Movies I Watched in August 2009

Movies and TV series.  Most of these I had watched before: Dr. Horrible, Dollhouse, Twilight and X-Men (years ago).  Origin wasn’t great but looked pretty.Not many of the 2006 short films were entertaining.  Dr. Renault’s Secret was of mixed goodness and I need to write about it.  I’ve been too busy to watch things, it seems.  The weather has been lovely and other demands on my time extensive.

1. Twilight
2. Land of the Giants 1:1
3. Dr. Renault’s Secret
4. Dollhouse 1:1
5. Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog
6. Origin: Spirits of the Past
7. Charmed 3:5
8. Vandread 1:3
9. X-Men 1:1
10. 2006 Academy Awards Short Films
11. My Name is Earl 3:2

Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog (2008)

Image by watchwithkristin via Flickr

My original review for the internet version.

Got it on DVD and still like it.  The Easter egg with Joss standing in for Captain Hammer is priceless. The making-of was charming.  The for real commentary was very good – I was especially glad they pointed out Sarah Michelle Gellar in the background.  Commentary! The Musical! was an interesting experiment but I thought it got too heavy handed at times.

I don’t necessarily want to see more but it was a good piece of entertainment.

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Land of the Giants (1968-1970)

Image by PetitPlat by sk_ via Flickr

My mother remembered watching a show about small people lost in a world full of giants. Her memory was imperfect but we narrowed it down to the TV series Land of the Giants.  I reluctantly agreed to watch it with her. The pilot didn’t cheer me up as it was unbelievable both in story and logic.  The first episode proper was no better.

That was all I could take.  She loaned the first disc to me since she worked the next day and I was off.  I decided to put it on while I was folding laundry.  Figured that I could keep up with it while doing chores.  The 2nd episode  was interesting enough that I kept pausing it each time I left the room.  Finally, I just sat on the sofa and watched the final episode straight through.

My trepidation was justified in that the plots are pretty simplistic.  Some of the acting makes me cringe.  But the special effects are lots of fun, and I was entertained in spite of myself.

The Setup:

In 1983, passengers on a “suborbital” shuttle flight go through some kind of wormhole and find themselves on a planet full of giants.  Their ship, the Spindrift, is damaged upon landing, which makes it impossible to return to Earth.  They spend some effort on repairs but the bulk of their time is spent on wacky missions. I would have preferred to have seen them struggle to survive on the inhospitable planet but adventures work too.

The characters:

The captain of the ship is Captain Steve Burton (Gary Conway), very square-jawed and stalwart.  His co-pilot is Dan Erickson (Don Marshall), more on him in a bit.  There is a stewardess Betty Hamilton (Heather Young) who has yet to do anything of note.  The passengers include an obnoxious young orphan Barry (Stefan Arngrim) and his dog, a conman Fitzhugh (Kurt Kasnar) , a wealthy young woman Valerie Scott (Deanna Lund) and Mark Wilson (Don Matheson) an engineer.

The Special Effects:

As we watched it, my mother commented that it must have been an expensive show to produce at the time.  IMDB asserts that it was. You can see a bit of the blue screen work at places, particularly in Framed.  The giant hands are obviously puppets which I don’t mind.  I do wish they had done a better job on the painting.

My mother wondered whether the safety pin and rope ensemble that the engineer carries is a nod to Pod from The Borrowers series by Mary Norton.  It would be delightful if that were true.

The huge props are enormous fun, and I enjoyed watching the characters laboriously climb up steps. It’s still a treat to watch people mimic dolls.  I would have thought doll people it would seem silly (what with Sims and CGI and all) but somehow the concreteness of the over-sized props amuses me no end.

Don Marshall:

I once wrote a paper on how Hollywood portrays computer scientists and other technologists.  Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” song easily sums up the stereotype. I started working on a list of how many people, not of European descent, had techie roles in science fiction films over the years. There weren’t many and few were positive. So, I was interested in seeing how Marshall’s character Dan was portrayed.  I was pleasantly surprised that it was a decent role. Dan proves to be sensible and extremely brave.

I looked up Marshall.  From Wikipedia and the Irwin Allen Network, I learned he was studying to be an engineer before he began studying acting at the Bob Gist Dramatic Workshop and Los Angeles City College.

He starred opposite Nichelle Nichols on a show named, Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’. He was a reoccurring character on Julia and Little House on the Prairie. He played Lieutenant Boma on the original series of Star Trek.

The Women:

They fair pretty badly in the first disk.  Maybe things get better later.  In the credits, Valerie is shown with her eyes closed.  The flight attendant waves her hands helplessly.  Valerie is spoiled and annoying.  When she has the opportunity to share the adventure, she’s constantly a blink away from full hysterics. Disappointing.

Pilot: The Crash – They encounter giant humans and animals and slowly realize that they aren’t in Kansas any more.  Dan neatly resolves a crisis when he points out that only he can pilot the ship.  The characterizations were banal and the boy and Fitzhugh made me cringe each time they had a scene.  The scene in which they are nearly run down by a car is nicely done.

Ghost Town – They encounter a town made in their size.  Some of the viewer of this episode commented snidely that it was amazing that the set designers could find such small props for them.

This episode was so dumb.

1. The electric force field was selective in whom it hurt and how much.
2. They took far too long to realize that they weren’t back on Earth.
3. The last bit of stupidity had Dan jumping through fire to save his captain from harm.  This seems heroic until the camera pulls back and it’s clear Dan could have just walked around the flame in perfect safety. What’s worse is that the actor dislocated his shoulder in the dumb stunt.

Framed – A lecherous photography frames a homeless man for murder.  The tinies set out to prove his innocence. I liked this episode a lot better.  They solve their problems step by step and there are a lot of big props in this episode.  Even though getting involved seems dumb (even to some of the characters), they do it for the noblest of reasons.

Underground: The tinies infiltrate a government vault to retrieve a letter that would condemn 20 people.  They didn’t solve the problems quite as I expected but they work them out reasonably well.  The giant Gorak they encounter is a morally gray, at best, but the tinies are pure of heart and ignore it.

TV.com has some excellent plot summaries and trivia for the show.

Salad Fingers

Image via Wikipedia

Youtube has David Firth‘s Salad Fingers in its horror shows listing.

It’s an imaginative series and I watched 5 of the episodes but didn’t make it all the way through episode 6.

I think the two main things that make it unbearably unsettling for me is its slow pace and quiet soundtrack.  Firth makes you wait and wait for a horrible thing to happen and he makes you think what it might be.  By the time it does happen, I have imagined a bunch of nastiness.

The monologue is great too.  “You smell like soot and poo.”  “Don’t you like my mouth-words?”

Halloween season approaches

Image via Wikipedia

I didn’t realize that it was close enough to October to start thinking of preparations for Halloween.

I have the horror disk to update for my brother, for one thing. A few years ago, I gave my brother a list of horror movies with reviews all grouped by monster type. The next year, I added horror site links and bunches of images. Last year, he said he wanted decoration how-to added to it. I’d love to find a bunch of classic movie trailers to add to the disk too.  Best of all I get to look up the new movies that have come out this year.

This year, I’ll have to tone down the horror movie watching since my roommate isn’t comfortable with them.  That means I can concentrate on old Universal pictures and animated specials.  Those are good too, so I won’t mind a gore-free Halloween.

Last year was a big decoration year but this year, I’d rather spend time telling ghost stories and bobbing for apples and carving jack-o-lanterns and things like that.

Break up at Devil’s Panties

I follow Jeannie Breedon’s Devil’s Panties strip regularly.  Her strip is very winning – it’s hard not to check in and see if Jeannie’s avatar has that goofy 1,000 watt smile yet again.

Recently, she began an arc which features much less smiling.  It seems she and her boyfriend Will broke up, maybe, on October 2008.  Her forum posters are all aflutter.

Here is the arc so far:

Break up

The Conversation: one — two — three

Dissection

Moving on: one — two — three — four

I’m sorry that things went bad for them.  I do hope that she’ll be able to grin again soon.

Sluggy Freelance

So, I’m reading the archives of Sluggy Freelance by Pete Abrams.  It’s not that I haven’t been aware of it, I was just daunted by the enormous archive.  He started the strip in 1997 and it’s still going strong.

But I’ve been reading it for several days and enjoying it very much. I’m up to February 1999, the arc with the near-sighted demoness.  I’ve read that the comic has changed over time from rotating parodies to a dramatic story.  It’s kind of hard to imagine right now but I trust that that’s true.

NPR interview 2007

NPR interview 1998

Buck Rogers (1936)

Cover of Buck Rogers

Part of my science fiction movie watching project.

Tagline:  AMAZING EXPLOITS OF DEATH-DEFYING DARING!

I confess, first of all, that I didn’t watch the whole four hours of this serial of Buck Rogers.

Twice I attempted it and twice I dozed off.  On the third attempt, I watched half of the episodes.  One of my co-viewers started reading a book and the other fell asleep.

Dave Sindelar from Fantastic Movie Musings & Ramblings suggests watching them over time rather than all at once.  This is good advice, and if I watch another serial, I think I’ll follow it.

Buster Crabbe who plays Buck also starred in several Flash Gordon serials.  It was too much to have two serials starring the same actor back to back, so I dropped Flash Gordon from the list.  In fact, I shortened my list a lot.  The titles I removed were the ones I had watched before or had little interest in watching now.

The Story (as much as I watched of it)

Buck Rogers (Buster Crabbe) goes into suspended animation until the 26th century.  He basically hits the ground running and gets involved in a rebellion against Killer Kane (Anthony Warde) which involves flying a lot of space ships hither and yon.  I stopped it about the time Buck and Prince Tallen of Saturn (Philson Ahn) were hiding from Killer Kane’s search parties.

Star Wars influence

As we started watching, one of my co-viewers said, “Hey, that’s like Star Wars.”  I nodded as we sat watching the recap scrolling up the screen.  There were other similarities too.  The good-guy rebels on Earth were fighting the dark cloaked Kane who was setting out to create an interplanetary government.  Buck is an excellent pilot like Han Solo.  The Zuggs reminded me a lot of  the Jawas.

There were probably many more similarities but that’s all I gleaned from the beginning of the series.

Other Things

They move between floor levels in futuristic elevators which work a lot like the Star Trek transmitter.

The Zuggs are an alien race oppressed and controlled by the humans. They move slowly and react slowly which I think was an effect of their controlling devices but I’m not sure. The only part of the serial I wish I had watched was the Zuggs revolting in chapter eight.

Wilma Deering (Constance Moore) is portrayed as a competent pilot, which was nice.  Buck is still better, despite sleeping through centuries of technological advancement.

Watch it or not?

It was fun to see the kind of movie that inspired Lucas.

On the other hand, it’s a show that requires patience and certain acceptance of the genre.  Sindelair sums it up best:

Whole episodes will sometimes pass without any plot development or new discoveries, but will contain nothing more than a series of “thrilling” action sequences.

Links

Buck-Rogers.com

Weird SciFi

FilmFax – pdf

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Book Preferences Meme

Here is a meme from Booking Through Thursday.

Reading something frivolous? Or something serious? Frivolous is my first choice.
Paperbacks? Or hardcovers? Paperbacks are easier to move. Much nicer to carry eight boxes of paperbacks than eight boxes of hardbacks up flights of stairs.
Fiction? Or Nonfiction? Used to be exclusively fiction.  Now, nonfiction is less of a commitment.
Poetry? Or Prose? Prose by far.
Biographies? Or Autobiographies? If I love the voice of the writer than I prefer autobiographies.  I’ve read too many dull biographies.
History? Or Historical Fiction? I enjoy historical fiction most when I know either very little or very much on the subject.  I like histories when I’m fascinated by events or people and desperately want more depth.
Series? Or Stand-alones? I used to stand-alones exclusively.  Now I am refuse to read series, mostly because I rarely was able to find the entire run.  I like both now but I have been enjoying sequels lately.
Classics? Or best-sellers? I have come to prefer either forgotten bestsellers or obscure classics.
Lurid, fruity prose? Or straight-forward, basic prose? Straight-forward, transparent prose is my favorite.
Plots? Or Stream-of-Consciousness? Plots.
Long books? Or Short? Short is good. Entertaining is better.
Illustrated? Or Non-illustrated? Non-illustrated.
Borrowed? Or Owned? I have no space for owning all the books I read.
New? Or Used? New if it’s a book that I will reread or consult a lot. Used for everything else.

me versus the TBR stack

I mentioned previously that I have been cataloging my books and movies with data crow.  I realized that I had about 40 books that I had borrowed from family members in the past year or so.  Well, they actually offered them to me.  I have been reading books from the library and these books had languished on different shelves.  I have them together now and decided to bend my will to finishing them up in the next couple of months.

• Horus Killings by P. C. Doherty
• Forever Odd by Dean Koontz
  
• Mystery of the Shrinking House by William Arden
• The Alton Gift by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
• Queen of Dragons by Shana Abe
• Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce
• First Test by Tamora Pierce
• Fushigi Yuugi #1-4 by Yuu Watase
• Juniper by Monica Furlong
• Beast by Donna Jo Napoli
• Wild Boy by Nancy Springer
• Trickster’s Choice by Tamora Pierce
• California Demon by Julie Kenner
• Return of the Twelve by Pauline Clarke

I put the list in the sidebar to help me remember.

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