I don’t know if this is good or bad news – as mentioned by BeckoningChasm in yesterday’s post, my crappy little horror movie, Forever Evil, has finally appeared on DVD. This was first promised something like four or five years ago, in an ad in Videoscope magazine. Now it has come to pass, in a two-disc version no less, featuring a 5.1 Dolby remix and a “Restored Director’s Cut” that also has a commentary track by yours truly, and the movie’s director, Roger Evans.
No, before you ask, the commentary track is not nearly two hours of Roger and me saying, “I’m sorry,” over and over again.
Amazon dropped the ball, as far as getting a copy to me (yes, I had to buy my own copy). Props to Digital Eyes, a nice little company that has never failed me, for getting a copy to me in only a couple of days. It’s ridiculous how giddy I was, pulling that box from the mailbin. I’ve calmed down somewhat since then, but it was an undeniable rush.
Listened to a bit of the commentary, to make sure I didn’t sound like a total dork (the jury’s still out). Fun fact: all those pictures in the Photo Gallery? I took ’em. Ditto for the photos on the back.
A startling discovery: the Director’s Cut has the original score by Houston artist Maryann Pendino, which I had thought lost to the ages.
Of course, all this really means, besides the realization of a couple of my self-aggrandizing fantasies, is that it’s going to be open critical season on me all over again. If I ever need to come down to earth, all I need do is look at the user review sections of Amazon and the Internet Movie Database: those will knock you off a cloud very damn fast.
Incidentally, when I am famous, I’m going to take out a full-page ad in every major newspaper in America detailing the difference between “Premiere” and “Premier”. That’s just dumb.
Ah, crunch time. You gotta love it. Or you’ll be tempted to blow your brains out.
I handed in what are theoretically the final versions of the scripts for Project One last night, and in celebration wrote a review of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village for 50 Foot DVD. Then I did something I haven’t done for quite some time: watched a movie without the intention of reviewing it. The movie was Chang Cheh’s The Brave Archer, so I didn’t got totally mainstream on you.
It was enjoyable, in that comic book “world of martial arts” kind of way. I’m surprised that more comic book geeks don’t embrace these old school kung fu flicks, as they resemble nothing less than groups of superheroes in constant conflict. Brave Archer even has the obligatory “super heroes meet each other for first time and mistakenly fight” bit.
There are three Brave Archer movies, and given that only one plot thread is resolved by the end of Part One, apparently it was always intended to be that way (especially since our title character has yet to even put a hand to a bow or arrow). I’ll hopefully spend the rest of the day (with the exception of Lost tonight) working on a long-delayed review for my other website, which was rather brutally back-burnered to accomodate last-minute changes and brainstorms on Project One. I’m soon going have to take up the trouble-shooter hat for the way-behind-schedule Project Two, but for right now, I get to spend some time with a semi-obscure British TV show and Alexander Fu Sheng.
Ah, it’s like a vacation, except I still have to answer phone calls.
I use that phrase a lot – “The world changed again today,” to get across the protean nature of my current work. Objectives seem to change on a weekly, capricious basis, rendering large percentages of work previously done superfluous, if not useless. Ah, well, it’s a living, even if the smiling “Well, you’re the genius! You figure it out!” is wearing thin.
But then, there are other ways in which the world changes; real perceptible ways. While driving into town at lunchtime to find out how the world changed this week, I was listening to 740AM, it being one of the very few hours of the day it was actually allowed to broadcast news. They took twenty minutes to play Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech in its entirety.
Rarely has that drive seemed so insubstantial, so common. This was history I was listening to, history that occured during my lifetime. I remember watching this speech on TV, Dr. King standing before the statue of Abraham Lincoln, resonant and iconic. This image will always be in black and white and scales of gray in my head. I am sure there are color versions somewhere, but this is the way I experienced my history.
How old was I then? Ten, eleven? Yet even then, I somehow knew this was Important. That this was a struggle between good and bad, and with that sort of imagery, that sort of pure, unadulterated presence, bad didn’t have a chance.
You can say that the struggle still goes on, because it does. You can say not that much had changed, and in a lot of ways, you’d be right. But that moment, that moment lives in the heart, and it keeps me warm at night.
Long ago, almost twenty years ago, I remember being asked outside a grocery store to donate to a foundation, or a monument, or something for Dr. King – regrettably, I was in danger of becoming homeless myself at the time, and had to say no. The young man with the can in his hand cursed me for that, then the woman behind me cursed him, because – and I quote, “My daddy told me Martin Luther King was the most evil man who lived!”
But I thought of that moment, that glorious black and white moment, and felt a weight lift from my heart. I saw these two as the sad, hateful creatures they were, and went on with my life. Dr. King argued for the dignity of all
“PEOPLE are to be tortured in laboratories at Oxford University in a US-funded experiment to determine if belief in God is effective in relieving pain.”
Though the opening paragraph makes it sound like the gov is financing this, the US-based entity supplying $2 million is the John Templeton Foundation.
Okay. I admit it. I canNOT wrap my head around this one.
Wait, here’s a slightly more detailed story from AFP via Yahoo:
“Volunteers will be either have a gel made from chilli peppers applied to their skin, or have a small box which heats up to temperatures of 60 degrees Centigrade (140 Fahrenheit) placed on the back of their hands.
The scientists will then study their brain as they are showed a religious image, or perform other distractions such as saying a list of numbers backwards.”
(After a three-day binge of playing Katamari Damacy) “I was driving down Venice Boulevard,” recalled her husband, Dan Kitchens, “and Kozy reached over and grabbed the steering wheel and for a moment was trying to yank it to the right…. (Then) she let go, but kept staring out her window, and then looked back at me kind of stunned and said, ‘Sorry. I thought we could pick up that mailbox we just passed.'”
There is no need for expensive research into this (and other incidents reported in the story); the principle here is obvious: “Do not play video games if you are a dumbass.”
Just to prove what a desperately geeky life I lead, this story at TVShowsonDVD.com: Twin Peaks – It sounds like we’re finally making progress! – makes me happy. Of course, I’ll still stop watching after the episode where they wrap up the “Bob” storyline, and pretend the series had the good grace to end there.
Of course, though this alleged DVD box set won’t allegedly ship until late 2005 (when the rights revert from Artisan to Paramount), I’ll still have my laserdisc box sets to keep me warm.
Of course, I still have that shrinkwrapped VHS box set that has the whole series at SLP speed.
Of course I still have the videos that I taped off Bravo.
Of course, I still have my tapes of the original broadcast.
For the second day in a row, the temperature hit 80 degrees in Houston. No matter how many times I thump the calendar, it still claims we are in early January.
I’m glad there’s no such thing as global warming, or I’d be worried.
It’s probably sad how much time I spend reading leftist blogs these days; but a refreshing change of pace in my rounds of Blogistan is Teleport City’s Enchantment Under the Sea, the blog of Teleport City‘s Keith Allison, which he recently overhauled to tell tales of “strange events in my childhood”. These are highly entertaining stories of a simpler time – the 1970s. And I never thought I would be referring to the 70s as “a simpler time”. Get in on the beginning with “Hitler’s Head” and continue through the two-part, nearly-epic “In Search of Bigfoot”. This is good stuff.
I should also mention, while I’m in the neighborhood, that I managed to cadge enough time from putting out fires and making sure educational software doesn’t suck too badly to update Attack of the 50 Foot DVD with a review of Paramount’s disc of the 1985 Joe Dante flick Explorers. Not that this was an astounding achievement – it wasn’t like they gave me a whole lot to talk about.
Hopefully there will be no more fires for a while so I can actually write the article I’ve been meaning to for The Bad Movie Report since, oh, early December…
In the interest of that tired old chestnut, Starting The New Year Off Right, I took a gift card and a coupon and returned home with a spiffy new media shelf unit which claims to hold “360 DVDs”. It also claimed “No Tools Required”, but the first thing I saw on the instruction sheet was “Tools Required…” (No sweat. I’m male. Handy as a condemned thief under Hamurabbi’s Code, but I own many tools)
My office had suffered from Stack Syndrome for quite some time, in that incoming media was placed in boxes which then formed stacks. So I stuffed more boxes to make room to build the shelf, then emptied the boxes to place the DVDs on the shelf, while also winnowing out the massive VHS collection, ridding myself of redundant offerings and finally getting a handle on how many I still needed to transfer to DVD-R…
And now I am in the usual place I am after such a cleaning binge: whereas before, could at least point to a box where I knew something was, I now know where nothing is located, including several things I know I held in my hand during the process. Lucky my computer stayed in the same place.
Just before the Christmas holidays, I received an e-mail from an old college bud, Dave Bennett, of whom I’d lost track. Totally my fault, and I’m glad he took the time to track me down again. Dave and I whiled away a lot of hours in my misspent youth, gaming. He and I were known as “The Listerine Brothers”, because when we co-dungeon mastered, people tended to die. We did not reward stupidity.
What’s that? Oh, yes, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons. Quite a bit. I’m one of those wheezing old derelicts who mutters that when he played the game, there were only three little books of rules, stapled together with brown cardstock covers. And that was the way we liked it, by cracky!
Yeah, I got out of the D&D habit the year before I left college, probably – not coincidentally – the year Dave left town. It just wasn’t fun anymore, the panoply of new hardbound rules were squeezing much of the spontaneity out of the game. But that’s neither here nor there. What matters was an offhand remark by Dave that he was in a movie about gamers called Uber Goober. I ordered it that very night.
Uber Goober is a video documentary by Austinite Steve Metze which does a damn good job of examining gaming culture via interviews and footage of gaming-in-process. Dave represents the old school contingent, the guys who painstakingly paint armies of miniature soldiers from all eras and then arrange them on massive tabletops to re-enact (and improve upon) historic battles, and create some battlefield scenarios of their own. The picture then spends a lot of time with the pen-and-paper RPGs like D&D, before moving on to the LARPers. That’s Live Action Role Players, for the acronym-impaired. Or as Dave puts it, “the people who don’t think the Society for Creative Anachronism goes far enough.”
I don’t know if it’s odd or perfectly reasonable that the Vampire: The Masquerade LARPers come off as more civilized and reasonable in their pursuit than the D&Ders, and frankly, I can use my brain cells on better things right now. What I find all-too-typical is on display in Metze’s connective structure, which consists of him interviewing people at random on Austin’s main drag one night, the major question being, “What do you think of people who play Dungeons & Dragons?” The responses are predictably extreme, and rarely good.
But the single most disturbing thing is a section devoted to fundamentalist Christian groups that oppose games like D&D (including frames from the infamous Jack Chick tract Dark Dungeons). Now, I’m used to a lot of the rhetoric in this section (and one of them seems to have his J.R.R. Tolkien mixed up with his C.S. Lewis), but one guy – who rather proudly professes himself to be a former gamer, until he saw the light – is incredibly hung-up on rape in a game milieu. He brings it up twice in one interview. I gamed for many years, and though I joked with my live-in lover and fellow player several times, rape never entered into the game, any game, no matter who the DM was, and my experience includes several major tournaments, conventions, and cities.
I may just be an old geezer, but I don’t want my kid anywhere near that guy. Or his church group.
So, anyway – Uber Goober. I didn’t learn anything particularly new from it, but then, it’s a documentary about stuff I’ve spent large amounts of my life doing. I direct those wondering what the hell I blither about on occasion to the movie; it’s a very good examination of the culture, and you want to know what your kid or significant other is getting into, you could do a whole lot worse than this entertaining primer.
drfreex.com 