it, and worked, and worked. And then I realized what my subject on this next blogathon would be, and then, goddammit, I signed up for it. So if it’s anything like The Seven Samurai, be ready for what might be the only thing I post in May:

But that’s a whole two months away. Plenty of time.

*sigh*

March 21, 2016
Categories: Mindless Blather . Tags: bah . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

Please Help Me, I Am A Fanboy

Well, I think we all knew that, but I don’t think we ever knew exactly how deep that river ran.

We know about me and movies – though there are bigger movie fans out there. I haven’t mentioned comic books much since that one comment about preferring that I talk about movies (I’m quite the sensitive soul, I assure you), but then again, I just don’t read them as much as I used to. The constant mega-events and reboots just wore me down, and I’ve largely turned my back on them.

The Usual Suspects

And then the local comics shop that I visited perhaps once every three months opened up a shop much closer (the bastards) and now I’m an every-three-weeks-or-so guy. I don’t leave with many books. The titles I have hung onto are because of the writers more than anything. It’s the usual suspects – Kurt Busiek, Gail Simone and – especially – Warren Ellis. Well, there’s also The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, but that’s mainly because for years nobody believed me there actually was such a character.

If we’re going to drill down into the fanboy thing, the author we have to concentrate on is Ellis, whose work I was turned onto in that selfsame comic shop so many years ago. If you’re a comics fan, you’re familiar with his work: Stormfront, The Authority and multiple Marvel titles (including the amazing NEXTwave: Agents of H.A.T.E.) in the superhero genre, and more wide-ranging genre work like Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency and Planetary. He branched out into prose novels and TV projects, but keeps returning to comics. The weekly Web serial FreakAngels has wrapped, but his current series, still being published in floppy form, are Trees, Injection (which is my current obsession) and a new James Bond series aiming to take the character back to his Ian Fleming roots.

The thing about serialized storytelling (which is the state of modern comics – the one-off single issue stories have seemed to all but vanish, though Global Frequency showed Ellis can also work very well at that form) is that each chapter has to find a way to stand on its own, while still serving the greater story. FreakAngels was good at that, publishing its tale in six-page gouts. Lately, Ellis really has gotten this down to a science, as each issue – I almost called them episodes – leads up to a final image that is almost always satisfying, but still causes the reader to say “Nooooooo! I want more!” I once snottily said that every issue of Injection was too short, but each issue is so densely packed with imagery that it takes time to unpack. Ellis (and his artistic collaborators, Declan Shalvey and Jordie Bellaire) give us tiny glimpses at a vast tapestry of a story, and like FreakAngels before it, Injection is going to provide an even better experience when it is all of a piece.

(A few years ago I went back and re-read Neil Gaimin’s Sandman from stem to stern, and was delighted at the many pieces I had not picked up on a monthly basis, but now revealed themselves when considered as a whole.)

Ellis is a writer intensely interested in futurism, and he lived his life pretty openly in the digital realm, back in the days when most of us were piddling around with an AOL account. Mailing lists, Twitter, Instagram, he was there, finding the possibilities, experiencing and recording a vast new world. He’s slowed down on that as responsibilities multiply (especially to his own health – take care of yourself, dammit! We need you!), but he still has a weekly newsletter I look forward to each Sunday.

Squad Goals

Now if all that wasn’t fanboy enough for you, Ellis also updates us about his work habits, what he takes with him on his travels for work purposes. And every now and then he will sing the praises of something that works really well for him and suddenly I have to have that thing because Warren Ellis uses it and thinks it’s cool.

Before I go any further, let me introduce you to this =>

I am the guy pushing 60 who’s still wearing cargo pants. The reason why is the right thigh pocket always has this kit in it. It’s an idea I saw on a Boing Boing post once, about a designer who always carried a pouch like this that had everything he might need on a typical day. Markers, measuring tape, small flashlight, the like. I thought, that is absolutely something I should do. Immediately went over to Amazon and bought the very same zipper pouch, the Maxpedition Micro Pocket Organizer. What you see poking out of the mesh pocket is one of Ellis’ gewgaws, the Nightcore Tube flashlight, which is rechargeable and insanely bright. The only drawback is also its strength: it is small, and once I lent it to my son, who immediately lost it. I lost no time in ordering its replacement, it is so handy. There’s also a lens cleaning cloth and a Swiss-Tech flat multi-tool, which is fairly useless but it was a gift from my flashlight-losing son. It’s meant to be carried in a wallet, but I already have too much crap in my wallet.

And in case you were wondering, this is the interior:

From left-to-right: 4-in-1 screwdriver, pencil, Leatherman 831207 multi-tool, 4-inch adjustable wrench, marker, Streamlight LED flashlight, and a clasp knife from my collection (which means at any given time I’m carrying three knives. Come at me, bro.) In the back pockets are yet another lens cloth and some braided paracord. I do like being prepared. The wrench and paracord are the only items I’ve never had cause to use. Yet.

Big deal, you’re thinking, you’ve found a kit that works for you, and it has a thing one of your favorite writers once said was cool. Yeah, you’re some fanboy.

We haven’t gotten to the Pebble yet.

I was one of those people who wasn’t interested in the idea of a smartwatch. They seemed like expensive toys, way out of the reach of my pocketbook, like a sports car or a curved TV set. I had stopped even wearing a watch, because I had a smartphone and I’m almost always in the presence of one computer or another with a clock in the corner.

Then Ellis waxes rhapsodical about his Pebble Steel. Not once, but twice. And suddenly, ridiculously, I feverishly desired a Pebble. My life would simply be hellishly incomplete without one.

Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on how you approach the story – the original version of the Pebble, only slightly removed from a successful Kickstarter campaign – is pretty affordable, especially if you buy it used. I thought $35 was a fair price to find out if it was actually as good as Ellis said, and I could actually afford that.

Baby steps, my friend. Baby steps.

The screen is not very bright – it’s a grayscale LCD e-paper display. It has an accelerometer so if you flick your wrist, a backlight comes on for a few seconds, so it’s usable in dark environments. It has various downloadable apps and watchfaces. It vibrates whenever you get a call, text message, or alert from any number of smartphone apps you choose.

Ellis likes it because it allows him to judge if he should engage immediately with an alert or if it is something he can deal with later without physically checking his phone. He claims it’s improved his phone’s battery life by one-half or more. And the Pebble itself, with that e-paper display, can go five days without a charge. It’s also waterproof, which starts getting into the realm of James Bond shit, unless you also have to wash dishes and it’s kind of refreshing to not have to take the expensive gizmo off when you do so. I even wore it into the shower once, just to prove I could. But that felt so freaky I never did it again.

After just a couple of days, I was sold on the damned thing. It turns out that pulling out your phone and turning it on just to see the time is actually a lot of wasted motion. It also appealed to me that I could see the weather and temperature outside if I chose the right watchface (that sort of functionality quickly supplanted the geeky novelty of the one that duplicated the Star Trek LCARS display). Yeah, yeah, I could just look outside but the Day Job is inside a server farm and I might as well be in Hitler’s bunker for all the windows I have access to.

Well, crap.

The one fly in the ointment was that the e-paper display could get famously buggy, and I’d have to switch back and forth between watchface and an app to clear it out, sometimes several times. Well, I thought, that’s what you get for buying a used one. So I saved up my birthday and Christmas gift cards and ordered a new version of the one my hero wore, the Pebble Steel. The original Pebble felt and kind of looked like that first digital watch I bought back in the late 70s, all black plastic and rubberized watchband.

Here’s the thing, though: like I said, the e-paper display was notorious for its instability. The first Steel I got wouldn’t even charge (and the charger is a different configuration between various generations of the device, so I couldn’t even determine if it was the cable or the Steel itself). The replacement charged up, but the display was even worse than my original Pebble. After trying various remedies found on Pebble’s forums, I finally went straight to them, and they very kindly sent me a new Pebble Time, which was their current iteration. They also offered to send me another Steel if I preferred, but when you’re offered a First Class Upgrade, you take it.

The Time has a color e-paper display, and though the body is still plastic, it looks classier. There’s yet another charger, but this time the port is positioned to also accept something called smartstraps, which I think is putting me back in the expensive toy category. The Time already does everything I want it to, and more.

Pebble is my co-pilot. All you other co-pilots, out of the boat.

A major major advantage is that I mute my phone whenever I am shooting video, or performing in a show. I don’t always remember to turn it back on. I might have missed calls from my wife or my mother if it weren’t for the Time alerting me (I also take unseemly delight in looking at a phone number on the watch and pressing a button to sent it straight to Voice Mail). Sometimes I can’t respond to my phone’s reminder for me to take my evening meds, and I wound up forgetting to take them entirely. The Time allows me to set another alarm for every day to remind me to take my damned old man pills. The accelerometer tracks my steps in a day, so I can try to take more. I’m never going to worry about leaving my phone somewhere again because the Time buzzes whenever I pass out of Bluetooth range. It has a countdown timer and a stopwatch, both things I used to haul out my phone to access.

So yes, Warren Ellis was right about that one, too. It’s a terrific tool. I just hope the next time he finds something wonderful and useful, it’s back in the ten buck range again.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled incoherent ramblings about cinema.

POSTSCRIPT: Judging from his Twitter feed, Richard Kadrey is now wearing a Pebble. I was doomed to this course of action in any case.

February 24, 2016
Categories: Hey Kids! Comics!, Mindless Blather, Senile Ramblings . Tags: life hack, Pebble, smartwatch, warren ellis . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Look, In The Trees! It’s Coming!

As promised, here it is, October, and you are going to get terribly, terribly tired of me. That is because October 6, this will begin:

Yes, a re-run of last year’s Hubrisween. Twenty-six days, a movie a day, A through Z. Last year it was the originator – Checkpoint Telstar – The Terrible Claw Reviews, and myself. This year, Web of the Big Damn Spider and Microbrewed Reviews will join the “fun”.

That banner at the top of each review will take you to Hubrisween Central, a collection of links to each review as they post. And yes, there will be a 2015 version of last year’s Letterboxd page. Here’s a preview:

I haven’t been exactly idle while I’ve been gone. Though I haven’t been posting here, I’m still watching movies for that 100 Films Challenge I suckered myself into. The need to comment on movies I watch runs deep, it seems, because I’ve still been reviewing them, but on the Letterboxd site, where I feel a little better about engaging in what Warren Ellis calls “first draft writing”. I don’t know why that is, but it’s enabled me to get them off my brain and still leave time to bank Hubrisween reviews and take care of my other writing projects. Almost. (but it was a good plan)

Here’s what you’ve missed (yes, yes, this is all on my List 2015 page, but we’re all here now):

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

In the Realm of the Senses

There. Now we’re all caught up. See you in a couple of days, then every night through Halloween.

(dammit, this song still plasters a big ol’ grin across my face!)

October 4, 2015
Categories: Mindless Blather . Tags: 100 films, hubrisween . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

The Joys of Crazytown

Which is where I am, right now. I’ll try to send you a postcard.

Later.

Yeah, it’s a real place. Go There, it’s fun.

My Day Job – well, Day as far as 19.5 hours a week go, because after that, you know, I’d be eligible for benefits – is, as usual, short-handed (gosh, I wonder why), so scramble is the operative word. Three shoots this week, somehow found time to edit one and a half stories. Fortunately, I do love this job. Just wish there were more of it.

I still work the other two part-time jobs.

I have a writing contract that is in the final stretch, and it still has a lot of work to be done.

I promised I would watch 100 specific movies this year.

Something has to give.

What that something is… is regular updates on this blog.

We’ve been here before. We’ll probably be here again. Until, against all odds, I become independently wealthy, this will probably be an occurrence frequently revisited.

I’ve tried to avoid writing about these 100 movies, but find I can’t, so I’m doing shorter reviews over at Letterboxd. Those reviews are linked on this page, so if you suddenly find you have a burning need to find out what I thought about Boss Nigger, that will be over there.

Regretfully, that means my in-depth article contrasting 8 1/2 with Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Souls will never be written. Do yourself a favor and program that double feature for yourself. There is a delightful amount of synergy there.

Things won’t be quiet here for long. Next month is October, and you know what that means:

Yes, that means you are going to get sick of me next month. And this time, there are more blogs taking part than last year, so you aren’t going to lack for horror movie reviews.

And speaking of blogathons, you have this to look forward to in November:

Yep, there’s a lot of blogs writing about the Criterion Collection and its movies on the Collection’s 30th anniversary, and honestly, I wasn’t going to take part, because as I mentioned earlier: my plate is very full and I really don’t need another run to the buffet table. Then I saw what movies had already been claimed, and it was a long list, and my eye wandered down it, and I discovered that no one had staked out my favorite movie of all time. Dammit.

So in November I am going to be writing about The Seven Samurai. This is in equal part awesome and terrifying. Writing about movies I like is always more difficult than heaping scorn on a movie that disappointed me; I want people to watch the movies that make me happy, so I don’t like to give away too much.

But this is an important movie to me. I’ve never written about it at length before. I haven’t had my yearly re-watch of it yet. So I’m going to try to forget the increased audience this event is going to bring in, and try to do it honor. And that will take time.

Wish me luck. I’ll see you around.

September 17, 2015
Categories: Mindless Blather . Tags: too busy for tags . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Oh Hai

I said in a post to the Letterboxd social site that my work duties lessen during the Summer. The Universe has proceeded to punish me for that statement.

A Writing Project that is currently keeping a roof over my head had entered its next phase, which I have been champing at the bit to start since about January – be careful what you wish for. 80,000 words due August 1.

The lessened workload I was bragging about has concentrated itself in this week and the next. We had a rain non-event last Tuesday that shut everything down, thanks to Tropical Storm Bill. Nervousness over the floods of Memorial Day, fed by local news media. You’d think these people had never been through a hurricane. Anyway, that means the day off (admittedly, I really needed the rest) jams everything that needs to be done in the remaining time.

Speaking of hubris (see opening statement), there’s that list of 100 movies I swore to watch this year. It is nearly July and as of this writing, I’ve only watched 35. There is something about having to watch them that kicks off my procrastination circuit something fierce. Then, like the Riddler, I have some sort of compulsion to actually write about the experience of watching them.

That post is getting longer and longer. Yes, I am still writing it. When I have the time.

One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn’t belong…

I direct you to the page about it – sometimes I just wrote a few paragraphs (if that) on Letterboxd instead of my usual lengthy blithering here. That page has links to those.

The first week in July my job will do its annual job of attempting to murder me as we cover the City’s Fourth of July parade, which is held on July 3. Don’t get me started.

I have a family which requires some attention. I cook. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who knows how to use the dishwasher. We go this Sunday to visit my Dad. All these things take time.

And oh yeah, the show every Friday and Saturday night, scooping out my life from 5:00 – Midnight. Prime movie-watching and writing time.

Well, this is the life I chose (and as the meme goes, also chose me), and I better get to living it.

Lengthy review-centered post, soon-ish. When I get the time.

June 19, 2015
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

The Week of Doom

Warning: mindless jabbering and sullen bitching this time.

FRIDAY MORNING:

The worst of the week is, I think, over. What’s left is two days of shows that my body does not want to do. Last night was the local Candidate Debates. I usually manage to pawn off the heavier lifting and loading on younger and stronger backs, but attrition has been so heavy this year that I am the younger and stronger back (lies, all lies). So loading in, loading out (both in heavy rain) and an evening spent at a camera have resulted in not only my recent back pains intensifying, but the bad leg waking up and my good leg telling it to shut the hell up, it has a hangover.

So my current life’s goal is to somehow engineer my professional life such that I can actually have weekends again. This requires long, hard looks at what I’m doing for a living. The major problem with my jobs – I work and pay taxes on four of them (because, remember, I am a moocher and a taker) – is that none of them are full-time; I have managed to juggle them for some time now, and this week was one of those instances where everything intersected and suddenly everybody needed me. I skipped out on the memorial service of an acquaintance because I desperately needed that evening to rest and heal.

And really, I’m tired of being envious and somewhat angry every time somebody posts a “Yay, it’s the weekend!” message or graphic. On one level, that is the choice I made when I decided to become an actor. On a deeper level, I am tired of acting for drunks and assholes. Would I feel better about this if I were doing – and here’s a label I hate, but like all labels, it has its uses – “legitimate” theater? Possibly. It’s nice to have an audience that, you know, actually wants to be there to listen.

Realize that this is exhaustion, pain and bitterness talking. I will be at my shows this weekend, and as usual, hit my marks and give it my all and eat ibuprofen like it was candy afterwards. Exhaustion and pain from once again humping equipment, bitterness from the economic necessity of doing same.

Let’s leave that for now and go to something that’s less rancorous, something that intrigues me: I own a Kindle, but I still pay lip service to physical books. It is a toss-up as what is going to collapse and kill me first in my home office: the stacks of movies or the stacks of books (Books are in the lead in that betting pool, adjust your wagers accordingly).

A couple of months back, on my moribund Tumblr site, I reposted the cover of Arthur Byron Cover’s The Playpus of Doom, because it’s a fun title to contemplate and a good read besides, which has gone out of print. Some discussion of the book and its author followed. I discovered that there was no Kindle edition of Platypus, and the vintage paperbacks were outrageously expensive. But there was a Kindle version of his first book, Autumn Angels, which I loved, and paperbacks of its sequel, An East Wind Coming, were dirt cheap. I remember being somewhat disappointed in it, but at that price, sure, why not revisit it? So I received my yellowing package and flipped it open and oy.

Were all paperbacks like this? Cramped type crowded onto the page? I couldn’t read this.

So I guess that e-readers have spoiled me for my beloved paperbacks. Or maybe it was just this book from this publisher, but memory tells me this is not the case. It’s that my progressive bifocals and tired eyes need a less populated, cleaner page to enjoy the printed (ha!) page as I once did. I also bought two larger trade paperbacks of Ellis Peter Cadfael novels and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, which I also need to revisit, and they are more comfortable to read.

Almost all my recent reading has been on the Kindle – saving a few dollars, and not adding to the teetering piles of bound paper that will someday crush me. I miss not being able to look up and see the titles with the easy familiarity of physical friendship, but as I get older and the type seems to get smaller, I’m glad that technology has given me a way to continue to do something that I love – even as I try to find ways to allow myself the time to do that.

SATURDAY:

There is the other side to that love of new technology, and it was brought home Friday night when I came home – once again, in heavy rain – to a dark house in a dark neighborhood, something I hadn’t experienced since the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. Used candles and flashlight that night, and I could, at least, read my Kindle Fire. As long as the battery held out.

My wife’s phone was dead, mine was halfway there – but I had charged both it and the Kindle before I left for the show. My scripts are all on the Kindle (and yes, I do read over my script before every show). Sleep was fitful that night. The next morning my wife and I went looking for a restaurant with power (luckily plentiful) and she used the car charger to get her phone back up to a minimal level. After eighteen hours, the power came back on and I gratefully grabbed a couple of hours of very deep sleep in a cooler house before I had to rise and get ready for another show.

God, I’ll be glad when this week will be over and I’ll be able to grouse and complain about other peoples’ work and not my own. You probably will be, too.

LATER SATURDAY NIGHT:

UPDATE: It’s over. I’m too tired and sore to go to sleep. Crap.

Oh, yes, speaking of which: that Crapfest I was looking forward to? Postponed. Host Dave got a paying gig. I identify. I just finished off a bunch of those. And just as well, that probably would have been enough to finish me off.

I’m turning this off and going to bed now.

April 17, 2015
Categories: Mindless Blather, Senile Ramblings . Tags: bitching . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Going Dark for the Holidays

Today is the last day of the Thanksgiving Holiday, the second weekend in a row I’ve had off. I have done nothing except cook. eat, sleep and play stupid puzzle games. It has been remarkably renewing. The opposite of profitable, but renewing. Which brings me to this entry.

December begins tomorrow. That is usually a busy month for me; hopefully the last two weeks are not an indicator of how busy I’ll be this year. I need to wrap up phase one of a writing project by the end of the month, and there is a personal writing project I’ve been putting off far too long.

So what I’m saying is, I’m going to stop pretending and simply announce that, likely, this space is going dark for the rest of the year. This downtime has been nice, but I need more. I haven’t watched a movie in more than a week, because – and I find this hilarious – if I watched any more, I’d have to write about them, and this entry was getting ungainly long already. That’s the epitome of putting the cart before the horse. So, before I close this tab on my browser, here’s a shorter version of that ever-growing blog post:

Ghost Catchers (1944) is Olsen and Johnson’s third movie for Universal, the first being Hellzapoppin’, which I raved about last time. Fortunately, it’s up on Vimeo in its entirety, as is their second movie, Crazy House.

Studio execs had ground them way down by this time (it is probably telling that their last picture is titled See My Lawyer, and reportedly has very little Olsen and Johnson in it), to the point that once more we have two movies occupying the same space, but there isn’t even the uneasy truce between them that made Hellzapoppin’ great. Olsen and Johnson find themselves in an Abbott & Costello knockoff (typically, they make a meta joke about it), and the best sequence involves a jitterbug exorcism to cast out the one actual ghost in the whole thing. Mel Torme is supposedly in that, and so is Morton Downey Sr., providing far more entertainment value in five minutes than his son did in an entire career. Chic Johnson seems to be on nitrous, so constant is his giggling. I should have watched Hellzapoppin’ again.

I went over to Rick’s to watch more movies; now, normally, Rick and I, during these outings, watch a better quality of film. During the last sojourn at Dave’s, however, when I showed Wheeler and Woolsey’s Diplomaniacs, Rick became a hardcore convert to the cause of W&W. We had been interested in So This Is Africa, their sole movie for Columbia (during a contract dispute with RKO), and reportedly one of their most heavily censored. Alas, my suspicions were correct, as not only does this movie suffer from the lack of Joe Mankiewicz’s lunatic scripting, but the print is pretty heavily and obviously cut, so much so that Rick and I took to marking each instant with scissor motions in the hour while hissing, “Filth!”

The best bit is an out-of-left-field riff on Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, which would have been brilliant had the Marx Brothers not done it three years before in Animal Crackers.

We next watched what is the best thing I’ve seen all week, which is the recent Criterion blu-ray of A Hard Day’s Night. The image is a crisp, clean black-and-white and the sound features a lovely 5.1 remix that serves the songs well. The movie stands as a milestone for any number of reasons, but mainly as a testament to letting creative types have their head, and how important is good timing. The Beatles occupied one of those rare intersections where talent and desire were in the right place at the right time, and it was amazing that Richard Lester and writer Alun Owen could break the precedent of other rock musicals to actually allow their stars to show their differing personalities, to be themselves by playing larger versions of themselves.

I hadn’t seen this movie since 1975, when a local theater ran a midnight movie marathon of this, Help!, Yellow Submarine, and Let It Be. Some of the ladies in the college crowd were game enough to scream during the appropriate parts. But what I had forgotten was how claustrophobic this picture was, that it showed how trapped the Beatles were inside their own success. There’s always a smile or a joke, sure, but their faces do not truly light up until they’re playing their music.

For some reason I truly appreciate that in the final concert segment of the movie, you are able to see that the Beatles are sweating under the stage lights. People tend to forget how much actual work is involved in performing, and it is good to see that paid tribute.

It took me two more nights to get through all the supplements. That’s a great disc, is what I’m saying.

Rick is a recent convert to the cult of Oliver Reed; he arrived there by watching Terry Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen, followed by my insistence that he watch Richard Lester’s (there he is again) Three Musketeers, where Reed rather steals the show as Athos. So I brought my old disc of The Assassination Bureau (1969) (Warner Archive recently re-issued it).

This movie is what we used to call a “romp”. In pre-World War I England, a young suffragette journalist (played by Diana Rigg) discovers the existence of the title organization, run by the son of its founder, Ivan Dragamiloff (Oliver Reed). She contracts the Bureau to kill Dragamiloff himself, which the young idealist accepts – he feels the organization has grown too complacent and greedy, accepting hits for their monetary value, not the moral killing of deserving targets his father had insisted upon. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse chase throughout Europe, with Rigg unknowingly reporting to the Vice Chairman of the Bureau (Telly Savalas), who wants that World War, because all his money is tied up in munitions factories.

This is light (despite the subject matter), frequently silly comedy-adventure, with a final fight scene aboard a zeppelin loaded down with a prototype blockbuster bomb bearing down on a castle housing a peace conference between all the crowned heads of Europe and Russia. I wanted Rick to see it because I think it proves that Reed could have been a credible James Bond… were it not for, you know, all the drinking and punching people.

For our follow-up, we’ll be watching The Devils, as soon as I figure how to play my Region 2 DVD on his system (really, Warner Brothers, what the hell).

I should close by mentioning that Rick, in retribution for my constant bad-mouthing of and cock-blocking a re-showing of Evilspeak at Crapfest, had re-named his wi-fi router so this was showing on my phone and iPad:

But this scheme, twisted genius that it is, has backfired upon him, as my phone now displays this comforting message:

Nyeah, nyeah.

If I don’t have a chance to see you before then, have a Merry Christmas, or whatever your inclination is this time of year. Be safe, and watch good movies. It won’t kill ya.

November 30, 2014
Categories: Mindless Blather, Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: a hard day's night, clint howard, diana rigg, ghost catchers, oliver reed, olsen and johnson, richard lester, so this is africa, the assassination bureau, the beatles, wheeler and woolsey . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Scourge My Hard Drive

Well, I really need to. The alternate title to this is “Why Don’t I Even Like TV Anymore?”

frabz-I-DONT-USUALLY-WATCH-TV-BUT-when-I-do-Im-always-in-control-b15058

“This is relevant to my interests.”

By all indications, we are living in a new Golden Age of Television. This is not measured by the yardstick of “Big Bang Theory” or “Two and a Half Men” – I have had no truck with sitcoms since Barney Miller went off the air. Certainly not Reality TV, which is an abomination before God. No, I’m talking about episodic drama. Which I’m also not watching.

I’m not watching it – perhaps – because it’s waiting for me for a hard drive. If not in my home office, in the cloud somewhere. I’ve tried, dammit. Even acclaimed dramas with limited run times. I just can’t get excited about them.

My limit seems to be five episodes, if that. I am currently one episode into The Wire and Game of Thrones. This qualifies me for Blasphemer status in some circles. The members of the five episode club are Penny Dreadful, True Detective and the first season of Hannibal.

The first cry against me is going to involve Penny Dreadful and True Detective only lasting eight episodes each, which is a typical evening’s fare for the average Netflix binge watcher. It’s probably obvious that I don’t binge watch, either. That would certainly solve a lot of problems, if I did.

Penny Dreadful nearly didn’t make it past the first episode for me. There was something about the last line of that episode – “My name is Victor Frankenstein,” that really turned me off. Do I need another fan fiction version of genre icons thrown together? There was enough that was intriguing to eventually bring me back to see if I was right about a couple of plot points – I was – and Timothy Dalton and Eva Green were fantastic. I appreciate this version of Frankenstein’s monster, which was written by somebody who actually for God’s sake read the book. Still. It is going to take an act of will for me to go back for those final three hours.

I understand Universal is trying to do a Marvel-type shared universe thing for its 30s horror properties. Has anybody mentioned to them it’s already been done? (I know we’ve already tried to point them toward House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula…)

The act of will is going to be even greater for True Detective. Much as I liked McConaughey and Harrelson, the soap opera elements seemed like mere filler, and the only thing that kept me coming back were the Robert W. Chambers references, wondering where they were going. Then we found out our heroes hadn’t really caught the serial killer, and I thought, Oh, yeah, it was that guy in the scene that was noticeably truncated. I have not yet been seduced back to find out if I was right, or what even was the event that finally broke up our dynamic duo. It was probably something soap opera related.

The problem with Hannibal is that it got picked up for a second season. Which resides on my hard drive. I’m mainly stunned it airs on a major broadcast network. Then again, I remember all the hand wringing over gore in the cinema back in the 80s and I wonder if any of those folks swallowed their tongues the first time they saw an episode of CSI in prime time.

Thus the blank look whenever anybody asks me if I’ve seen Breaking Bad. My list of sins of omission against popular entertainment is vast, and that is one of them.

I am made of time only in the metaphorical sense.

Since my life seems to be composed of ongoing multiple deadlines, it is unlikely this state of affairs will change anytime soon, or ever. I have a hell of a lot of movies to watch, and they generally weigh in at about two hours, and then that’s it. Done. Finito. I can deal with that. I can schedule time for that. I can schedule brain time for that. This stuff is srs biznss for me; I can’t have something playing in the background and then say I’ve watched it. Because I haven’t. I engage. This is my side of the storytelling bargain – I agreed to be told the story, and that involves paying attention while it’s being told.

I admit that last thing may have become something of a lost art.

Anyway. I’ve met the first major deadline of this week, and by way of celebration (and clearing the mental boards for the next deadline) I’m here muttering into the ether. There’s no easy solution for any of this; I’ve just been meaning to vent about it for a while. Now, before I settle down to writing, I think I’ll watch last night’s episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., because it just ain’t the Internet without a hint of hypocrisy.

September 24, 2014
Categories: Mindless Blather . Tags: Television . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

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