Author: UncaScroogeMcD

Nocturnal Admissions: Running Scared

Alerted by a movie talk forum to the glories of Running Scared, I moved the disc to the head of the queue. Then I popped it into the DVD tray without even looking at the box, so I viewed it with only the knowledge that it was an urban crime film of exceeding violence starring Paul Walker; no director or writer research, no awareness of the other cast members.

From this virgin vantage, Running Scared quickly revealed itself to be a criminal version of Kurosawa’s Stray Dog. It’s about a guy trying to get back a gun. I hesitate to go into too much detail about the plot, so let me first say this about the film. It is great. If you haven’t heard of it, and you like visually stylish urban crime thrillers with a twist, go out and rent or buy this film now.

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That being said, the movie focuses on one Joey Gazelle (Walker). He’s a minor level enforcer for a NY or Jersey mobster while also maintaining a family, consisting of wife Teresa (Mimi Rogers look-alike Vera Farmiga), a son, disabled father, and most of the time the abused Russian kid Oleg (Cameron Bright from Birth) from next door. The film opens violently, as Joey finds himself in the middle of a drug deal gone bad, in that it’s raided at mid-point by a third group. Soon it devolves into one of those Tarantino-popularized mass shoot-outs where only a few get out alive. In this case it is Joey and his boss Tommy “Tombs” Perello (Johnny Messner, from the short lived Fox show Killer Instinct), who at one point shoots an opponent right in the crotch. This is the kind of pulp product where anything can happen and life is cheap. If you have ever read Raoul Whitfield’s Green Ice you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s one of the most violent scenes you’re likely to see in an R rated movie, and the film doesn’t stop there. Children are imperiled and see terrible things; human life is cheap; the city is an evil place and even “good” places like diners play host to bad scenes.

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Frankly, part of me knows that this film is gross, excessive, and ludicrous. I also know that Running Scared (New Line, 2006, 122 minutes, color, NR, 2.40:1 enhanced, English, DTS 6.1 ES, Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo with English and Spanish subtitles, 20 minute making of, director commentary track, two storyboarded sequences, the trailer, additional trailers, and CD-ROM features, static musical menu with 22-chapter scene selection, 28-page insert with comic book version of a scene, one disc, keep case, $27.98, released on Tuesday, June 6, 2006) is the kind of film I like. In fact, it got me so excited that I watched a bunch of other similar films afterwards – The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Eyewitness, Way of the Gun – instead of absorbing the disc’s multiple extras or watching any of the other DVDs I’m behind on. I also know that the plot of RS gets crazier and more unpredictable, capping it off with a serious detour into a pedophile ring, and has an ending in which practically everything happens at once. Still, I loved it, partially because of the intensity of Walker and the rest of the cast’s performances, and partially because of its visual creativity.

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I watched the movie shortly after reading Ron Rosenbaum’s impassioned defense of Tony Scott in the New York Observer (no longer on line for free), and there is something of a Tony Scott feel to the film, which was directed, I learned at the end credits, by Wayne Kramer, who did The Cooler (the film was also co-produced by Brett Ratner). The film has other influences, intentional or not. There is a bit of Little Odessa, a smidge of Donnie Brasco, and The Cowboys is referred to explicitly when John Wayne buff Anzor (Karel Roden) strips off his shirt and is shot in the back where a Wayne image is tattooed (two of the bullets go right through Wayne’s eyes). To top it all off, I was surprised to learn that the film was shot in Prague, standing in for Newark. It’s so convincing (maybe it was all those wire fences) forum poster Bob Cashill was inspired to call Prague “the Lon Chaney of cities.”

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Running Scared impresses but not so much for its violence which, after the opening scene, is fairly conventional, though of a quality increasingly rare in milquetoast Hollywood product. No, it’s not so much the violence as the intensity of the world portrayed, in which there at first appears to be no moral compass. Take the scene with Dez and Edele (Bruce Altman and Elizabeth Mitchell), the outlandish pedophiles for whom the whole movie makes a complete stop so as to explore their bizarre world and to dispense upon them street justice. A more traditionally plotted film would have dispensed with the passage (it would appear only as a deleted scene on the disc). And the sequence raises more questions than it offers satisfying revenge. How does the person who blows them away think it is a crime with a free pass, given the ‘phone calls and other evidence that would lead right to the killer? On the other hand, the exaggerated kids playground in which the couple dwell is another example of the fairy tale components that Kramer has inserted into the movie. The film works on three levels: hard edged thriller, fairy tale allegory, and visual storytelling. One question I had after the disc was done, however, went right to the heart of the film. Why is Joey so hot to find the gun? It makes sense at the start of the film, but as the narrative progresses and we learn more about Joey, it ceases to be a logical engine for the whole movie. You’ll see what I mean when you watch it. But don’t let that damper your pleasure in Running Scared.

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June 23, 2006
Ken P. D. Snyde-Cast #10: Fortune Cookies

Adult Swim’s Dana Snyder and FRED’s Ken Plume set out to have a literate conversation between two pals, but inevitably devolve into a verbal, and funny, free-for-all full of bickering, infighting, and the special kind of male bonding that comes from conflict expressed through the podcast medium.

Actor/comedian/raconteur Dana Snyder, you’re certainly aware, is Aqua Teen Hunger Force’s Master Shake, Squidbillies‘ Granny, Minoriteam’s Dr. Wang, and The Venture Bros.‘ Alchemist. Available for weddings and bar mitzvahs (bat availability pending), you can keep tabs on him via his website, www.eyeofthesnyder.com.

Ken Plume is the editor-in-chief here at FRED. He is a friend of Dana’s, as well as his arch-nemesis.

VISIT THE SNYDECAST EXPERIENCE

KEN P.D. SNYDECAST #10: Fortune Cookies – What happens when two bitter friends reunite in a new location after months off, with tons of mail piled up, road trip stories, and deadly fortune cookies to tempt them?

[CONTENT WARNING]: This podcast may contain some foul language and horribly off-color jokes. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

DOWNLOAD: (right click to save)
Episode #10 (MP3 format)

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SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to this Podcast via iTunes

Got something to say? E-mail Dana & Ken at the Snydecast mailbag.

CLICK HERE FOR THE SNYDECAST ARCHIVES

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June 22, 2006
The Fred Hembeck Show: Episode 62 – Network Switching

It happened to Leave It To Beaver, it happened to Taxi, it even happened to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and now it’s happened to The Fred Hembeck Show as well!

WHAT happened? Well, the three programs mentioned above each successfully switched networks during their illustrious runs, and we’re hoping that The Fred Hembeck Show can make a similar smooth transition as we move over to the brand spanking new Quick Stop Entertainment site after posting 61 previous episodes over at the IGN Comics page. We wish our old friends there well, and thank them for the opportunity to launch this weekly web extravaganza of ours. Happily, we’ll still be working under the keen stewardship of newly anointed Quick Stop maven, Ken Plume, and while we don’t plan any radical departures from what went before, there are a few new quirks now available to us due to the switcheroo:

We can swear if we want to.

“@#$%” generally works for me, so I’ll save the f word for those precious moments at home when my darlin’ daughter does something to REALLY get on my nerves!

We can show a little skin!

I guarantee you, though, the minute I decide it’s time to flash you my nipple, we’re ALL in trouble! So, don’t hold your breath…

Most importantly, comics no longer have to be the focal point of every single episode! Oh, don’t worry – there’ll still be plenty of funnybook talk, but we’ll also be able to stray off into other areas of popular culture without having to go through any gyrations to force a comics connection onto the topic so as to make it palatable.

And so, with that in mind – and in honor of Sir Paul’s recent 64th birthday – I’d like to share with you something plucked from the Hembeck.com archives (my home site, for you new readers) that I wrote over two years ago to mark the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of The Beatles initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show – which just coincidentally was the fortieth anniversary of the day I became a life-long fan!(Hey, look – Beaver, Buffy, Taxi – they all had summer reruns too, y’know! It’s a grand old tradition!)And now, on with our really big reminisce…On Saturday, February 8th, 1964, I was an 11 year-old boy, one who nurtured such a total disdain for the state of popular music as it then stood that my favorite singer was, by far, Al Jolson.

That’s right, folks – the fellow who regularly got down on one knee, face blackened in the now dubiously regarded but nonetheless historic minstrel show tradition, and beseechingly sang to his poor “Mammy”! Hey please understand, the guy WAS the biggest star in the world at one time, y’know, even if he DID peak just as the Roaring Twenties morphed unmercifully into the Great Depression.

My dad always talked him up, y’see, and when television broadcast his bio-pic, “The Jolson Story”, well, that was a major event in the Hembeck household, lemme tell ya! I sat enchanted in front of the tube as a fellow by the name of Larry Parks, in best proto-Milli Vanilli mode, lip-synced the master’s bombastic crooning. Of course, a great deal of my initial fascination with the storied performer was directly due to his pivotal role in the history of American cinema: that being, namely his starring role in the very first full-length – if only partial – talking picture, 1927’s The Jazz Singer.

Back in the early sixties, that still seemed like quite the notable accomplishment. A “Movies 101” gimme. Three and a half decades after the fact, it was still fresh enough in the collective consciousness to clearly be viewed as a landmark by many. Nowadays, however, the whole affair appears to have mostly been forgotten and/or ignored. Reports that the film was basically a fairly lugubrious melodrama with a few lines of dialog and a couple of songs thrown in probably didn’t aid in The Jazz Singer‘s long-term cinematic stature. And that embarrassing black-face make-up? I’d venture THAT probably didn’t help any either…

But nearly 20 years later, 1946’s The Jolson Story was met with such surprising success upon its release that it not only revived the celebrated vaudevillian’s floundering career, but even spawned a sequel three years later entitled Jolson Sings Again! When the man long billed as “The World’s Greatest Entertainer” died a year afterwards, he went out on top, and left a large legend for future generations of admirers to conjure with. Admirers apparently like me. After all, how could I NOT be impressed? Besides breaking the sound barrier decades before Chuck Yeager, here was a guy with a life so big it took not one but TWO major motion pictures to tell his story? Louis Pasteur made do with one flick – for Jolson, they needed a pair! Now, I ask you – how could anyone or anything possibly top THAT, hmm?…

Yes, Jolsonmania reigned in my own little corner of the world. My parents, life-long admirers of Lawrence Welk and musicians of his ilk, rarely if ever had their radio tuned to a station spewing out the wild and discordant sounds of rude, raucous rock and roll, and that was just fine with me. I held the entire scene in self-righteous contempt. On the one hand, I surmised, the music seemed to be the product of a group of wild men (Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and their beat-crazy brethren, a gang I found vastly unappealing and even vaguely frightening), or conversely, pompadoured crooners mouthing inane lyrics at a mildly accelerated pace, all suspiciously named “Bobby”, their entire persona’s specifically aimed towards selling black vinyl to gullible pre-teen girls. Either way, I didn’t want anything at all to do with the whole misbegotten genre – and that was years before I even KNEW what the word “genre” meant, much less “misbegotten”!…

Remarkably, up until the following Sunday afternoon, there were only a small handful of popular recordings that had somehow managed to register in my stubborn subconsciousness. My earliest musical memory? Elvis barking out “Hound Dog”. That’s a tough one to forget, friends. Why, at the oh-so-tender age of six, I can still distinctly recall thinking, geez, I’d sure never heard anything like THIS before! But perhaps being so young accounted for the impression left being substantially more negative than it was positive. Outside of “All Shook Up”, I don’t recall any of the King’s other classics wending their way deep into my cerebellum. Most of the other tunes that did manage to stick were novelty songs of one type or another…

“Big Bad John”, sung with a grave solemness by future pork sausage tycoon, Jimmy Dean, made a lasting impression (I gave up ALL thoughts of pursuing a mining life, for instance…). And despite what’s been said over the ensuing years in regards to the, ahem, “hidden” drug references in “Puff The Magic Dragon”, I still have to fight back a tear every time I hear Peter, Paul and Mary sing of poor little Jackie Paper’s sad if inevitable demise. OTHER, um, emotions were stirred up whenever I heard Brian Hyland’s mildly salacious “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini”, and the Rooftop Singers chart-topping “Walk Right In” was a perennial favorite as much for its innate catchiness as the for the cleverly modified lyrics the pint-sized Lenny Bruce’s in my neighborhood invariably came up with, ever hoping to liven up the rather pedestrian words!

Not that I ever actually OWNED any of these records, mind you. I’d only gotten my very first portable record player a mere 53 weeks earlier as a gift for my tenth birthday. Inasmuch as my folks seemed pleased enough previously to rely totally on the radio for their source for all sounds melodic, it automatically doubled then as a valued component of the now-burgeoning Hembeck family music center. And let me explain something – the Hembeck family in general found the price of long-playing record albums – generally roundabout three bucks a pop in those days – to be, yes, prohibitively overpriced! Certainly, the accepted theory went, why waste money buying THOSE records when perfectly fine – albeit budget-price – knockoffs could be had for a paltry dollar a disc? Why plunk down the cash for the REAL Al Jolson disc when for but a third the cost, you could get yourself an LP featuring a perfectly decent sound-alike doing all his most famous numbers – AND blatantly made-up in black-face on the cover, too, to boot? Yup, it’s true – I never actually owned a TRUE Jolson recording! But somehow, after watching his life unfold in the guise of Larry Parks on the tube, the ersatz version sufficed. In fact, for that whole first year, our record collection was totally composed of cheaply priced analog’s of the era’s light sounds, with but one exceptional exception: Hayley Mills’ “Let’s Get Together”…

What can I say? I’d been hopelessly smitten with the adorable British lass ever since I’d seen her up on the big screen in 1961’s The Parent Trap, which was home to this tune’s first appearance. Apparently, the 45 RPM being a few years old by the time I moseyed along and gleefully snapped it up, it was most likely priced to move. That was just swell by me – it was a pleasant reminder of a rare if memorable afternoon spent sitting in a darkened movie theater, watching a tousle-haired goddess – times TWO! And, as it turned out, the song served as a portent of the future as well. Y’see, for those of you unaware of this now-mostly forgotten Disney ditty, sung by the English actress, the catchy chorus cheerfully repeats the phrase, “Let’s get together, yeah, yeah, yeah!…” over and over.

I share all this seemingly extraneous detail with you so as to better present a sense of just precisely where I was coming from early in 1964. How, despite the fact that this oddly monikered group of mop-topped musicians had a record perched at the summit of the charts – a little something called “I Want To Hold Your Hand” – I could still be willfully ignorant of most everything concerning this latest overblown craze, save for perhaps a vague if begrudging acknowledgment on my behalf of their very existence. I knew about ’em – I just didn’t want to KNOW about ’em, dig? Rock and roll music was for juvenile delinquents, and pop music was for girls, and I felt absolutely no desire to be the slightest bit interested in either. But y’know, even the formidable barrier of close-mindedness that a pre-teen boy is all too capable of erecting can be breached if its pummeled often and long enough…

It all started when my dad brought home the Sunday papers that cold February afternoon. For reasons lost to the mists of time, besides his three standard purchases – the Sunday Daily News, Newsday, and the Long Island Press – he also brought home a copy of the soon to be defunct Journal American (at least, I THINK that’s what it was…). Floating up above the paper’s logo was a cartoony drawing of four shaggy heads of hair – sans the heads! This provocative illustration, shilling for an article found within heralding the English lads American debut that very evening on the Ed Sullivan program, somehow snared my attention and soon weaseled its way deep into my imagination. For the first time, I paused for a moment and truly wondered just what all this fuss about these four long-haired musicians from the U.K. was really all about…

Though it may be exceedingly difficult for those of you who weren’t there at the time to fathom, something ultimately as trivial as the length of these Beatle-boy’s hair was more than enough to intrigue many a usually uninterested observer, myself definitely included. EVERYONE, man and boy alike, maintained a short hairstyle in the early sixties. Even our popular westerns heroes, proliferating as they were all over the tube at the time, had nary a stray lock hanging out of place under their ten-gallon hats, flying totally in the face of historical evidence that indisputably proved otherwise. We were, simply put, an uptight, regimented, buzz-cut culture. And here were four young men armed with the sheer audacity to literally let their hair down – hey, how could I NOT be intrigued?

But still I was ambivalent. I felt I needed more evidence. After all, if it was just an outrageous image they were selling, well, for THAT, I really didn’t need to get involved. Instead, I was curious to see how their music shaped up. Now, in retrospect, I suppose I could’ve merely flicked on the AM radio and found any number of Beatles tunes giddily streaming out of the speaker, but I wasn’t nearly hip enough to the process at that point to conceive that plan of action. I never actually listened to THOSE stations, y’see, so it just didn’t occur to me at the time. I thought instead of my next door neighbors, the McGuiness family. My little pal John was three years younger than I was, and had even less use for this whole music scene than I did, but I was reasonably sure his two older sisters didn’t feel the same way. After checking with him, it turned out that his oldest sister, Jane, did indeed own a Beatles record. So, after some mild cajoling, he convinced her to lend it to me briefly. I’d give it a spin, sorta taking it out for what amounted to a test run…

No, it WASN’T “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, but rather the tune that would soon enough take the Liverpudlians to the top of the American Pop Charts for a second – though hardly last – time – “She Loves You”. Initially issued on the tiny Swan label, I took the small 45, inserted my handy-dandy adapter into the center hole, dropped the needle onto the opening groove, and sat back, listening with great interest…

I liked what I heard. A lot.

There was a freshness to the sound, a palpable sense of joy that, emanating as it was from a barely serviceable set of speakers, nonetheless projected upon me the most profound musical impression my ears had yet to encounter. But, tough sell that I was, I still wasn’t thoroughly convinced. Anybody can get lucky ONCE, I calmly surmised. So, I turned the record over. Now, even given the meager state of my singles collection up to that point, I was well aware that the B-side of most any record was little more a throw-away, and I had yet to come across one that’d had any sort of lasting impact. I wondered, then, what would happen when I flipped THIS disc over…

The tune in question was “I’ll Get You”. Now, gazing back on things from the vantage point of four accumulated decades, this minor composition hardly stands out in the Lennon-McCartney canon, even when measured against just their earliest recordings. There’s a sing-song like quality to the chorus that, let’s face it, hardly screams out, “Rock and Roll”! The fact is, I rarely recall it getting much, if any airplay, even in those heady months of wall-to-wall Beatlemania that followed the Sullivan gig. And yet, and yet…

When I listened to it for the first time, following directly in the wake of the justly more famous “She Loves You”, I was immediately charmed! Slight though it may’ve been, it nonetheless exuded a gleeful sincerity that was hard to deny. After but a single spin, I found myself happily muttering the chorus to myself. “I’ll get you, I’ll get you in the end, yes I will, I’ll get you in the end, oh yeah, oh yeah” – oh YEAH, they got me in the end, all right!…

You all have a pretty good idea what happens next, right? After returning to its rightful owner this little piece of black plastic that had effectively changed my young life, like millions of others, I sat down in front of my TV set later that landmark evening and tuned into the Ed Sullivan Show to watch, transfixed, as the Beatles took the country by storm by sheer force of their youthful exuberance and spirited musicianship. And they didn’t even play “I’ll Get You”!!…

The transformation was immediate and complete – from that point on, Al Jolson truly WAS history, as I, like so many others of my generation, had found our collective voice in this charismatically talented quartet from across the sea…

Soon after, I went out and sprung for my first fully priced 45, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” backed with yet ANOTHER even more brilliant B-side, “I Saw Her Standing There”. Needless to say, I played it over and over and over AND over!! I vividly recall getting up early one morning – never a happy chore for moi, I assure you – just so that I could give this precious piece of plastic a few extra spins before trudging off to school that otherwise-dreary day. Not long afterwards, I became the proud owner of one of those new-fangled tiny transistor radios, the dial of which was ALWAYS tuned in to NYC’s WABeatleC – and NEVER far from my ear!

And since the DJs only played Beatles music about, oh, roughly seventy per cent of the time, I soon learned there was a lot more to pop music than “Puff the Magic Dragon”, a WHOLE lot more! Early Rock and Roll, it turned out, was actually pretty exciting, once you developed a taste for it! And did I EVER! Even more amazing, it turned out that some of those Bobbys were actually pretty talented (Bobby Vee, Bobby Darin), some were sorta tolerable (Bobby Vinton), and some, well, some were NEVER heard from again after the sun came up on February 10th (Bobby Rydell – seriously, now, has anybody EVER heard one of the many alleged hits he chalked up prior to that fateful night? I never heard any of them played subsequently as oldies, even on stations that regularly pumped Fabian’s warblings out into the ether of the airwaves…)! The Beatles, simply put, opened my eyes – AND my ears – to so very much. It’s almost inconceivable to me that my wavering decision to reluctantly approach them with an open mind hinged on the chance purchase of a stray Sunday newspaper AND the modest merits of a quaint little B-side entitled “I’ll Get You”!?!…

THAT’S how my life-long devotion – some might say “obsession” – to John, Paul, George, and Ringo began. That’s how I met the Beatles. The story hardly stopped there, however. To quote the first words uttered on the silver screen long-ago by my erstwhile singing idol, “You ain’t heard NOTHIN’ yet!” and indeed, folks, we hadn’t.

But ANOTHER time for those tales, worry not…

And that’s all for this week friends, but you can always find more of me over at

Hembeck.com, on Fred’s MySpace Page, or you can contact me directly by going here. If you’re looking for porn, well, you’re on your own, pal – and no, I’m STILL not gonna show you my nipple! Although, who knows what’ll happen NEXT week, so I guess you’d all better come back, huh?

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

June 22, 2006

Music For The Masses

Hello again, friends and. . .umm, Pearl Jam fans.Â Long time, no see!Â I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you had little snippets of that Streisand/Diamond song running through your head. . .”You don’t bring me flowers, you don’t sing me love songs.”Â Yeah, sorry about that, but I gotta tell you, the move to the new site was a bitch.Â The trucking company got lost, the china hutch was scratched and those damn movers dropped a couple of my Humel’s.Â But hey. . .all minor inconveniences because check out this place!Â What do you think of the classy, new digs, huh?Â Pretty damn “shi-shi,” don’t you think?Â Of course, I’m going to have to ask you to leave your shoes at the door, remember to flush and for the love of all that is holy, keep your grubby mitts to yourself.Â You break it, you buy it.

So, now that we have THAT out of the way, the new powers that be here at the “˜Shoo. . .er, “˜Stop, felt that a re-introduction might be in order.Â So bear with me as I tell you a little bit about myself.Â For starters, my name is M.C. and I’m an ex-radio DJ living in Colorado, or, as people on the coasts like to call it, “one of those fucking red states.”Â I’ve been told that I have the attention span of a retard in a room full of rubber balls (Love you, mom!!!) and I like to write about music.Â Why do I like to write about music?”Â Easy.Â I do it for the children. . . like these little whipper-snappers. . .

That’s odd. . . I thought dogs buried bones in the yard.

Sweet enough to give you cavities, huh?

My “turn-on’s” include finger puppets, “ass-play,” progressive metal, Brazilian “fart” porn, the Beatles, amputees, the “Manchester sound” and Spiderman Underoos Â®. Â Turn off’s are line dancing, “creative” facial hair, Clay Aiken, the name “Dave,” anything with pork in it, bukaki, message board music snobs and bands named Coulier.Â Oh yeah, and I’m a Virgo. . .but please don’t hold that against me.Â I just haven’t found the right girl, yet.

Just so we’re clear. . .THIS is the right girl.

For fun, I play beer league hockey, the guitar and “with myself.”Â I have an extensive comics collection and I’ve seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark” 23 times. . .3 of those times, I was what the “squares” like to call “sober.” My secondary goal, (the main being, of course, to become a Mormon prophet), is to inform you of some new releases, from bands both big and small, in a slightly different, andÂ unconventional way. . .umm, in case you haven’t figured that out yet.Â In other words, don’t you be comin’ into ma’ house an’ expectin’ yo’ mamma’s reviews. Â *SNAP!!* Â Unh unh!

Oh yeah, and if I say something about a band you like that offends you?Â Relax.Â We’re here to have fun and don’t forget that these are just my opinions.Â And you know what they say about opinions, don’t you?Â That’s right. . .they’re like assholes.Â This is my asshole.Â Enjoy it, but go slow.Â My safety word is “Banana.”

So, friends, both new and old, what do you say?Â Ready to jump back in?Â Fantastic!Â We have a couple of new discs for you to check out below, one reviewed by yours truly and the other is from a new, regular, co-contributer climbing on board, A.A. (yes, like the support group).Â Double A will be handling the world of rap. . .whoops!. . .I mean, hip hop, mostly to give the kids something to read, and any menial chores that I can dream up.Â For instance, I was just noticing today that my toe nails are getting AWFULLY long.Â Basically, you can consider him the “Choda Boy” to my “Orgazmo.”Â Good Stuff.

We are also going to shoot for making this a weekly column, but I gotta be honest with you.Â There’s a better chance of Ellen going straight, so we’ll see.

But enough about all that.Â You folks ready?Â Good. . .let’s check out some “newish” releases.

Artist:Â Guster
Album:Â Ganging Up On The SunÂ
Bastard Love Child of:Â World Party and the Beach BoysÂ
Best for: Doing keg laps and drinking from a “beer bong” at the Tri-Delt mixer.

Guster:Â Backstage in preparation for their “Puppetry of the Penis” audition.

If you would have come up to me a few years ago and told me that you had a “cool band with two acoustic guitars and a bongo” for me to check out, Â I would have told you to “lay off the pot, you patchouli-smelling freak.”Â Then I would have grabbed you by your dreadsÂ© and beaten the PatagoniaÂ® out of you with your own BirkenstockÂ®.Â However, if you quickly told me, in between swings, that the band you were referring to was Guster, I would have immediately picked you up, “dusted” you off as best I could and offered you a chai to quench your cotton-mouth and a clove cigarette. Â Â I would have looked at you and said, with tears welling in my eyes, “Sorry, dirty hippy. . .I just assumed. . .”

Seriously, when I first heard of this band, from a buddy who used that very same “two dudes on acoustics and a guy with bongo’s” description, I was thinking to myself “You gotta be fucking kidding me” and thoughts of tie-dyed, hacky-sackin’ hula hoopers danced through my head.Â “Kumbaya, muva’ sucka’!!!”Â But my friend insisted that the band rocked, in a decidedly non-hippy way, and drug me, against my will, to see them at the Winter Park Music fest.Â That was 6 years ago, friends, and I have been thanking him ever since because that one show blew my mind.Â Guster’s live set that day was amazing and hilarious and their music was IMMEDIATELY accessible.Â In fact, I have been a huge fan of them ever since and I will fully admit that I love this band.Â And yes, smart ass, I would marry them. . .if I lived in Canada, but I don’t.Â We’ve already covered that.

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Of course, today, die hard fans will tell you that they hardly recognize the college band from Tufts who, more than a decade ago, first “wowed” fans by unleashing their quirky sense of humor and the Thunder God, Brian Rosenworcel, on unsuspecting audiences.Â Good lord, friends, believe me when I tell you that this guy can beat the shit out of the skins. . .kinda like Yanni, only replace the word “skins” with “wife.”Â However, each subsequent studio release, from Lost and Gone Forever, to the latest, Ganging Up On The Sun, has seen Brian beat it less with his hand and more with a stick as the bongo has been slowly replaced with an acoustic kit.Â Hell, I can’t recall hearing a whole lot of bongo on the new disc.Â Let me check again. . .wait a minute. . .there’s some hiding on the new disc’s second track, “Satelite.”Â Tap, tap. . .tappity tap.

But as we have learned here at the site, change can be good, and in the case of the new disc, Ganging Up On The Sun, change is fantastic. . .especially when that “change” comes courtesy of multi-instrumentalist, co-producer and fourth, honorary band member, Joe Pisapiai.Â Joe is one talented motha’. . .shut yo’ mouth!. . .and his impact on the band and their music has been both immediate and undeniable. Â A few trips through the disc and it’s easy to discern that the melodies are more clean, the harmonies more rich, the arrangements more tight and the sound, overall, more memorable.Â In fact, that is one of my favorite things about this disc. . .it rewards repeated listenings by giving you something new each time; Â new hook here, a clever lyric there. . .a hint of bongo over there.
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Highlights on this disc are the flat-out, sister-pumpin’, country rocker, “The Captain,” the straightforward, harmony-laced, first single, “One Man Wrecking Machine” and the epic-length “Ruby Falls.”Â I will admit, the album grinds to a halt on the weak and weary “Empire State” (Track 9) and fails to regain any steam as the bands penchant for pig-blapping you with the mighty hook wanes.Â But who really cares?Â Bad Guster still trumps most of the crap out there today.Â Good job, Guster, but next time. . .MORE BONGO!!!

Yanni says: “Buy Guster or you’ll make Yanni angry.Â You wouldn’t like Yanni when he’s angry.”

Rating:Â 4 out of 5

AND NOW. . .A WORD FROM DOUBLE A. . .Â Â

Artist:Â Ice CubeÂ
Album:Â Laugh Now, Cry laterÂ
Bastard Love Child of:Â Loretta Lynn and Roy Orbison?Â
Best for: Pourin’ a little on the curb fo’ yo’ dead hommies.

What’s this?Â Are your eyes deceiving you?Â Could this be an actual review of a rap album?Â While your eyes maybe playing tricks on you (yes, I know what you were doing before you clicked over here) this is an honest to Zeus hip hop review.Â Are you ready?Â Got your seat belt on?Â You know, they have all those “Click It Or Ticket” things going on now.Â So, here we go.

It’s been 6 years, and 9 movies, since Ice Cube released a full length album, and to be honest his last effort, War & Peace the Peace Album, wasn’t exactly what most people have come to expect from the world of Cube.Â There were a few good tunes on the disc, but it really seemed that Mr. Cube had lost a step on the whole rap game.Â Perhaps it was his role in Anaconda that messed him up for a bit.Â I know when I wrestle with my giant snake every night I’m always left traumatized.

But now, with the release of Laugh Now, Cry Later, Ice Cube is once again good for something other than making a tasty beverage cool and refreshing.Â The key to this album is a return to what made Ice Cube great in the first place.Â Unapologetic, hard core gangster rap.Â This album is probably not for the Ice Cube fans that most fondly remember him like this”¦

Or like this”¦

Ice, shaking hands withÂ the President.
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No, this is an album for the straight up rap fans.Â Believe me, if your kid thought Ice Cube was funny in “Are We There Yet?” stay away from this album.Â Well, I mean you could get it for your kid.Â Just don’t get mad at me when your kid starts dropping “F” bombs like a Pearl Jam fan sending e-mails to MC.Â But I digress”¦

Laugh Now, Cry Later is pretty tight from start to finish.Â I would even go as far as to say it’s as tight as Queen Latifa’s wardrobe in her last movie, but I never saw it, so that would only be conjecture on my part.Â The album starts off with the obligatory introduction and at times meanders through the even more obligatory “rap disc skit” but for the most part, every song on the disc is good.Â From the first single “Why We Thugs” to the last song “Holla @ Cha’ Boy,” there are really no fast forward songs on the disc.Â The highlights of this album are the previously mentioned, anthem like “Why We Thugs” and “Doin’What It “˜Pose 2Do.”Â Guest stars like Snoop Dog and Lil Jon only help things along.Â The beats are good, the flows are tight (resisting urge to make another Queen Latifa joke, resisting”¦urge”¦) and overall this is a great album that is sure to get Ice Cube back to his rightful place near the top of the rap hierarchy.

Now for the bad business.Â Listening through this album, one cant help but think of how far Ice Cube has come.Â Back in the day of NWA and his album Lethal Injection listeners had the feeling that Ice Cube probably did the things that he was rapping about.Â But with his recent movies, some of the lyrics on Laugh Now, Cry Later, just seem, well, laughable.Â I’m not saying that they are hokey or anything, just that Ice Cube has lost a bit of his street cred over the years, and hearing lines about “busting gats” and all his baby mammas just don’t jive with the Ice Cube that we will certainly remember like this”¦

Rating:Â 4 out of 5 stars

LOOK, UP IN THE SKY!!!Â IT’S A BIRD! A PLANE! A CONTEST!!!

“Easy, Miss.Â I’ve got you.”

“You’ve got me?? Who’s got YOU!?

What better way to celebrate the re-launch of this site, than some free schwag, huh?Â The fine folks at Rhino Records and CineMedia (Thanks, Beth!!) are offering up some copies, 5 to be exact, of the soundtrack to possibly the biggest movie to drop this summer that doesn’t have a pirate in it.Â That’s right, friends. . .Supreman Returns.Â Here is little description of this gem:

“The thrilling and dramatic score from Superman Returns, the highly anticipated film featuring the Man of Steel’s latest heroic adventure, arrives in stores June 27, with nearly an hour of music from award-winning composer John Ottman (Fantastic Four, X2). The score album will be enhanced with an exclusive video interview with the film’s director, Bryan Singer (X2: X-Men United, X-Men, The Usual Suspects), a featurette on the making of the score and two trailers for the film.

Recorded with a 97-piece orchestra led by conductor Damon Intrabartolo, SUPERMAN RETURNS: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SCORE features Ottman’s epic score including his unique twists on themes that John Williams composed for the original 1978 film, such as the classic main theme, “Superman March.” Superman Returns stars newcomer Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, Parker Posey and Kevin Spacey. Released by Warner Bros. Pictures, the film will open nationwide on June 30.”

I honestly can’t tell you how cool it is to hear this disc kick off with Ottman’s take on William’s original score from the first movie.Â Good stuff.Â So, I’m sure you’re sitting there now, scratching your. . .umm, head, and wondering how you can win one of these.Â Simple.Â While cleaning up aged dog turds in your backyard, you happen upon, what you believe to be, a chunk of Kryptonite.Â Send me an email with the subject, SUPERMAN, and tell me the color and what effect it has on Supes.Â The 5 most creative entries win.Â Pretty simple, huh?Â Have fun with this one and good luck!!

Well, friends, that is going to do it for this week.Â Hope you had fun!Â Until next time, keep wearing it proud and playing it loud!

Send rubber balls, review copies, presents and assorted hate mail to:

M.C. Bell
P.O. Box 1222
Arvada, CO 80001

E-MAIL ME

Check us out at the Scoop News!

June 22, 2006

Noctural Admissions: Opus Dei For Night

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-By D.K. Holm

Nocturnal Admissions is back, and after a two week or so hiatus, while the site made the transition from MoviePoopShoot to QuickStopEntertainment, there are a lot of odds and ends to catch up on.

For example, on June 16th, Roger Ebert dropped out of sight again to undergo further surgery on a recurrent problem, a cancerous growth in his salivary gland. In the introduction to one of his recent yearly compilations, Ebert wrote movingly of his disease and its impact on his job and on his spirit. Ebert has been a friend to this site in the past, and I wish him well. Curiously, I’ve become something of a “defender” of Ebert of late. Here’s the background. When I was younger, and Ebert was first on national TV (on PBS), finding the Pulitzer Prize winning writer’s columns wasn’t so easy, so in evaluating the man all one had to go on was the prize itself and his TV persona, in which he was, then anyway, aggressive, smart, and with a debater’s cunning for his opponent’s weak spots. Only later, when his annual review compilations began to appear, and then with the advent of the WWW, could a curious reader not living in Chicago, or with access to cumbersome library copies of the Sun Times, dive into his prose. Thus in recent years I’ve become quite a fan of Ebert the daily journalist. At the risk of insulting the TV Ebert, the print Ebert is a much better reviewer than the TV version would lead you to thinkÂ Â

On the page he is expansive, generous, confessional, and politically forthright, and has that quality so rare in writers of any kind, common sense. In the past four or five years I get his annuals, issued by Andrews McMeel Publishing in November, and read them from the beginning to (I hope) end while in the bath or going to bed. I go as far as I can, anyway (the next edition usually beats me to the end; I’m only in the “D”s for 2006 and the year’s half over). This immersion in the work of a reviewer is the true test of a reviewer. Can you read the old material with the same urgency and appreciation now that it had then? Does the style in such large gulps wear on you? Though the answer to the first question is “no” when asked of, say, the terribly overrated and sentimentalized James Agee, with Ebert it is yes; and while the answer to the second question is “yes” when it comes to the dread Pauline Kael (Ebert would never use thephrase “dread” of a fellow reviewer, live or dead), for reading Ebert’s style in large doses the answer is “No,” it doesn’t wear on you. It is plain prose that lasts, which isn’t to say that Ebert doesn’t occasionally have the memorable flourish or the odd joke (good phrase: a barber shop in a movie serves as a place where “daily soap operas are played out to loud acclaim or criticism”; good joke: on Dirty Dancing: “I thought the plot was a clunker assembled from surplus parts at the Broken Plots Store”).Â

One knock against Ebert I’ve heard in conversations with friends is that he is too easy on African-American films and actors. Though that may be true of the TV Ebert, the print Ebert is fair and often quite hard on films that displease him. But it is true that he is much nicer in print in general than people seem to take him to be, especially Hollywood types. In fact, the individual ratings for films really only make sense (to me, anyway) if you knock them all down a star. My only complaint against his books, which annually come in at just under 1000 pages, is that the movies are offered up alphabetically instead of chronologically. I wish in the future he would either re-print them in order of publication, or post the actual release date of each film (instead of just the year), or add an appendix that re-lists all the films in chronological order. But that’s just me. In any case, it is testimony to the nature of the times that Ebert must be “discovered” as the fine writer and thinker he really is.Â Â Â

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The Closer is back on the tube and it has grown to be one of my favorite crime shows. It’s partially because Deputy Chief Brenda Johnson, as played by Kyra Sedgwick, is a very interesting character, but also because the individual mysteries are in and of themselves quite clever (the show was created by James Duff of Popular, Wolf Lake, and The Agency fame), and it is the latest in a minor genre that is one of my favorites, the “interrogation” genre. Most of John LeCarrÃ©’s novels revolve around a detailed and lengthy interrogation, and the movies A Pure Formality, Closet Land, and Under Suspicion (and its progenitor, Garde Ã vue) are extended interrogations and they allow moreso than in other genres for nuance, detailed and subtle variations in acting tones, and essays on the nature of truth. Johnson is the show’s “closer,” a cop version of Jerry Maguire, the big gun they pull out at the end to seal the deal. These scenes are finely etched. But there is another link that The Closer has, unofficial though it may be. It’s an Americanized version of one of my favorite periodic British TV shows, Prime Suspect. Even some of the male cop sexist pigs Johnson encounters in her job are replicas of the pigs (in both senses of the word) that Helen Mirren’s undermining nemesis, Otley (Tom Bell), has his replicant in The Closer‘s Det. Lt. Provenza (G.W. Bailey), though Provenza can’t not be a cop at times, and helps her our. Like most good shows, The Closer is perfectly cast, from Ox-alum J.K. Simmons to that essence of hard-bitten seen-it-all cops, straight-to-video king Tony Denison as Flynn.

What a difference a Dei makes! I was unprepared for how truly bad The Da Vinci Code was when I finally caught up with it. It was not only a bad movie with terrible dialogue (Her: “Ease eat possible?” Him: It’s not impossible”) that also squandered its budget and location, and cursed with long scenes of talking interrupted by scenes of driving, wherein both the camera swoops and glides hysterically in the manner David Bordwell so well describes in his latest book The Way Hollywood Tells It. It is also no Inquisitor. What’s that you say? Never heard of The Inquisitor?

Back in the 1970s there was a vogue for “mechanic” novels, thrillers in which an operative acted outside the law to thwart crime and communism. The first was Don Pendleton’s The Executioner series, in which Mack Bolen methodically took out the Mafia around the world in vengeance for the accidental death of his family. This was followed by Wayne Murphy and Richard Sapir’s The Destroyer, featuring ex-Jersey cop Remo Williams, which appears to be the most popular and most long lasting. But the best of the genre was The Inquisitor, a delightful series about the Pope’s hitman, who, after every assignment, had to do penance in the dungeons of Vatican City (killing remains a sin, you see). Though there were only a few in the series – The Devil in Kansas, The Last Time I saw Hell, Nuplex Red, His Eminence, Death and The Midas Coffin – they were funny, a highly satiric take on the “mechanic” genre and of at contemporary culture itself (although the Destroyer series has its satiric edge). Though credited to Simon Quinn, Inquisitor books were really written by a very young Martin Cruz Smith,Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

Dan Brown’s novel is part of a long tradition in popular American fiction, from Moby Dick to James Michener, the novel as technical manual. Tom Clancy is the highest current living perpetrator of this style of novel. Books in this mode must be big and fat and tell you how to do simple and complex things, such as how to drain a whale of blubber or navigate the icy depths of the Bering Straight. These books revel in providing the reader with the fruits of the author’s research. Every once in a while a novel like Da Vinci Code comes along, and within living memory they have included Love Story, The Godfather, Jaws, and The Exorcist, books that everybody seemed to be reading or have read and that at the same time the elites hated. There is a secret to all these books that I am loath to expose, but they all became very popular movies.

The point is, though, that they were mostly good movies, era defining movies, career announcing movies. Da Vinci (shouldn’t it be the Leonardo Code? [Da Vinci means a place of birth, and isn’t a name]) is none of these things (a career ender, maybe). Nothing in it is clear. Who are the bad guys? What did she say? What does the end mean?

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly raises the good questions in his blog commentary on the film, noting that the movie changes he book significantly, mostly in leaving out “Dan Brown’s ultimate thesis about the evolution of Christianity – i.e., its suppression of the ”sacred feminine.” In the movie, the notion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had descendents is the cornerstone of the conspiracy. The Church, as presented, is guilty of covering up a fact – the human proof of Christ’s bloodline. That, of course, is true in the novel as well, yet what gets muddled, if not lost, in the movie is the spiritual significance of Christ’s having been married. Throughout the novel, Dan Brown uses the lighting-rod issue of Christ-as-husband to ask, in a far more general and embracing way, What happened, over the course of two millennia, to women in the church? Were they ever more central? Why did goddess culture – an undisputable truth of history – fade?”

Some time in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, Saturday Night Live did a parody of 60 Minutes or at least the Andy Rooney part, with a NRFPT Player (Joe Piscopo? Al Franken?) slumped at a desk, huge eyebrows quivering, and asking the camera in great anger, “Have you thought about shoes lately?!” The opening salvo capture perfectly the banality, the false whimsy, the unfocused crotchetiness, What we really didn’t know was that Andy Rooney really isn’t a humorist, because he doesn’t have a sense of humor, as shown in the way he reacted to Ali G.’s attempt at an interview with him. I assume that a humorist requires a sense of humor but perhaps I’m being optimistic. In any case, Rooney reversed the usual order of parody on Sunday, June 4th, by dedicating his segment to “¦ shoes, reaching finally after 20-some years the depths of banality that SNL had unknowingly predicted for him. His rage at shoes. Their expense. Their ugliness. The fact that they accumulate (he hauled all his shoes over from his no doubt expensive abode in order to prove this). And so forth. The segment wasn’t funny. But then, Rooney never is. It wasn’t insightful, or whimsical, or even quotable (the collected wit of Andy Rooney is a slim, if existent, volume).

as anyone else noticed how the Dodge Caliber commercial (titled “Too Tough”) has been censored or edited? This is the commercial where the cute Tinkerbelle clone is raising havoc in a city trying to change things into child’s toy versions of themselves. She meets her match in the Dodge Caliber, which bounces her spells back at her till she collapses in defeat. When a street tough laughs at her, deriding her as a “stupid fairy,” she “taps” him into a sweater garbed Fire Island denizen with four Pekinese instead of White Supremacist with an attack dog (I know I don’t have the breed quite right here”).

However, since that commercial has first aired, the “Stupid fairy” line has been excised. Or at least is often excised (sometimes late at night the whole text is there). Sometimes its there and sometimes it’s not. Did a gay rights group protest, or did the commercial suddenly seem offensive to the car company when they finally saw it on TV?

While on hiatus from QuickStop-to-be, I wrote an exhaustive and exhausting (to read) review of John Ford’s The Searchers over at the DVDJournal.com.

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June 22, 2006
Tales from the Toybox: Wolverine vs. Sabretooth

-By Ken PlumeÂ

In a rivalry spanning decades (and a backstory that seems to change depending on which direction the editorial wind happens to be blowing that day), Wolverine and Sabretooth have been among the top tier of “classic” Marvel match-ups.

Sideshow Collectibles has chosen these two combatants to inaugurate their Marvel “VS” series of polystone dioramas. Standing over a foot tall (and nearly as wide), it’s an impressive piece of sculpture that can’t help but draw your attention ““ I mean, the thing is friggin’ huge.

Limited to an edition size of 1500, this little piece of sculptural tussle will set you back $250. Â

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June 22, 2006
International Intrigue: The 10 Best Foreign Films Of the ’90s

-By Alison Veneto

Welcome to my first Quick Stop Entertainment version of International Intrigue. I can only imagine it’ll be quite similar to the Movie Poop Shoot version, but anything is possible. Perhaps the changeover will make me more clever and intelligent. We can dream anyway.

An introduction for any newbies who have drifted to our fine new shores — as your deductive reasoning may have already figured out this is where I write about the foreign films. A quick look through the archives when are they are brought over will show you that this largely means always talking about films from Asia and pretty much never talking about films from other continents except occasionally Europe. But I always do my best to cover what you want to know about based on your e-mails and now your posts (I’m sure a link somewhere at the bottom will direct you to my shiny new section of the forum).

Since the newbies do not know about my tendency to have some of the longest columns on the site, I’ll try to keep to the spirit of “˜quick stop’ and write columns slightly shorter than a Russian novel so you can read them in one sitting instead of over the course of a number of hours. Although all this pre-column blabber is not helping me any, so let’s get on with it:

The Top 10 Foreign Films Of The 1990s.
And let’s start right off with controversy shall we? Every time one makes a list of any sort, the amount of angry people always manages to out-number the amount of satisfied ones. Obviously it’s all a matter of taste. But a lot of people who are not well schooled in the ways of foreign films often have trouble knowing where to start. And at the very least, I’m going to try to help with that. Here’s a list of where to begin your education so you can impress all your friends at tea parties.

(I’m going to wuss out on numbering them and just go alphabetical):

AFTERLIFE (Japan)
Japan had some really great movies in the 90s and it was hard to pick (I ended up naming two). They’re all very diverse — from Anime like Ghost In The Shell, to horror like The Ring to comedy like Shall We Dance? or drama like Fireworks. But now to talk about Afterlife. This film shows us a purgatory of sorts, where go when you die, and watch videotapes of your life. It’s a very quiet, simple kind of film but that’s what makes it so affecting. It’s one of those films that stays with you days later. And gives you a very pleasant feeling just watching it.

AUDITION (Japan)
I think director Takashi Miike is a genius. All of his films are really about something, usually intelligent analogies on Japanese society. Also, all of his movies are absurdly entertaining (or entertaining in their absurdity perhaps). The problem I have with him though is that since he makes a million movies a year and makes them very quickly, they don’t always look technically very good. But AUDITION is an exception. An impeccably filmed movie in which the topic of female repression in Japanese society is played out with sadist horror. The film might be a bit hard to sit through as there are very intense scenes of torture, but it reminds me of a time when horror was a genre for exploring questions like these.

CHARACTER (Netherlands)
This film, the winner of Best Foreign Film at the Oscars in 1998, is often forgotten now. Director van Diem creates a fantastic world for his family drama. A revenge tale that deftly weaves otherwise-tired conventions and themes in a unique way. The oft used themes of which I speak include the office as a machine and the Oedipus complex among others, but it all seems somewhat fresh here. And in the end, it is of course a “˜character’ study. But what really stands out is the moody look of Rotterdam van Diem creates as his tale unravels. The film is most easily compared to the works of great writers like Kafka and Dickens. You may not always know what is going on, but you’ll probably still enjoy it, at least until you realize how depressing it all is.

FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE (China)
It’s no secret that of director Chen Kaige’s films I think TEMPTRESS MOON is the best (if not one of the best films ever made). But for the purposes of this list I’m going to jump on the bandwagon and suggest the easier-to-get film FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE. This film is fantastic with a great epic story spanning several years over the Cultural Revolution in China following two Peking Opera performers. The acting is fantastic, the cinematography is fantastic — it’s an epic worthy of David Lean, the kind rarely seen in America anymore. It’s a great statement on the cultural change in China but put in a story that any audience member anywhere can easily become involved in. A bit of a warning though, the first third of the film shows the torture young children in Peking Opera camps normally had to endure. It may or may not be of interest to you that this portrayal is similar to Jackie Chan’s upbring.

HEAVENLY CREATURES (New Zealand)
I still believe this is by far Peter Jackson’s, director of LORD OF THE RINGS, finest achievement. An inventive tale of two young girls and their relationship with each other and their fantasies. Sure it’s in English so it’s a bit of a cheat, but New Zealand is still a foreign country after all. This film introduces us to Kate Winslet for the first time and she’s outstanding as is Melanie Lynsky (whose career since has not gone quite as well despite her talent). It’s especially enjoyable for filmlovers as you see fantasy lust scenes with computer generated characters like Orson Welles. The whole film explores creative use of CGI as created by the now famed WETA Workshop. And the story explores both the joys and dangers of a fantasy life and makes you feel a lot less weird if you’ve ever had one. And yes there’s all kinds of weird underage lesbian undertones (and overtones) but that’s hardly the point now is it?

LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE (Spain)
I’ve never met another person who has seen this film but I was happy to find out through a quick internet search that others who had liked it as much as I did. A quirky little picture about two lovers with palindromic names (Otto and Ana) and the fate that is more in control of their lives than they are. A fantastic, if not quirky, love story that spans a good amount of the globe. The story and the dialogue are often very matter-of-fact. Although it’s a love story it’s never too emotional or sentimentalized. But I really understand the connection between the characters and this style really works in a film where fate plays such a large role. And despite an assertion of the role of fate in our lives, the movie also posits if there’s any rhyme or reason to life at all. The film is very well made and the great locations add a lot to this universal tale which is told in an unorthodox way.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA (Hong Kong)
This movie might be a bad introduction to Hong Kong action films of this period since the quality of the fighting, production values, and even the story are better than a lot of other films in the genre. But in this film, Jet Li, fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, and director Tsui Hark are all in top form (and that’s saying something because these three guys are generally pretty good). The story surrounds the occupation of Hong Kong by the British and the somewhat common theme of martial arts versus guns. Jet Li plays Wong Fei Hung, a legendary character in China who has more films made about him than any other character in history. And while there are certainly moments of melodrama and as in all Hong Kong films all English speaking actors are comically horrible, it all comes down to the fights which are some of the most outstanding in genre history. As a side note, it’s always fun to watch IRON MONKEY after this one to see how Yuen Wo Ping weaves the same choreography themes into the prequel.

THE PROFESSIONAL (France)
Once again, I may be going against the grain here since of Luc Besson’s directing work LE FEMME NIKITA is usually considered the better film. But when sitting around on a Sunday afternoon, I’m a lot more likely to throw on THE PROFESSIONAL. A young Natalie Portman is great as the young girl taken in by the hitman Jeno Reno. Gary Oldman is deliciously almost-over-the-top as the villain. And Besson takes the stale tale of a lonely man and a spirited child finding meaning and happiness in each other and adds blood and bullets. Besson is always finding new ways of using his camera. His action scenes are great and the story is very well handled. Besson is (was?) one of the few men in the world making action film with gravity of dramas — trying to make the popcorn genre into an art.

THE ROAD HOME (China)
Of all of director Zhang Yimou’s works, many think that RAISE THE RED LANTERN is his masterpiece. I like that film quite a lot but have instead chosen to highlight THE ROAD HOME. From a director known for larger epic films like LANTERN, this small film is truly a delight and an achievement. It’s deceptively simple — a country story about a young girl and boy falling in love. It’s Zhang Ziyi’s film debut and she’s radiant, carrying the whole picture on her own. And director Zhang Yimou shows that he doesn’t need big tragedy, big sets and big stories to affect an audience. A scene where Ziyi’s character loses a hairpin is as heartbreaking as anything I’ve ever seen. This is a small film that packs a big emotional punch. One of the few times I’ve cried from happiness. A word of warning though, when I first saw this movie in the theater I was about to walk out after 10 minutes because the film starts in modern China in black and white before flashing back. So, give the film a little time to get going and you’ll be well rewarded.

RUN LOLA RUN (Germany)
I feel like there’s some backlash toward this film at this point, but certainly when it came out it was a jolt of high octane filmmaking. A film that honestly isn’t about very much but contains some good ideas in it’s use of animation and montage still holds up as a very enjoyable use of 80 minutes. The flood of imitators may seemingly have lessened this film’s impact but watching it again it’s as entertaining and full of energy as it ever was. Franke Potente is Lola, who has only minutes to find the money to keep her lover alive. She leads us through a time bending run of desperation that never lets up. The film shows us that small things in life can make as much a difference as the big ones. A great creative effort that will keep you pumped for hours as if you drank a whole vat of Jolt cola.

Your Turn
Now, as shocking as this may seem, I did not see every foreign film that came out in the 1990s. So let’s try a participatory exercise: I’m looking for your e-mails filled with your insightful opinions about what the best foreign film of the 90s truly is (Although I know you are all going to say CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, PRINCESS MONONOKE and ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, but that’s fine). And my next column, two weeks from now, will be a list of 5 or so of the most voted for, or simply most interesting sounding films. I’m very much looking forward to watching some things I haven’t seen (although probably not looking forward to finding the more obscure of your suggestions). You can hit me up at alisonveneto@yahoo.com.

Also a note to any of you in New York. The truly fantastic New York Asian Film Festival is running until July 1st. More info here. I have seen almost none of these films and am salivating with jealousy at this very moment.

IN TWO WEEKS: Your films. Reviewed.

June 22, 2006
Monkey Talk with Paul Dini: Bill Morrison

-By Paul Dini & RashyÂ

Quick Stop welcomes Paul Dini’s Monkey Talk (co-hosted by his irrepressible sock monkey son, Rashy) featuring an interview with comics artist/writer Bill Morrison (and plenty of Rashy shenanigans).

DOWNLOAD:
Monkey Talk with Paul Dini: Bill Morrison (560 x 420 – 120MB QuickTime)

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June 21, 2006
Mattt Potter’s Web Fun For Four Year Olds
Â -By Mattt PotterÂ Â

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Hey kids! Holy crap I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas! Well guess what? I got two fun filled christmas activities for you today. I am a little behind on getting this zebra shit together. So please give old Uncle Mattt a big break, okay kiddos? Because Uncle Mattt is old and his farts are starting to smell like that too. And it does not even bother me. Which is sad -Â it’s like I’m Laura Dern when she stuck her hand in that big pile of dinosaur shit in that one movie… Citizen Ruth.

That is where I am at. (All this was code for “sorry my page/section looks like the said stuff Laura Dern was sticking her hand in, I just ran out of time and last minute putting it up”).

So here we go! The first of many PODCASTs starring View Askew’s own Mattt Potter, co-starring the Scott Baio to my Erin Moran… because I love him so… Wil “Riker” Wilkins! A Podcast that explains itself when you click this linky dink here.

DOWNLOAD:
FAT MAN PANTS

***Special apologies go out to “Brian L” (we will call him that to keep his anonymity). We ran out of time to re-record a funnier podcast. Next one for sure it will be funny! PROMISE!****

(ALSO THIS IS NOT REALLY A PODCAST, MORE AN EXPLANATION OF WHAT OUR PODCASTS ARE GOING TO BE LIKE, THIS IS JUST AN MP3 TO DOWNLOAD AND LISTEN TO IF YOU ARE REALLY BORED!)

ALSO HERE IS A LINK TO a little trailer called COCOON 3 MOTHERFUCKER!

DOWNLOAD:
COCOON 3 TRAILER

***THOSE WHO KNOW WHAT THIS IS, YOU ARE WELCOME, THOSE THAT DON’T please take a picture of your confused face and send it to me at mailto:mattt@viewaskew.com so that I may laugh.****

Â

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June 21, 2006
Brat-halla #133: Norse Force – Basic Training

by Jeffery Stevenson and Seth Damoose with colors by Anthony Lee

Larger Sized Comic

For extras, visit the Brat-halla Web site!

Check out the preview to the Image comic Jeff writes…

E-MAIL WRITER | ABOUT JEFF | ABOUT SETH | BRAT-HALLA BLOG | BRAT-HALLA FORUM | ARCHIVES

June 21, 2006
Nocturnal Admissions: A Slacker Darkly

Hello, my name is D. K. Holm, and I am a cinemaholic.

I’ve liked movies since I was a kid. I quasi-studied film in college. When I got out of college, I helped start a film magazine (Cinemonkey; it lasted three issues). Ten years after that I got a job reviewing movies for an “alternative” weekly. And ten years after that, I left that paper for another, the late, lamented PDXS, where I worked for another four years. After a brief interregnum, I landed at MoviePoopShoot.com, which this week mutates, to the relief of a nation, into QuickStopEntertainment.com. So I’ve been at this game for a long time, without necessarily progressing, advancing, or improving.

And why did I stick with it? Because I am a cinemaholic. I need to have movies in my life. I need to be viewing them (preferably for free), commentating on them, saving them (hoarding them is more like it), and then turning around and watching more movies. When I am not viewing a DVD or sitting in a movie theater I am reading about movies, either in Variety, Sight and Sound, or in a new film book from an academic press. One thing I am currently not inclined to do is make them, primarily because it is too fucking hard. Now, I’ve been in a couple of movies but “¦ well, for that you can consult my IMDB page.

So consequently, you, the QuickStopEntertainment browser, are the beneficiary. In this column, a blend of all the stuff I was doing at MPS, I’ll cover current big screen releases, DVDs, film books, TV shows I’ve been watching, and whatever else film related comes into my head. Let the quick stops begin!

Taking the Red Pill

A SCANNER DARKLY
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don’t want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don’t read on.]

Keanu Reeves is taking the pill again. Over the past several years, Reeves has evolved into the premiere sci-fi film anchor, the guy whose presence gets the film made. He alternates these parts with roles in romantic comedies (House by the Lake is opening near-simultaneously) which probably pay the bills that allow him to appear in Constantine, the Matrix movies, and Johnny Mnemonic (though now Reeves is moving into the crime film genre).

One wonders if the long gestating A Scanner Darkly, based on the cult novel by Philip K. Dick that many people have tried to film over the past two decades, would have gotten off the ground without Reeves’s presence.

The result is that Richard Linklater’s film is about 25 per cent science fiction, 50 per cent stoner tale, 100 per cent animated and 100 per cent live action (because of the rotoscoping process, which requires live action footage that is then drawn over frame by frame at a cost of what is broadcast as 500 person hours per frame). I was curious to see if the rotoscoping process was even necessary to the story, but yes, it is, as it allows fantastical moments to be seamlessly installed into the narrative, moments such as various hallucinations and the bizarre technology that Dick imagined, such as the electronic suit that undercover cops use to cloud their identity, and which allows the key characters to shift personas.

Dick’s source novel is ambitious, flawed, heartfelt, and paranoid all at once and the movie is a reasonably accurate adaptation of the source text, even down to the valedictory list of drug causalities that Dick included at the end of his novel. It concerns Bob Arctor (Reeves), one of Dick’s characteristically jangly named characters (Anderton?). Bob lives in a suburban ranch house in southern California, which he shares with a few other stoners, Barris (Robert Downey, Jr.), in an exquisite performance), and Luckman (the cleverly cast Woody Harrelson). “Stoners” is probably not the proper term, as they take a speed like drug. A frequent visitor is Freck (Rory Cochrane), the very definition of an addict, with hyperactive eyes and mobile hair that hides and reveals his face like a curtain. But Bob is also known as Fred, to the police surveillance team he works for, We first meet Fred, really a cloaked Bob, giving a talk to a business group about the problems of undercover life and the evils of drugs, especially a deadly new drug called Substance D, nicknamed simply Death. It reminds me of the Red Death drug in Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, but is really the speed that Dick and numerous friends were taking back in the 1970s, though Dick anticipated the current Meth crisis. Bob eventually ends up as “Bruce,” working the fields that create Substance D for the corporation, New Path, which rules the whole endless cycle of abuse, from addition to recovery to supply and back again. Meanwhile, Bob loves Donna (Winona Ryder), a fellow addict whom he wrestles internally over betraying, and who is sexually frigid, though that proves to be associated with her own secret life.

Dick’s vision of corporate criminality, one basically of fascism in its true definition, in which business and government join hands, is a product of the paranoid 1970s, just like the films Parallax View The Conversation, and Blow Out, but no less plausible for that. After a long series of directors attached to A Scanner Darkly over the decades (including, Terry Gilliam and, I think, Brian De Palma), Linklater, it turns out, proves to be the perfect helmer for the project (the film is co-produced by Steven Soderbergh, who, given his affection for ’70s cinema, might also been a good choice). Linklater is also a child of the 1970s and feels the paranoia in his bones. He also simply knows drug culture, at least cinematically. With three perfectly cast actors at the heart of the film, who each represent in their own way aspects of popular drug culture, real or imagined, this is a film that feels true, observed, prescient and retrospective at the same time. Despite, or maybe because of, the rotoscoping shield, the actors give their best performances in years.

The trailer says the film is set seven years in the future, but it feels like “now,” and the ’70s at the same time. Surely we have all been to a house like Bob’s. Dirty, cramped, cluttered, where the couch is the center of activity, where food scraps in the kitchen age like archeological finds, and no one seems to have any visible means of support. The non-stop “party” gravitates from couch to back yard and back depending on the weather, the light, and the underlying sociological rules of engagement. The urge is to be always “on” but without the confidence that anyone is listening and almost always in slow motion, and occasionally someone will marshal their resources and come out with a speculative riff that has everyone howling with laughter, and which, if you’re lucky, you remember enough to put into a novel or screenplay later. Linklater, under the influence of Dick, captures this quality of life perfectly, along with its subsidiary settings, the broad bright streets of suburban arteries that serve malls and the diner. These characters have no background, no past, no future. They are collections of base animal needs augmented with intellectual pretensions.

A home away from home the car, and it is curious to see how car-oriented the movie is (I didn’t get that sense from the book). The automobile represents vitality, man’s god-given right to go where he chooses. It’s an emblem of social and financial success. But like almost everything else in the film, the car is ultimately unreliable, even though all you really need it for is to go get more drugs. The car is there to suggest that, in this drug culture, mobility doesn’t matter much, and the car grows literally and figuratively etiolated as the drug users slump deeper into inactivity. (Animals and cats is another theme or visual motif of the film.)

An important component of both Dick and Linklater’s Scanner is the “vision of the future” in which we are all monitored at all times, a state of being that doesn’t seem so “future.” Bob goes to “work” where he sits in from of a console of monitors that show his own life passing before his eyes, via the numerous cameras hidden in his house, and he also sees what goes on when he isn’t there, such as the odd drug overdose. Science fiction that was yet plausible when the book was published, this now feels like “reality,” and it is difficult to conceive of this kind of monitoring lessening. All that saves us from complete 1984-style observation is the X factor, the human element, i.e., the kind of incompetence that we see at airports and in military strikes and police stings.

On the one hand the sci-fi elements have a Cronenberg-level viscosity, but on another broad level A Scanner Darkly is really just another movie about the workaday world, like Clockwatchers, American Beauty or Office Space (I call this genre, if it is one, Heroic Alienation). Bob is a guy doing a job, stuck with friends who don’t work and drain him of his resources, and with a girl friend who won’t fuck him We finally get to see Ryder’s rack on screen, by the way; it’s just that it’s rendered as a cartoon. But that is also the point of the rotoscoping. It puts you another step away from the characters, which allows you to view them “objectively,” while paradoxically making them seem cozier, the way that cartoons appeal to the kid in us. I think that this is a film that people will be watching over and over in years to come, because they characters feel familiar and the setting is so real (and also because of Downey’s performance).

Linklater had the remarkable, Soderberghian happenstance of having two films at Cannes this year. Though he didn’t win anything, the fact symbolized his progress since Slackers. It’s a prolific career but also one like Michael Winterbottom’s (or indeed Soderbergh’s) in which you never know what kind of film he’s going to make next. That’s because, like these other two directors, Linklater has a big appetite: for films of all kinds, for knowledge, for people of all kinds.

Linklater will go down in history, of course, for popularizing the term “slacker” and giving a taxonomy for the type. In fact in the audio commentary track to Slacker (The Criterion Collection, No. 247, 1991, 100 minutes, color, NR, full frame, DD stereo in English with English subtitles, static musical menu with 32-chapter scene selection, 68-page insert with transfer info, pix, credits, memorabilia, and essays, two discs, dual disc folder in a slip case, $39.95, released on Tuesday, September 14, 2004), Linklater gives the best ever definition of a slacker, which he calls an “active non-participant,” which is perfect (he says this in chapter eight). Linklater also makes the key point that slackers are, contrary to popular belief, not lazy or inert. All the kids in the film have something going, be it a JFK conspirary book, or a band, or a street hustle, or something. What’s also amazing is that, though the film was shot in July and August of 1989, everyone in it looks like you could run into them on the way to today’s neighborhood coffee shop.

Indeed, the movie is blessed. At one point, a girl comes up to try and sell two of the slackers Madonna’s pap smear. Fortunately, Linklater and his collaborators picked Madonna for the job, and not some other contemporaneous flash in the pan, for it is she who has lasted.

In fact, overall, Linklater is inspiring. For one thing he appears to be a legitimately nice guy, from the sound of his own audio commentary track and from what others say about him (I met Linklater once, in a cigarette-residue filled club called the X-Ray cafÃ© long gone now, though there is a film about this club that I happen to be in – when he was promoting Dazed and Confused; it gave me the chance to ask him why there was a car with Oregon license plates in Slacker [it turned out to be his parent’s car, borrowed for the shot, and they now live in Oregon]). And he did it, he actually got it done, gather a cast and crew and got them all to work on his script.

And he seems to be “one of us.” Like me, for example, he is a big fan of Ulysses, which one of the characters reads from. Also, like me, he doesn’t like to do anything, and on the yak track he says that the indolent guy in the bathrobe in chapter 12, who doesn’t like to leave his house, doesn’t like to go hiking or to the lake, or any other kind of “premeditated fun” (except fucking) is just like him, Linklater. Well, his views reflect mine as well.

If you have grown to love this film as I have, Criterion’s two-disc set is a must-have. Aside from the movie itself, which has three audio commentary tracks (Linklater’s, the cast’s and the crew’s), the set has a wealth of supplements. On disc one, there is “No Longer Not Yet” (script excerpts), “Showing Life” (audition interviews, with a text intro by casting director Anne Walker-McBay, itself reprinted from the Slacker book), “Taco-and-a-Half After 10,” a compilation of home movies made during the filming, “Les Amis,” the trailer for a film-in-progress about one of the film’s locations, the trailer, and ” Shooting From the Hip,” a gallery containing more than 100 stills and snapshots from the shoot. Linklater’s commentary track is one of the best, ever.

Disc Two provides a wonderful archive of earlier Linklater films along with his views on “slacker culture.” This disc has two films, the feature length It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (with a director commentary) and the short film Woodshock . In addition there is the working script to the film, which includes additional scenes, information about the Austin Film Society, which Linklater co-founded, the film’s trailer, and footage from the 10th anniversary Slackerreunion.
Austin, Texas must be a great place to live. You’ve got the seat of state government lodged in a college town; you’ve got Whole Foods, Harry Knowles, the South by Southwest festival, Robert Rodriguez and, once a year or so, Tarantino in town to show films from his personal collection. You’ve got Austin City Limits, Mexican free-tailed bats, Charles Whitman, and the Zilker Tree.

The Zilker Tree, a lighted faux Christmas tree, figures in Linklater’s next film, Dazed and Confused (The Criterion Collection, No. 336, 1993, 102 minutes, color, NR, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD 5.1 and DD stereo in English with English subtitles, DTS Surround, static musical menu with 32-chapter scene selection, 72-page insert with chapter titles, transfer info, pix, credits, memorabilia, and essays, plus a mini poster, two discs, dual disc folder in a slip case, $39.95, released on Tuesday, June 6, 2006), by all accounts a terrible experience for the director (it’s his, if you will, Mall Rats). Universal promised to release a director’s version of the film, but came out only with a bare bones disc in 1998 and a “flashback edition” in 2004, with nine deleted scenes, some faux PSAs, and a few other extras. This mammoth Criterion set supersedes all previous discs.

Write what you know, they say, and what Americans know is high school. Thus, from American Graffiti to That ’70s Show and about a million After School Specials. For most Americans high school is the defining moment, and for the underclass, high school is perhaps the most traumatizing event of their lives, like being in a concentration camp. Both factions never get over it. I suspect, from his chat on the Dazed disc, that in his HS years Linklater was part of the elite (he was on the football team, for example), so here, history is being written by the winner, though also an observant, sympathetic one. When it first came out, the buzz on the film was that Dazed was “amorphous” with too many characters, and that the ritual humiliation of younger kids by older was emblematic of the totalitarian nature of small town American life.

In the last chapter of Slacker‘s audio commentary track, Linklater gives a poignant, realistic account of what he learned about being a director, what he learned about himself, and how the personas clashed and / or helped each other. Slacker cost only about $20 thousand, but a studio paid $6 million for Dazed with all the attendant interference, and Linklater needed everything he learned to get through the trauma. I’m sorry that happened to him, but in the process Linklater managed to create a minor masterpiece of Americana while also mastering another key element of the director’s craft, casting. Look at the list of people that Linklater discovered or highlighted for this movie: Parker Posey, Matthew McConaughey, Anthony Rapp, Milla Jovovich, Joey Lauren Adams, Ben Affleck, Nicky Katt and RenÃ©e Zellweger (who doesn’t have any lines, but walks around a lot). The film is probably not quite a the cusp yet where you watch it and go, Wow, is she in this?!

Disc No. 1 has an amiable commentary from Linklater, and 25 minutes worth of deleted scenes, some with the visuals only (First National Bank, “Banned From the School,” Smoking in the Girls’ Room, “When They Lost, We Lost, “Narcing on a Friend, Family Plot, “Are the Good Times Worth It?,” “Where’s My Drugs, Man?,” Eighth Graders, Going Into Ninth, “You Little Slut!,” Parents Without Plans, Global Thermonuclear War, Cutting in the Keg Line, Bumfuckville, Tailgate, “Knew Then What I Know Now,” Way Me the Show to Go Home), and the original theatrical trailer. The deleteds tend to make the finished film less “philosophical.”

Disc No. 2 comes in three large sections. It kicks off with an hour long documentary “Making Dazed,” which aired on American Movie Classics. It’s a very, very good retrospective “making of,” celebrating the film while also being frank about production issues, and much of the other footage on this second disc consists of outtakes from this project. Casting director Don Phillips is revealed as a key component here, as he found most of the film’s young actors, as he did on Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “Making” is followed by an auditions reel (Michelle Burke, Rory Cochrane, Adam Goldberg, Cole Hauser, Christin Hinojosa, Nicky Katt, Jason London, Deena Martin, Matthew McConaughey, Anthony Rapp, Marissa Ribisi, Wiley Wiggins), and concludes with “Beer Bust at the Moon Tower,” a compilation of mixed material, on set footage and the actors being interviewed in character. It starts out with “Character Interviews,” which were used during rehearsal, each actor improvising in their roles (Sabrina Davis, Don Dawson, Cynthia Dunn, Randall “Pink” Floyd, Jodi Kramer, Mitch Kramer, Darla Marks, Mike Newhouse, Fred O’Bannion, Benny O’Donnell, Tony Olson, Ron Slater, Shavonne Wright). This is followed by “Cast & Director Interviews,” shot during the length of the production (Linklater Before Shooting Parker Posey, Ben Affleck (1992), Affleck & Cole Hauser, Nicky Katt & Adam Goldberg, Rory Cochrane, Wiley Wiggins and Catherine Martin, Wiley Wiggins, Michelle Burke and Christine Harnos, Christin Hinojosa, Linklater at End of Shoot, Linklater, Matthew McConaughey and Don Phillips). Finally, there is “Behind-the-Scenes Footage” (Every Other Decade, Muscle-Car Driving Lessons, The Costumes, The Boys, The Girls, “Love Those Redheads,” Retaliation on O’Bannion, Buying Beer, Crest Hotel, Picture Day, Start Acting,” The Props, Wiley’s First Day Back at School, Reunion Clips), a wide collection of all kinds of material that includes rehearsals, costume checks, interviews, and finally some reunion clips (of which I could have used a lot more, both here and in “Making Dazed“).

I want to say that Linklater has evolved into one of our best directors, but he started out pretty damn strong, as even his “student” films show, and his career, in its diversity, puts him up with Soderbergh, Winterbottom, Rodriguez, and Tarantino. What these directors have in common is that they are all like Howard Hawks. Within the studio system, Hawks made among the best entries in almost all the genres, including mysteries, aviation, comedies, slapstick, and westerns. These guys are like Hawks, making the best examples of the films in the wider range of genres that exist now, political films, neo-noir, comic book adaptations, and so on. We are all Hawksians now.

June 20, 2006
DVD Late Show: June 20, 2006

June 20, 2006

Welcome to the DVD Late Show. I’m your host, Christopher Mills, a struggling writer, compulsive DVD collector and fanatical film buff with a particular fondness for the imaginative, offbeat, obscure and unusual. For a little more than a year, I’ve been reviewing and previewing cult, genre and exploitation films on DVD ““ covering the gamut of cult classics, vintage sci-fi, foreign freakshows, sleazy sexploitation, Spaghetti Westerns, kaiju eiga, giallos, unusual animation, forgotten horrors, late night TV shows, and oddball action flicks ““ and I’m not going to stop now!

Originally, this particular column was going to be devoted exclusively to more of the horror DVDs that have been piling up on my To Be Viewed/Reviewed stack, but that was before I knew this was going to be the first DVD Late Show under the new Quick Stop Entertainment management/brand. It made sense, therefore, to instead review a wider variety of new and upcoming DVD titles to give newcomers a better idea of the scope of this column.

So, without further ado”¦the biggest Late Show yet!

In the Sixties and Seventies, England’s Amicus Films produced a string of horror anthology films, using some of the top genre stars of the era and screenplays by such legendary horror scribes as Robert Bloch (PSYCHO, TORTURE GARDEN). ASYLUM (1972), directed by Hammer Films veteran Roy Ward Baker (SCARS OF DRACULA), is a particularly entertaining entry in the series.

A young psychiatrist (Robert Powell, THE ASPHYX) interviews four inmates in a mental asylum to try and determine which one was the former director of the institution before going mad. Is it the wronged wife (Barbara Parkins) whose affair ended in grisly murder? The poverty-stricken tailor (Barry Morse, SPACE: 1999) who was commissioned to make a suit out of an unusual glowing material for a mysterious client (horror legend Peter Cushing)? The schizophrenic beauty (Charlotte Rampling of ZARDOZ) who insists that her possibly imaginary friend (Britt Ekland, THE WICKER MAN) really killed her brother? Or the mad genius (Herbert Lom, Hammer’s PHANTOM OF THE OPERA) who builds homicidal toy robots with human heads?

Loaded with experienced horror performers, a dry wit and PG-rated gore and thrills, ASYLUM is a fun and rewarding trip back to the days when horror films had grown-up casts and clever scripts. Sure, the effects may be hokey by today’s standards, but that’s part of the nostalgic charm.

Previously issued some years ago by Image Entertainment on a bare bones disc with a soft, scratchy, incorrectly framed print, ASYLUM is about to be re-issued by Dark Sky Films in a vastly-superior edition. Featuring a new, improved transfer culled from original vault materials, and presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, this shock cinema staple has never looked better, with strong, well-balanced colors and impressive detail.

Dark Sky has also seen fit to include a few choice extras, including a full-length, informative commentary track by director Baker and cameraman Neil Binney. There’s also a short featurette called “Inside the Fear Factory,” that chronicles the history of Amicus and includes interviews with some of the studio’s prime movers, including the late Max J. Rosenberg, the president of the company. Additionally, there are bios of the cast and crew, a still gallery, and trailers/TV spots for ASYLUM and Dark Sky’s other upcoming Amicus titles.

My only criticism of the release is that screenwriter Robert Bloch’s name is misspelled on the DVD sleeve as “Robert Black.” Considering Bloch’s status as one of the all-time great writers of horror fiction, the mistake is particularly unfortunate.

ASYLUM will be hitting the shelves on July 25. If you’re a fan of vintage horror, you’ll want to pick it up, and if you happen to own the earlier Image version ““ as I do ““ it’s definitely worth buying again in this new edition. It’s that much better.

Regular readers of this column know that I dig those “Women In Prison” (WIP) flicks of the Seventies and early Eighties, the raunchier and more perverted the better. Well, I think I’ve just discovered the sleaziest WIP movie ever made. Oswaldo de Oliveira’s insane, utterly over-the-top BARE BEHIND BARS (a/k/a A PRISÃƒO, 1980) may very well be the ultimate in chicks ‘n chains cinema.

As usual, there’s no real plot to speak of, but all the usual elements of the WIP genre are present, and taken to the extreme. You’ve got beautiful naked convicts, the lusty lesbian warden, a perverted prison nurse, horny guards, full-body cavity searches, sapphic shower sex, rapes, torture, castrations, car chases and white slavery”¦ but where in every other WIP flick they seem to stop just short of delivering the goods, BARE BEHIND BARS goes all the way, with copious bloodletting and hardcore sex scenes.

Yet, mixed in with all the carnality and carnage, there’s a definite and deliberate sense of the absurd. Obviously, while everybody involved was determined to leave no exploitation opportunity unfulfilled, there’s still the feeling that no one involved was taking it all that seriously. Pineapples are used as sex toys, a rubber dildo makes its way from cell to cell in amusing ways, and a man’s severed sex organ is tossed to a stray dog to get it to stop barking. No, really. And it’s funny.

Well, it made me laugh.

Blue Underground’s DVD of BARE BEHIND BARS presents the film in a surprisingly sharp and impressive 1.66:1 anamorphic transfer that belies the film’s 26-year age. Every decadent detail is crystal sharp and print damage is virtually non-existent The Brazilian import is dubbed into English and the movie is presented unrated, although BU has designed the packaging to include a huge “X” on the front cover. The only extra is a theatrical trailer, but I can’t complain. The movie is the real bonus here.

It’s not for prudes or the squeamish, but if you’re a fan of WIP films and feel that they never quite go far enough, BARE BEHIND BARS just might be what you’re looking for.

THE BEAST MUST DIE, a 1972 offering from England’s Amicus Studios, has one of the coolest B-movie, genre-blending plots I’ve ever come across. Directed by Paul Annette, from a screenplay by Michael Winder, BEAST is based on a short story by famed SF writer James Blish.

Millionaire sportsman Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart, COTTON COMES TO HARLEM) has bagged every sort of big game trophy there is”¦ except one. He summons six of his acquaintances to his isolated (and heavily video monitored) country estate for the weekend. Over dinner, he announces that he’s come to the conclusion that one of his guests (which include the late greats, Peter Cushing and Charles Gray) is a werewolf, and come moonrise, he will hunt it down and kill it.

Thus, the stage is set for a movie that’s part Agatha Christie’s TEN LITTLE INDIANS and part THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. There’s also a touch of blaxploitation, and bit of Bond, with Newcliffe’s high-tech security gadgets and handy helicopter. Peter Cushing (CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, STAR WARS) spouts tons of inconsistent werewolf lore, Charles Gray (THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, ROCKY HORROR) looks annoyed, Lockhart overplays his part in an entertaining manner, and the rest of the cast dutifully subject themselves to one inconclusive “werewolf test” after another. Plot holes abound, and there’s some not-entirely-effective day-for-night photography, but there’s a nice fake-out twist near the end and the movie’s never dull.

And, did I mention the “Werewolf Break?” It’s a gimmick that would have made William Castle proud. About an hour and ten minutes into the movie, the narrative stops, and there’s a 30-second break where the viewer is encouraged to pick which of the possible suspects is the werewolf. Not as easy as you’d think, since the werewolf’s identity is so arbitrary that you’d think Kevin Williamson wrote the screenplay, but it’s a fun, nostalgic gag ““ even if the director hated it.

The werewolf in this film is portrayed by a large black dog with a fur stole tied around its neck, but it kinda works. The music by Douglas Gamley is very “early Seventies,” but it’s effective enough ““ actually, the whole movie is pretty effective if you approach it in the right frame of mind.

Previously issued by Image Entertainment in a bare-bones edition with a decidedly scratchy, battered print, Dark Sky’s forthcoming reissue is a marked improvement in all ways. Beginning with a new anamorphic 1.78:1 widescreen transfer from a nearly pristine vault print source, Dark Sky has delivered a great, fully packed disc. There’s a commentary track by director Annett, two featurettes ““ Annett’s tribute to Peter Cushing and the behind-the-scenes “Directing The Beast” ““ a still gallery, cast and crew bios and the same trailers and TV spots that are on the company’s ASYLUM disc.

Hitting stores on July 25, THE BEAST MUST DIE is a fun, if flawed, fright flick and I recommend it. As with ASYLUM, if you bought the earlier disc, you’ll want to upgrade.

The long-awaited Michele Soavi classic CEMETERY MAN (a/k/a DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, 1994) finally makes its DVD debut, courtesy of Anchor Bay.

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett, MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING) is a cemetery watchman who spends his nights waiting for the dead to rise from their graves so he can pop a cap in their heads and re-bury them. But after a graveside sexual encounter with a kinky widow (the gorgeous Anna Falchi, in three roles) ends badly, Francesco begins to reconsider his place in the world, and starts to wonder if it might just save time and effort to blow people’s brains out while they’re still alive.

Then, of course, there’s Francesco’s assistant, the obese and imbecilic Gnaghi (FranÃ§ois Hadji-Lazaro), who’s carrying on a love affair with the re-animated, decapitated head of the local mayor’s daughter”¦

Filled with darkly poetic imagery and macabre black humor, CEMETERY MAN is a genuine classic of Italian horror cinema, and a truly unique film experience. Based on a novel by European comic creator Tiziano Sclavi, director Michele Soavi (STAGE FRIGHT, THE CHURCH) has crafted possibly the most original horror film of the 1990’s.

Anchor Bay presents the film in a sharp, clean 1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. There’s been some online debate as to whether the aspect ratio on this edition is as Soavi intended, but the framing looks fine to me. The dubbed English track is presented in a clear Dolby Digital 5.1.

Anchor Bay has included a well-produced, new featurette called “Death is Beautiful,” which features interviews with director Soavi and star Anna Falchi, and some great behind-the-scenes info, a Michele Soavi text bio, and the original theatrical trailer (in Italian). There’s also a nice little 8-page booklet with liner notes by Michael Felsher.

For those who have been eagerly awaiting a Region 1 release of this important film, you’re definitely going to want to pick this up.

Dark Sky Films have just unleashed another in their Drive-In Double Feature series upon the DVD collecting public with two Sixties color sci-fi oddities, CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS/WAR BETWEEN THE PLANETS (1962/1965).

CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS is a surprisingly cerebral and cinematically inept sci-fi treatise on tolerance set some decades after a nuclear war, when mankind has created a race of blue-skinned ‘bots to help rebuild civilization. Disparagingly called “clickers,” the robots continue to evolve, becoming more human-like. But not everyone is happy about that. A fanatical group of humans called The Order of Flesh and Blood is dedicated to halting the ‘bots’ evolution and preserving human purity. One of its leaders, Cragis (Don Megowan, THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US) is surprised to discover that his own sister is living “in rapport” with a “clicker,” and goes to confront her. But there are greater surprises in store for Cragis”¦

Wesley Barry’s direction is static, giving the film the feel of a stage play, with very little cutting and only a few (very long) scenes, made up almost entirely of dialogue. While thematically, the movie could be seen as a precursor to Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER, cinematically, it’s about on the level of an Ed Wood film. In fact, Dudley Manlove, one of the stars of Wood’s PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, plays one of the chatty “clickers.”

As a side note for genre film buffs, the legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who decades earlier had created the original Frankenstein and Wolf Man make-ups for Universal, devised the bald, blue-skin look of the “clickers.” Sadly, CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS was one of the genius make-up maestro’s last credits.

The second feature (actually, the first on the menu but not on the packaging) is Antonio Margheriti’s (CASTLE OF BLOOD, TAKE A HARD RIDE) colorful space opera, WAR BETWEEN THE PLANETS. One of four inter-related sci-fi potboilers Margheriti directed in the mid-Sixties, WAR tells the sometimes-exciting tale of the Earth space force’s battle with a rogue, living planet ““ which just happens to be on a collision course with Earth. Filled with delightfully cheesy miniature spaceships, space stations and model cities, not to mention square-jawed heroes and the Continental cuties they live love and fight for, WAR is a Fifties’ pulp magazine story come to vivid life. It’s a little talky at the beginning, but it pays off at the end, when our heroes land on and descend into the (literal) bowels of the wandering planet. Great fun, if you’re in the right mood.

This second volume in Dark Sky Films’ “Drive-In Double Feature” line offers both films in nearly pristine 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, absolutely rock-solid color transfers, with virtually no visible specks or scratches. WAR BETWEEN THE PLANETS is dubbed into English and both films are presented in 2.0 Dolby mono. Dark Sky has the disc set up so you can watch the two films as one long drive-in program ““ complete with trailers and snack bar intermission promos ““ or individually. The packaging is great, too.

Now that MGM seems to have all but abandoned its line of Midnight Movie double features discs, Dark Sky has helped fill the void with their own high quality, classic cult double-feature line. CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS/WAR BETWEEN THE PLANETS is a satisfying two-shot of drive-in nostalgia and highly recommended for vintage sci-fi fans.

To tie in with Warner Bros. recent special edition of the 1967 World War II movie classic, THE DIRTY DOZEN, MGM has dug into its vaults and unearthed a couple of late Eighties TV-movie sequels and issued them as a double feature, THE DIRTY DOZEN: THE DEADLY MISSION/THE FATAL MISSION (1987/1988).

In THE DEADLY MISSION, Major Wright (Telly Savalas, replacing Lee Marvin, who originated the role in the theatrical feature and one previous TV sequel) must assemble a new 12-man team of military convicts for a suicide mission behind enemy lines. In this case, the target is a secret nerve gas factory and their orders are to blow it up and extract the scientists working there so the Nazis can’t try again. It’s pretty much a retread of the theatrical film, but Savalas makes an acceptable lead (he played one of the convicts in the 1967 original, so there’s at least a tenuous connection) and the new dozen includes such familiar faces as Randall “Tex” Cobb (RAISING ARIZONA), Gary Graham (TV’s ALIEN NATION), Bo Svenson (WALKING TALL PART 2) and a couple of Van Pattens. With authentic-looking Yugoslavian locations, fairly high production values, and solid direction by Lee H. Katzin, DEADLY MISSION is a better-than-average TV adventure movie.

Set near the end of the war, THE FATAL MISSION requires Maj. Wright (Savalas again) to assemble one last team of convict commandos to take out a trainload of Nazis on their way to the Middle East to establish a new base of power for the continuation of the Third Reich. The titular dozen this time includes Erik Estrada (DO OR DIE, CHiPs), John Matusak (ONE MAN FORCE), Ernie Hudson (GHOSTBUSTERS, CONGO), Jeff Conaway (GREASE, BABYLON 5), and ““ in a first for the franchise ““ Heather Thomas, the blonde bikini-clad babe from THE FALL GUY. The story, while following the established formula, is a bit different this time, with an enemy agent imbedded in the group and the presence of a woman on the team (Thomas is surprisingly good here). Katzin’s direction is once again efficient and briskly paced.

MGM’s two-disc package is bare bones but serviceable, with each movie on its own single-sided disc, presented in their original full screen TV aspect ratios. Sound is Dolby Digital stereo, and the movies are unrated. There are no extra features whatsoever.

If you’re a fan of the franchise, it might be worth picking up: you get two decent DIRTY DOZEN teleflicks at a low retail price. If you’re not a fan, well, you wouldn’t want to see them anyway, right?

Another legendary B-movie finally makes its way to DVD thanks to those twisted geniuses at Dark Sky Films. In fact, for diehard fans of vintage drive-in cinema, FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER (1965) is probably the most essential DVD release of the year.

Martians in a flying saucer keep blowing up America’s rockets because they think they’re hostile missiles. Confused, and determined to stop losing valuable flesh and blood astronauts, NASA sends a remarkably advanced (and certainly expensive) android named “Frank Saunders” (Robert Reilly) on their next space mission. The Martians shoot him down too, of course, causing his capsule to crash land in Puerto Rico. In one of those classic cosmic coincidences, the Martians land there too and hit the beach to round up bikini babes for breeding purposes. Frank, damaged in the crash, wanders the Puerto Rican landscape in a malfunctioning, murderous daze while his creator Dr. Steele (James Karen, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD) searches for him from the back of a Vespa scooter. Eventually, all the above parties collide, and the space age Frankenstein (get it?) must go toe-to-toe with the Martians’ shaggy Space Monster (Bruce Glover ““ Crispin’s dad ““ who also plays one of the Martian crewmembers).

Padded with tons of stock footage ““ close to half the running time, by my estimate ““ and loaded with camp acting, shoddy sets, military surplus costumes and nearly non-existent production values, FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER may well be the cheapest, most absurd, inane, inept and oddly enjoyable exploitation flick of the Sixties.

It’s pure, giddy fun, right up there with Ed Wood’s “classics.”

Dark Sky’s DVD is a delight, with a remarkable 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that is amazingly sharp and clear (except for the extensive stock footage, which, understandably, varies considerably). Audio is clear Dolby Digital 2.0 mono. For extras, Dark Sky has included a 16-page booklet with liner notes by the film’s screenwriter, a still gallery, and the original theatrical trailer. Even the cover art is great, reminiscent of Sixties monster mags.

Highly recommended for aficionados of “bad” movies.

I vaguely recall kinda liking the first UNDERWORLD flick a couple years ago (although that was probably just because I enjoyed looking at the fetching Kate Beckinsale in that skintight black rubber suit), so I was pleased when Sony’s UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION (2005) showed up in my mailbox. (Woo-hoo! More Kate!) As it turned out, while it’s no classic, I found director Len Wiseman’s sequel to be a fairly entertaining flick.

For one thing, the plot is simpler. The protagonists of the first film ““ sexy fugitive Deathdealer (vampire) Selene (Kate Beckinsale, VAN HELSING) and Lycan (werewolf) hybrid Michael (Scott Speedman, FELICITY) ““ find themselves unwittingly embroiled in a quest by the world’s very first vampire ““ a bat-winged badass named Marcus (Tony Curran, FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX) ““ to revive his twin brother William, the world’s first werewolf, and unleash him on the world.

Beautifully shot and designed, UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION drops much of the over-complicated plotting and political underpinnings of the original film in favor of a straightforward monster mash. Personally, I approve. Beckinsale looks great in black latex and the creatures are extremely well designed. In fact, albino werewolf William is by far the coolest looking CGI lycanthrope I’ve yet seen in a film.

Sony’s DVD is a nice package, with a sterling 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer and a window-rattling Dolby 5.1 surround mix. They’ve also included a slew of informative featurettes, covering everything from the film’s stunt work and visual effects to sound design. Director Len Wiseman contributes a lively commentary, and there’s a music video by the band Atreyu (wasn’t that the kid in THE NEVER-ENDING STORY?).

For fans of the original film, Kate Beckinsale’s butt, or monster mayhem in general, UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION is a good bet for a weekend rental. I liked it.

From director Jun Fukuda and special effects wiz Nakano Teruyoshi, the creators of several Seventies’ Godzilla epics, comes Toho Studios’ 1977 interstellar adventure, WAR IN SPACE (WAKUSEI DAISENSO).

Conceived by Toho Studios as a STAR WARS rip-off, the final film owes more to Gerry Anderson’s British television shows UFO and SPACE: 1999 and the Japanese studios’ own Sixties sci-fi thrillers like ATRAGON and BATTLE IN OUTER SPACE than to George Lucas’ intergalactic epic.

In the (then-future) year of 1988, UFOs attack the Earth. While the invaders are devastating New York, Paris, Tokyo and the world’s other major cities, a team of scientists race to complete a space battleship called Ghoten. Once launched, the ship and its crew head for Venus, to counterattack the aliens. Along the way, the only female crewmember (Yuko Asano) is kidnapped by the green-skinned, Roman-helmeted alien leader and his horned wookie, UFOs engage in high-speed dogfights with the Earth fighters above the barren Venusian landscape, and space ships explode impressively.

The old school, handcrafted special effects work ““ finely detailed miniatures on mostly-invisible wires ““ is expertly executed and effective. The spaceships, in a decidedly Asian conceit, resemble sea-faring vessels, and the alien flagship is specifically modeled on ancient Roman sailing ship designs. The Ghoten features a huge drill bit (shades of ATRAGON!) and cool, giant revolvers that fire missiles and are also used to launch sleek, one-man fighters. The UFOs are original and unique. Made on a fraction of STAR WARS’ budget, WAR IN SPACE demonstrates that ingenuity and imagination can carry the day even when money’s tight.

Discotek Media’s DVD presents WAR IN SPACE for the first time on U.S. home video (I believe) with a brilliant 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, completely restored and remastered for this edition. Audio options include both the original Japanese language track and an English dub, presented in both the original mono and in a newly created 5.1 remix. The Japanese track is preferable, as it’s stronger and more robust. Discotek has also included a bevy of cool bonus features, including a fascinating video interview with special effects director Nakano Teruyoshi, the original theatrical trailer, an extensive still gallery, and an informative booklet that includes poster art, spaceship design sketches and informative liner notes.

(NOTE: Some of the first batch of WAR IN SPACE discs released had an encoding problem causing playback issues. Discotek is aware of the problem, and if you get one of the defective DVDs, they’ll replace it for you for free. Visit their website at www.diskotekmedia.com for more information.)

As a fan of outer space epics and Japanese fantasy films, I’ve been wanting to see this movie ever since I saw the poster art in a 1978 issue of Fantastic Films magazine. It took almost 30 years, but I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a terrific presentation of a great old-fashioned space opera, and I recommend it highly.

That’s it for this installment, the longest DVD Late Show yet. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. I’ll be back soon with more B-movie goodness, including a bunch of MASTERS OF HORROR discs from Anchor Bay.

June 20, 2006
Open For Business

As you might have noticed, we’re open for business.

Now, you might be wondering what exactly that business might be. We don’t sell milk, eggs, cigarettes, or lotto tickets, but we do offer a smorgasbord of material we hope will keep you coming back for more.

Think of Quick Stop as your destination for the unique and eclectic, fun and eccentric ““ from columnists on topics ranging from film and DVD to comics and TV, plus interviews, podcasts, production blogs, and videos featuring artists, writers, directors, musicians, actors, and personalities that you know (and some you’ll come to know a little bit better).

In addition to some familiar columnists you might recognize as regulars from Movie Poop Shoot (or, as I like to call them, the “Quickshooters””¦ but they don’t like when I do that”¦ which is understandable, because it’s actually kind of lame”¦ I promise never to do it again), we’ve got a bevy of new columnists on tap (including Paul Dini, Peter Sanderson, and Fred Hembeck). We’ll also be doing some in-depth coverage of quite a few upcoming films and TV shows, similar to another feature making its exclusive debut at Quick Stop ““ the cast & crew video blog from NBC’s cult hit Scrubs.

Before we get to the snazzy little intro vid from our guiding poobah Kevin Smith, I’d like to thank Kev for sponsoring this littleÂ corner of cyberspace. We have been tasked to kick ass, and so we shall. Finally, I want to send a special note of appreciation to Chris Ryall, Scott Tipton, and Ming Chen, without whose hard work over the years there wouldn’t have been a Quick Stop Entertainment.Welcome one, welcome all, and I assure you ““ we’re open.

-Ken Plume
Editor-in-Chief
Quick Stop Entertainment

Watch Kevin and Jay do the Robot:

560 x 420 – 9MB

320 x 240 – 3MB

YouTube

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June 19, 2006
Interview: LITTLE BRITAIN’s David Walliams & Matt Lucas

-By Ken Plume

Every once in awhile, a British program manages to make its way out of the sceptred isle and wind its way to the former colonies, where it is greeted with wonder and amazement and just how fresh and unique it seems compared to the majority of American tele-pap.

One of those recent exports was the sketch show Little Britain, written by and starring the comedy duo David Walliams and Matt Lucas.

Wonderfully surreal and filled with larger-than-life characters (which is also a literal description of Matt Lucas’s immense socialite, Bubbles Devere), Little Britain is like a cross between The Kids in the Hall and Benny Hill.

Both the first and second seasons are currently available on features-laden DVDs, and the third season is currently airing in the US on BBC America.

Quick Stop had the chance to chat with David Walliams and (just a teensy bit to) Matt Lucas”¦

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QUICKSTOP: I guess you’ve had a long day of interviews”¦Â

DAVID WALLIAMS: We’ve had a few this afternoon, but it’s been fun and we did some photographs with Martin Parr. Do you know him? He’s a quite famous British photographer. He’s great. So that’s from American GQ so we were quite happy about that. We’ve had a few this afternoon, but it’s been fun and we did some photographs with Martin Parr. Do you know him? He’s a quite famous British photographer. He’s great. So that’s from American so we were quite happy about that.

QUICKSTOP: So the freight train has not slowed down at all”¦

WALLIAMS: No, it hasn’t. We’ve just come off a tour – we’ve just done a 140 day tour of Britain. We’ve stopped that, but we’ve got loads of things to do. We’re making a Christmas special of Little Britain for the BBC at the moment, so it doesn’t stop for us.

QUICKSTOP: When we last talked, you were in rehearsals for the live show.

WALLIAMS: Yeah, so that must have been October then.

QUICKSTOP: Now that the live show is over, were you surprised by the reaction that it got? Because it was quite popular”¦

WALLIAMS: Yeah, it was great. And it kind of grew as we went along. We ended up playing, like, arenas for 10 or 12 thousand people. So yeah, it’s been extraordinary.

QUICKSTOP: And that was the first time you had done a major live show like that, right?

WALLIAMS: Yeah. It’s on quite a big scale. It was stunning. It’s kind of weird when you’re in it, you know, for me, because you’re just dealing with each new gig. But the first time we stepped out in front of 12,000 people in Manchester was amazing. An amazing feeling. Our first gig was like four people in an art center in north London, which was about 10 years ago. So it was really only at the curtain call that it really hit me. “˜Cause that’s when suddenly all the lights went on and I could feel the audience, “Oh my god, we have actually come quite a long way and this is pretty amazing.”

QUICKSTOP: Did you envision that it would get this far?

WALLIAMS: No, not for a minute. But then, you don’t”¦ I never really think of it in those terms. I always just think, “Oh it’ll be good to do a funny show and make people laugh” rather than thinking, “I’d like to do a show that will get this amount of viewers or do a tour and play to this amount of people.” I’ve never been too worried by those kind of things. I just liked doing what I thought was funny, and that I was proud of. And beyond that, it’s hard to think in those terms. It’s a mistake thinking in those terms, as well.

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QUICKSTOP: When the lights come up and you see the audience and the power that the show has, and the characters have, does that in any way affect you, creatively? When you went back after the success of series one to do series two, did that success ever have a creative influence on you, knowing the popularity?

WALLIAMS: Not really. I mean, only that you know when you put the show in front of a live audience you go, “Oh, this character’s more popular than we thought, and maybe this one isn’t as popular as we thought.” And so it may be, you know, just shock”¦ maybe you think, “Oh, okay, maybe people would want to see more of this or that,” but not really, no. It doesn’t. We can only sort of do what we find funny. Do you know what I mean? You can’t think, “Well, I’ll try and do what people find funny,” “˜cause it doesn’t’ really work that way.

QUICKSTOP: Is there any character that you are surprised didn’t get the reaction that you hoped it would?

WALLIAMS: I think it’s hard to say”¦ and that’s always a negative thing to say, but yeah. Some characters, we thought, “Oh, no, you know, they will go down well,” but some we thought, “Oh, that went down better than expected.”

QUICKSTOP: Were you in any way surprised by the backlash that the third series got?

WALLIAMS: I was disappointed. Now people are looking for problems, you know, but it didn’t affect the show’s popularity. We got nine million viewers on BBC 1, which was kind of unheard of, and played to 800,000 people on our tour, and as far as the reviews, it’s just what kinda happens, really. I think the problem in Britain is that the show that people most hold in esteem is Fawlty Towers. And the problem is that people think it’s amazing because there are only 12 episodes. Now, I just think it’s amazing “˜cause it’s an amazing program. Just brilliantly funny. And I could have watched it for longer, but people kind of think”¦ they’re almost annoyed with you for doing more than 12 episodes. You know, people were coming to us all the time and saying, “Don’t stop doing what you’re doing.” People want to see more, but you can almost think you’ve done something wrong – like 12 is this kind of magic number with a comedy show, and if you do any more than that you’re sort of finished.

QUICKSTOP: Do you think what Ricky (Gervais) did with The Office unfortunately reinforced that idea?

WALLIAMS: Yeah, I think so”¦ yeah. I think, again, that he suffered from the same kind of thing, in a way, which was there was so much hype, that you’re almost scared of”¦ you’ve been so lauded, it’s become so popular, that you become a bit scared that it’s gonna turn. But we’ve always just made the show for kind of ourselves and for people who want to watch it. And so that was what was guiding it for me. Not the fear of, “Oh my god, we might get a bad review.” “˜Cause we’ve had bad reviews before. We’ve been to the Edinburgh Festival and had bad reviews. That’s what happens. And by the time the reviews are written the show’s done anyway and it’s out there, and in a way it can’t harm you that much, because they’re not gonna take it off air “˜cause it got a bad review.

QUICKSTOP: At what point do you look at it and go, “Now it’s time to walk away”¦”? Not from Little Britain per se, but particular characters?

WALLIAMS: When we’re not finding it funny anymore. When we’re kind of thinking, “Well actually, this isn’t kind of getting our creative juices flowing anymore.” That to me would be the time. And then it’s kind of when we’re ready to do that. But I’d hate to think we don’t perform any of these Little Britain characters again.

QUICKSTOP: Certainly in the transition from series one to series two were characters that were left behind”¦

WALLIAMS: Yeah, characters got left behind from series two to three, and then there were new characters in series three. But I do think there’s a core of about six or eight characters that people really like and really want to see. And they provide a backbone to the series. You do see Marjorie as she’s with her fat fighters group again, but I kind of think, “Well if something different is happening next week, it doesn’t really bother me.” You know what I mean? I kind of think, “Well it’s a good character and I want to see her again.”

QUICKSTOP: What character is most comfortable to you at this point?

WALLIAMS: Most comfortable to play?

QUICKSTOP: To play or write for.

WALLIAMS: I like playing Lou in the Lou and Andy scenes. I feel that I kind of know him quite well now. I enjoyed playing Carol Beer on stage because she doesn’t move. So I can just have a sit down for a couple of minutes, which is nice. They’re all enjoyable. I think in doing this show, the live shows 70 times, is that you find you like different ones on different nights. You particularly feel, “Oh yeah, I was really on it tonight. I really knew what I was doing with this character.” And then the character that doesn’t make a big impact on the TV show, who’s in the first series, called Des Kaye”¦ a sort of failed children’s entertainer. And we do that in the live show. Get people out of the audience. And I love doing that one, even though that’s not one that people even, I don’t think, remember. But because it has a sort of spontaneity to it and it’s always different every night, and ended up normally with someone”¦ one of the audience members with their trousers around their ankles and me on top of them on the floor. Um, it’s always”¦ that’s always a joy to do. For those very reasons.

QUICKSTOP: Is there a character that surprises you the most in performance, in where the character will take you?

WALLIAMS: I suppose that character is a bit surprising because, in a way, it’s grown. I mean, the first night I didn’t take their trousers down. That kind of grew. And that’s become a bit crazier as he’s gone along, really.

QUICKSTOP: Do you think it’s the audience interaction that brings the energy to that?

WALLIAMS: Yeah, the real energy to that ““ because of that and because you never know what people are gonna say or do. And that really grows. But yeah, some nights you really feel you’re inhabiting it, which is very frightening. But it’s a weird one because even in this live show we’re playing a different character every three or four minutes. So just as you’re kind of getting into it, you’re into another one, you know? It’s not quite like you’re playing King Lear or something. You know what I mean? You really feel, “Tonight I was King Lear.” “˜Cause each night we’re each about a dozen characters each.

QUICKSTOP: When is the show coming to the U.S.?

WALLIAMS: Well, at the moment there aren’t any plans to bring it to the U.S. We’d really like to. We’re doing some touring in Australia next year, which is great, but we would like to do it in America ““ but we really need an American promoter to sort of fund it, really. So if you know anybody, can you mention it to them? We’ll play anywhere. Australian promoters came and saw the show in England and then said, I really want this show to come to America, but we didn’t have anybody from America come yet. It may still happen.

QUICKSTOP: I’ll make that happen.

WALLIAMS: Thank you very much.

QUICKSTOP: At this point, is there any comedic line that you won’t cross?

WALLIAMS: Well, the line I think”¦ people often say you can’t make jokes about this, that or the other. But I don’t think there are any rules, because I think if it’s fun, it’s kind of okay. And just because it’s humor doesn’t mean you’re necessarily belittling an important subject like that. You can do jokes about the most extreme awful thing, and as long as it’s funny, I think it’s kind of okay. I think people think you’re making light of something when you’re making a joke out of it, but I don’t think you are, really. I think you’re getting to a truth of it with humor. And I don’t see why you could watch a poem about something or make a film about something but you couldn’t do a comedy sketch about it. I don’t see why you should make any distinction. I think we’re quite lucky that we’ve always done the show in front of an audience, the TV show ““ we record the sketches and then play them into an audience, then we record sketches on the night, which means that the audience will kind of tell us if we’ve gone too far. And if people are just in shock and not laughing, we wouldn’t include it, because we’d just think, “Well what’s the point of that.” We wanted to be explosively funny. But comedy is”¦ you know, you look at something like Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, the man exploding and everyone getting covered in guts and vomit in a restaurant ““ it’s amazing. It’s disgusting, yeah, but it’s also brilliantly funny, and I kind of think as long as it’s both those”¦ as long as it still is funny there’s no reason not to do it.

QUICKSTOP: Has there ever been anything put on the table in the writing process that you refused to do?

WALLIAMS: Not really, no. Sometimes we think of ideas and go, “Oh no”¦ Actually, it’s funny to have it as an idea, but to actually see it would be a bit kind of horrible.” But no, we have our own sensibilities and then we have those of the audience. But I think it’s a weird one, because people often ask us, you know, “Well, do you think this has gone too far?” But, I mean, there’s a comedian in Britain called Chris Morris, if you’ve heard of him. Made The Day Today. Well, he made an episode of his show Brass Eye“¦

QUICKSTOP: This was the pedophile episode, right?

WALLIAMS: The pedophile episode. Now, obviously, to some people that was a big media storm around that with some people shocked and horrified that anyone could bring those kind of themes into what was a funny show. Other people applauded the bravery that he was dealing with this subject that was a taboo. I think we all have different kind of levels. We’ve all drawn the line in a different place. It’s quite hard to think where the line is, “˜cause I think it’s different for each person.

QUICKSTOP: Is there anything that you consistently draw the line at?

WALLIAMS: I think we’d find it hard to do something like that about pedophilia, because it really is shocking and”¦ I mean, I applaud his bravery for doing it, but I don’t think we could really think about doing anything on that. But it’s weird, if you dance around the subject ““ like The League of Gentlemen did, and have a character Herr Lip, who was a kind of pedophile, but because the boys are older it sort of made it sort of not too distasteful. It was still funny. It’s hard. It’s how you do it, really.

QUICKSTOP: You’ve finished 3 series, you’ve done a live tour, you’ve got a Christmas special coming up – are there projects right now outside of Little Britain that are drawing your attention?

WALLIAMS: Well yeah, we were kind of thinking what the next move will be, and it may be in different series for the BBC, or it could be a film or something. We’ve just got to take it where our creativity takes us, really. If we think of a great story for a film, we’ll make a film ““ you know?

QUICKSTOP: Does that mean we’ll see the return of Mash and Peas?

WALLIAMS: I don’t think we’ll ever do the return of Mash and Peas.

QUICKSTOP: Is there anything you’re pursuing independently?

WALLIAMS: Not really at the moment, because apart from odd bit of acting, there hasn’t really been time because we’ve been touring, and then we’re making a Christmas special over the summer. So there hasn’t really been time to do that, I’m afraid. But I’m sure I will, yeah.

QUICKSTOP: I certainly hope you guys are able to bring the show over to the U.S. “¦

WALLIAMS: Yeah, we’d love to do the show in America. That would be fantastic. Do you want to have a quick chat to Matt?

QUICKSTOP: I would.

WALLIAMS: I’ll just pass you over.

MATT LUCAS: Hello?

QUICKSTOP: Hello Matt”¦

LUCAS: You’ve got about one minute, I’m afraid. Anything you need to ask me?

QUICKSTOP: When are you going to finally do that Broadway show?

LUCAS: Oh that would be lovely, but at the moment we’re working together, so I don’t know. I haven’t any new news to tell you, I’m afraid. Gotta run”¦ Bye!

Â

Â

Â

June 19, 2006
Preaching From The Longbox: The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning

Â

July 19, 2006Â

IntroductionÂ

Greetings, my friends – both old and new.Â This column right here is called “Preachin’ from the Longbox” and I’m your humble comic book advocate, Britt Schramm.Â Since the column’s surroundings as well as the URL have changed, I thought that this would the perfect time to move PftL into a second volume.Â But don’t worry; even though QSE is considered the evolution of the old MPS site, there won’t be any type of evolution going on here.Â I’m still gonna write about comics my way, not because I have to answer to a new authority figure.Â So, watch out, Mr. New EIC, your time will come within these here columns real soon.

Now, without that unnecessary intro out of the way, here’s this week’s column:

This week’sÂ sermon – “The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning”Â

A couple of weeks ago, I was left home alone with a list of To Do’s from the wife.Â Now, I don’t know about you but being deafened by a house that is devoid of the usual loud electronic noises and laughing little voices is very unnerving, especially when you have grown oddly fond of it.Â Â

After placing the aforementioned Honey Do list firmly in hand, I had to do something to make the house seem more “alive” (for lack of a better word) and that led to only one thing ““ to find some background noise on to help me maintain my cleaning focus as well as to make the house not seem so vacant.

I went through all of the possible alternatives in my head.Â Music was my first choice but since I’ve stopped turning to terrestrial radio for my musical enjoyment and really wanted to keep my CD collection fresh for the daily work commute, that option was instantly scratched off the list.Â

(And by the way, when did AM/FM Radio get the lame moniker of “terrestrial radio”?Â Is it because of the whole satellite radio “revolution”?Â If that’s the case, then shouldn’t satellite radio be considered “extra-terrestrial radio”?Â Or is that label only reserved for the newest technological advancement in radio – Digital FM or that damn cute but overly wrinkly Phone Home midget?Â Really, am I the only one who questions this stuff?)

With radio out the door, my decisions boiled down to cable and DVD.Â Although I dig having the whole cable hook-up, the whole ordeal in trying to find something on the tube during the weekday mid-morning that isn’t a) nails-on-the-chalkboard irritating or b) moronically stupid is harder than you may think.Â And after cycling through half of the channels, I had to cut my losses and make the command decision that there was nothing on the old idiot box.

I was left with putting on a DVD.Â Now, thanks to my pre-children days (and having a Best Buy within walking distance), I have in my possession a decent sized collection of DVDs.Â The problem is finding the right balance of playing something that is good enough to allow for repeated viewings but isn’t so visually stunning that I’ll stop whatever I’m doing in order to watch the scene that is playing like a drooling moron.Â Â

There are only a few select movies that I feel make this cut.Â Movies like:

“Almost Famous” (although I am guilty of lingering a little too long during the Penny Lane topless scene but I’m only human)

All of Quentin Tarrentino’s movies (except for the Kill Bill series because they’re so damn pretty to watch)

“Ford Fairlane” (I’ve already given my explanation for that one)

“When Harry Met Sally” (because I have a some sort of Meg Ryan-in-the-late-80’s fixation)

And, of course, the Jersey Trilogy (hey, I was a fan first before I started writing here).

All make the grade for that kind of background chatty noise that I need to prevent my most notable trait ““ procrastination ““ from rearing its ugly head.

But also, around the same time (even serendipitously, you might say), the first season of The Batman was released.Â And being the hardcore Bat-fan that I am, I was able to budget my allowance (don’t ask) for this purchase.Â So, rather than reach for a tried-and-true DVD from the aforementioned list, I reached for Disc 1 of The Batman: Season 1 and plopped it into the Pioneer DVD tray.

Again, half of my mind was occupied with cleaning and I may have whiffed too many noxious fumes but I want use this column to make the following declaration. Â “The Batman” is just as good as “Batman: The Animated Series” and here’s why:

First, the Bat-costume is a great spin on the various designs from the Batman: The Animated Series but with some minor tweaks.Â The now classic Black on Gray suit still solid but putting the oval back into the Bat chest symbol (as well as reverting the utility belt back to the old “tubular” design) brings back some of the iconic heritage to the character.Â But it’s the little changes like shortening the ears, making the eyes more oval and rounding out the forehead in an attempt to make the cowl sleeker and more like a helmet plus the introduction of the Bat-Wave PDA that bring the whole costume together.Â Sure, it’s hard to go against the breakout and very stylish design that eventually lead to changing the costume of the DCU Batman but this one is pretty solid.

There’s not that simulated “retro” lookÂ within any ofÂ the show’s design elements.Â Don’t get me wrong; I’m a huge fan of B:TAS.Â But some of the shows seemed to try too hard to be generically retro.Â If you get a chance, watch at a B:TAS episode and take a look at the cars, the clothes, and the buildings.Â If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see that by going “retro”, the shows come off older than they really are.Â The Batman is doing what I like to say all of the time ““ living in the now.Â Â

I like that the creators went for a more subtle anime approach versus a two-thirds anime hybrid like the way Teen Titans has become.Â Using some speed lines and slightly adapting the characters’ appearance and nuances keep the show relatively grounded in American comic lore while still showing that the Bat-franchise is acceptable to interpretation.Â FYI – there’s anything wrong with the Teen Titans show, as I like it well enough.Â But some days, I just can’t handle how Beast Boy reverts to some mocking anime character.Â Call me an old fart, if you want.Â Another step away from some of the literal anime influences is the removal of Chief Rojas (a stereotypical angry police chief in some of the anime DVDs that I’ve seen) after the end of Season 1 and the re-introducing Commissioner Jim Gordon in Season 2.

I also like the interpretations of the Bat-villains since they’re not bogged down by years of continuity like B:TAS was.Â Seeing Catwoman as an anime-infused version of Jim Lee’s recent redesign was nice to see and modifying Mr. Freeze into a mutant was a deft touch.Â But, again, the creators didn’t go overboard with the changes.Â The Penguin, Firefly and Poison Ivy are more or less the same character that is in the books.Â Although I still find it somewhat disturbing to see the Joker without shoes but hey, he’s crazy so that fact kinda fits his modus operandi.

Another way that The Batman is on par that B:TAS is in the excellent quality of voice work for the show. Â Â No, that’s not a slam against Kevin Conroy, Luke Skywalker, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. or Bull from “Night Court”.Â But it’s hard to compete with the gaggle of actors that are on “The Batman” like the newest Commander William Adama, X-Files’ Mitch Pelligi, comedian and self-admitted comic nerd Patton Oswalt, SpongeBob SquarePants, uber-hottie Gina Gershon, the Villain from “Highlander” as well as Bat-alumni like Adam West (who also voiced the Grey Ghost on B:TAS), Eric Matthews from “Boy Meets World” (who voiced Batman Beyond) and the dearly departed Frank Gorshin.Â Whoa, I think that I may have been wrong earlier.Â This cast of supporting voice actors actually slays Batman: The Animated Series.Â But fans of B:TAS can take some consolation.Â At least the majority of their voice work wasn’t done by Ted Knight.Â True, the guy is a television legend.Â But don’t tell me that during those Saturday Filmation cartoons back in the day that you didn’t picture Ted Baxter in his WJM Channel 12 blazer staring blankly back at you.

Although, I’ll admit that there have been some recent setbacks to the show.Â I hate hate HATE the new theme song for Season 2, which sounds like a bastardized mashup of epic proportions comprised of the first season’s theme song (brilliantly composed by The Edge) and the theme song from the Jack Lord classic TV show, Hawaii Five-O.Â (If you don’t know Hawaii Five-O, you should crack a history book every occasionally, kid.Â You might learn something.)Â I might be alone on this one but the theme from Season 1 kills any Bat-Theme that was made before or will be made in the future.Â I’m not trying to be controversial; this is just factual knowledge.Â And while I understand the inclusion of Batgirl was done to inject some estrogen into the show as well as to explain the addition of Jim Gordon, I’m really not digging her in this series.Â She seems like an amalgam of Robin (natural acrobat) and old school Bat-girl (computer whiz).Â Her costume is with the oversized eyes is just too odd-looking.Â Okay, so I’m a hypocrite but that’s nothing new.Â By the way, did I tell you that I hate the new theme song?

Aside from those slight hiccups, I can’t see for the life of me why people hate the new Batman series so.Â I’ve read the very unflattering “Amazon.com” reviews for the DVDs and wondered if they’re watching the same show that is on My TiVo’s Season Pass.Â My friend Steve told me that I didn’t like the three-quarter profile, which is the same style that was used on the Jackie Chan Adventures cartoon (Jeff Matsuda was key player in designing and conceptualizing both shows) and I can understand that argument.Â It does take getting used to seeing.Â But the real problem with the complaints is that the show is not a direct carbon copy of the wonderful and hallowed Batman: The Animated Series.Â Again, you probably won’t find a bigger fan of that series more than yours truly.Â However, I refuse to let theÂ spectre of that show cloud my judgment concerning “The Batman”.Â Once people take those blinders off and let go of their pre-conceived misgivings about “The Batman”, they should begin to see what I’ve been seeing all along ““ a show that is still ground in Batman-mythos yet still moving forward.Â As I always say, “Live in the Now, people!”
Â

The PftL Mailbox

Matt M. dropped a huge ass letter in the mailbox a couple of months ago concerning the “Dreaming in Digital” column.Â To keep the column as short as possible, I’ve decided to post justÂ an excerpt:

“I happily download comics because I cannot afford to buy comics. That’s the simplest answer. One can make lots and lots of arguments about the illegality and the unethical behaviour of downloading comics, but I think they are predominantly forgetting that it is not theft because I am not taking the original method of creating profit from the hands of the creators or the corporations. In a digital world in which people copy and paste all the time (ha), I think the industry must must must catch up to my downloading speed. I download comics all the time. So many that I haven’t even read half of them yet”¦..This is my point: the qualitative argument for downloading information. I will resort to purchasing comics only if the quality is up to my standards. I’m not idiot: quality is far more relative than morals. Who am I to judge the professionals? Well, unfortunately, the power of my dollar is the judge. I choose to buy Grant Morrison (GM), therefore GM becomes the next writer of Batman. Excellent. There’s a comic I will buy. But until the rest of comicdom catches up with the Scottish scribe (along with Gaiman, Millar, Slott, Moore and others), I will be downloading comics”¦I could go on, as I’m sure all comic fans could, but I choose to stop here.”

PftL: Â Matt, thanks for writing.Â While I didn’t really get into the legalities of the current practice of P2P sharing of scanned comics, I’d still like to address your comments.Â I totally understand your current financial crunch but it just seems like your justification is flawed.Â Any reproduction of that copyrighted material, no matter what form the output is ““ digital or otherwise, is still regarded as stealing.Â I don’t see how the act of downloading a scanned comic is not considered taking money that you would’ve spent to purchase said book out of the hands of the creators or the corporations, as you put it.Â I could see if it was something like a network share with read-only access or a license for a one-time reading of the issue, which would be very similar to reading the book at the local store.Â But once the file is downloaded, it’s there until someone deletes it.Â Maybe I’m just being obstinate but it still sounds like pilfering.
Â

The PftL Moment of Irony

Now, this is not about the “Black Fly in Your Chardonnay”/Alanis Morissette-type of irony.Â Here’s the scenario.Â At the end of March, an interesting email arrived into the old inbox from a top writer in the industry and in the subject line was a request to peruse his new creator-owned book.Â No problem, so I thought, until the email was opened and a link to a PDF of the preview was imbedded in the body.Â This was only a couple weeks after I had written the abovementioned “Dreams in Digital” column in which I describe in some detail that I’m not a fan of reading comics that are expressly made for print in a digital format.Â I’ll be honest; not only did I chuckle about this coincidental email but ironically, I actually read the PDF comic.Â And it was so good (the comic ““ not the format) that I went ahead and bought the comic when it finally hit the stands a few months later.Â

The writer (in case you were wondering) ““ Dan Slott

The book ““ Big Max (Mr. Comics)

The lesson here is not that the comic book medium is going to a digital format sooner that anyone thought.Â It’s the fact that I’ll read almost any comic book that is offered gratis.Â Creators, I’m talking to you.

Three Comics to keep your eye on this week:

Eternals #1 (Marvel) ““ Neil Gaiman + John Romita, Jr = Must Have.Â That is unless it’s like 1602.Â Then, it’s more like Must Wait for the Trade.

Flash, The Fastest Man Alive #1 (DC) ““ How will DC explain this one now that Wally West and Bart Allen are out of speed juice?Â Hopefully, the story will not involve BALCO or HGH.

Uncle Scrooge #355 (Gemstone) ““ In honor of my new EIC (Damn, I couldn’t make it through the first column.Â I’m such a suck-up!)

The Wrap-Up

I would like to dole out a little dap to a couple friends to the PftL scene:Â

Big Ups to former MPS honcho Chris Ryall and the Hope to his Crosby, Scott Tipton, for getting a solid plug for Comics101.com in the latest Entertainment Weekly (the one with the metrosexual Superman on the cover.Â Keep up the good work, gentlemen.Â Â Â

And congrats to Keith Giffen on getting his new column, As If I Care, up and running on Wizard Universe.com (http://www.wizarduniverse.com/magazine/archive/giffen.cfm).Â I only hope that he won’t make it look too easy.Â Us regular Internet Columnist Joes gotta have something to hang our hats on.Â I’d like to give him a piece of advice that the first industry pro gave me when I first started out at Moviepoopshoot (and I’m paraphrasing here) – “Try not to fuck up too badly.”Â

Lastly, I’ll exit out the door with a one-page back-up gag from the first issue of “Ursa Minors!” a June release from SLG Comics.Â The subject matter is one that we should all be familiar knowing; old jokes and all.Â Although I didn’t know that a possible chink in Mr. Smith”˜s armor would be the inability to down a nice frosty cold one.

That’s it. Â I’m off the Longbox this week.Â Thanks for reading.Â And don’t forget, kiddies; Keep your bags & boards together and your continuity straight.

-britt

June 19, 2006
Spook’d #82: KIPS – Well-Suited

by Jeffery Stevenson and Seth Damoose with colors by Anthony Lee

Larger Sized Comic

To see Spook’d host Alastor’s blogging silliness and more fun Spook’d stuff,visit the Spook’d Web site!

Check out the preview to…

E-MAIL WRITER | ABOUT JEFF | ABOUT SETH | SPOOK’D BLOG | SPOOK’D FORUM | ARCHIVES

Disclaimer: All material in Spook’d is fictitious and intended solely for the purpose of entertainment. Names are fabricated and any similarity to real people or places is purely coincidental except in those cases where public figures are being satirized.

June 19, 2006
Spook’d – #81 – Sweet Reunion

by Jeffery Stevenson and Seth Damoose with colors by Anthony Lee

Check out the preview for Task Force 1 (from Image Comics).

View Full Size

Beginning of Current Story | Previous Story>

To see Spook’d host Alastor’s blogging silliness and more fun Spook’d stuff,

visit the Spook’d Web site!

Beginning of Current Story | Previous Strip

Check out the preview to…

E-MAIL WRITER | ABOUT JEFF | ABOUT SETH | SPOOK’D BLOG |
SPOOK’D FORUM |
ARCHIVES

Disclaimer: All material in Spook’d is fictitious and intended solely for the purpose of entertainment. Names are fabricated and any similarity to real people or places is purely coincidental except in those cases where public figures are being satirized.

June 12, 2006
Spook’d – #80

by Jeffery Stevenson and Seth Damoose with colors by Anthony Lee

Check out the preview for Task Force 1 (from Image Comics).

Full Size Comic

Beginning of Current Story | Previous Story

To see Spook’d host Alastor’s blogging silliness and more fun Spook’d stuff,

visit the Spook’d Web site!

Beginning of Current Story | Previous Strip

Check out the preview to…

E-MAIL WRITER | ABOUT JEFF | ABOUT SETH | SPOOK’D BLOG |
SPOOK’D FORUM |
ARCHIVES

Disclaimer: All material in Spook’d is fictitious and intended solely for the purpose of entertainment. Names are fabricated and any similarity to real people or places is purely coincidental except in those cases where public figures are being satirized.

June 5, 2006
International Intrigue

June 1, 2006

The International Intrigue hiatus is officially over. I donÂ’t know how you went about watching any foreign films at all in the past couple of weeks. DonÂ’t worry, IÂ’ve returned to guide you through the murky waters of languages not quite our own.

But in the interest of easing back in, IÂ’ve just got one single solitary review for you (regulars will know that oftentimes I have many). So I dedicate this still not-all-that-short column to the Â“I love your column but it takes me all week to read itÂ” crowd.

TYPHOON

Director Kwak Kyung-Taek found enormous success in Korea in 2001 with his film FRIEND which is still one of the countryÂ’s highest grossing films. And heÂ’s been trying to regain that success ever since. He directed two more films CHAMPION and MUTT BOY, fairly well regarded efforts but neither of which struck the chord with people that FRIEND did. But TYPHOON is the most high profile film heÂ’s ever done and is a clear attempt at mainstream success.

The film centers on Sin (Jang Dong-gun), who as a child attempted to defect from North Korea with his family. But due to bureaucracy they were denied. Ultimately, his whole family was killed except for himself and his sister Choi Myeong Ju (Lee Mi-Yeon). But they were eventually separated. He ended up as some sort of indentured child worker in Thailand and she ended up as a prostitute in Russia.

Subsequently, the film takes place not only in Korea but also in Thailand and Russia, making it a complex mix of languages (that you probably wonÂ’t even notice unless you can tell them apart by hearing them). And thereÂ’s even some heavily accented English thatÂ’ll make you wish they kept the subtitles going. But the exotic scenery is at least of interest and gives the film a worldliness and visual panache.

But cut to the current day and Sin is a pretty hot tattooed pirate. But a pirate who is full of anger and bitterness and bent on destruction of the two Koreas that made him so miserable. Thanks to the US breaking some Nuclear treaties, now he has his chance.

Trying to catch up with SinÂ’s truly complicated plan is Kang Se-jong (Lee Jung-jae), a South Korean agent. Kang is always one step behind until he finds SinÂ’s sister first and then tables are turned. The cat and mouse game eventually leads up to the climactic attempted realization of SinÂ’s grand plan (which relies heavily on the chance arrival of a typhoon) and a massive showdown on the high seas.

The film stars Jang Dong-gun, an actor that Kwak pretty much made into a celebrity with FRIEND, and who had gone on to even more success in the huge Korean blockbuster TAEGUKGI and the very high profile Chinese production THE PROMISE. But the poor guy, who was already forced to speak Mandarin in THE PROMISE and Japanese in 2009: LOST MEMORIES, is once again subjected to languages he doesnÂ’t know and valiantly attempts tackle Thai and Russian (and if I recall correctly, a bit of English). When will they stop doing this to this guy?

The film also stars Lee Jung-jae (IL MARE). He brings real empathy to a pretty one dimensional role. And LeeÂ’s down note, duty bound agent is a good counterpoint to JangÂ’s more outrageous, angry pirate (full with Jang doing his bulging eyes thing, which made a memorable debut in TAEGUKGI). In fact, both the actors are rather good in the film.

This kind of cast and director in a big North versus South action picture with the biggest budget to date in Korea is about as sure a bet as one can get there. It was bound to make money and it did. Too bad they made the most American of mistakes and neglected to put all this effort into a worthy screenplay.

As you probably gathered from my summary, the story is just outright confusing. Even though we tediously follow Sin through every step of his plan, it never really begins to make any logical sense. He gets the US nuclear something or other but thatÂ’s not what heÂ’s using, heÂ’s trading it for something or other. And why are there two typhoons? The film works best in the honestly emotional scenes between Sin, his sister and the Korean agent. Also, the most affecting scene of the film is easily the flashback to SinÂ’s childhood. But the actual thrills and intrigue tend to bog the story down.

On the plus side, the film is well made. Like a lot of top notch Korean films, the cinematography was good and the sound was good for a foreign film (Korean films often have some of the best sound youÂ’ll find outside of Hollywood). Even the effects are fine. And I really liked the score even though some might find it heavy handed. But in the end it comes down to the story. And itÂ’s just not there.

At least the themes are there, but theyÂ’re nothing new. It is ballsy making the South Koreans the bad guys in the way they do. ItÂ’s easy to empathize with Sin as a victim of diplomacy. He never would have tried to destroy the country if the South Koreans didnÂ’t treat him so horribly by denying his family entry. ItÂ’s the South Koreans who made him who he is, not the North. But in a way heÂ’s a martyr to a greater cause (is one family too much a price to pay for the possibility of peace?). But TAEGUKGI and SILMIDO tread some of the same ground, inferring that the North wasnÂ’t entirely to blame and that the South shares some blame as well.

The US aspect of the film is interesting and something different. As it is now, the movie seems to indicate that if the US never got involved (by shipping illegal nuclear something or other) then there would be no catalyst for North Korean revenge. But from a Western point of view, the film would have been more potent if the Americans had caused the original offense instead of the South Koreans. Just this week, documents were uncovered alleging that Americans did shoot refugees (or at least were told to). But these kinds of big budget South Korean films are really about the North-South divide, not AmericaÂ’s place in it.

The relative mediocrity of this film makes me wonder if the golden age of really fantastic action films that delve deep into the question of the North-South Korean divide have run their course. Is there anything left to say? Any angle left to explore?

TYPHOON is being released tomorrow (June 2nd) by Paramount Classics as the Â“DirectorÂ’s International CutÂ”. IÂ’ve heard some negative things about the original Korean cut of the movie but I donÂ’t actually know what the differences are. But from my estimation, this one doesnÂ’t seem to be all that better. Yet, in the end, itÂ’s a pretty enjoyable romp and not a complete waste of time. ThatÂ’s the backhanded compliment I have for you TYPHOON…

June 1, 2006

Music for the Masses

May 31st, 2006

By M.C. Bell

Welcome back, friends! Hope you’re all doing well. Me? I’m doing great and thanks for asking. But I gotta tell you, like many of you out there, I am still recovering from that emotional roller coaster ride that ended last week. I mean, whoa. . .I’m tearing up just thinking about it. How cool, nay, how inspiring was it to see a mentally retarded young man chase his dreams and reach the pinnacle of success? That’s a rhetorical question, of course, because it was damn cool. Damn inspiring. So, before we go any further, let’s give a shout out to this amazing young man. That’s right, Soul Patrol, give it up for our boy, Taylor “Corky” Hicks! WHOOOO!!!! High five!!!

DEE DE DEEEE!!!

In fact, friends, I found Taylor’s story so inspiring, I, too, began the quest to fulfill my secret dream. No, not the one where I’m the “pants-less” warden of an all-female prison, the other one. . .where I’m a popular singer. Now, unlike Taylor, I fancy myself to be more of a country crooner and the whole “M.C.” thing didn’t fit. So the first thing I had to do was to come up with a catchy, country-sounding “stage name.” Then, of course, I actually had to learn HOW to sing. THAT was the tough part. But, after many months of study and practice, all my hard work has paid off and I am finally ready to release my first album. So, friends, as you head out to the record store to pick up Taylor’s new disc, Grey-Haired Palms, grab yourself a copy of my new album. . .

And yes, ladies. . .I AM single.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. Some other people released some new discs that you might be interested in, as well. For instance, there’s a new album from an old friend, Jack White, plus a couple of cool, little releases from Rookie of the Year and the Ditty Bops. So, what do you say? Let’s have a listen, eh?

Artist: Raconteurs
Album: Broken Toy Soldiers
Bastard Love Child of: White Stripes and the Traveling Wilburys.
Best for: Understanding that a raconteur is a person who is good at telling stories.

Hinkley High School Chess Club, 1998

It’s not uncommon for a White Stripe fan to wonder what their band would sound like with the addition of a bass player. In fact, some fans, like Redd Kross’ bass player Steve McDonald, went one step further and actually dropped bass lines all over the Stripes’ White Blood Cells. . .to umm, mixed reviews. Well, fans, wonder no more. . .sorta. You see, Jack White, the creepy-looking, fashion-challenged guitar virtuoso, has temporarily dumped his sister/mother/secret lover/drummer/bandmate, Meg White, to join forces with a couple of his other buddies; namely guitarist Brendan Benson and the entire rhythm section of the Cincinnati rock band, the Greenhornes (bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler). And let me be the first to tell you, folks, together, as the Raconteurs, White and friends have crafted music that is much sweeter and more pop-oriented than anything the White Stripes or the Greenhornes ever produced on their own.

I attribute this new found “sweetness” to the exceptional harmonizing between White and Benson, who share guitar and vocal leads on the disc, as well. The dual vocals here are a nice touch and add impressive depth and variety to many of the tracks to ensure repeated listenings. Now, admittedly, there is nothing on this tight little album, whose 10 songs clock in at a brisk 34 minutes, as insanely catchy as the groups first single, “Steady As She Goes.” So be forewarned. The other tracks have ample hooks, both lyrically and musically, but it will take a few trips through the disc to really get you warmed up. Also, if you are simply looking for a “new” White Stripes disc with some different, and freakier looking players, keep looking. The only song on Broken Toy Soldiers that even comes close to sounding like a Stripes song is the title track. Backed by crunchy, Middle Eastern-style guitar drones and crisp drumming, White’s tortured falsetto will bring to mind the last Stripes album, Get Behind Me Satan. But that’s as close as you’re going to get to White Stripes goodness. I would recommend going into this album thinking “Traveling Wilburys-lite.” And no, that’s not a bad thing.

Additionally, if you are a fan of White’s riffing and solo bursts, you are going to have to dig deep into the disc to find them. The only two songs here that really allow Jack to flex any guitar muscle come late in the disc with “Store Bought Bones,” a tough sounding, prog-rock epic that is equal parts Deep Purple and Zeppelin and the album closer, “Blue Veins,” a bluesy, whiskey-soaked ballad choke full of White’s “alt-blues” chops.

It’s highly likely that this album will stand as a one-shot wonder, so enjoy it while it lasts. Consider it a half hour well spent.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Artist: Rookie of the Year
Album: The Goodnight Moon
Bastard Love Child of: Jimmy Eat World and Yellowcard.
Best for: Gazing at your shoes while waiting for the fries to cook.

So. . .do you kids like emo music? Do bands like Copeland, Jimmy Eat World, Death Cab for Cutie and The Juliana Theory make your pimples tingle? Well, my friends, do I have a band for you. Their name? Rookie of the Year.

Rookie of the Year. . .helping to make “comb-overs” cool since 2004.

Now, in all fairness, I’ve had this disc sitting on my desk for almost two months, but, after a cursory pass, I never gave it a second thought. That was a mistake!! Kinda like that one time I went to a Melissa Etheridge concert to meet chicks. Luckily, though, I got a second chance at this band as they rolled through Denver with another phenomenal (and underrated) band, MuteMath. I’ll tell you right now, with the energy of the live show and the immediate accessibility of the music, color me impressed. Of course, I’m not saying that Rookie of the Year’s music is breaking down barriers or re-defining emo. Far from it. But screw it. . .these guys know how to play to their strengths and they do the emo genre proud with heartfelt vocals and soaring harmonies, lush choruses and persistent, harmonic guitar leads. And really, fellow “shoe gazers,” what more could we ask for?

Rookie of the Year’s, The Goodnight Moon, is the first, full length disc from this North Carolina band and their first as a four-piece. You see, RotY (as the “cool” people like to call them) started life as the acoustic solo project of vocalist/guitarist Ryan Dunson. . .that’s him up there, second from the right. . .yeah, with the comb-over. However, Ryan soon realized that he would be better served with an actual band and recruited guitarist Mike Kamerman, bassist Pat Murphy and drummer TJ Holt. For good measure, he tossed in acclaimed indie producer, Ed Rose (The Get Up Kids), and ended up with a strong disc “filled to the brim” with well-written, thoughtful and catchy-as-all-hell pop tunes.

Emo Phillips. . .no relation to Emo genre.

The disc opens with “The Goodnight Moon,” an ambient track whose slow build bleeds seamlessly into the first “real” song, “Poison Like Your Own.” It’s with this track that the listener gets their first taste of Dunson’s dynamic and yearning vocals. It’s also the listeners first taste of the un-inspired, sometimes clichÃ©d lyrics (“I’m drowning for your love. . .”), my only real knock to this band. Musically, though, the band provides numerous high points on this disc, dropping hook after hook with a nice blend of acoustic and electric guitars. My personal favorites are the slow waltz of “Silhouettes (All Eyes Above),” the finger snapping “Sign of Her Glory” and the slow burn of “The Blue Roses.” I will admit, the disc loses steam on the closing tracks as Ryan reverts back to a more solo-oriented, acoustic approach, but when the band is working together, they are truly something to behold.

The Goodnight Moon is a great, little “surprise” of a disc that is well suited to repeated listenings and new “favorites” emerge each time. If you are a fan of the emo scene, I highly recommend this disc. First and foremost, because it’s fantastic, secondly, these guys are some of the coolest musicians I have ever met. And hey, if you ever get a chance to see these guys live, do it, and after the show, be sure to ask them about how their van got towed at the Denver show. Good stuff.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Artist: The Ditty Bops
Album:
Moon Over The Freeway
Bastard Love Child of: Jenny Lewis and The Dresden Dolls
Best for: Background music as you get dressed in your Dr. Frank-N-furter costume for the midnight showing of Rocky Horror.

Sometimes, I secretly wish I was a bike seat.

It’s hard to believe, but The Ditty Bops (the smoking hot duo of former model Amanda Barrett and tomboy hottie, Abby Dewald), with their eclectic musical combination of folk, ragtime, pop, jugband, country swing, jazz and alternative, have created the musical equivalent of a puppy. I mean, good lord. . .this is the cutest, most adorable music you will ever hear and I don’t care how big of a cynical bastard or bitch you may be, it’s going to bring a smile to your face. . .guarenteed.

Does that mean that the music is childish and silly? Hardly. You see, under the “cute” veneer lurks a couple of accomplished musicians and brilliant vocalists who are as comfortable wielding dulcimers, toy pianos and accordions as they are mandolins, banjos and acoustic guitars. In fact, Moon Over The Freeway, the second disc from the L.A. duo, is actually a mature and sophisticated album that readily shows that the girls have actually grown in confidence and musical prowess from their first outing.

That being said, I’ll admit that it’s easy to lose site of the “maturity and sophistication” amongst the odd instrumentation which, at times, sounds too whimsical to have any substance. But keep digging and you’ll quickly realize that the unique instrumentation and throw-back sound, although extremely prominent, are not meant to be the focal point of the girls sound. On the contrary, over the course of any given track, the music becomes unobtrusive and serves as the perfect counterpoint for the girls beautiful voices as they weave around one another and blend together to mesmerizing effect.

Personally, every track on this disc is a winner, but my personal favorites are “Your Head’s Too Big,” with the brilliant line “Your head’s so big and tall how is it that your thoughts are so small” and “Waking Up In The City,” which features the following lyric: “We’ll frolic in the pesticide grass underneath the smog/Don’t gotta worry ’bout bee stings!/Don’t gotta worry ’bout ants!”

If you are looking for a true, alternative experience, pick up this disc. Or hell, catch the girls on one of their many stops as they peddle across the country on their bikes to promote the new album. Good stuff all the way around and you won’t be disappointed.

Rating: 4 out of 5

PEARL JAM FANS STRIKE BACK. . .UMM, SORTA.

As promised, here are the only, two Pearl Jam-related letters that I received that didn’t just call me a douche bag. By the way. . .what the hell is a douche bag? Is there really such a thing and is it even bad? Ladies. . .why do you put them in a bag? Are you saving them? Wouldn’t it be easier to just throw them away? And, most importantly, why did 5, separate emails each start out with “You are a douche bag?” Is this some kind of agreed upon, “secret” Pearl Jam put down? Seriously. Pretty weird shit. At any rate, here are a couple of really cool Pearl Jam fans:

Leo Lucky writes:

I have to say you just made me a life-long fan of anything you write with that column – and I mean the whole thing, even though I’m writing in about the PJ piece. Seriously, keep that shit up and don’t ever change.

And now for the riot act (note: this letter will be filled with these half-veiled PJ references, so look out). I first saw the band open up for the Chili Peppers back in 90 at a place in Dallas called The Basement (which, alas, no longer exists). I was quite impressed by this loud, angry, rocking sound and the little guy up front who was jumping all over the place. By the time Evenflo came out (it was a slow burn, if you remember), I had my friends anticipating them at the first EdgeFest (it was actually an Earth Day concert, I think) again in Dallas my senior year of high school (1992). They rocked the joint so hard that no one even stayed for the headliner, Dramarama (“˜member them?).

And then they hit. We all know the rest of the story.

But let’s talk about me. In the time between Versus (originally titled “˜Five Against the World’) and the misstep that was Vitology, I had collected 20 or so PJ bootlegs, every single import, single, vinyl, and still to this day have magazine articles and Rolling Stone covers from that period. This was MY band. I discovered them. They belonged to me. This was literally true among my circle of friends, and back then they were hard-driving gods of rock and roll whose live performances were epic religious experiences for me. I was a front-row fan all the way, completely enthralled in a state of love and trust. I have a DirtyFrank T-Shirt, for crying out loud. I apologized for Vitology, Eddie’s marbles, and the fact that they were so into PETA (rats have rights? You’ve got to be kidding me). By the time No Code was said and done, I stopped apologizing. I think even I could feel the slippage. And Vedder had stopped jumping around on everything. He actually kicked me in the hand once at Lollapalooza 92 when he swung out over the crown on a rope ladder. Think THAT didn’t pump me up? WOW! But lately he just kind of stands there bouncing his bob up and down and making slurred, mumbled, hopefully ironic statements about the government. The band’s evolution has just made this fan extinct.

(Whew) All that being said, I actually think Binaural and Yield are great discs, though they rarely capture the might of the first two discs. I bought the last one but only listened to it once (can’t even remember the name or bring myself to do enough research to find it) because it sucked and I wasn’t in the mood to listen to some old fart (Vedder’s in his 40s) bitch and moan about things he really was ignorant on anyway. Yes, the rest of the band is extremely talented, but Eddie decided to stop really using his voice sometime before Yield. Gone is that super-scream that had me going so much back in the grunge days. In its place is something weak. Why go home? Cause it just ain’t what it used to be, and it’s a damn shame when it happens. Metallica is going through it right now, and it’s freaking painful to listen to.

Now, I still haven’t missed one of their tours, and they still put on a fantastic show (the way Black rolls out in a live performance is subtle, amazing, and gets more and more interesting as the years go by), but seeing as they’re not coming anywhere within a 4 hour drive of Dallas this year I won’t be seeing them. Can’t say I’m all that upset. I grew out of defending them a long time ago, and think Vedder’s just a little silly nowadays. That there are still guys out there that will is pathetic, but to each their own – after all, I’ll write you a dissertation on Supergrass any day.

Until then, here’s me not buying that avocado-laden self-titled offering. Don’t call me, daughter. I just can’t be bothered.

Great column, man.

Thanks, Leo Lucky

And this one from Andrew Waldner:

Hello there Mr. Bell, just responding to your call on Pearl Jam fans.

Actually, I have no rebuttal. I have no idea why you think Pearl Jam fans are any more obsessed with defending their band from criticism than other bands’ fans are. Yes we’re a strange cult that there really is no explanation for. And of course I love the band, I’m crazy obsessed with them, to the point I love their last two albums when most of the world barely noticed them. I also admit they have little humor and not everyone’s going to appreciate that. Is there some reason youre entire review was a personal attack? Sure, hate their seriousness, hate their views, but next time try to write a review on the music, not on your own personal feelings.

Oh, I agree about the new Chili Peppers CD, they really did a fantastic job bringing all their talents onto this one. Although I have to disagree about “Dani California,” I just don’t get anything from it. I think other songs on the album would have been such better lead singles, and it pales in comparison to previous ones like “By the Way.”

Andrew

Thanks for writing in, gentlemen, and even more importantly, thanks for reading.

Well, friends, that is going to do it for this week. So, until next time, keep wearing it proud and playing it loud!

Send marriage proposals, review copies, presents and assorted hate mail to:

M.C. Bell
P.O. Box 1222
Arvada, CO 80001

May 31, 2006

Spook’d – #79

by Jeffery Stevenson and Seth Damoose with colors by Anthony Lee

Check out the preview for Task Force 1 (from Image Comics).

Full Size Comic

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Disclaimer: All material in Spook’d is fictitious and intended solely for the purpose of entertainment. Names are fabricated and any similarity to real people or places is purely coincidental except in those cases where public figures are being satirized.

May 29, 2006
Addicted to Bad

By Patrick Keller

Dispirited

In the months leading up to its release, FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN, based on the long-running video game series, was hailed as a wonder of technological achievement. Reports surfaced that dozens of programmers spent more than a year animating just the lead character’s hair, while other sources claimed that the programmers took about three weeks to do the hair, and spent the rest of the year trying to look busy when anyone was looking. Regardless, with a four year development period, at a cost more than $130 million, FF arrived as the most ambitious video game adaptation ever created. Subsequently, when the film made an estimated -4 cents its opening weekend, a lot of hopes were dashed, not the least of which were those of little Billy Daniels, age six, who was forced to resign as Columbia Pictures’ Head Accountant.

What went wrong? Were audiences turned off by the director’s bold, innovative use of tedium as a central component of his action movie? Or was it the reviews from the likes of Gene Shalit (who called the film “a giant, steaming bag of mouse puke”), Kenneth Turan (“like a scenic tour through Hitler’s colon”), and Roger Ebert, who famously quipped that the film made him want to savagely beat a mime to death with his bare hands, just to feel alive inside again? (That summer’s string of brutal street mime deaths in the Chicago area were later proven to be a complete coincidence, and hilarious.)

That said, FINAL FANTASY is far from the worst-received video game adaptation ever to hit the screen. Many were quickly produced to cash in on fads, while others were so awful that they never even made it to production. Here are some of the worst of the worst…

CASTLEVANIA: A lone hero takes on the most horrific being ever to walk the earth, a timeless, evil creature, a destroyer of countless men. Long in development, the film actually stalled long before the release of FF when producers were unable to negotiate a reasonable fee for Cher’s likeness.

DONKEY KONG: Shortly after the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” craze of the late 90s, Warner Bros. developed a game show where players attempted to answer a series of questions while an enraged ape threw barrels at them. The show was shelved in the United States over safety and animal rights concerns, but went on to be a huge success in Japan, where it goes by the name “Super Happy Bam-Bam Donkey Punch!”

SPIDER-MAN: THE MOVIE: THE GAME: THE MOVIE: Released direct-to-video, this film was actually just two solid hours of watching some kid (played by Kieran Culkin) attempt to beat this game, punctuated by surprisingly foul language that invokes, at various times, sex with animals, relatives, dead mimes, friends’ relatives, furniture, “the pan-roasted corpse of Pia Zadora,” Dickens characters, and even very small rocks. In one of the more pointless wastes of money in cinema history, producers actually commissioned their own version of “Spider-Man: The Movie: The Game” for the film.

MIKE TYSON’S PUNCH-OUT: Produced almost two decades after the original game hit the streets, this movie is little more than a video of a destitute Mike Tyson offering to beat up random strangers on the streets of Prague for money. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people get beat up regardless of their decision.

DIG DUG: Deviating considerably from the source material, apparently someone at Paramount thought that audiences desperately wanted to see a short, fat man (Danny DeVito) fight crime using a bicycle pump.

CONTRA: This little-seen documentary attempts to prove that President George H. W. Bush was involved in giving power-ups and extra lives to the Nicaraguan rebels.

BLADES OF STEEL: With no plot to speak of, this project went through dozens of scripts before producers realized that most of the original game’s appeal stemmed from getting into fights and hearing the occasional awkward, synthesized speech from the Nintendo. The resulting plot found a group of former boxers who are drafted by a failing hockey franchise owned by a tobacco company. The fight-prone players all get throat cancer and have to use electronic voice boxes. In an effort to be socially conscious, one of the boxers turns out to be a gay robot astronaut from the future.

May 24, 2006
Scrubs Blog: Week 27

VIDEO BLOG #53: “My Scooter Rally” ““
Scrubs loves scooters. A lot. No other show has loved scooters more.

Download Scrubs Video Blog #53:

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VIDEO BLOG #54: “My Batcave” ““
Here’s an end-of-the-season treat for you all ““ a glimpse at a scene that didn’t make it into the season finale, featuring the lair of one Dr. Acula.

Download Scrubs Video Blog #54:

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##

May 19, 2006
The Fred Hembeck Show: Episode 61

In the arena of popular culture, May is always one of the saddest months.

Why?

Well, because invariably, some long-running and beloved television show comes to the end of their line during season-ending sweeps. Sometimes there’s even a nationwide frenzy surrounding a treasured program’s demise, the most extreme example to date of mass audience mourning being the overheated reaction to the Seinfeld finale of several years back. But whether it’s an over the top reaction such as the farewell afforded Jerry and his associates, or the more low-key bye-bye’s directed towards several of this year’s departing programs – like The West Wing and Malcolm In The Middle, or the slightly more elaborate send-off’s bestowed upon Will and Grace and That 70’s Show – America annually gets out their collective hankies to bid adieu to some of their favorite TV characters.

Except, of course, when those TV characters originated inside the pages of a pulpy four-color comic book.

Think about it – has there ever been a comics-related show that went off the air blissfully wallowing in a country-wide swathe of melancholia? Back when the iconic Adventures of Superman shut down production, people weren’t yet conditioned to mourn the passing of a favorite television show much the way they would a close relative – and besides, until George Reeves met his unfortunate end, there was always a possibility of that show coming back for yet another season.

Then there was Batman.

When that Adam West camp-fest burst onto the scene in January of 1966, it was an immediate sensation, the likes of which had rarely been seen before – or since. Little over two years later, though, it quietly limped off the air, its welcome worn out in seeming record time. There were no “Final Batman episode” parties in March of “˜68, folks! (Though, considering what I’ve written about the show in the past, you can be excused for thinking that yours truly may’ve been throwing a celebratory shindig that very evening – but no, didn’t happen”¦)

After that, what have we got? Spider-Man? The Flash? Sable? Birds of Prey, fer gosh sakes? None of those shows lasted long enough for most Americans to even realize they were ON the air, so there was certainly no sentimental outpouring when they left those selfsame airwaves. And syndicated offerings like Swamp Thing, Superboy, and Night Man were off in their own obscure corners of the ever-expanding television schedule, so only their loyalist fans ever took the time to shed a tear or two when their inevitable end came.

The Incredible Hulk? Wonder Woman? Both shows had decent runs, true, but I wouldn’t term either one an across the board hit, either. I’ll be honest here – I only ever watched the debut episode of The Incredible Hulk (though I DID catch the trio of latter day reunion telefilms, which I suppose, was SOME evidence of the show’s enduring appeal amongst a more general public), and just a handful of Wonder Woman episodes, mostly in its forties-era situated initial season. Without actually having viewed their final shows, I’m reasonably certain that they WEREN’T the sort of “hail and farewell, tie up all loose ends” thingies that Friends, Cheers, and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer got to go out on. I think that’s mainly due to the fact that these shows don’t actually go out on their own terms, but were canceled while still desperately trying to hang on.

Which brings us to Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

This show ran four seasons on ABC and was a mild hit for the network. I liked it quite a bit myself (well, at least until the last season, but more on that in a moment). The series was a lot of fun, a nicely done mix of comedy, romance, and adventure, ably acted by an attractive cast. Hey, sorry Noel, Phyllis, and Margot – Teri Hatcher immediately became my favorite Lois Lane – AND the main reason I took a chance on Desperate Housewives last year! Dean Cain did a fine job as well, though I always thought it was interesting that he was made to look more appealing as Clark Kent, with the often wind-swept hair, than he was as Superman, who generally had HIS locks slicked entirely back, making him look like a muscle-bound Gilbert Gottfried! Well, at least he didn’t SOUND like him too”¦Things all went suddenly, shockingly downhill when the pair got hitched during the last season – and no, I wouldn’t blame the show’s deterioration on the mere fact that Lois and Clark married. The concept COULD’VE worked, but only with decent writing, but sadly, decent writing was nowhere to be found that last season. Truth is, I STILL have several of the program’s last episodes on tape somewhere, unwatched. I MEANT to get to them, honest I did, but somehow, I could never quite bring myself to do so, not with the memory of that horrific wedding episode still fresh in mind. I hear tell the couple were thinking about having a baby, but even that intriguing potential storyline wasn’t enough to save the show, and after such a promising start – both quality and popularity-wise – it simply vanished from sight in the spring of 1996. Faster than a speeding bullet indeed”¦

(Gee, y’know, that kid would be ten now, wouldn’t he (or she)? Wonder if he (or she)’s being kept in some kryptonite-aided stasis field buried deep in “Susan’s basement on Wisteria Lane? Hope not, cuz that’d probably be enough to kill THAT show, too”¦)

But y’know, there actually WAS one comics-based network televised program that was given a moderately respectful send-off after a long run: Sabrina The Teenage Witch.

While hardly of Seinfeld proportions, when Sabrina’s magic finally faded (not to mention star Melissa Joan Hart’s waning youthfulness) in 2002 after seven solid seasons, the folks at ABC were accommodating enough to allow the producers (many of whom were members of the Hart family, coincidentally enough) to do up a final episode, invite a few departed cast members back, and tie up the long-running romance between Sabrina and the mortal Harvey in a reasonably satisfactory manner.Hey, I’ll admit it – I watched every episode!

Partially, that was due to the fact that daughter Julie was six when the show debuted, and she was already a fan of star Hart’s earlier Clarissa Explains It All over on Nickelodeon, so it seemed like it’d be good show for us to watch together, what with its four-color roots. We kept watching because, at least over the first several seasons, it was also a genuinely good show. It was clever, it was hip (Penn and Teller had recurring roles early on, for instance), and it was actually able to pull off the trick of being funny without ever resorting to the pervasive – and oh-so-easy – suggestive material found on every other sitcom, without ever seeming sugar-coated in the process. Look, I have no problem with raunchy yocks, but I had to admire the way Sabrina was able to skillfully avoid them, and yet STILL manage to regularly elicit laughter.

But, after a fast start, the show eventually leveled off, and it seemed as if every year, the concept was overhauled and new background characters were continually rotated in as others were discarded without explanation. They even dumped Sabrina’s two aunts that last season, only one of which later elected to return for the big send-off (Penn and Teller were nowhere in sight either). Sabrina the Teenage Witch got to say goodbye all right, but it was maybe two or three years later than it should have. There were no fluffy interviews eating up time on network news programs to mark its passing. Too bad – I would’ve loved to have witnessed Barbara Walters asking that talking cat what kind of tree he wanted to be!

(Nick Bakay as Salem – he was the TRUE star of that show, and the source of an awful lot of my heart felt guffaws those seven magical years!”¦)

So currently, that leaves us with Smallville.

This show seems to be a hit of sorts, though being on a smaller network, I’m not really sure how wide-ranging a fan-base it truly has. Odds are though, when it does shut down production, it WILL be given the fond farewell salute. The intensity will no doubt fall somewhere between that of Seinfeld and Sabrina (closer to the latter, I’d imagine), and its finale, much like the freshly departed West Wing, will be more of a beginning than an ending. Just as that show morphed into “Mr. Smits Goes To Washington” as Martin Sheen tuned his office over to successor Matt Santos, the eventual end of Smallville can only mean one thing:

SuperMAN.

Gee, I wonder if Gilbert Gottfried’s gonna be available?”¦

Stay tuned”¦

But in the meantime, you can always visit Hembeck.com, my MySpace page, or send along a personal message – ain’t the Internet grand?

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

May 16, 2006
Scrubs Blog: Week 26

VIDEO BLOG #52: “My Ring of Fire” ““
Sometimes it doesn’t pay to show off your mad scooter skillz.

Download Scrubs Video Blog #52:

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“THE TODD” BLOG #15: The Todd’s Match –
Yes, even “The Todd” ““ the omnisexual surgeon played by Robert MaschioÂ ““ has been keeping a blog, and here’s his latest entry.

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May 12, 2006

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Author: UncaScroogeMcD

For extras, visit the Brat-halla Web site!

Taking the Red Pill

To see Spook’d host Alastor’s blogging silliness and more fun Spook’d stuff,visit the Spook’d Web site!

To see Spook’d host Alastor’s blogging silliness and more fun Spook’d stuff, visit the Spook’d Web site!

To see Spook’d host Alastor’s blogging silliness and more fun Spook’d stuff, visit the Spook’d Web site!

To see Spook’d host Alastor’s blogging silliness and more fun Spook’d stuff, visit the Spook’d Web site!

Dispirited

To see Spook’d host Alastor’s blogging silliness and more fun Spook’d stuff,

visit the Spook’d Web site!

To see Spook’d host Alastor’s blogging silliness and more fun Spook’d stuff,

visit the Spook’d Web site!

To see Spook’d host Alastor’s blogging silliness and more fun Spook’d stuff,

visit the Spook’d Web site!