'Las Vegas Hillbillys' - 1966
Story in Brief: Woody Weatherby's uncle dies and leaves him a casino in Las Vegas. Woody and his buddy/business manager Jeepers drive from Tennessee to Vegas in their barely running truck to discover that the casino is a simple roadside tavern and the fortune they imagined is nothing but debt. All they have is the space, a bartender and singer Boots Malone's contract for the rest of the year. Are Woody's dreams of being a big country singer destined to remain dreams?
Thoughts:
I apologize for making it sound like this movie has much of a story. It doesn't really and I don't think it was intended to be much more than a framework to hang the performances of a number of country stars upon. In that it succeeds. Unfortunately the simple story that we follow for eighty some minutes just stops and this is what frustrates me most. I mean it wasn't much and I had grown to accept that, I was even enjoying it, but then there's nothing at the end to wrap things up. It feels like the producers realized they had enough footage for a feature and just stopped. Plotlines (simple as they were) are left. There's no real buildup to the last minute or so of the movie, no real link between what we've been watching and the ending. That's what bothers me.
That said, the movie's not bad until the frustrating ending. It's amusing in bits, not too badly made most of the time and it's reasonably well acted for the most part. The bits that are bad are really awkward, but they're relatively infrequent. The breaks for the music are a bit too frequent and run too long. The majority of this movie is music. Since that was the intent, I can't fault them there but it does make it a bit tricky to watch now, especially as many of the performers in the film are relatively obscure now.
Ferlin Husky is a likable lead as Woody. He's friendly and well intentioned. When people start to rally around him, it's not hard to understand why. He's good people. Don Bowman is fun as Jeepers. Jeepers is the relatively quiet cynical guy you know who's always willing to let you know where things will go wrong. He makes for a good counter point to Woody. Mamie Van Doren is Boots and she seems to be having a reasonably good time acting with the country folk (and looking cuddly). The big surprise (in more ways than one) in the cast is an appearance from Richard Kiel as a bodyguard. Dressed with a big cowboy hat, he was the reason behind my only vocal laugh while watching the film. While laughing at one of Jeepers' comments, he smacks Jeepers in the back, knocks him down, and quickly apologizes and helps him up. I'm sure it was intentional, but it was so natural it amused me.
The image is full screen. If the opening credit lettering is anything to go by, it's slightly cropped, but not by much. The picture is flecked and damaged, but not horribly so. The picture is crisp except in moments when the photography appears to get too clever and fails. The audio is solid but unremarkable. In short, it's a reasonably good representation of what was no doubt a low budget sixties film. It's not likely to ever look any better.
The only extras VCI has supplied is a loop of films that were 'coming soon' when this DVD was released. Still, considering it's going for $9.99 now, that's not bad.
Not recommended. The non-ending has left me too bitter towards this film. I just can't recommend it. If you have a sizable interest in sixties country music, then look for it. Otherwise there's not enough here for most people.
(Standard 'pricing may have changed' disclaimer. Add 'I'd be more creative but work in Archive has me tuckered out'. Also add 'This is probably the most anyone has ever written about this film'. And I reviewed the sequel as well so add 'Coming soon...')
26 November 2008
25 November 2008
Busy at mo
Had a great 'rearrange the Archive' thought this morning. It's working out good so far. Pieces falling into place and everything.
Will talk more later.
Will talk more later.
24 November 2008
Series 4 Reviews - continued
'The Doctor's Daughter'
I'd braced myself going into this story for a couple of reasons: the title, and my friends had reacted rather positively to it. Hype makes me nervous.
I've explained that before, haven't I? How I tend to lower my expectations for things I'm looking forward to in an effort to better enjoy the thing when it arrives? I'll go to the point of bad talking things in public in an effort to keep that expectation low.
It's hard to go into an adaptation of something you enjoy, or an experimental episode of a TV show you like, or an issue of a comic that doesn't seem to do much but is setting something else up. Sometimes you can expect too much or not be in a receptive mood for the variation or whatever. What people often tend to forget is that a review of something, even if it's as part of a casual conversation over lunch, is just an opinion. There are ways to discuss the construction of a work, to determine mathematically that its made well or made poorly, but, really, who reviews things like that? Of what value is it? A poorly constructed film can still be more entertaining than one that is technically well assembled. A review is how one person reacted to a work, generally in that one moment. Music reviews can be done from multiple plays of the songs involved, but often a movie or TV review is done from one viewing of the work in question. What kind of mood did the reviewer have going in? Do they generally like the type of work in question? What distracted him/her while watching the work? In the average review, none of that is discussed, just a 'it was awesome!' or 'it was awful'.
The Internet often does not help as it is considered 'criticism' to hate what is liked and like what is hated. It's 'cool' to be contrary for the sake of it. To be fair, I've lived that life too, but it soon gets very boring.
Now, in all fairness, everyone has their own limits as to what they'll accept. It annoyed a lot of people that Spider-Man had organic web-shooters in the movies instead of the mechanical ones. It's really not much of a plot point but, from a purist point of view, it was wrong and tainted the film for them. Fair enough to them but in the overall scheme of things, I didn't think it was a big deal. I had some issues with the ending to Series 3 of Doctor Who, with the world thinking about the Doctor enough to 'fix' him, but it was a moment and I moved on.
Where was I going with all this? Oh, right, 'The Doctor's Daughter'. Returning to the task at hand.
I enjoyed it. Some of the new 45 minute episodes feel truncated in their stories and this was one of them. While watching it, I enjoyed it, but I could also feel the 'missing' parts if this had been a old-style 4 part story. There were characters and set-up that was bypassed that felt like it was there. It was weird in that regard.
The title had concerned me as I was afraid of some weird set of circumstances that would generate the title character. It actually is dealt with straight away in the story so that we can focus on the consequences.
This is where the episode shined for me. There was a lot of other things to enjoy: the mystery, the fish-like aliens, the gritty look of everything but the Doctor's reactions and reasons for such made this all click. For viewers of the new series, some of what he explains might be news, but for me, this was just going back to the old days. It was almost like a sequel of Troughton's conversation with Victoria in 'Tomb of the Cybermen'.
The fact that the Doctor's Daughter, Jenny (Genny?), was played by the Doctor's Daughter (Peter Davison's daughter) amused me. I will also admit the fact that she's very pretty indeed helped my attention as well. Wow. Such a smile!
'The Unicorn and the Wasp'
Murder mystery with Agatha Christie writted by Gareth Roberts. You had me at hello.
The only rough spot in this story, indeed in the season in general so far, has been some of the CGI effects. Some of them are getting more noticable. I'm not sure if I'm getting more picky about it or if CGI is being used more or what exactly it is. It's not been a big problem so far but it's just something that I've noticed more.
Oh, and yesterday I also watched:
'An Unearthly Child'
Still one of the most exciting half-hours of television, 45 years later, and nothing really happens. When Ian sums up the series to come as 'A Police Box, standing in a junkyard, it can go anywhere in Time and Space', I have to wipe a tear from my eye.
It's just so... right. You can go anywhere from there.
And they did.
I'd braced myself going into this story for a couple of reasons: the title, and my friends had reacted rather positively to it. Hype makes me nervous.
I've explained that before, haven't I? How I tend to lower my expectations for things I'm looking forward to in an effort to better enjoy the thing when it arrives? I'll go to the point of bad talking things in public in an effort to keep that expectation low.
It's hard to go into an adaptation of something you enjoy, or an experimental episode of a TV show you like, or an issue of a comic that doesn't seem to do much but is setting something else up. Sometimes you can expect too much or not be in a receptive mood for the variation or whatever. What people often tend to forget is that a review of something, even if it's as part of a casual conversation over lunch, is just an opinion. There are ways to discuss the construction of a work, to determine mathematically that its made well or made poorly, but, really, who reviews things like that? Of what value is it? A poorly constructed film can still be more entertaining than one that is technically well assembled. A review is how one person reacted to a work, generally in that one moment. Music reviews can be done from multiple plays of the songs involved, but often a movie or TV review is done from one viewing of the work in question. What kind of mood did the reviewer have going in? Do they generally like the type of work in question? What distracted him/her while watching the work? In the average review, none of that is discussed, just a 'it was awesome!' or 'it was awful'.
The Internet often does not help as it is considered 'criticism' to hate what is liked and like what is hated. It's 'cool' to be contrary for the sake of it. To be fair, I've lived that life too, but it soon gets very boring.
Now, in all fairness, everyone has their own limits as to what they'll accept. It annoyed a lot of people that Spider-Man had organic web-shooters in the movies instead of the mechanical ones. It's really not much of a plot point but, from a purist point of view, it was wrong and tainted the film for them. Fair enough to them but in the overall scheme of things, I didn't think it was a big deal. I had some issues with the ending to Series 3 of Doctor Who, with the world thinking about the Doctor enough to 'fix' him, but it was a moment and I moved on.
Where was I going with all this? Oh, right, 'The Doctor's Daughter'. Returning to the task at hand.
I enjoyed it. Some of the new 45 minute episodes feel truncated in their stories and this was one of them. While watching it, I enjoyed it, but I could also feel the 'missing' parts if this had been a old-style 4 part story. There were characters and set-up that was bypassed that felt like it was there. It was weird in that regard.
The title had concerned me as I was afraid of some weird set of circumstances that would generate the title character. It actually is dealt with straight away in the story so that we can focus on the consequences.
This is where the episode shined for me. There was a lot of other things to enjoy: the mystery, the fish-like aliens, the gritty look of everything but the Doctor's reactions and reasons for such made this all click. For viewers of the new series, some of what he explains might be news, but for me, this was just going back to the old days. It was almost like a sequel of Troughton's conversation with Victoria in 'Tomb of the Cybermen'.
The fact that the Doctor's Daughter, Jenny (Genny?), was played by the Doctor's Daughter (Peter Davison's daughter) amused me. I will also admit the fact that she's very pretty indeed helped my attention as well. Wow. Such a smile!
'The Unicorn and the Wasp'
Murder mystery with Agatha Christie writted by Gareth Roberts. You had me at hello.
The only rough spot in this story, indeed in the season in general so far, has been some of the CGI effects. Some of them are getting more noticable. I'm not sure if I'm getting more picky about it or if CGI is being used more or what exactly it is. It's not been a big problem so far but it's just something that I've noticed more.
Oh, and yesterday I also watched:
'An Unearthly Child'
Still one of the most exciting half-hours of television, 45 years later, and nothing really happens. When Ian sums up the series to come as 'A Police Box, standing in a junkyard, it can go anywhere in Time and Space', I have to wipe a tear from my eye.
It's just so... right. You can go anywhere from there.
And they did.
23 November 2008
76 Totter's Lane
Ian's brain ached with confusion. Things had been so simple a few short minutes ago and now... now it was if he understood nothing. He picked up a word of the old man's reply and echoed it automatically. "Ship?"
This seemed to further irritate the old man. "Yes, yes Ship!" Continuing his condescending tone, he noted "This doesn't roll along on wheels, you know."
Next to Ian, Barbara also struggled to understand. "You mean, it moves?"
Susan shrugged off the question. It made sense to her. Why did it make sense to her and not him? "The TARDIS can go anywhere," she stated matter-of-factly.
"TARDIS?" The unfamiliar word further threw Barbara. "I don't understand you Susan."
She tried to explain. "Well I made up the name TARDIS from the initials: Time And Relative Dimension In Space." The lack of comprehension from us seemed to fluster her. "I thought you'd both understand when you saw the different dimensions inside from those outside."
He struggled to understand. "Now let me get this straight," Ian began. "A thing that looks like a police box, standing in a junkyard, it can move anywhere in Time and Space?"
"Yes," Susan replied.
"Quite so," her Grandfather confirmed.
Ian's brain continued to ache.
(45 Years of Doctor Who today. November 23rd, 1963. Loving it!)
This seemed to further irritate the old man. "Yes, yes Ship!" Continuing his condescending tone, he noted "This doesn't roll along on wheels, you know."
Next to Ian, Barbara also struggled to understand. "You mean, it moves?"
Susan shrugged off the question. It made sense to her. Why did it make sense to her and not him? "The TARDIS can go anywhere," she stated matter-of-factly.
"TARDIS?" The unfamiliar word further threw Barbara. "I don't understand you Susan."
She tried to explain. "Well I made up the name TARDIS from the initials: Time And Relative Dimension In Space." The lack of comprehension from us seemed to fluster her. "I thought you'd both understand when you saw the different dimensions inside from those outside."
He struggled to understand. "Now let me get this straight," Ian began. "A thing that looks like a police box, standing in a junkyard, it can move anywhere in Time and Space?"
"Yes," Susan replied.
"Quite so," her Grandfather confirmed.
Ian's brain continued to ache.
(45 Years of Doctor Who today. November 23rd, 1963. Loving it!)
22 November 2008
Wrapping up
The reason I hesitated to tell this as a long, detailed story has arrived. At this point, my adventure is over; it's all chit-chatting, being surprised that the prices in the Pro Shop were reasonable, being warm, being tired, and eating from here. Nothing complicated and nothing really exciting.
All the adventure was now Moppy's job.
It seems awkward to tell Moppy's story at this point. I was only there for it and he had to live it. I don't think he'll mind but it's not the same as telling my story. So we'll just briefly cover it. Going into this, please note that we were all very sober, tired maybe, but very sober. All the 'Lucy Ricardo' that Moppy inherited from his late mother kicked in at this point.
The Pro Shop was warm. Moppy had spent the last three hours or so somewhat chilled. He quickly overheated and lost his balance once or twice.
While we jockeyed for position on the still-crowded highways, Moppy managed to lose his phone under the car seat before him. He couldn't find it, even with me calling it.
When we got out of the car to eat, he was able to retrieve his phone, but painfully caught the middle finger of his right hand in the door while closing it.
After eating, we all dozed off in the car to some degree, apart from the driver of course. Moppy woke up to the buffalo chicken wings he'd eaten disagreeing with him. We quickly pulled over so that he could have a 'food escape'.
Poor fella.
After that the drama was over. We all went to our seperate homes expecting to fall asleep immediately but were too wired to do so. Watched Jeff Dunham on Comedy Central instead, much like a good chunk of the populace. Quick review: Thumbs up!
On a totally unrelated note: I think I have part of a movie scene in my head. Must dash.
All the adventure was now Moppy's job.
It seems awkward to tell Moppy's story at this point. I was only there for it and he had to live it. I don't think he'll mind but it's not the same as telling my story. So we'll just briefly cover it. Going into this, please note that we were all very sober, tired maybe, but very sober. All the 'Lucy Ricardo' that Moppy inherited from his late mother kicked in at this point.
The Pro Shop was warm. Moppy had spent the last three hours or so somewhat chilled. He quickly overheated and lost his balance once or twice.
While we jockeyed for position on the still-crowded highways, Moppy managed to lose his phone under the car seat before him. He couldn't find it, even with me calling it.
When we got out of the car to eat, he was able to retrieve his phone, but painfully caught the middle finger of his right hand in the door while closing it.
After eating, we all dozed off in the car to some degree, apart from the driver of course. Moppy woke up to the buffalo chicken wings he'd eaten disagreeing with him. We quickly pulled over so that he could have a 'food escape'.
Poor fella.
After that the drama was over. We all went to our seperate homes expecting to fall asleep immediately but were too wired to do so. Watched Jeff Dunham on Comedy Central instead, much like a good chunk of the populace. Quick review: Thumbs up!
On a totally unrelated note: I think I have part of a movie scene in my head. Must dash.
21 November 2008
Game time!
The game started at noon. We arrived around 9. We were early.
The point of this was to get good parking and beat the rush. I'm used to tailgating before Brewer games at Miller Park. There's loads of parking at the stadium, it's not that expensive, and it's relaxing. At Lambeau, there isn't loads of parking at the stadium, you can't park at the stadium without a special pass, and parking near the stadium isn't cheap. We did it anyway. It was worth it to be close and grill in the shadow of the stadium.
It was cold getting out of the car. The wind was whistling through the area that we parked in. We started the grill and huddled around it to warm up. Eventually we did cook something. When Moppy went to toss out the hot coals, some knucklehead had used it as a rubbish bin, tossing a box in it. It burned nice. We used that for warmth as well.
Oddly enough, beer doesn't warm you up much when the chill is that strong. It's the only time I've tailgated when my beer got colder as I drank it.
We wandered off, heading for the stadium, pausing to run for batteries and the bathrooms on the way. Pictures were taken. Statues were gawked at. Finally we entered the stadium itself. The atrium was warm, so very warm.
Once we went into the stadium itself, I was no longer cold, despite the lack of heating. That helped. We wandered around a little, returned to the bathroom again (I wasn't THAT warm), and then it was time to enter the stands.
It's weird. I've seen it on tv so many times, heard about people entering the place and trying to explain the vibe, so I thought I was prepared for it. I don't know how to explain it. It was exciting and fascinating and ... something. There was a hint of the feeling of history that I've had at certain places, the feeling of a very old place that just exudes its age, but this was still so alive. It was unique.
The game itself seemed to race past. I wasn't cold. The people around us were nice. Everyone was behaved. There were kids in front of us, grandparents behind us, and Bears fans next to us. When the Packers scored, which happened a lot, we slapped five with everyone apart from the Bears fans. We were nice enough to not laugh at them. However, when Rex Grossman came in to quarterback for the Bears, we did laugh. I paused, heard that it wasn't just us laughing but the crowd as a whole, and laughed even harder.
The outcome of the game was never in doubt. For whatever reason, the Bears did not show up to play that day. The Packers never lost the lead. They won the game. We celebrated, took more pictures, and headed back into the atrium for warmth and the Pro Shop.
The point of this was to get good parking and beat the rush. I'm used to tailgating before Brewer games at Miller Park. There's loads of parking at the stadium, it's not that expensive, and it's relaxing. At Lambeau, there isn't loads of parking at the stadium, you can't park at the stadium without a special pass, and parking near the stadium isn't cheap. We did it anyway. It was worth it to be close and grill in the shadow of the stadium.
It was cold getting out of the car. The wind was whistling through the area that we parked in. We started the grill and huddled around it to warm up. Eventually we did cook something. When Moppy went to toss out the hot coals, some knucklehead had used it as a rubbish bin, tossing a box in it. It burned nice. We used that for warmth as well.
Oddly enough, beer doesn't warm you up much when the chill is that strong. It's the only time I've tailgated when my beer got colder as I drank it.
We wandered off, heading for the stadium, pausing to run for batteries and the bathrooms on the way. Pictures were taken. Statues were gawked at. Finally we entered the stadium itself. The atrium was warm, so very warm.
Once we went into the stadium itself, I was no longer cold, despite the lack of heating. That helped. We wandered around a little, returned to the bathroom again (I wasn't THAT warm), and then it was time to enter the stands.
It's weird. I've seen it on tv so many times, heard about people entering the place and trying to explain the vibe, so I thought I was prepared for it. I don't know how to explain it. It was exciting and fascinating and ... something. There was a hint of the feeling of history that I've had at certain places, the feeling of a very old place that just exudes its age, but this was still so alive. It was unique.
The game itself seemed to race past. I wasn't cold. The people around us were nice. Everyone was behaved. There were kids in front of us, grandparents behind us, and Bears fans next to us. When the Packers scored, which happened a lot, we slapped five with everyone apart from the Bears fans. We were nice enough to not laugh at them. However, when Rex Grossman came in to quarterback for the Bears, we did laugh. I paused, heard that it wasn't just us laughing but the crowd as a whole, and laughed even harder.
The outcome of the game was never in doubt. For whatever reason, the Bears did not show up to play that day. The Packers never lost the lead. They won the game. We celebrated, took more pictures, and headed back into the atrium for warmth and the Pro Shop.
20 November 2008
Ugh, it's been awhile
I arrive at the apartment complex at which we were to meet a few minutes early. I'd talked about stopping to get coffee at McD's or something along the way, and had the time to do so, but just wanted to meet up and get going. We could stop as a group. I texted Moppy to let him know I'd arrived before closing my eyes for a cat-nap.
When he called me a few minutes later, I snorted like I was dragged from a deep sleep. Probably needed that. I get up, help him collect stuff, the Harms' arrive so we pack stuff into the car, and off we go. Everything is cheery. We are excited. We chit-chat.
In anticipation of the 30 some degree weather, I have layers of clothing on. I've a t-shirt, thin flannel, thick flannel with a hood, another thick flannel without a hood, and my blue 'Doc' jacket on. I'm wearing two pairs of socks. I'm wearing my flannel pajama pants on underneath my jeans. I'm ready to be in the cold. The car is not cold and I quickly start to overheat and not feel... right.
As a child I was prone to getting motion sickness on long trips. I'd sometimes get bus-sick on the school bus. The fumes can still turn my stomach. It's not something I've experienced in decades.
But lack of sleep + lack of food + beer foam still in stomach + overheated = car sick.
I was miserable but not horrible. I watched my lips grow pale in the rear view mirror. I removed most of my layers. I cracked the window for some fresh air. These helped but not that much. Once we hit Sheboygan (about an hour or so into the drive), I started burping. That helped. I've had occasional issues with gas that doesn't want to go anywhere but just inflates where it is, so I considered this could be part of that, especially when the burps helped a bit. One got a little acidy. Felt weird.
Then, it happened. It would have been a food escape but I had no food in me, so it was more of a foam and acid escape. I'm sure my expression was comical as it felt like my face expanded to its full capacity while containing the overflow. I soon controlled it and swallowed it back down.
Yuk.
A number of very reasonable questions followed. Yes I would be okay, no I haven't been like this in a while, stopping for a minute would probably be a good choice.
At the next exit, we pulled off and into a nearby Hardees. I miss Hardees. There aren't really any nearby me so I get to go to them rarely. This pleased me to begin with. I didn't readd the layers I'd removed and hurried into the restaurant, shivering a bit from the cold. After breathing deeply, warming up, and reassuring everyone I would be okay, I needed something to eat.
Now, it's obvious at this point that my brain and my stomach were not really communicating. My stomach said 'we are shaky and would feel better if we had some food in us' and evidently my brain only heard 'we need food'. It saw biscuits and gravy, which I enjoy, and figured this would make me happy. It's a nice, sturdy meal and would fill me up. As the coffee I sipped in the car had not made me feel better, the brain was smart enough to get orange juice, hoping it wouldn't be too acidic, and more like orange drink. Got a combo with hashbrowns (yay, hashbrowns!) and sat down to the excitement of eating. It smelled so good!
And then I opened the container of biscuits and gravy. I considered it for a moment and then closed it, to the amusement of those with me. When your stomach is jumpy, ordering something that looks like it may already have escaped you is not a good idea. Juice, no problem. Hashbrowns, no problem. Managed to nibble at the biscuits and that was all of that. Felt guilty throwing it out but it was the best choice.
Got back in the car feeling better, but not all better. Was much more relaxed and cat-napped the rest of the way to Green Bay, about another hour, hour and a half. That helped too.
I became alert when we spotted the stadium in the distance. We were here!
When he called me a few minutes later, I snorted like I was dragged from a deep sleep. Probably needed that. I get up, help him collect stuff, the Harms' arrive so we pack stuff into the car, and off we go. Everything is cheery. We are excited. We chit-chat.
In anticipation of the 30 some degree weather, I have layers of clothing on. I've a t-shirt, thin flannel, thick flannel with a hood, another thick flannel without a hood, and my blue 'Doc' jacket on. I'm wearing two pairs of socks. I'm wearing my flannel pajama pants on underneath my jeans. I'm ready to be in the cold. The car is not cold and I quickly start to overheat and not feel... right.
As a child I was prone to getting motion sickness on long trips. I'd sometimes get bus-sick on the school bus. The fumes can still turn my stomach. It's not something I've experienced in decades.
But lack of sleep + lack of food + beer foam still in stomach + overheated = car sick.
I was miserable but not horrible. I watched my lips grow pale in the rear view mirror. I removed most of my layers. I cracked the window for some fresh air. These helped but not that much. Once we hit Sheboygan (about an hour or so into the drive), I started burping. That helped. I've had occasional issues with gas that doesn't want to go anywhere but just inflates where it is, so I considered this could be part of that, especially when the burps helped a bit. One got a little acidy. Felt weird.
Then, it happened. It would have been a food escape but I had no food in me, so it was more of a foam and acid escape. I'm sure my expression was comical as it felt like my face expanded to its full capacity while containing the overflow. I soon controlled it and swallowed it back down.
Yuk.
A number of very reasonable questions followed. Yes I would be okay, no I haven't been like this in a while, stopping for a minute would probably be a good choice.
At the next exit, we pulled off and into a nearby Hardees. I miss Hardees. There aren't really any nearby me so I get to go to them rarely. This pleased me to begin with. I didn't readd the layers I'd removed and hurried into the restaurant, shivering a bit from the cold. After breathing deeply, warming up, and reassuring everyone I would be okay, I needed something to eat.
Now, it's obvious at this point that my brain and my stomach were not really communicating. My stomach said 'we are shaky and would feel better if we had some food in us' and evidently my brain only heard 'we need food'. It saw biscuits and gravy, which I enjoy, and figured this would make me happy. It's a nice, sturdy meal and would fill me up. As the coffee I sipped in the car had not made me feel better, the brain was smart enough to get orange juice, hoping it wouldn't be too acidic, and more like orange drink. Got a combo with hashbrowns (yay, hashbrowns!) and sat down to the excitement of eating. It smelled so good!
And then I opened the container of biscuits and gravy. I considered it for a moment and then closed it, to the amusement of those with me. When your stomach is jumpy, ordering something that looks like it may already have escaped you is not a good idea. Juice, no problem. Hashbrowns, no problem. Managed to nibble at the biscuits and that was all of that. Felt guilty throwing it out but it was the best choice.
Got back in the car feeling better, but not all better. Was much more relaxed and cat-napped the rest of the way to Green Bay, about another hour, hour and a half. That helped too.
I became alert when we spotted the stadium in the distance. We were here!
19 November 2008
Lets start this trip
I had a really good, fun weekend which was capped by going to Lambeau Field for the first time for football. Reflecting on the build-up to the trip does explain a few things.
Friday night I went out with a group of Edge geeks for dinner and to see the new Bond film. (Really short review: more of the same if you enjoyed 'Casino Royale'. If you haven't seen 'Casino Royale' yet, this movie may not make much sense to you.) 'Star Trek' trailer left happy chills. Drank no alcohol but 'misbehaved' in other ways (such as drank soda, which I don't really do anymore). Good time.
Saturday afternoon I went to the Admirals hockey game. Made up for not drinking the night before by drinking now. Had Buffalo Chicken tenders (spicy!) for lunch.
Saturday evening the original plan was to go to the Compound, but Primary Compound Personage Amy sadly twisted her ankle so that didn't happen (they thought it might have been broken at first so it could have been much worse). Went with out with Chad for beers instead. Now, I hadn't had dinner Saturday in expectation of wings at the Compound. The switch to go out for a few drinks was late so I didn't eat at home. I could eat at the Club but, once I got some beer in me, I wasn't hungry any more. Stayed too late considering how early I had to get up the next day, drank more than I should have but was still all sorts of sober (honest!), got home, ate some chips and tried to go to sleep because I had to get up at 5am to start the process of going to Lambeau.
But I'm wired, hungry, and excited. Sleep does not come easy.
I wake up a few minutes in advance of my alarm and just get going. I take a quick shower, eat a couple pieces of bread (no time to toast them!), drink more water than I think is really safe for my overactive filration system, and get going.
I maybe got four hours of sleep. I'm tired. In the past 24 hours I've had more beer than food. I'm nervously excited.
To quote a local radio team: 'Sounds like a recipe for disaster Fireman Jim.'
And they would be right.
Friday night I went out with a group of Edge geeks for dinner and to see the new Bond film. (Really short review: more of the same if you enjoyed 'Casino Royale'. If you haven't seen 'Casino Royale' yet, this movie may not make much sense to you.) 'Star Trek' trailer left happy chills. Drank no alcohol but 'misbehaved' in other ways (such as drank soda, which I don't really do anymore). Good time.
Saturday afternoon I went to the Admirals hockey game. Made up for not drinking the night before by drinking now. Had Buffalo Chicken tenders (spicy!) for lunch.
Saturday evening the original plan was to go to the Compound, but Primary Compound Personage Amy sadly twisted her ankle so that didn't happen (they thought it might have been broken at first so it could have been much worse). Went with out with Chad for beers instead. Now, I hadn't had dinner Saturday in expectation of wings at the Compound. The switch to go out for a few drinks was late so I didn't eat at home. I could eat at the Club but, once I got some beer in me, I wasn't hungry any more. Stayed too late considering how early I had to get up the next day, drank more than I should have but was still all sorts of sober (honest!), got home, ate some chips and tried to go to sleep because I had to get up at 5am to start the process of going to Lambeau.
But I'm wired, hungry, and excited. Sleep does not come easy.
I wake up a few minutes in advance of my alarm and just get going. I take a quick shower, eat a couple pieces of bread (no time to toast them!), drink more water than I think is really safe for my overactive filration system, and get going.
I maybe got four hours of sleep. I'm tired. In the past 24 hours I've had more beer than food. I'm nervously excited.
To quote a local radio team: 'Sounds like a recipe for disaster Fireman Jim.'
And they would be right.
18 November 2008
Now what?
The problem with having a specific topic like that for a week is that now I'm at a bit of a loose end mentally.
It's not like I talked about everything from those periods of time. Digging through my head like that made me bounce into other stuff I'd not thought of right away, or had simply forgotten about, like the story I wrote for 'Enlightment'. I wrote another story for 'Enlightment', one I like much better, but it was rejected for not having a strong enough role for the Doctor to play. Fair enough and probably quite true. It featured the main character from that still unfinished first novel meeting up with the Troughton Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria, probably near 'The Two Doctors'. The story's got more of my kind of weird in it.
I also didn't talk about my time on the radio, a creative endeavour but not a written one. That's discussed on my website when I was blogging before I was blogging.
There's also the short film we did *snaps fingers* just like that the first time I went to visit the Point crew. The 'Season' Doctor! On video! That should be very important but it has to be 'good for being developed in a half-hour' as opposed to 'good'. Planning can be very helpful.
We haven't had any fiction here in awhile. Maybe I should clean up an old short story. And there's an old review or two left. I think.
I know I'm going to talk about the professional football endeavour I attended this past Sunday, the first such endeavour I've attended. I'm just not sure if I want to mention it or tell it as an adventure.
I'll figure that out for tomorrow.
It's not like I talked about everything from those periods of time. Digging through my head like that made me bounce into other stuff I'd not thought of right away, or had simply forgotten about, like the story I wrote for 'Enlightment'. I wrote another story for 'Enlightment', one I like much better, but it was rejected for not having a strong enough role for the Doctor to play. Fair enough and probably quite true. It featured the main character from that still unfinished first novel meeting up with the Troughton Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria, probably near 'The Two Doctors'. The story's got more of my kind of weird in it.
I also didn't talk about my time on the radio, a creative endeavour but not a written one. That's discussed on my website when I was blogging before I was blogging.
There's also the short film we did *snaps fingers* just like that the first time I went to visit the Point crew. The 'Season' Doctor! On video! That should be very important but it has to be 'good for being developed in a half-hour' as opposed to 'good'. Planning can be very helpful.
We haven't had any fiction here in awhile. Maybe I should clean up an old short story. And there's an old review or two left. I think.
I know I'm going to talk about the professional football endeavour I attended this past Sunday, the first such endeavour I've attended. I'm just not sure if I want to mention it or tell it as an adventure.
I'll figure that out for tomorrow.
17 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - Recent fun - 2007 until nowish
Despite the fact that I believe a figurative no one read the wrap-up to the 'Notes' series, it helped move me forward. It was fun to do, it showed me where I'd been and what I'd been up to, and, most importantly, some places where I could go. I'd learned things during the Wilderness period and was showing that I could use it. I also felt that, if I was trying something new, it wasn't a bad thing to 'go back' a bit. For instance, I'd used 'Dr. What', the 'Teen' Doctor, and the 'Season' Doctor in the 'Notes' wrap-up story but, due to the way I handled the characters, it didn't feel like I'd fallen into the trap of 'just' writing fan fiction again.
It did make me want to write more 'Doctor Who', if only because I'd left the 'Season' Doctor in such a weird place emotionally. Again, in order to try something new, I crossed him over with the current tv Doctor, as played by David Tennant. I'd never done that before, not for a full story anyway. 'Time for a Change' was previewed here, in this very blog, as 'Fresh Fiction for Friday' over a year ago and was finally finished and released about a month ago. Once again I had some new people in the audience and early response to it has been positive. I've got some plans for uploading it to a Who fan fiction site but want to polish up the earlier 'Season' stories for that site first.
'Time for a Change' was also heavily edited by me as I wrote, the most I've ever edited anything I've done. If nothing else, it was worth it for helping me upgrade that skill.
There's another story sitting, half done, while I work on other stuff and ponder the level of detail needed for the ending. It's a tale of El Hombre de Silla and a looooonnnnngggg description of a wrestling match could get tedious so I'm not sure how that's going to end up yet.
There's another novel being worked on, a few pages here and a few pages there. It's based on a 'What If?' to a never written story from decades ago and could well be structured right to be publishable. We shall see. I'm feeling good about it at the moment.
Just finished a draft to a movie script, when was that, last week? Week before? It's a comedy meant to star myself and my buddy George. Early days on that project, definitely one of those 'hope we get to do this but wouldn't be surprised if we don't' sort of things. That helped me learn the basic script structures and how quick I might be able to do one of those again. 'Time for a Change' took over a year, with editing. This script has yet to be edited but only took about four months to write. Not bad for a story that took me five minutes to generate. I had another script idea about a year or two ago. I've been pondering that idea again to see if I can crank it out as well.
After the lull of the Wilderness years, I feel that I'm getting to a place where I can generate fiction that I enjoy and might be enjoyable to others. I feel that I might be getting to a place where I don't feel the need to write 'career' with the quotes around it. I still feel the need to generate words on a more consistant basis but a lot of the writing process involves working things out. It can be difficult to see that it's happening when it's happening. Writing here, on this blog, even if it's to a virtual 'no one', does help.
I'm just keen to see what's next.
It did make me want to write more 'Doctor Who', if only because I'd left the 'Season' Doctor in such a weird place emotionally. Again, in order to try something new, I crossed him over with the current tv Doctor, as played by David Tennant. I'd never done that before, not for a full story anyway. 'Time for a Change' was previewed here, in this very blog, as 'Fresh Fiction for Friday' over a year ago and was finally finished and released about a month ago. Once again I had some new people in the audience and early response to it has been positive. I've got some plans for uploading it to a Who fan fiction site but want to polish up the earlier 'Season' stories for that site first.
'Time for a Change' was also heavily edited by me as I wrote, the most I've ever edited anything I've done. If nothing else, it was worth it for helping me upgrade that skill.
There's another story sitting, half done, while I work on other stuff and ponder the level of detail needed for the ending. It's a tale of El Hombre de Silla and a looooonnnnngggg description of a wrestling match could get tedious so I'm not sure how that's going to end up yet.
There's another novel being worked on, a few pages here and a few pages there. It's based on a 'What If?' to a never written story from decades ago and could well be structured right to be publishable. We shall see. I'm feeling good about it at the moment.
Just finished a draft to a movie script, when was that, last week? Week before? It's a comedy meant to star myself and my buddy George. Early days on that project, definitely one of those 'hope we get to do this but wouldn't be surprised if we don't' sort of things. That helped me learn the basic script structures and how quick I might be able to do one of those again. 'Time for a Change' took over a year, with editing. This script has yet to be edited but only took about four months to write. Not bad for a story that took me five minutes to generate. I had another script idea about a year or two ago. I've been pondering that idea again to see if I can crank it out as well.
After the lull of the Wilderness years, I feel that I'm getting to a place where I can generate fiction that I enjoy and might be enjoyable to others. I feel that I might be getting to a place where I don't feel the need to write 'career' with the quotes around it. I still feel the need to generate words on a more consistant basis but a lot of the writing process involves working things out. It can be difficult to see that it's happening when it's happening. Writing here, on this blog, even if it's to a virtual 'no one', does help.
I'm just keen to see what's next.
15 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - Notes - 2003 to 2006
Even during these lean times in my writing 'career', I was known as the writer to my friends. Since high school, I've been that guy. It's not the first thing I mention to people when I met them and sometimes it's something I don't like bringing up because so much of what I've written is fan fiction but it's something that does get mentioned eventually.
As a result, when Katy and Eric were heading to Japan for a year, Eric set up a website with a forum for family and friends to communicate together on. We could pretend we were together having conversations as a group. One of the default sections was 'Steve's Literary Corner'. Given a place to play, I felt I should. Some older stuff was uploaded to it and I started to play in the short story venue for the first time in years, just playing a little, doing some fun stuff.
Before they left, they also said 'You should come visit us while we're there.' I politely hemmed and hawed a little to which they noted 'How often are you going to know people in Japan?' It was a good point. I spent about a week there with them in late April/early May 2004. It was a brilliant time. I'm glad I went and look to return someday.
I wrote a diary of those days as 'Notes from Japan'. While walking around chatting with Eric, I noted that I had a line in head that had been stuck there since I got off the plane, something about checking the Godzilla detection system and seeing it at a low setting for my trip. I felt there was a story brewing. Eric agreed as he's generally filled with the enthusiasm for accomplishing things.
Not unlike high school, I was writing to a specific audience, writing a fictional tale based on the adventures of me and my friends. It was fun. Fun means more writing. I got fired up again.
It didn't take long for the Doctor to poke his head into this series of adventures. Rather than retread old territory, I pushed myself to do something a little different. To make up for the bad Tom Baker fan fiction that had been the 'Dr. What' series, I didn't bring my Doctors into the story, but rather the 4th Doctor, Romana, and K-9. I had to write to those characters, locking myself into a more specific style for them. It was more fun than I expected. I also wrote one part of the story in script form, something I hadn't done much of in the past. That was also fun. I was stretching my skills out and doing different things while doing the same thing. It helped me learn.
Upon their return from Japan, I continued the story in America, introducing a thread that would end up becoming a grand anniversary story, tying together threads from all the things I'd ever written, well, mostly everything. Unfortunately, by then the forum had gotten attacked by spammers and lies rotting in the Internet sun. The last few stories are the best things I've wrote that hardly anyone has read.
The forum and the trip had accomplished their goal. My creative brain was firing on all cylinders again. New story ideas that weren't directly based on something were populating in my head. There were places to go and people to meet.
The novel, the start of the Steveverse, had a draft completed and, as noted previously, needs 'something' in order to work properly. It sits waiting while other parts of the Steveverse get explored. It's primary goal, to start things off, was accomplished. Other things need their own attention now.
As a result, when Katy and Eric were heading to Japan for a year, Eric set up a website with a forum for family and friends to communicate together on. We could pretend we were together having conversations as a group. One of the default sections was 'Steve's Literary Corner'. Given a place to play, I felt I should. Some older stuff was uploaded to it and I started to play in the short story venue for the first time in years, just playing a little, doing some fun stuff.
Before they left, they also said 'You should come visit us while we're there.' I politely hemmed and hawed a little to which they noted 'How often are you going to know people in Japan?' It was a good point. I spent about a week there with them in late April/early May 2004. It was a brilliant time. I'm glad I went and look to return someday.
I wrote a diary of those days as 'Notes from Japan'. While walking around chatting with Eric, I noted that I had a line in head that had been stuck there since I got off the plane, something about checking the Godzilla detection system and seeing it at a low setting for my trip. I felt there was a story brewing. Eric agreed as he's generally filled with the enthusiasm for accomplishing things.
Not unlike high school, I was writing to a specific audience, writing a fictional tale based on the adventures of me and my friends. It was fun. Fun means more writing. I got fired up again.
It didn't take long for the Doctor to poke his head into this series of adventures. Rather than retread old territory, I pushed myself to do something a little different. To make up for the bad Tom Baker fan fiction that had been the 'Dr. What' series, I didn't bring my Doctors into the story, but rather the 4th Doctor, Romana, and K-9. I had to write to those characters, locking myself into a more specific style for them. It was more fun than I expected. I also wrote one part of the story in script form, something I hadn't done much of in the past. That was also fun. I was stretching my skills out and doing different things while doing the same thing. It helped me learn.
Upon their return from Japan, I continued the story in America, introducing a thread that would end up becoming a grand anniversary story, tying together threads from all the things I'd ever written, well, mostly everything. Unfortunately, by then the forum had gotten attacked by spammers and lies rotting in the Internet sun. The last few stories are the best things I've wrote that hardly anyone has read.
The forum and the trip had accomplished their goal. My creative brain was firing on all cylinders again. New story ideas that weren't directly based on something were populating in my head. There were places to go and people to meet.
The novel, the start of the Steveverse, had a draft completed and, as noted previously, needs 'something' in order to work properly. It sits waiting while other parts of the Steveverse get explored. It's primary goal, to start things off, was accomplished. Other things need their own attention now.
14 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - The Wilderness Years - 1997 to 2003
When a cycle ends, such as my 'Teen Doctor' series, it's generally easy to mark that date. The last story is written, you think 'this is the end of this series', and you move on. There wasn't an official end to the 'Season' series so, in theory, I was still working on it while I picked up other projects. I say 'in theory' because I'd look at the notebooks and go 'I need to get back to those stories soon', put them down and not think about them for months. It never occurred to me that I wasn't getting anywhere and the project was done for some years. I had Jack update the website and it became official and a little sad.
As hinted at, I never stopped writing or being creative. The problem was that the writing wasn't getting to completion fast enough and the other creative things didn't take off like I hoped. When you're doing things for fun, the doing needs to be fun, boost you up by doing it. I had some of that, but not enough. At the time there wasn't a lot of payoff, little completion, so it didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. At times I wondered if this hobby of mine that I thought would turn into something was coming to an end.
The novel I'd started with the intent of writing a page a day would sit fallow for weeks at a crack. I was trying to write it linearly and without my hand written first drafts, something new. This hampered my progress and the book took years to write. Eventually I discarded the limitations I'd set on myself and got a draft done, but it needs work and sits waiting for that work to happen on it. It needs ... something and I'm yet to determine what that is.
I became involved with the 'Trenchcoat' series of Doctor Who fan fiction, a group that had influenced my 'Season' series to some degree. I ended up writing two stories for that series and sparked a last burst of energy for the project in general, a fact in which I do take some pride. Some good things came of this. I learned how to not write linearly (starting at the beginning of the story and writing it to the end), but write the scenes I had already in my head and work out the rest later, rather than getting stuck because I didn't know what should be next. I had gotten used to writing complete stories out of order during the 'Teen Doctor' series so this was just a new application of that concept. I also got to be edited for the first time in years and the give and take of the process was more enjoyable than I expected. The downside to this was that the stories weren't released until 2004 so there wasn't that immediate feeling of completion. On the plus side, when they were released it was in a large hardcover book and that felt really nice.
My involvement with that group also led to me writing a 'Season Doctor' story for the 'Enlightment' fan fiction magazine (something I'd forgotten about yesterday). This was the first time I was published in any way (outside of the high school newspaper which didn't really feel like being published) outside my own doing. I think I tend to forget about the story because I pushed an idea through my head and I don't think it turned out very well.
This is also the period where I got to be a wrestling 'booker'. In some ways, this was the height of the time period because I got to develop plans, tell people what to do, and they'd do it. That was different. On the other hand, we didn't perform as often as I'd like and our grand dreams of actually running a real show never materialized. Still, I have video of myself acting like a fool while wearing a wrestling mask and that is always fun.
Lots of stopping and starting. Projects that didn't see the light of day right away. Messing around in George's garage. It was a step back from releasing an episode of 'Doctor Who' fan fiction to the Internet every week and having the chance that a 'bunch' of people would see it.
I needed a spark to get things moving again. The spark turned out to be a big one, an overseas sort of thing.
As hinted at, I never stopped writing or being creative. The problem was that the writing wasn't getting to completion fast enough and the other creative things didn't take off like I hoped. When you're doing things for fun, the doing needs to be fun, boost you up by doing it. I had some of that, but not enough. At the time there wasn't a lot of payoff, little completion, so it didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. At times I wondered if this hobby of mine that I thought would turn into something was coming to an end.
The novel I'd started with the intent of writing a page a day would sit fallow for weeks at a crack. I was trying to write it linearly and without my hand written first drafts, something new. This hampered my progress and the book took years to write. Eventually I discarded the limitations I'd set on myself and got a draft done, but it needs work and sits waiting for that work to happen on it. It needs ... something and I'm yet to determine what that is.
I became involved with the 'Trenchcoat' series of Doctor Who fan fiction, a group that had influenced my 'Season' series to some degree. I ended up writing two stories for that series and sparked a last burst of energy for the project in general, a fact in which I do take some pride. Some good things came of this. I learned how to not write linearly (starting at the beginning of the story and writing it to the end), but write the scenes I had already in my head and work out the rest later, rather than getting stuck because I didn't know what should be next. I had gotten used to writing complete stories out of order during the 'Teen Doctor' series so this was just a new application of that concept. I also got to be edited for the first time in years and the give and take of the process was more enjoyable than I expected. The downside to this was that the stories weren't released until 2004 so there wasn't that immediate feeling of completion. On the plus side, when they were released it was in a large hardcover book and that felt really nice.
My involvement with that group also led to me writing a 'Season Doctor' story for the 'Enlightment' fan fiction magazine (something I'd forgotten about yesterday). This was the first time I was published in any way (outside of the high school newspaper which didn't really feel like being published) outside my own doing. I think I tend to forget about the story because I pushed an idea through my head and I don't think it turned out very well.
This is also the period where I got to be a wrestling 'booker'. In some ways, this was the height of the time period because I got to develop plans, tell people what to do, and they'd do it. That was different. On the other hand, we didn't perform as often as I'd like and our grand dreams of actually running a real show never materialized. Still, I have video of myself acting like a fool while wearing a wrestling mask and that is always fun.
Lots of stopping and starting. Projects that didn't see the light of day right away. Messing around in George's garage. It was a step back from releasing an episode of 'Doctor Who' fan fiction to the Internet every week and having the chance that a 'bunch' of people would see it.
I needed a spark to get things moving again. The spark turned out to be a big one, an overseas sort of thing.
13 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - Restart - 1994 to 1997
This is when picking dates for these things gets extra tricky. I'm trying to remember stuff and not go back and check dates. There's a really good chance I'm going to mess this up bad. Oh well, that should keep things interesting at least!
Moving on, apologies aside: The Internet.
The World Wide Web and all its visual glory was yet ahead of most of us. There was just the Internet, text on a screen. I had gotten used to text on a screen from people I saw in class all the time. We had email in school. I still had access to an alumni account and we'd used it for a round robin story that my enthusiasm messed up. I'd been working for a major manufacturing concern for a couple years by this point and I barely had email at work. My desk had a terminal on it to connect up to a mainframe. I think our work room had just gotten a PC in it, just one, around this time.
I had saved up my money and bought a computer of my own, a Macintosh like I'd gotten used to using at school. With it, and the pre-installed AOL software on it, I was on the Internet at home. At the time, I was really the only Doctor Who fan I knew. Sure I knew people that were familiar with the show, most of whom would rather read my stories than actually watch the programme, but there was no one else around that knew the show, read about the show, thought about the show, to the degree that I did. I knew there were other people in the area that did, I knew fan clubs existed in the area, but they had membership fees and such and I couldn't justify it to myself. (I was soon to find some non-fan club fans in Milwaukee but that's another story entirely.) With the Internet, there were newsgroups where people would go to discuss Doctor Who or post their Doctor Who fiction. For that matter, there was a group on AOL itself that did the same thing. If I really wanted to rewrite 'Alien Invasion: 1991' to show myself how my skills had advanced since then, I could post it here. I wouldn't need to print it out, make photocopies at Kinkos, and find people to want to read it; they could just download it and read it if they wanted. It would be fun.
It was fun. I know, you were probably expecting a twist at this point, the collapse of the project, the crushing of my ego, but that's not what happened. I set some standards for myself, kept the basic concepts of the original (set in Milwaukee, the alien name and design), wrote it and posted it up. Most people that bothered to react to it liked it. I remember getting some criticism on it from one individual, nothing too bad, and was delighted when other people, people I didn't know, largely agreed with me when I politely rebutted. There was even some constructive criticism. I enjoyed it, perhaps too much. Before I'd even finished the story, I'd mapped out a season. I was back in.
Now, to a degree, this was a problem. My original plan was to move on, do some stuff that I'd made up completely so that I could benefit financially from my work. On the other hand, I hadn't thought up anything of my own yet and writing more fan fiction was better than writing nothing, so I continued.
I decided that this new series would be different but similiar to the one I'd already written (some slightly edited versions of my original series would also be posted for download on AOL with pages of explanation for characters I didn't need to discribe in the story because, well, originally they were people everyone reading the stories already knew). Taking some cues from the structure of other available fan fiction, this new series was meant to be novelizations of the show, stories that didn't appear on television in our universe, but did elsewhere. The stories I were telling were from Season 31 of Doctor Who (the last aired series of the real run was 27). The production of the show had moved to America (as rumours were saying was going to happen in real life) and was being made by me and my friends (essentially) as Python Lord Productions.
Of course, I was the Doctor. The important difference being that this time I was an actor playing the Doctor, not some strange set of circumstances that meant I was actually the Doctor.
The goal was to tell stories that could be part of the actual series, as if I was charting the future of the programme. I still wanted to have fun and that's how I ended up blowing it. Here's the twist where it goes bad.
The fifth story in the series was a crossover with a popular (at the time at least) manga/anime series called 'Ranma 1/2'. This would never have happened in real life. The story was a good one but it didn't fit in Season 31. It should have been separate. While I was able to post it to a anime fan fiction newsgroup and get more readers, it just wasn't right in that context. Worse yet I'd once again had too much fun and envisioned a 13 part side story continuing the crossover of which I completed 5 parts and partly wrote another 5 parts. Again, these were not bad stories, they do a lot of good for the characters actually, but Doctor Who fan fiction had distracted me from my goal of original fiction and now Doctor Who/Ranma 1/2 fan fiction was distracting me from writing Doctor Who fan fiction.
At one point, I envisioned the 'Season' series to run for five or six years. I wrote all of 'Season 31', finished one story from 'Season 32' and half finished another. That's it. The 'Teen Doctor' series I wrote in high school has 20+ completed stories in its canon; the 'Season' Doctor has 9.
I had messed up my own project. There were other things yet ahead.
Moving on, apologies aside: The Internet.
The World Wide Web and all its visual glory was yet ahead of most of us. There was just the Internet, text on a screen. I had gotten used to text on a screen from people I saw in class all the time. We had email in school. I still had access to an alumni account and we'd used it for a round robin story that my enthusiasm messed up. I'd been working for a major manufacturing concern for a couple years by this point and I barely had email at work. My desk had a terminal on it to connect up to a mainframe. I think our work room had just gotten a PC in it, just one, around this time.
I had saved up my money and bought a computer of my own, a Macintosh like I'd gotten used to using at school. With it, and the pre-installed AOL software on it, I was on the Internet at home. At the time, I was really the only Doctor Who fan I knew. Sure I knew people that were familiar with the show, most of whom would rather read my stories than actually watch the programme, but there was no one else around that knew the show, read about the show, thought about the show, to the degree that I did. I knew there were other people in the area that did, I knew fan clubs existed in the area, but they had membership fees and such and I couldn't justify it to myself. (I was soon to find some non-fan club fans in Milwaukee but that's another story entirely.) With the Internet, there were newsgroups where people would go to discuss Doctor Who or post their Doctor Who fiction. For that matter, there was a group on AOL itself that did the same thing. If I really wanted to rewrite 'Alien Invasion: 1991' to show myself how my skills had advanced since then, I could post it here. I wouldn't need to print it out, make photocopies at Kinkos, and find people to want to read it; they could just download it and read it if they wanted. It would be fun.
It was fun. I know, you were probably expecting a twist at this point, the collapse of the project, the crushing of my ego, but that's not what happened. I set some standards for myself, kept the basic concepts of the original (set in Milwaukee, the alien name and design), wrote it and posted it up. Most people that bothered to react to it liked it. I remember getting some criticism on it from one individual, nothing too bad, and was delighted when other people, people I didn't know, largely agreed with me when I politely rebutted. There was even some constructive criticism. I enjoyed it, perhaps too much. Before I'd even finished the story, I'd mapped out a season. I was back in.
Now, to a degree, this was a problem. My original plan was to move on, do some stuff that I'd made up completely so that I could benefit financially from my work. On the other hand, I hadn't thought up anything of my own yet and writing more fan fiction was better than writing nothing, so I continued.
I decided that this new series would be different but similiar to the one I'd already written (some slightly edited versions of my original series would also be posted for download on AOL with pages of explanation for characters I didn't need to discribe in the story because, well, originally they were people everyone reading the stories already knew). Taking some cues from the structure of other available fan fiction, this new series was meant to be novelizations of the show, stories that didn't appear on television in our universe, but did elsewhere. The stories I were telling were from Season 31 of Doctor Who (the last aired series of the real run was 27). The production of the show had moved to America (as rumours were saying was going to happen in real life) and was being made by me and my friends (essentially) as Python Lord Productions.
Of course, I was the Doctor. The important difference being that this time I was an actor playing the Doctor, not some strange set of circumstances that meant I was actually the Doctor.
The goal was to tell stories that could be part of the actual series, as if I was charting the future of the programme. I still wanted to have fun and that's how I ended up blowing it. Here's the twist where it goes bad.
The fifth story in the series was a crossover with a popular (at the time at least) manga/anime series called 'Ranma 1/2'. This would never have happened in real life. The story was a good one but it didn't fit in Season 31. It should have been separate. While I was able to post it to a anime fan fiction newsgroup and get more readers, it just wasn't right in that context. Worse yet I'd once again had too much fun and envisioned a 13 part side story continuing the crossover of which I completed 5 parts and partly wrote another 5 parts. Again, these were not bad stories, they do a lot of good for the characters actually, but Doctor Who fan fiction had distracted me from my goal of original fiction and now Doctor Who/Ranma 1/2 fan fiction was distracting me from writing Doctor Who fan fiction.
At one point, I envisioned the 'Season' series to run for five or six years. I wrote all of 'Season 31', finished one story from 'Season 32' and half finished another. That's it. The 'Teen Doctor' series I wrote in high school has 20+ completed stories in its canon; the 'Season' Doctor has 9.
I had messed up my own project. There were other things yet ahead.
12 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - An Audience Arrives - 1990 to 1994
Right away in my British Authors class, we discussed what makes a hero. Mrs. Branson wrote the characteristics on the chalkboard as we high school Juniors could think of them and call them out. This led to an assignment to write a short story, 1 or 2 pages, about a hero using the characteristics we'd decided on. Instinctively I knew the majority of the class, if not all of them, would hear 'hero' and put 'super' in front of it. I felt the need to be different. I went to study hall and eagerly started writing my first draft, telling the story of a young man and his girlfriend who try to do the right thing and end up in trouble.
It was also eleven pages long.
When you go to review something like that, it can get a little attention. We broke up into little groups to read each others works and mine obviously took a little longer. Mrs. Branson stated that she'd only asked for a page or two and therefore that's all of it that she'd read, which was fair enough. Hearing about what I'd done, other students asked to read it after it was complete. I saw no harm in that. The second draft was a little longer storywise but was shorter in page length, I think nine pages, due to better penmenship. I got an A as well as a note saying that she'd read the whole thing, despite her good-natured statement that she wouldn't in class. I typed the story up on the school's mainframe, printed a few out, and passed them out to whoever was curious.
People liked it. Could I do any more? As it turned out, yes I could.
I wrote a number of short stories. I returned to a Bill Gaines influence but, instead of MAD magazine, was referencing his EC (Entertaining Comics) led stuff, as I had just started getting reprints of that. As a result, there were a number of twist endings, people dying, or turning out to have never existed, things like that. They were all generally short and had no titles. Other assignments for British Authors would get released to the group as well. Things were going well, and I was learning to use the Macintosh computers in the lab for a better looking output.
It erked me a bit that everything was so short. Ten typed pages was a lengthy tale at that point. Something longer, more grand in its storytelling would feel more... skillful I guess, show that I had something to tell. A longer story had started at one point, but it wasn't working out and I'd stopped work on it. I rewrote what I had and started over. This time it seemed to work. It just needed a clever title...
'Alien Invasion: 1991'
Set about three months into the future when it was released, the story was set at our school, in our classes, with myself and my friends in it. When the aliens attack, the gray blobby Klack'tu, I come across as heroic, helping lead the charge against them, although everyone in the team gets to do something.
Near the end of what would probably have been the third act, I am seperated from my friends. The auditorium I love so much as part of Stage Crew has been used as a feeding and breeding ground for the aliens (they eat humans in order to asexually reproduce and have started feasting on the staff and students). At the moment, it is empty. The battle is far off, near the lunch room, but I am drawn here, to one of the pillars that holds up the balcony in the auditorium. Now that I'm looking for it, the keyhole set into it is obvious and I know the key that I've had all my life fits into it. I am right. A door opens and I walk inside, into an area that is bigger on the inside than the outside.
I am the Doctor.
It's all very complicated and somewhat stupid but I am the Eighth Doctor, taking over from McCoy. While I don't believe I knew it at the time, the original run of the show was already over and here I was seeking to continue it. The Doctor had been exiled to Earth again, caught in a Time Storm on the way, and regenerated as an infant which would grow up to be me. After learning all this, the Doctor saves the day. As if there was any doubt.
In part because my friends were in it, part because it was a long story, and part because I'd hand out stories before a history class that most students slept through, this was well received. I continued. (I also found that I could write during that history class while still paying enough attention to the teacher to interact with him, multitasking!) Slowly but surely the random short stories faded away and there was only Doctor Who for me to write.
My audience grew even further with the first story released in my senior year of high school: 'Psychotic Reaction'. A night setting up for a stage production goes horribly wrong as my buddy gets bonked on the head, goes crazy and starts killing the rest of us off. In the end, the Doctor shows up in this alternate universe to save the day. This got handed out to everyone in it, including the teacher that gets messily dismissed within the first few pages (Kids: Don't do this now. I was blowing off steam towards a teacher I didn't often get along with. If you do this today, you will go to counciling, maybe worse). The audience grew ever larger. It got reprinted a couple times and I was introduced to people, at least a couple times, as 'the guy who wrote THAT story'.
I considered ending the series with my graduation from high school but didn't as I had enough friends still there, my brother was attending the same school so he could pass stuff out, and I would stop in on my way home from work to use the computer lab because (1) they'd let me and (2) I didn't have a computer at home yet. I'm glad I didn't as the best stories in the run (my opinion) came after I'd graduated.
But in 1994, realizing this audience was going away, I regenerated the Doctor and returned his companion back to school in a rather abrupt fashion so that everything was 'back to normal'. Another reason to quit the series was that by this point I hated the first season of Doctor Who I'd written as a junior. The stories were clumsy and poorly told. I also didn't like the idea of me actually being the Doctor anymore as the mix between me and Doctor didn't always seem very ... Doctory.
I still wanted to write but wasn't quite sure what I would do next or for whom. I was really trying to find something fun to write that wouldn't be fan fiction that I could try to market, you know, for money. What and how and everything else eluded me.
Maybe to get the ball rolling I could rewrite 'Alien Invasion: 1991', you know, just for fun. And there's this whole Internet thing, there seem to be people on it that like Doctor Who.
Hmmm.....
It was also eleven pages long.
When you go to review something like that, it can get a little attention. We broke up into little groups to read each others works and mine obviously took a little longer. Mrs. Branson stated that she'd only asked for a page or two and therefore that's all of it that she'd read, which was fair enough. Hearing about what I'd done, other students asked to read it after it was complete. I saw no harm in that. The second draft was a little longer storywise but was shorter in page length, I think nine pages, due to better penmenship. I got an A as well as a note saying that she'd read the whole thing, despite her good-natured statement that she wouldn't in class. I typed the story up on the school's mainframe, printed a few out, and passed them out to whoever was curious.
People liked it. Could I do any more? As it turned out, yes I could.
I wrote a number of short stories. I returned to a Bill Gaines influence but, instead of MAD magazine, was referencing his EC (Entertaining Comics) led stuff, as I had just started getting reprints of that. As a result, there were a number of twist endings, people dying, or turning out to have never existed, things like that. They were all generally short and had no titles. Other assignments for British Authors would get released to the group as well. Things were going well, and I was learning to use the Macintosh computers in the lab for a better looking output.
It erked me a bit that everything was so short. Ten typed pages was a lengthy tale at that point. Something longer, more grand in its storytelling would feel more... skillful I guess, show that I had something to tell. A longer story had started at one point, but it wasn't working out and I'd stopped work on it. I rewrote what I had and started over. This time it seemed to work. It just needed a clever title...
'Alien Invasion: 1991'
Set about three months into the future when it was released, the story was set at our school, in our classes, with myself and my friends in it. When the aliens attack, the gray blobby Klack'tu, I come across as heroic, helping lead the charge against them, although everyone in the team gets to do something.
Near the end of what would probably have been the third act, I am seperated from my friends. The auditorium I love so much as part of Stage Crew has been used as a feeding and breeding ground for the aliens (they eat humans in order to asexually reproduce and have started feasting on the staff and students). At the moment, it is empty. The battle is far off, near the lunch room, but I am drawn here, to one of the pillars that holds up the balcony in the auditorium. Now that I'm looking for it, the keyhole set into it is obvious and I know the key that I've had all my life fits into it. I am right. A door opens and I walk inside, into an area that is bigger on the inside than the outside.
I am the Doctor.
It's all very complicated and somewhat stupid but I am the Eighth Doctor, taking over from McCoy. While I don't believe I knew it at the time, the original run of the show was already over and here I was seeking to continue it. The Doctor had been exiled to Earth again, caught in a Time Storm on the way, and regenerated as an infant which would grow up to be me. After learning all this, the Doctor saves the day. As if there was any doubt.
In part because my friends were in it, part because it was a long story, and part because I'd hand out stories before a history class that most students slept through, this was well received. I continued. (I also found that I could write during that history class while still paying enough attention to the teacher to interact with him, multitasking!) Slowly but surely the random short stories faded away and there was only Doctor Who for me to write.
My audience grew even further with the first story released in my senior year of high school: 'Psychotic Reaction'. A night setting up for a stage production goes horribly wrong as my buddy gets bonked on the head, goes crazy and starts killing the rest of us off. In the end, the Doctor shows up in this alternate universe to save the day. This got handed out to everyone in it, including the teacher that gets messily dismissed within the first few pages (Kids: Don't do this now. I was blowing off steam towards a teacher I didn't often get along with. If you do this today, you will go to counciling, maybe worse). The audience grew ever larger. It got reprinted a couple times and I was introduced to people, at least a couple times, as 'the guy who wrote THAT story'.
I considered ending the series with my graduation from high school but didn't as I had enough friends still there, my brother was attending the same school so he could pass stuff out, and I would stop in on my way home from work to use the computer lab because (1) they'd let me and (2) I didn't have a computer at home yet. I'm glad I didn't as the best stories in the run (my opinion) came after I'd graduated.
But in 1994, realizing this audience was going away, I regenerated the Doctor and returned his companion back to school in a rather abrupt fashion so that everything was 'back to normal'. Another reason to quit the series was that by this point I hated the first season of Doctor Who I'd written as a junior. The stories were clumsy and poorly told. I also didn't like the idea of me actually being the Doctor anymore as the mix between me and Doctor didn't always seem very ... Doctory.
I still wanted to write but wasn't quite sure what I would do next or for whom. I was really trying to find something fun to write that wouldn't be fan fiction that I could try to market, you know, for money. What and how and everything else eluded me.
Maybe to get the ball rolling I could rewrite 'Alien Invasion: 1991', you know, just for fun. And there's this whole Internet thing, there seem to be people on it that like Doctor Who.
Hmmm.....
11 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - The First Big wave - 1986 to 1989 (or so)
Midway through sixth grade, my class was assigned to write some 'themes'. These turned out to be short stories so I'm not sure why we weren't just assigned to write some short stories. It may be that we had to write to different themes in each one or it could just have been the style at the time.
I still have all four of these works so the genesis of this period can be reviewed and investigated. A major influence, yet not at the same time, is clearly Mad Magazine, as from the titles these are all meant to be parodies of existing works. Since only one of them tries to be funny, it was as if I was also introducing myself to the concept of fan fiction, writing ones own version of an existing work for your own amusement.
'Sherluck Phones' was a two parter, an attempt at a Sherlock Holmes type story. It's even written by his 'Watson' character. The first part is mostly dialogue. I believe my teacher either directed me to get to the point or one of our 'themes' was dialogue as none of the other stories feature much, if any, dialogue, especially the second part of the story. It is not good but I was twelve.
The moderately amusing story is 'Superflab', the tale of a grossly overweight super-hero in the 'Superman' style. I was working from the 50's 'Adventures of Superman' tv show model as I was just starting to read comic books about this time and I bought mostly Marvel Comics, not DC. Superflab repels an alien invasion with his stomach. I think it shows the Mad Magazine vibe I was reaching for with these stories.
And then there was 'Dr. What'.
Immediately explained as one of five Time Lord brothers (Drs Who, What, Where, Why, and How), Dr. What and his Time Lady companion Romana face the Dalkens on a spacecraft disguised as a field and create green slime as a toy for earth children to scare off the Daleks, er, Dalkens as that is what they look like inside their casings. It's pretty dumb. And shows I'd seen 'Destiny of the Daleks' recently or I just remembered it very clearly.
Dumb maybe, inspiring, yes. The interest in doing my own comics and prose magazines for my 'audience' (aka my brothers) came from this assignment. More 'Dr. What' stories followed and in the very next story we met adult versions of my friends from middle school, including myself. By the end of the story, Romana stays behind to be with my friend Richard and I sneak onto the ship to be the new companion. Both of these concepts would return in later works.
I wrote other things as well: the Pac-Man/Lego related comics I mentioned recently, an adaptation of the original Godzilla movie written before I'd seen the movie, and some other stuff I apparently no longer have access to and don't really remember. There was a 'newspaper' with a buddy of mine that had access to a computer but that ran to one whole issue. That we actually tried to distribute to our friends (I think it was a brief fad during 7th grade, still the early days of home computing, desktop publishing, and printers) but beyond that, I don't think I pushed my work on anyone apart from my family and the teachers that had to read my assignments.
The momentum faded out during my freshman year of high school. My brothers and I weren't really playing 'store' any more, which is where I'd 'sell' my comics to them. I also had an epiphany while writing 'Dr. What'. Apparently I managed to delude myself into thinking I was writing parodies this whole time. Once I realized I was just trying to write 'Dr. Who' and doing a very poor job of it at that, I stopped, right in the middle of a Dalkens sequel which also saw the return of old companion Jamie.
The first wave was over because, let's face it, I was no good. Suddenly that was as important as the fun I had doing it.
Apart from being as creative as possible in my school assignments, that was about it for a couple years. Then school kicked up the ashes of the fire again.
I still have all four of these works so the genesis of this period can be reviewed and investigated. A major influence, yet not at the same time, is clearly Mad Magazine, as from the titles these are all meant to be parodies of existing works. Since only one of them tries to be funny, it was as if I was also introducing myself to the concept of fan fiction, writing ones own version of an existing work for your own amusement.
'Sherluck Phones' was a two parter, an attempt at a Sherlock Holmes type story. It's even written by his 'Watson' character. The first part is mostly dialogue. I believe my teacher either directed me to get to the point or one of our 'themes' was dialogue as none of the other stories feature much, if any, dialogue, especially the second part of the story. It is not good but I was twelve.
The moderately amusing story is 'Superflab', the tale of a grossly overweight super-hero in the 'Superman' style. I was working from the 50's 'Adventures of Superman' tv show model as I was just starting to read comic books about this time and I bought mostly Marvel Comics, not DC. Superflab repels an alien invasion with his stomach. I think it shows the Mad Magazine vibe I was reaching for with these stories.
And then there was 'Dr. What'.
Immediately explained as one of five Time Lord brothers (Drs Who, What, Where, Why, and How), Dr. What and his Time Lady companion Romana face the Dalkens on a spacecraft disguised as a field and create green slime as a toy for earth children to scare off the Daleks, er, Dalkens as that is what they look like inside their casings. It's pretty dumb. And shows I'd seen 'Destiny of the Daleks' recently or I just remembered it very clearly.
Dumb maybe, inspiring, yes. The interest in doing my own comics and prose magazines for my 'audience' (aka my brothers) came from this assignment. More 'Dr. What' stories followed and in the very next story we met adult versions of my friends from middle school, including myself. By the end of the story, Romana stays behind to be with my friend Richard and I sneak onto the ship to be the new companion. Both of these concepts would return in later works.
I wrote other things as well: the Pac-Man/Lego related comics I mentioned recently, an adaptation of the original Godzilla movie written before I'd seen the movie, and some other stuff I apparently no longer have access to and don't really remember. There was a 'newspaper' with a buddy of mine that had access to a computer but that ran to one whole issue. That we actually tried to distribute to our friends (I think it was a brief fad during 7th grade, still the early days of home computing, desktop publishing, and printers) but beyond that, I don't think I pushed my work on anyone apart from my family and the teachers that had to read my assignments.
The momentum faded out during my freshman year of high school. My brothers and I weren't really playing 'store' any more, which is where I'd 'sell' my comics to them. I also had an epiphany while writing 'Dr. What'. Apparently I managed to delude myself into thinking I was writing parodies this whole time. Once I realized I was just trying to write 'Dr. Who' and doing a very poor job of it at that, I stopped, right in the middle of a Dalkens sequel which also saw the return of old companion Jamie.
The first wave was over because, let's face it, I was no good. Suddenly that was as important as the fun I had doing it.
Apart from being as creative as possible in my school assignments, that was about it for a couple years. Then school kicked up the ashes of the fire again.
10 November 2008
My Writing 'Career' - The Early Years
When you are a child, no creative outlet is foreign to you. Art, music, performance, writing, whatever; you can do it all because you're just having fun. At this point, there's no pressure to be 'good'. Adults will look at, perhaps even praise, an odd scribble of yours.
I was really no different.
I drew acceptably but not well. Replicating cartoon art was within my skillset, but nothing very realistic. I never really played a musical instrument but I can whistle after a fashion and sorta of keep a beat so I'd tap out rhythms. I and my friends would lip sync to my Muppet records, each of us having assigned characters to 'perform' for the entertainment of the adults in the room. For that matter, I even did some acting in public, for a grade school talent show. I don't remember if I was good or not. Probably not.
It only made sense that I'd try to write as well. I did on occasion. In fact our little group of friends tried writing a collective story, each chapter written by another person, featuring us friends as the 'stars' of the story. I seem to remember finding my page and a half of uncompleted chapter at one point. Not sure if I still have it. What's important now is that I remember that it didn't seem weird that we would TRY to write something. It was natural. I didn't do that much with the feeling at the time but it was normal for me to want to write.
Then I went to middle school. Then it didn't just seem normal. It would actually happen.
I was really no different.
I drew acceptably but not well. Replicating cartoon art was within my skillset, but nothing very realistic. I never really played a musical instrument but I can whistle after a fashion and sorta of keep a beat so I'd tap out rhythms. I and my friends would lip sync to my Muppet records, each of us having assigned characters to 'perform' for the entertainment of the adults in the room. For that matter, I even did some acting in public, for a grade school talent show. I don't remember if I was good or not. Probably not.
It only made sense that I'd try to write as well. I did on occasion. In fact our little group of friends tried writing a collective story, each chapter written by another person, featuring us friends as the 'stars' of the story. I seem to remember finding my page and a half of uncompleted chapter at one point. Not sure if I still have it. What's important now is that I remember that it didn't seem weird that we would TRY to write something. It was natural. I didn't do that much with the feeling at the time but it was normal for me to want to write.
Then I went to middle school. Then it didn't just seem normal. It would actually happen.
09 November 2008
Cleaning up some earlier posts
The Paul Newman movie in my collection is 'Slap Shot', the hockey movie from the 70's with comedic elements. I even have the novelization!
The 'handfull of pills' line was not meant to refer to anyone in particular. Or was it? :) I just saw what seemed to be a ... trend and felt the need to comment on it.
As much as I liked the Sontaran story from this year's Doctor Who, Martha has a really stupid sounding line to say at the beginning of the story regarding her bringing the Doctor back to Earth. There was probably no good way to deliver the line and Freema doesn't deliver it in a way that makes it sound less silly. Unfortunately, they play the line in the preview for the first Sontaran episode, during the Sontaran episode, and during the reprise of the episode. Seeing it three times makes it that much more awkward sounding.
The 'handfull of pills' line was not meant to refer to anyone in particular. Or was it? :) I just saw what seemed to be a ... trend and felt the need to comment on it.
As much as I liked the Sontaran story from this year's Doctor Who, Martha has a really stupid sounding line to say at the beginning of the story regarding her bringing the Doctor back to Earth. There was probably no good way to deliver the line and Freema doesn't deliver it in a way that makes it sound less silly. Unfortunately, they play the line in the preview for the first Sontaran episode, during the Sontaran episode, and during the reprise of the episode. Seeing it three times makes it that much more awkward sounding.
08 November 2008
Distracted
I had something else I meant to say yesterday and I've forgotten what it was now. Yesterday I got distracted by working on my script and watching hockey so it's not like I got completely lazy or anything.
I have been feeling lazy of late, even eliminating my time of being sick from the process. The piles aren't moving, up until this past week or so my writing was in a 'recharge' state, and there's part of me that feels I should be employed in some way.
I think that's it more than anything else; I'm not doing anything at the moment that directly will earn me money. The writing might earn me money but it might not. It's a gamble and that's not reassuring as the economy burns around us.
Should win some money on a game show. These are the plans I get when I turn on the Game Show Network. It's easy to win from the couch, isn't it?
Anyway.
I have been feeling lazy of late, even eliminating my time of being sick from the process. The piles aren't moving, up until this past week or so my writing was in a 'recharge' state, and there's part of me that feels I should be employed in some way.
I think that's it more than anything else; I'm not doing anything at the moment that directly will earn me money. The writing might earn me money but it might not. It's a gamble and that's not reassuring as the economy burns around us.
Should win some money on a game show. These are the plans I get when I turn on the Game Show Network. It's easy to win from the couch, isn't it?
Anyway.
07 November 2008
06 November 2008
Exit interview
Was interrupted while writing that last post in order to give an exit interview regarding the job I no longer have. That felt weird. I've thought about the situation with a logical detachment as much as I could. Some of the emotion came back while talking about it. I miss it and don't at the same time.
There was one question I knew would be in the interview and it was right near the end as I expected it would. 'Would you work for them again?' Short answer - right now, with the economy as it is, no. I wouldn't feel stable or safe. Economy straightens out, sure why not.
Phew. Felt as weird typing it as it was saying it.
There was one question I knew would be in the interview and it was right near the end as I expected it would. 'Would you work for them again?' Short answer - right now, with the economy as it is, no. I wouldn't feel stable or safe. Economy straightens out, sure why not.
Phew. Felt as weird typing it as it was saying it.
More Series 4 Reviews
'The Sontaran Stratagem' and 'The Poison Sky'
Robert Holmes loved the double-act so I can't speak of these episodes separately.
Grand sci/fi action-adventure! HAVOC would have been proud of the action.
Scope showing the danger at small and grand levels! Wooo!
And U.N.I.T.s name is different! 'Greyhound Leader to Trap One'! Did she just call Yates? And the Brigader is in Peru! And Knighted!
*does little happy dance*
Everything here fits together. It takes small little continuity points from the Sontaran stories of the past and builds them into a new story. It worked so well. It was what it was supposed to be.
-Compare/Contrast-
I couldn't have the Rutans show up without mentioning the Sontarans. They couldn't have the Sontarans show up without mentioning the Rutans. Still a Holmesian double-act! Wonderful!
Robert Holmes loved the double-act so I can't speak of these episodes separately.
Grand sci/fi action-adventure! HAVOC would have been proud of the action.
Scope showing the danger at small and grand levels! Wooo!
And U.N.I.T.s name is different! 'Greyhound Leader to Trap One'! Did she just call Yates? And the Brigader is in Peru! And Knighted!
*does little happy dance*
Everything here fits together. It takes small little continuity points from the Sontaran stories of the past and builds them into a new story. It worked so well. It was what it was supposed to be.
-Compare/Contrast-
I couldn't have the Rutans show up without mentioning the Sontarans. They couldn't have the Sontarans show up without mentioning the Rutans. Still a Holmesian double-act! Wonderful!
05 November 2008
Talking about that which I don't talk about
It feels weird that I discuss my health here as I have been. I don't generally discuss it with those around me unless I have to do so. I mean, I've honestly answered 'You've been quiet today' with 'Got a headache' or whatever aliment is affecting me, but it's not like me to walk into a room and go 'Be warned; I had a bad lunch.' Or whatever.
Every situation is different and I have volunteered information as necessary but I tend to keep it to myself.
One main reason for this is that when I'm sick, I generally just curl up and try to be left alone. I'm not like some sitcom male that locates a female in his life and seeks to be babied while ill. Blankets, medicine, juice, tv, soup; I'll sweat through the rest. I rarely called into work sick (for many years I was in a room mostly by myself so I had no fear of infecting others) and would try to work through illnesses. In 17 years I think I called in sick 9 times. Something like that anyway. Stupidly low levels of calling in sick in retrospect. The only major benefit to being sick at the moment is that I don't feel as compelled to push myself as hard when I don't feel well. Once I feel a little better, I return to my less intensive projects and try to get something done. Like scanning CD covers in order to make my iTunes collection look brighter. What kind of dumb project is this? Anyway.
The other main reason is that I know other people, younger and older than myself, that have worse things they deal with on a daily basis than I do. A tummyache pales in comparison to lingering illnesses or aches and pains from injuries that never really heal. Serious stuff. Most of them don't complain about their issues. They might explain them but they don't really complain and they have things to complain about. It doesn't seem right for me to kvetch.
It's said that Midwesterners are a tough breed. Maybe that's part of it as well.
Anyway, I'm feeling a bit better today. We'll see how this goes.
Every situation is different and I have volunteered information as necessary but I tend to keep it to myself.
One main reason for this is that when I'm sick, I generally just curl up and try to be left alone. I'm not like some sitcom male that locates a female in his life and seeks to be babied while ill. Blankets, medicine, juice, tv, soup; I'll sweat through the rest. I rarely called into work sick (for many years I was in a room mostly by myself so I had no fear of infecting others) and would try to work through illnesses. In 17 years I think I called in sick 9 times. Something like that anyway. Stupidly low levels of calling in sick in retrospect. The only major benefit to being sick at the moment is that I don't feel as compelled to push myself as hard when I don't feel well. Once I feel a little better, I return to my less intensive projects and try to get something done. Like scanning CD covers in order to make my iTunes collection look brighter. What kind of dumb project is this? Anyway.
The other main reason is that I know other people, younger and older than myself, that have worse things they deal with on a daily basis than I do. A tummyache pales in comparison to lingering illnesses or aches and pains from injuries that never really heal. Serious stuff. Most of them don't complain about their issues. They might explain them but they don't really complain and they have things to complain about. It doesn't seem right for me to kvetch.
It's said that Midwesterners are a tough breed. Maybe that's part of it as well.
Anyway, I'm feeling a bit better today. We'll see how this goes.
04 November 2008
Just a note about my Dad
Was talking to my dad the other day about the election. He noted that the last time he voted for President was in 1968 during the Nixon/Humphrey battle. He stated it didn't even feel like he had a choice between the lesser of two evils. It did feel like he'd wasted his time so he never went back.
Now, my dad has never been a radical as far as I can tell. He had no hippie period or anything like that. He was in high school in the late 50s/early 60s, spent some time in the military, and has been a blue collar worker for the bulk of his life. He apparently took some computer programming classes at some point (I remember getting to play with his flowchart template as a kid) but didn't care for it. A very normal, salt of the earth type guy from that description I think. Of course, I've known him for a long time so my normal is largely based on his normal and if I'm not normal I'd have to think that he can't be completely normal either. 1968 would have been about the time he started hanging out with my Mom and, while they don't exactly agree on everything, she's not politically minded so it would have been easier for him to not be at that point either.
Still, I think it's funnier to believe that Nixon destroyed by Dad's desire to vote.
Now, my dad has never been a radical as far as I can tell. He had no hippie period or anything like that. He was in high school in the late 50s/early 60s, spent some time in the military, and has been a blue collar worker for the bulk of his life. He apparently took some computer programming classes at some point (I remember getting to play with his flowchart template as a kid) but didn't care for it. A very normal, salt of the earth type guy from that description I think. Of course, I've known him for a long time so my normal is largely based on his normal and if I'm not normal I'd have to think that he can't be completely normal either. 1968 would have been about the time he started hanging out with my Mom and, while they don't exactly agree on everything, she's not politically minded so it would have been easier for him to not be at that point either.
Still, I think it's funnier to believe that Nixon destroyed by Dad's desire to vote.
03 November 2008
Progress I think
Had a big lunch, took a handful of pills, had a nice nap and feel a bit better.
Okay, that was a joke. I didn't take a handful of pills. That would be reckless. I took something to settle my stomach and it helped.
Take a handful of pills... Silly. That would be like mixing pain medication and alcohol. No one I know would do that...
Okay, that was a joke. I didn't take a handful of pills. That would be reckless. I took something to settle my stomach and it helped.
Take a handful of pills... Silly. That would be like mixing pain medication and alcohol. No one I know would do that...
The fun of my last couple days
1) Stomach knots up.
2) Body tenses up in response to 1). Muscles in back that like to tighten up anyway take this opportunity to do so. Discomfort is high.
3) Everything relaxes. Am at peace.
4) Repeat step one.
Occasionally I've been skipping step 3.
Unpleasant, distracting, pretty sure I'll live through it though.
2) Body tenses up in response to 1). Muscles in back that like to tighten up anyway take this opportunity to do so. Discomfort is high.
3) Everything relaxes. Am at peace.
4) Repeat step one.
Occasionally I've been skipping step 3.
Unpleasant, distracting, pretty sure I'll live through it though.
01 November 2008
Brief Reviews of Series Four as I Finally Catch Up
'Voyage of the Damned' special
I don't expect too much from the Christmas specials as it's been noted by the staff that they try not to demand too much from the audience during them, expecting them to be distracted by the eating and merrymaking and what have you. I found it an interesting adaptation of the disaster movie style to Doctor Who, with all sorts of science-fiction added to it so that we wouldn't get too distracted by real life. I found it enjoyable as it went through the paces. Enjoyed the cameos of old men. Was amused by the fact that London was deserted because of the events of the past two Christmas specials. It also made for a weird moment about a week later as I walked through the Titanic exhibit at the museum. Staring at the deck layout of the actual ship, I realized it was familiar because I'd been staring at it in the computer screens in the special. A little creeped out I muttered "Yes, that looks about right" and moved on.
-Compare/Contrast to 'Time for a Change'-
The Doctor uses 'Take me to your Leader', noting he's always wanted to say that. I have him using that line in 'TfaC'. Since he doesn't get to use it 'successfully', I suppose it counts that he didn't use it. Both lines are meant as jokes anyway. Forgive me if I find my own joke funnier (for a change).
'Partners in Crime'
A hint of an idea wrapped in character development to launch the season. More lightweight than the Christmas special (pun intended). Not unenjoyable but felt too mired in Russell's need to be sentimental on a regular basis.
-Compare/Contrast-
The Doctor notes that Martha 'fancied him', which is how I wrote her character in the story. Julie tries to explain how the Doctor is different, but it's early in their time together and she just doesn't get it. Julie would understand as it was her reaction to the Doctor and primary reason to travel with him as well.
'Fires of Pompeii'
Wow! Now we're in the good stuff. Mystery, historical event, a dash of sci-fi weirdness, all wrapped in an explanation of how the series views time and how the Doctor is different from you and I. And it was entertaining throughout. Quite, quite excellent. A nice throwaway line that's a continuity reference back to Hartnell early on when they still think they're in Rome. Excellent!
-Compare/Contrast-
The Doctor explaining how he views events and sees the options available is somewhat similar to the Doctors attempts to explain Nexus Points, only here done much more seriously, and rightfully so too!
'Planet of the Ood'
A bit simpler compared to the episode that preceeds it (which I just really enjoyed) but very nice as well. Has a cliffhanger moment halfway in, as if it were two episodes from the original run cut together! More old sitcom fellas show up here. As if going 'oh yeah?' to the Hartnell reference in the previous story, this story manages to reference a story from the first ever season, tying the Ood and the Sensorites a bit closer together! Nice!
By this point, all of three episodes in, I love Donna's character. As much as I liked Martha, she often felt like Rose 2, the 'rebound girl' if you like. Donna feels like a different character, a companion from the original series 'done right' by today's story telling styles. Her moment of emotional crisis in this episode is key to that. She already realized it would be all fun and games traveling with the Doctor but her moment of being overwhelmed felt very 'right', very normal. She's adjusting, finding out if her 'skin' is tough enough to do these sorts of things with the Doctor. I liked that.
-Compare/Contrast-
Didn't see anything specific in this episode. After three in a row, I found that odd almost, but is neither good nor bad.
More to watch.
I don't expect too much from the Christmas specials as it's been noted by the staff that they try not to demand too much from the audience during them, expecting them to be distracted by the eating and merrymaking and what have you. I found it an interesting adaptation of the disaster movie style to Doctor Who, with all sorts of science-fiction added to it so that we wouldn't get too distracted by real life. I found it enjoyable as it went through the paces. Enjoyed the cameos of old men. Was amused by the fact that London was deserted because of the events of the past two Christmas specials. It also made for a weird moment about a week later as I walked through the Titanic exhibit at the museum. Staring at the deck layout of the actual ship, I realized it was familiar because I'd been staring at it in the computer screens in the special. A little creeped out I muttered "Yes, that looks about right" and moved on.
-Compare/Contrast to 'Time for a Change'-
The Doctor uses 'Take me to your Leader', noting he's always wanted to say that. I have him using that line in 'TfaC'. Since he doesn't get to use it 'successfully', I suppose it counts that he didn't use it. Both lines are meant as jokes anyway. Forgive me if I find my own joke funnier (for a change).
'Partners in Crime'
A hint of an idea wrapped in character development to launch the season. More lightweight than the Christmas special (pun intended). Not unenjoyable but felt too mired in Russell's need to be sentimental on a regular basis.
-Compare/Contrast-
The Doctor notes that Martha 'fancied him', which is how I wrote her character in the story. Julie tries to explain how the Doctor is different, but it's early in their time together and she just doesn't get it. Julie would understand as it was her reaction to the Doctor and primary reason to travel with him as well.
'Fires of Pompeii'
Wow! Now we're in the good stuff. Mystery, historical event, a dash of sci-fi weirdness, all wrapped in an explanation of how the series views time and how the Doctor is different from you and I. And it was entertaining throughout. Quite, quite excellent. A nice throwaway line that's a continuity reference back to Hartnell early on when they still think they're in Rome. Excellent!
-Compare/Contrast-
The Doctor explaining how he views events and sees the options available is somewhat similar to the Doctors attempts to explain Nexus Points, only here done much more seriously, and rightfully so too!
'Planet of the Ood'
A bit simpler compared to the episode that preceeds it (which I just really enjoyed) but very nice as well. Has a cliffhanger moment halfway in, as if it were two episodes from the original run cut together! More old sitcom fellas show up here. As if going 'oh yeah?' to the Hartnell reference in the previous story, this story manages to reference a story from the first ever season, tying the Ood and the Sensorites a bit closer together! Nice!
By this point, all of three episodes in, I love Donna's character. As much as I liked Martha, she often felt like Rose 2, the 'rebound girl' if you like. Donna feels like a different character, a companion from the original series 'done right' by today's story telling styles. Her moment of emotional crisis in this episode is key to that. She already realized it would be all fun and games traveling with the Doctor but her moment of being overwhelmed felt very 'right', very normal. She's adjusting, finding out if her 'skin' is tough enough to do these sorts of things with the Doctor. I liked that.
-Compare/Contrast-
Didn't see anything specific in this episode. After three in a row, I found that odd almost, but is neither good nor bad.
More to watch.
31 October 2008
Zombies, man...
Just finished reading 'The Zombie Survival Guide'. No clue why it's listed as a 'humor' book according to the back cover. It treats zombie outbreaks as matter of fact, truth. It's very creepy and tries to prepare you for what will likely happen. Soon. It's not funny at all.
Unless...
They want us to believe it's 'funny' so we won't put any faith in it. It's part of the cover up man! Believe nothing! Think for yourself! Pay atten
*communication ends*
Unless...
They want us to believe it's 'funny' so we won't put any faith in it. It's part of the cover up man! Believe nothing! Think for yourself! Pay atten
*communication ends*
30 October 2008
Progress makes me happy
Finally, finally, finally! got some work done on my script again yesterday. I started writing a movie script back in late June during the wind down period of actually having to go to work. I actually generated the bulk of it rather quickly but hit a point in the creative process which is the actual work part of it.
Let me see if I can explain. Generally speaking, ideas are no big deal to come up with. Everybody comes up with ideas for stories, mostly when you're not thinking too hard about it. It's like those 3D puzzles that don't look like anything until you relax your vision and then, boom, there's the sailboat. If you sit around trying to think of ideas, nothing. If you walk around talking randomly, they can flow like water.
The trick is taking this general idea ('Wouldn't it be cool if this happened, then that, and it ends like this?') and turning it into a tale that holds together to some degree. Not everyone can do that. If they could, they probably would. I'm not saying I have any great talent at this but I've managed to do it before, to completion, and I guess that counts for something.
I generated the general flow for the movie in about five minutes. Boom. I wrote most of the last third/half/not sure of the exact math/whatever first and then went back and did most of the rest. My use of 'most' is where the work comes in. You see, the generation of most of the script has been all the creative, fun, making stuff up as I go part. The work part was outlining what I already had, seeing what I needed to add and making sure that the stuff I reference as having happened near the end, is referenced or happened in the beginning. Otherwise the audience goes 'huh? did I miss something?' and gets all distracted.
I didn't do the outline part until yesterday, about two months after I'd generated the bulk of the text.
'Wouldn't it be easier to outline it from the beginning and just check off what you've done?'
Probably. I'm sure some people work that way. I'm sure at some point I might work that way. In general I try not to do too much paperwork on the structure of the story I'm going to write. I prefer to mentally generate the basic idea, come up with a couple scenes in my head, and start writing it, working it out as I go. If I have something written down that dictates the flow of the story, I feel I'd be tied to that.
This doesn't mean that I never generate background material for a story, essentially write down stuff that's not meant to be scenes from the story itself. I just did that this past week for part of the novel I'm also working on, in an effort to work out the motivations and timelines for the characters involved, trying to make sure it makes sense so I don't have to rewrite a bit of stuff I already wrote. It's just that I've seen others work hard at building all this background information for stuff, writing histories of worlds, and get so wrapped up in that part of the process that they end up not writing anything because they burn out all the creative juices for a project. I've already mapped out multiple sequels to things in my head before. Sometimes it kills your interest in finishing what you're working on because you want to start on the fun part of the next story, rather than do the work parts of the beginning story. It can be a distraction.
Been awhile since I actually rambled here. That was fun! I'm not going back and reading it so hopefully it makes some sort of sense! :)
Let me see if I can explain. Generally speaking, ideas are no big deal to come up with. Everybody comes up with ideas for stories, mostly when you're not thinking too hard about it. It's like those 3D puzzles that don't look like anything until you relax your vision and then, boom, there's the sailboat. If you sit around trying to think of ideas, nothing. If you walk around talking randomly, they can flow like water.
The trick is taking this general idea ('Wouldn't it be cool if this happened, then that, and it ends like this?') and turning it into a tale that holds together to some degree. Not everyone can do that. If they could, they probably would. I'm not saying I have any great talent at this but I've managed to do it before, to completion, and I guess that counts for something.
I generated the general flow for the movie in about five minutes. Boom. I wrote most of the last third/half/not sure of the exact math/whatever first and then went back and did most of the rest. My use of 'most' is where the work comes in. You see, the generation of most of the script has been all the creative, fun, making stuff up as I go part. The work part was outlining what I already had, seeing what I needed to add and making sure that the stuff I reference as having happened near the end, is referenced or happened in the beginning. Otherwise the audience goes 'huh? did I miss something?' and gets all distracted.
I didn't do the outline part until yesterday, about two months after I'd generated the bulk of the text.
'Wouldn't it be easier to outline it from the beginning and just check off what you've done?'
Probably. I'm sure some people work that way. I'm sure at some point I might work that way. In general I try not to do too much paperwork on the structure of the story I'm going to write. I prefer to mentally generate the basic idea, come up with a couple scenes in my head, and start writing it, working it out as I go. If I have something written down that dictates the flow of the story, I feel I'd be tied to that.
This doesn't mean that I never generate background material for a story, essentially write down stuff that's not meant to be scenes from the story itself. I just did that this past week for part of the novel I'm also working on, in an effort to work out the motivations and timelines for the characters involved, trying to make sure it makes sense so I don't have to rewrite a bit of stuff I already wrote. It's just that I've seen others work hard at building all this background information for stuff, writing histories of worlds, and get so wrapped up in that part of the process that they end up not writing anything because they burn out all the creative juices for a project. I've already mapped out multiple sequels to things in my head before. Sometimes it kills your interest in finishing what you're working on because you want to start on the fun part of the next story, rather than do the work parts of the beginning story. It can be a distraction.
Been awhile since I actually rambled here. That was fun! I'm not going back and reading it so hopefully it makes some sort of sense! :)
29 October 2008
Cynical? No. Realistic? Yes.
Voting is the process by which we select the individuals that will be complained about for the next four years.
No politician will vote to eliminate their job. However, they will vote to eliminate your job.
Power corrupts. Therefore all politicians are corrupt to some degree. Therefore, logically speaking, voting is always the process of choosing the lesser of two evils.
No politician will vote to eliminate their job. However, they will vote to eliminate your job.
Power corrupts. Therefore all politicians are corrupt to some degree. Therefore, logically speaking, voting is always the process of choosing the lesser of two evils.
28 October 2008
'I Bury the Living' review
'I Bury the Living' - 1957
Story in Brief: It's businessman Bob Kraft's turn to run the local cemetery for a year. He's introduced to the details, especially the large map of the cemetery which displays unsold plots, sold plots (which are marked with a white pin) and plots in use (marked by a black pin). Bob accidentally starts slipping black pins into the map, only to have the associated people turn up dead. Does Bob suddenly have power over life and death?
Thoughts:
It's a great title, isn't it? It conjures up images of some demented man who tortures people by burying them alive, doesn't it? Well, that's not this movie. This movie is about the possibility of men having 'powers beyond those of known science'. If it were made today, it probably would have been an episode of the 'X-Files'. For that matter, it may have been remade as an episode of the 'X-Files'. I haven't seen all of them, so I don't know myself.
At any rate, the focus of the movie is on Bob Kraft, his guilt, the possibility that he may have some strange ability, how this affects his relationship with others, and how all this erodes at his sanity. Richard Boone (playing Bob Kraft) starts out as a normal businessman, accepting what he sees and not thinking about much else. He is, for all intents and purposes, a 'normal' fifties strong male lead. We watch as his world slowly shatters around him.
In all honesty, this movie shouldn't be any good. The direction gives the movie a very television feel (perhaps assisted by the fact that it was shot at the television ratio). It feels like a very good, slightly long episode from some anthology programme. This is not a bad thing. Tension builds as the movie progresses and remains tight for the finale. While attempting to not discussing the ending much, it seems to state one thing but hint at others. It seems tight enough to feel like an ending, but loose enough for the viewer to make up their own mind.
As referred to earlier, this film appears to have been shot at the 'standard' ratio which translates to a full-screen image. The way that the lettering is displayed during the opening credits seems to bear out that the film was meant to be at this ratio and nothing during the course of the film looks incorrect at this ratio.
The black and white video image is solid, miles crisper than the murky VHS copy I found a few years ago. There are a few marks to the image, but nothing awful and nothing consistent. The sound is free from pops and crackles. It may have been treated or remastered in some way, but I won't swear to that.
The back of the case indicates that the running time is about one hour, twenty minutes. The actual run time is closer to one hour, fifteen minutes. As such, it's not a substantial time investment to make.
This film is another in the MGM 'Midnite Movies' line and, like the others, has an SRP of $14.95 but can be found for $9.95. The disk also includes a trailer as well as French and Spanish subtitles. I have seen the title pop up on presumably gray market DVDs at an inexpensive price. Considering the low price of this disk, and despite not having seen the quality of the other disk as of yet, I would recommend this version of the movie. I don't expect the movie will sound or look any better than it is presented here.
Recommended to rent. I know I have spoken relatively highly of this title, but I'm not sure it will appeal to many others. It's a good, quiet cult film. Watch it and see if you like it first. Most people will probably only require viewing it once, they'll enjoy it, but have no need to see it again. Rent it.
(Standard DVD pricing has probably changed note applies here as well.)
Story in Brief: It's businessman Bob Kraft's turn to run the local cemetery for a year. He's introduced to the details, especially the large map of the cemetery which displays unsold plots, sold plots (which are marked with a white pin) and plots in use (marked by a black pin). Bob accidentally starts slipping black pins into the map, only to have the associated people turn up dead. Does Bob suddenly have power over life and death?
Thoughts:
It's a great title, isn't it? It conjures up images of some demented man who tortures people by burying them alive, doesn't it? Well, that's not this movie. This movie is about the possibility of men having 'powers beyond those of known science'. If it were made today, it probably would have been an episode of the 'X-Files'. For that matter, it may have been remade as an episode of the 'X-Files'. I haven't seen all of them, so I don't know myself.
At any rate, the focus of the movie is on Bob Kraft, his guilt, the possibility that he may have some strange ability, how this affects his relationship with others, and how all this erodes at his sanity. Richard Boone (playing Bob Kraft) starts out as a normal businessman, accepting what he sees and not thinking about much else. He is, for all intents and purposes, a 'normal' fifties strong male lead. We watch as his world slowly shatters around him.
In all honesty, this movie shouldn't be any good. The direction gives the movie a very television feel (perhaps assisted by the fact that it was shot at the television ratio). It feels like a very good, slightly long episode from some anthology programme. This is not a bad thing. Tension builds as the movie progresses and remains tight for the finale. While attempting to not discussing the ending much, it seems to state one thing but hint at others. It seems tight enough to feel like an ending, but loose enough for the viewer to make up their own mind.
As referred to earlier, this film appears to have been shot at the 'standard' ratio which translates to a full-screen image. The way that the lettering is displayed during the opening credits seems to bear out that the film was meant to be at this ratio and nothing during the course of the film looks incorrect at this ratio.
The black and white video image is solid, miles crisper than the murky VHS copy I found a few years ago. There are a few marks to the image, but nothing awful and nothing consistent. The sound is free from pops and crackles. It may have been treated or remastered in some way, but I won't swear to that.
The back of the case indicates that the running time is about one hour, twenty minutes. The actual run time is closer to one hour, fifteen minutes. As such, it's not a substantial time investment to make.
This film is another in the MGM 'Midnite Movies' line and, like the others, has an SRP of $14.95 but can be found for $9.95. The disk also includes a trailer as well as French and Spanish subtitles. I have seen the title pop up on presumably gray market DVDs at an inexpensive price. Considering the low price of this disk, and despite not having seen the quality of the other disk as of yet, I would recommend this version of the movie. I don't expect the movie will sound or look any better than it is presented here.
Recommended to rent. I know I have spoken relatively highly of this title, but I'm not sure it will appeal to many others. It's a good, quiet cult film. Watch it and see if you like it first. Most people will probably only require viewing it once, they'll enjoy it, but have no need to see it again. Rent it.
(Standard DVD pricing has probably changed note applies here as well.)
27 October 2008
An epiphany leads to calm
Took a walk and pondered, as I tend to do while walking. All the signs on peoples' front lawns kept distracting me. Then it hit me, I have electionitess! I'm sick of hearing about all the stuff that guy did and this guy won't live up to and all that associated junk.
Started to feel better immediately. Ahhhh...
Started to feel better immediately. Ahhhh...
Grumpy part 2
Not to belabor my grumpiness, which has yet to completely fade, but there are a couple more possible reasons for it.
1) I'm tired. This sounds ridiculous to me because I've been getting more sleep now than when I was working. I do set the alarm so that I don't oversleep as I know that leads to me being groggy and grumpy. With the weather changing and the temperature often in the not really cold yet but not warm anymore range, it's possible I'm not sleeping very deeply and therefore not getting rested properly.
2) Upon seeing me yesterday, one of my young friends noted I looked tired. "Maybe you're getting sick!" she noted cheerfully. Wouldn't that be wonderful? She also playfully chastised me for not getting a flu shot but I think that stuff is no good. Just makes the flu virus mutate faster. I understand some peoples reaction to a flu shot is that they feel oogy for a couple weeks. Might as well have the flu at that point. And what's the difference between a cold and the flu now? When I was younger, a cold was something that made your nose run and your throat cough. The flu involved tummy troubles. Now they've blurred together somehow.
Mostly I don't like the idea of a flu shot because I don't deal well with needles. They've made me pass out before. Not a fan. I don't get sick every year so I figure it's worth the gamble.
Probably also means I'm due...
1) I'm tired. This sounds ridiculous to me because I've been getting more sleep now than when I was working. I do set the alarm so that I don't oversleep as I know that leads to me being groggy and grumpy. With the weather changing and the temperature often in the not really cold yet but not warm anymore range, it's possible I'm not sleeping very deeply and therefore not getting rested properly.
2) Upon seeing me yesterday, one of my young friends noted I looked tired. "Maybe you're getting sick!" she noted cheerfully. Wouldn't that be wonderful? She also playfully chastised me for not getting a flu shot but I think that stuff is no good. Just makes the flu virus mutate faster. I understand some peoples reaction to a flu shot is that they feel oogy for a couple weeks. Might as well have the flu at that point. And what's the difference between a cold and the flu now? When I was younger, a cold was something that made your nose run and your throat cough. The flu involved tummy troubles. Now they've blurred together somehow.
Mostly I don't like the idea of a flu shot because I don't deal well with needles. They've made me pass out before. Not a fan. I don't get sick every year so I figure it's worth the gamble.
Probably also means I'm due...
26 October 2008
Grumpy
Been in a bit of a sour mood of late. I'd hoped that completing 'Time for a Change' would lead to further completions but none have been forthcoming. I've been a bit writers blocked since then. I've been getting things done on my other projects but they are so expansive that it's sometimes hard to see the progress on a daily basis. I'm trying to do too much at once and it looks like I'm getting nothing done. Not unlike work really.
I did get some background planning work done on a section of my novel today. That's helped. Progress.
Some of it might be physical as well. I'd gotten more sun than normal this summer and the past couple weeks I've gone almost cold turkey due to the weather. That's gotta mean something. I managed to get a walk in yesterday and get some hints of sun during it but it didn't help too much.
With the baseball season over, for the Brewers anyway, I've had less beer than I'd been drinking over the summer. Boozed it up a little last night, relatively speaking anyway, and that helped a little.
I think I understand the problems. I'm still working on the solutions.
I did get some background planning work done on a section of my novel today. That's helped. Progress.
Some of it might be physical as well. I'd gotten more sun than normal this summer and the past couple weeks I've gone almost cold turkey due to the weather. That's gotta mean something. I managed to get a walk in yesterday and get some hints of sun during it but it didn't help too much.
With the baseball season over, for the Brewers anyway, I've had less beer than I'd been drinking over the summer. Boozed it up a little last night, relatively speaking anyway, and that helped a little.
I think I understand the problems. I'm still working on the solutions.
24 October 2008
Titanic at MPM
It's been awhile since I last talked about the Milwaukee Public Museum so today we're doing that.
Yesterday I got to see the temporary Titanic exhibit. When they first announced that they were getting a collection of Titanic artifacts I thought 'Oh, that's nice' and managed to not be as excited as some of my friends. I hadn't counted on their ability to put these things into a context and it turned out to be quite the moving experience.
Yes, I said moving. Let it go.
As you enter, you're given a replica boarding pass with information regarding a specific passenger on it. I was traveling 3rd class. This does make a difference.
The first sections deal with the construction of the ship and why certain decisions and declarations about the ship were made. A large model of the vessel is available for examination and there is actual silent (probably newsreel) footage of the construction. I found this to be fascinating. For some reason it never occurred to me that footage like that would still exist.
After this you move into a section that houses reconstructions of a 1st class and 3rd class room. 1st class is opulent, even by today's standards. 3rd class is spartan. Actors in costume filter through the exhibit and my longest interaction with one occurred here as an Irish gentleman asked if I was a 3rd class passenger as well. When I confirmed that, we had a lengthy conversation about the bunks in our room, who inhabited them, how funny watching the drunk fellow getting into the top bunk was, etc. Much of it was information found on the exhibit walls but presented well. It was fun.
Next came the Grand Staircase. I clung to the edges of the room as the lady within appeared to be a 1st class passenger and I didn't want to get caught out sneaking around 'up there' by her.
What? I was playing my character.
A host of personal effects comes after, information on the restaurant menus, a recreation of the gathering space, information on the boiler room, all lit in ways to echo the mood of the space and with the appropriate sound effects, music for the common areas and the sound of the engines in the boiler room.
Then the ice looms near. The lighting darkens. The air grows cooler. The iceberg hits and you're 'in the ocean'. The room is lit by the stars. A wall of ice tries to simulate the cold of the water that night. I could barely press by hand to it for a minute without yanking it back. I couldn't imagine being immersed in that cold.
The next room is 'under water', the salvage site. Items are presented as they were found under water, with pictures of the site to prove it. The lighting ripples to simulate the 'under water' feel. The highlight is a two ton section of the actual hull. I sat and stared at that for awhile.
More personal stories are shown in the next hallway. A light from the ceiling maps out the size of a lifeboat.
In the final area, there are more effects. A large wall contains the passenger list and who survived the sinking. My passenger, the one on my replica ticket, did not. A few brief sections detail ship sinkings in the state and then you're in the giftshop.
I spent an hour and a quarter in there. I look forward to returning.
Yesterday I got to see the temporary Titanic exhibit. When they first announced that they were getting a collection of Titanic artifacts I thought 'Oh, that's nice' and managed to not be as excited as some of my friends. I hadn't counted on their ability to put these things into a context and it turned out to be quite the moving experience.
Yes, I said moving. Let it go.
As you enter, you're given a replica boarding pass with information regarding a specific passenger on it. I was traveling 3rd class. This does make a difference.
The first sections deal with the construction of the ship and why certain decisions and declarations about the ship were made. A large model of the vessel is available for examination and there is actual silent (probably newsreel) footage of the construction. I found this to be fascinating. For some reason it never occurred to me that footage like that would still exist.
After this you move into a section that houses reconstructions of a 1st class and 3rd class room. 1st class is opulent, even by today's standards. 3rd class is spartan. Actors in costume filter through the exhibit and my longest interaction with one occurred here as an Irish gentleman asked if I was a 3rd class passenger as well. When I confirmed that, we had a lengthy conversation about the bunks in our room, who inhabited them, how funny watching the drunk fellow getting into the top bunk was, etc. Much of it was information found on the exhibit walls but presented well. It was fun.
Next came the Grand Staircase. I clung to the edges of the room as the lady within appeared to be a 1st class passenger and I didn't want to get caught out sneaking around 'up there' by her.
What? I was playing my character.
A host of personal effects comes after, information on the restaurant menus, a recreation of the gathering space, information on the boiler room, all lit in ways to echo the mood of the space and with the appropriate sound effects, music for the common areas and the sound of the engines in the boiler room.
Then the ice looms near. The lighting darkens. The air grows cooler. The iceberg hits and you're 'in the ocean'. The room is lit by the stars. A wall of ice tries to simulate the cold of the water that night. I could barely press by hand to it for a minute without yanking it back. I couldn't imagine being immersed in that cold.
The next room is 'under water', the salvage site. Items are presented as they were found under water, with pictures of the site to prove it. The lighting ripples to simulate the 'under water' feel. The highlight is a two ton section of the actual hull. I sat and stared at that for awhile.
More personal stories are shown in the next hallway. A light from the ceiling maps out the size of a lifeboat.
In the final area, there are more effects. A large wall contains the passenger list and who survived the sinking. My passenger, the one on my replica ticket, did not. A few brief sections detail ship sinkings in the state and then you're in the giftshop.
I spent an hour and a quarter in there. I look forward to returning.
22 October 2008
'Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde' review
'Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde' – 1971
Story in Brief: Our story is told primarily in flashback, reviewing the situation so that we may learn from Doctor Jekyll's experiments into prolonging life. The potion he develops to extend his existence uses female hormones and has the unfortunate side effect of turning the individual who takes the potion into a female because of it. His 'sister' Hyde is significantly less restrained than he is, which leads into all sorts of trouble and confusion, especially when Jekyll starts to fall in love with a young lady and Hyde begins to pursue her brother.
Thoughts:
I really had low expectations going into this movie. The title, while grandly clever, does conjure up thoughts of a rather cheap exploitation flick. What I watched was a surprisingly clever construction of a film. While the title points you rather accurately towards 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' the movie also weaves in the tales of Burke and Hare as well as Jack the Ripper. The resulting mix was probably years ahead of it's time. The movie also progresses surprisingly logically, the tension and action building as the film moves along. In all fairness, if I woke up tomorrow morning to find I was suddenly a female one of my first acts would likely be to give my new naked form a look-see.
Ralph Bates is a great Jekyll and I've getting the feeling he's been a very underrated actor for years. Offhand I only recollect him in this, 'Horror of Frankenstein' and 'Lust for a Vampire' and he was excellent in all of them. Martine Bestwick is equally excellent as Hyde. Creepily enough the two leads do look like they could be related, perhaps brother and sister so the casting is excellent, inspired even.
The film looks excellent with minimal flaws to distract the eye. The sound wasn't anything special, but didn't sound tinny or faded either.
This film is part of Anchor Bay's Hammer Collection. They snuck three films into the collection in late 2001 and these films were at a lower price point than the majority of the films in the Hammer Collection. I'm not sure if this was due to these films having fewer extras that the earlier films or if Anchor Bay simply revised their pricing structure. Eitherway the decreased price of this film led me to scoop it up more quickly than most of its fellow collection mates. I was not disappointed.
Highly recommended.
(As per normal with these reviews, the availability and price of the DVD has likely changed in the years since I originally wrote this review. I leave that information intact because, well, its a flashback thing and I don't want to edit them. Or the information is integrated into the overall text in some reviews. Yeah, that's the ticket.)
Story in Brief: Our story is told primarily in flashback, reviewing the situation so that we may learn from Doctor Jekyll's experiments into prolonging life. The potion he develops to extend his existence uses female hormones and has the unfortunate side effect of turning the individual who takes the potion into a female because of it. His 'sister' Hyde is significantly less restrained than he is, which leads into all sorts of trouble and confusion, especially when Jekyll starts to fall in love with a young lady and Hyde begins to pursue her brother.
Thoughts:
I really had low expectations going into this movie. The title, while grandly clever, does conjure up thoughts of a rather cheap exploitation flick. What I watched was a surprisingly clever construction of a film. While the title points you rather accurately towards 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' the movie also weaves in the tales of Burke and Hare as well as Jack the Ripper. The resulting mix was probably years ahead of it's time. The movie also progresses surprisingly logically, the tension and action building as the film moves along. In all fairness, if I woke up tomorrow morning to find I was suddenly a female one of my first acts would likely be to give my new naked form a look-see.
Ralph Bates is a great Jekyll and I've getting the feeling he's been a very underrated actor for years. Offhand I only recollect him in this, 'Horror of Frankenstein' and 'Lust for a Vampire' and he was excellent in all of them. Martine Bestwick is equally excellent as Hyde. Creepily enough the two leads do look like they could be related, perhaps brother and sister so the casting is excellent, inspired even.
The film looks excellent with minimal flaws to distract the eye. The sound wasn't anything special, but didn't sound tinny or faded either.
This film is part of Anchor Bay's Hammer Collection. They snuck three films into the collection in late 2001 and these films were at a lower price point than the majority of the films in the Hammer Collection. I'm not sure if this was due to these films having fewer extras that the earlier films or if Anchor Bay simply revised their pricing structure. Eitherway the decreased price of this film led me to scoop it up more quickly than most of its fellow collection mates. I was not disappointed.
Highly recommended.
(As per normal with these reviews, the availability and price of the DVD has likely changed in the years since I originally wrote this review. I leave that information intact because, well, its a flashback thing and I don't want to edit them. Or the information is integrated into the overall text in some reviews. Yeah, that's the ticket.)
21 October 2008
Ow!
Halloween falls on Friday this year. Today I noticed that Friday the 31st is Friday the 13th 'backward'.
Made my head hurt.
Made my head hurt.
20 October 2008
The early days
While cleaning in the archive last week I located the bulk of the comics I wrote and drew while in middle school, the period of my first great creative endeavors. I say 'most' because I would create them and 'sell' them to my brothers. We had fake money, played store a lot, whatever. At some point, I was given most of them back. Dunno if the rest even exist anymore.
Do not start to think that because I 'drew' comics that I had some artistic skill that I never developed. I managed to barely draw some simple shapes and sort of tell a story in 6-8 pages at a crack. A number of them were based on games that I'd play to amuse myself and tell a story with in my head so you get lego built spaceships firing on one another and 'regenerating' damaged parts (aka reassembling the lego ships) or spaceships that look suspiciously like the cheap mechanical pencils I used to use in school.
The longest running series? Pac-Man.
Seriously, Pac-Man. Vaguely based on a combination of the arcade games and the Saturday morning cartoon it spawned, I did over a dozen Pac-Man comics. Most of them involve the ghosts trying to steal power pellets, a theme of the cartoon as I recall, and Pac-Man managing to stop them.
While most are simple crayon or marker based silliness, I was surprised to find an experimental one, drawn in pen, staring a pixel, explaining a day where the pixels lined up incorrectly and misdrew Pac-Man and the ghosts. It's not really funny as it tries to be but is an interesting stretch. Young Steve trying something different. Interesting to see.
I also did prose 'magazines' that generally existed to release my early not-quite-Doctor-Who fan fiction. While I don't have the issues any more, I have the original drafts so none of those... interesting stories are missing.
The weirdest thing I remember doing in prose at that time was an adaptation of the original Godzilla movie. It's weird because, at that time, I hadn't seen the film yet and scrawled out a couple pages based on the synopsis I'd read.
Haven't changed all that much, have I? Well, except that I don't think I've got some definitive Pac-Man fan-fic epic seeking outlet. That would be creepy.
Do not start to think that because I 'drew' comics that I had some artistic skill that I never developed. I managed to barely draw some simple shapes and sort of tell a story in 6-8 pages at a crack. A number of them were based on games that I'd play to amuse myself and tell a story with in my head so you get lego built spaceships firing on one another and 'regenerating' damaged parts (aka reassembling the lego ships) or spaceships that look suspiciously like the cheap mechanical pencils I used to use in school.
The longest running series? Pac-Man.
Seriously, Pac-Man. Vaguely based on a combination of the arcade games and the Saturday morning cartoon it spawned, I did over a dozen Pac-Man comics. Most of them involve the ghosts trying to steal power pellets, a theme of the cartoon as I recall, and Pac-Man managing to stop them.
While most are simple crayon or marker based silliness, I was surprised to find an experimental one, drawn in pen, staring a pixel, explaining a day where the pixels lined up incorrectly and misdrew Pac-Man and the ghosts. It's not really funny as it tries to be but is an interesting stretch. Young Steve trying something different. Interesting to see.
I also did prose 'magazines' that generally existed to release my early not-quite-Doctor-Who fan fiction. While I don't have the issues any more, I have the original drafts so none of those... interesting stories are missing.
The weirdest thing I remember doing in prose at that time was an adaptation of the original Godzilla movie. It's weird because, at that time, I hadn't seen the film yet and scrawled out a couple pages based on the synopsis I'd read.
Haven't changed all that much, have I? Well, except that I don't think I've got some definitive Pac-Man fan-fic epic seeking outlet. That would be creepy.
19 October 2008
Tartu/Sting review
'Death Curse of Tartu'/'Sting of Death' - 1967/1966
Story in Brief: 'Death Curse of Tartu' - A group of archaeologists and their students camp at an Indian Burial site within the Everglades. In doing so, they awaken the spirit of Tartu, Indian Shaman, who placed a curse on any who would trespass on his gravesite. People die.
'Sting of Death' - A scientist and his crew welcome the scientist's daughter's return home from college. She brings a number of her friends along to their Everglades island home for a party. Recently there's been a number of strange deaths which appear to be caused by a impossibly large jellyfish. People die.
Thoughts:
I am particularly fond of Something Weird Video. First off, I just like the name of the company. Secondly, they dig up well known and not so well known cult movies, mostly from the independent days of the sixties and seventies, and present them as best they can to an eager audience. These are weird movies. I've never been completely disappointed with a tape or DVD from Something Weird Video. Now that they moved to primarily releasing double and triple feature DVDs it's even more likely that the disc will have something to interest a person for their twenty bucks, if you have the right frame of mind.
'Death Curse of Tartu' is a title I've read about for years. It's a great title, it has a great premise, and a great makeup job/character design for Tartu. It's not a great movie unfortunately. I always try to give credit where credit is due and any low budget film made by people just trying to get their movie done gets extra points for finishing their film (it can't be that easy, if it were, I'd have a bunch of films out already). Tartu is held back by a really awkward beginning. The first twenty or thirty minutes of the film are slow, really slow. Even worse, most of the explanations we get early on are repeated after this opening sequence or are merely verbalizing things we've already seen. It felt like the movie had restarted at this point. I get the impression that the film ran short and an extra section was added to the beginning to fill out the running time. The film is only 84 minutes long and it would have been dreadfully short had even ten minutes gone missing. In all fairness, once the film gets past that first half-hour or so, it is quite good and did grip my attention. The fact that the females were by-in-large rather attractive didn't hurt any. The last hour is a good movie.
The film is presented in full frame which may or may not be an accurate representation of how it looked in the theatre in the sixties but it's just as likely that this is the only format the film currently exists in. The colours look a bit odd, but aren't necessarily wrong. The video does look a little weird, but I'm not sure why. The image is visibly damaged, but it's not been battered to pieces either. The image quality doesn't significantly damage the enjoyment of the story. The sound is tinny sounding, but considering the likely low budget of the film and the fact that it's probably not been well looked after over the years, that's not unexpected. It's not bad.
According to the back of the case, 'Sting of Death' has been barely, if at all, seen in thirty years. This would explain why I've seen less information about this film than Tartu. Both were made by the same company with essentially the same crew working on both (the only major exception being that Neil Sedaka recorded a song for 'Sting of Death'). After being mildly disappointed by Tartu, I expected less from 'Sting of Death'. I was pleasantly surprised. The movie flowed well, the story was well developed, the characters were moderately developed and had reasonable motives. There are a few surprises, but the villain is easy to spot early on. The result is a fun, very watchable and entertaining film that is logically developed within the 'rules' it develops for itself. More attractive females don't hurt any either. There are some good makeup effects (perhaps done by the same individual that turned out the grand Tartu makeup) but it's a good thing they don't show the jellyfish monster much. It looks too much like a guy wearing a garbage bag over his head.
'Sting of Death' was transferred from the 35mm negative and it shows. The image is surprisingly crisp and clean, especially when compared to Tartu. This film is also presented in full frame but it looks proper at that composition. The sound is good, nothing special, but certainly better than Tartu sounded.
While Tartu isn't fully bad, the beginning is enough to turn most people off. 'Sting of Death' is pleasant fun and I recommend that movie. The extras might help interest you into checking this out. Both films have an audio commentary track done by the director (I must note I've not listened to either track). There are six trailers, apparently all films done by the same company or filmed in the same area. Trailers for 'Tartu' and 'Sting' are amongst the six. Thirty minutes (or so) of 'highlights' from the el cheapo feature (brace yourself for a grand film title) 'Love Goddesses of Blood Island' are included (from a video master by the look of it). Rounding out the disc is the featurette 'Miami or Bust' which only goes to prove the saying 'No one wants to see an old stripper'. If you invest in this disc or rent it I really suggest you avoid this extra. It's not a good thing.
I'm not sure what SRP is on this disc, but since I found it for $19.99, I'm going to guess it's about $24.99.
Mild recommendation to view/rent.
(As per before, this review was written some years ago and I have no updated information on the availability of this DVD nor its pricing.)
Story in Brief: 'Death Curse of Tartu' - A group of archaeologists and their students camp at an Indian Burial site within the Everglades. In doing so, they awaken the spirit of Tartu, Indian Shaman, who placed a curse on any who would trespass on his gravesite. People die.
'Sting of Death' - A scientist and his crew welcome the scientist's daughter's return home from college. She brings a number of her friends along to their Everglades island home for a party. Recently there's been a number of strange deaths which appear to be caused by a impossibly large jellyfish. People die.
Thoughts:
I am particularly fond of Something Weird Video. First off, I just like the name of the company. Secondly, they dig up well known and not so well known cult movies, mostly from the independent days of the sixties and seventies, and present them as best they can to an eager audience. These are weird movies. I've never been completely disappointed with a tape or DVD from Something Weird Video. Now that they moved to primarily releasing double and triple feature DVDs it's even more likely that the disc will have something to interest a person for their twenty bucks, if you have the right frame of mind.
'Death Curse of Tartu' is a title I've read about for years. It's a great title, it has a great premise, and a great makeup job/character design for Tartu. It's not a great movie unfortunately. I always try to give credit where credit is due and any low budget film made by people just trying to get their movie done gets extra points for finishing their film (it can't be that easy, if it were, I'd have a bunch of films out already). Tartu is held back by a really awkward beginning. The first twenty or thirty minutes of the film are slow, really slow. Even worse, most of the explanations we get early on are repeated after this opening sequence or are merely verbalizing things we've already seen. It felt like the movie had restarted at this point. I get the impression that the film ran short and an extra section was added to the beginning to fill out the running time. The film is only 84 minutes long and it would have been dreadfully short had even ten minutes gone missing. In all fairness, once the film gets past that first half-hour or so, it is quite good and did grip my attention. The fact that the females were by-in-large rather attractive didn't hurt any. The last hour is a good movie.
The film is presented in full frame which may or may not be an accurate representation of how it looked in the theatre in the sixties but it's just as likely that this is the only format the film currently exists in. The colours look a bit odd, but aren't necessarily wrong. The video does look a little weird, but I'm not sure why. The image is visibly damaged, but it's not been battered to pieces either. The image quality doesn't significantly damage the enjoyment of the story. The sound is tinny sounding, but considering the likely low budget of the film and the fact that it's probably not been well looked after over the years, that's not unexpected. It's not bad.
According to the back of the case, 'Sting of Death' has been barely, if at all, seen in thirty years. This would explain why I've seen less information about this film than Tartu. Both were made by the same company with essentially the same crew working on both (the only major exception being that Neil Sedaka recorded a song for 'Sting of Death'). After being mildly disappointed by Tartu, I expected less from 'Sting of Death'. I was pleasantly surprised. The movie flowed well, the story was well developed, the characters were moderately developed and had reasonable motives. There are a few surprises, but the villain is easy to spot early on. The result is a fun, very watchable and entertaining film that is logically developed within the 'rules' it develops for itself. More attractive females don't hurt any either. There are some good makeup effects (perhaps done by the same individual that turned out the grand Tartu makeup) but it's a good thing they don't show the jellyfish monster much. It looks too much like a guy wearing a garbage bag over his head.
'Sting of Death' was transferred from the 35mm negative and it shows. The image is surprisingly crisp and clean, especially when compared to Tartu. This film is also presented in full frame but it looks proper at that composition. The sound is good, nothing special, but certainly better than Tartu sounded.
While Tartu isn't fully bad, the beginning is enough to turn most people off. 'Sting of Death' is pleasant fun and I recommend that movie. The extras might help interest you into checking this out. Both films have an audio commentary track done by the director (I must note I've not listened to either track). There are six trailers, apparently all films done by the same company or filmed in the same area. Trailers for 'Tartu' and 'Sting' are amongst the six. Thirty minutes (or so) of 'highlights' from the el cheapo feature (brace yourself for a grand film title) 'Love Goddesses of Blood Island' are included (from a video master by the look of it). Rounding out the disc is the featurette 'Miami or Bust' which only goes to prove the saying 'No one wants to see an old stripper'. If you invest in this disc or rent it I really suggest you avoid this extra. It's not a good thing.
I'm not sure what SRP is on this disc, but since I found it for $19.99, I'm going to guess it's about $24.99.
Mild recommendation to view/rent.
(As per before, this review was written some years ago and I have no updated information on the availability of this DVD nor its pricing.)
18 October 2008
How did I manage to take the lead?
How did I get to the front of the line? How am I leading the charge? I suppose I shouldn't complain as I do generally write myself as a leader of the gang but it's pitch black and I can't see a thing. There are hints of light but they are from the other side of the crudely assembled wall. It's not enough to indicate which way to go.
I turn my head to the right and light! Thank heaven for that. I head in its direction, pulling on the hand of the young lady behind me, the first in a chain of held hands to lead us from the dark. The glow is brilliant, but pooling only in the doorway. I can see light in the room beyond, another happiness. This should be easy to traverse and get us closer to freedom. I see bright colours swirling, a cylinder spinning around the room. Pretty really. Relaxing.
I lead the group up the step onto the walkway through the cylinder. It spins and so does my head. The room tilts 45 degrees to the right, threatening to spill us from the walkway into the ever churning cylinder. With my free hand, I clutch onto the handrail and pull us forward. Ever focusing ahead, the colours of the spinning room overwhelm me. In their centre is a portal, grounded in black. An elevator perhaps? Access out certainly. It's blocked by a female of indeterminate age. She doesn't look willing to let us pass. I decide to worry about one thing at a time and pull us forward, towards her and the exit. My group swoons behind me, even more affected my the room due to their preexisting situations. I am not as affected in this way. Perhaps that is why I lead.
As we near the exit, the bloody, deformed woman thankfully slides to the side and lets us pass. We tumble from the room into a simple area, also thankfully lit, with black walls. Our chain of hands separates as all stumble to a wall and try to regain our balance. The female, fellow victim or demon I could not tell, hisses at us to progress.
The chain of hands reforms. I am still at its lead and am forced to plunge us back into the inky blackness of the next hallway.
I turn my head to the right and light! Thank heaven for that. I head in its direction, pulling on the hand of the young lady behind me, the first in a chain of held hands to lead us from the dark. The glow is brilliant, but pooling only in the doorway. I can see light in the room beyond, another happiness. This should be easy to traverse and get us closer to freedom. I see bright colours swirling, a cylinder spinning around the room. Pretty really. Relaxing.
I lead the group up the step onto the walkway through the cylinder. It spins and so does my head. The room tilts 45 degrees to the right, threatening to spill us from the walkway into the ever churning cylinder. With my free hand, I clutch onto the handrail and pull us forward. Ever focusing ahead, the colours of the spinning room overwhelm me. In their centre is a portal, grounded in black. An elevator perhaps? Access out certainly. It's blocked by a female of indeterminate age. She doesn't look willing to let us pass. I decide to worry about one thing at a time and pull us forward, towards her and the exit. My group swoons behind me, even more affected my the room due to their preexisting situations. I am not as affected in this way. Perhaps that is why I lead.
As we near the exit, the bloody, deformed woman thankfully slides to the side and lets us pass. We tumble from the room into a simple area, also thankfully lit, with black walls. Our chain of hands separates as all stumble to a wall and try to regain our balance. The female, fellow victim or demon I could not tell, hisses at us to progress.
The chain of hands reforms. I am still at its lead and am forced to plunge us back into the inky blackness of the next hallway.
17 October 2008
A Moment of Explanation
As I've been working to reorganize, reduce, and clean the physical archive, I've started working on doing the same to my digital archive as well. Actually I started working on it a couple years ago and then put the project aside for new projects. The long term goal is to collect all my work together (at least up to a point) and be able to have it all backed up in one place. Hopefully, it will also allow me to have some 'off-site' backups of the archive as well; in other words, be able to hand a disk or two to some of my buddies and say 'Here you go'.
The priority surrounds the 'teen doctor' series I wrote in high school. The bulk of these are retained on floppy disks that don't like to function properly anymore. They're also often in file formats that are becoming less and less compatible by the day. While it's true that I have access to paper copies of everything, those too are prone to decay. That and retyping an entire story is a lot of work. I've done it a couple times already and it's not much fun. Also, the temptation to reedit them is strong. I want them to be remastered, not special editions.
So in-between typing up new projects, I work on updating the old. Sometimes I find unused items, like the cache of movie reviews I wrote a few years ago for use on the website and never uploaded, and I realize I can use them here. I think the reviews are well written and deserve some exposure. There's some even more obscure movies to come from that pile so be warned.
Steve watch obscure movies? That unpossible!
The priority surrounds the 'teen doctor' series I wrote in high school. The bulk of these are retained on floppy disks that don't like to function properly anymore. They're also often in file formats that are becoming less and less compatible by the day. While it's true that I have access to paper copies of everything, those too are prone to decay. That and retyping an entire story is a lot of work. I've done it a couple times already and it's not much fun. Also, the temptation to reedit them is strong. I want them to be remastered, not special editions.
So in-between typing up new projects, I work on updating the old. Sometimes I find unused items, like the cache of movie reviews I wrote a few years ago for use on the website and never uploaded, and I realize I can use them here. I think the reviews are well written and deserve some exposure. There's some even more obscure movies to come from that pile so be warned.
Steve watch obscure movies? That unpossible!
15 October 2008
'Dr. Phibes Rises Again' review
'Dr. Phibes Rises Again' - 1972
Story in Brief: The moon and planets slide into a specific configuration bringing Dr. Phibes back! Time is of the essence as the planets will soon reach another pattern, one that will unlock ancient secrets hidden away in Egypt. If found these secrets will lead to renewed life for Phibes' beloved wife Victoria as well as eternal life for Phibes. There are those who are in Phibes' way. Unfortunately for them, Phibes has already proved himself willing to kill for his wife and will not hesitate to do so again...
Thoughts:
Sequels almost never live up to the original. Chances are you can count on your fingers the number of sequels you enjoyed. That's not really a problem with 'Dr. Phibes Rises Again'. The original is a grand film and the sequel manages to be more of the same whilst being totally different.
Phibes' character is the same, as well it should be. His main focus in life remains his wife Victoria. Everything he does is related to his wife in one way or another. The only difference I could pick out is that Price is allowed (or was called to, I've no clue who's idea it was really) to be a bit more amusing, a bit more like the image of a Vincent Price character. While I like Vincent Price and the 'image' people seem to have of him being a big ham (I rarely see it happen to the detriment of the movie or character he's playing) I am glad to see that this change is minimal. Phibes is still Phibes. There are a few moments, especially early in the film, when he seems to be speaking without using the special voice apparatus he made to recreate his voice. It is possible that these are meant to be mental musings, but he tends to gesture as if speaking. It's also possible that these moments were originally meant to be silent and dialogue was later dubbed over rather than have more narration. These moments are a bit distracting, but they do disappear as the movie plays out and the memory of them fade as the movie grabs your interest.
The main variation between this film and the original is the motivation for the killings that we see, despite the fact that in both movies Phibes kills for his wife. In the original Phibes kills those he feels are responsible for his wife's death. He seeks, and gets, revenge. In this movie he kills those that are in his way. There is nothing personal to these killings. If the people in his way had simply gone away at the first death, he would have gladly left them alone. In the original, had a target hid, he would, and did, track them down. While it seems like a minor point, afterall people die in both movies, it does change the theme of the movie. In the original, he can be pitied, but he is definitely the villain. In the sequel, he's more of an anti-hero. His intent is noble and it becomes easier to support his goals, despite the fact that most who oppose him do so unintentionally. It's an interesting, if subtle, shift.
The change of location helps make the movie feel different as well. Once the characters start reaching Egypt, the movie starts to feel a bit like an action/adventure film that just happens to have a relatively high number of deaths. There's a hidden tomb, secret chambers and ancient texts that point to the powers of long forgotten gods.
Phibes also has a more specific enemy in this film. While the police chase him in both films (simultaneously serious and used as comic relief) they never seem to be his primary foil. While in the original film the head surgeon can be seen as his primary opponent, this fact is only due to the fact that this surgeon happened to work on his wife. In this film, Biederbeck is Phibes' opponent because they both quest after the same river of life. They butt heads because of this goal, not because of chance. While they share very little screen time together, their actions continually affects the other. They play a game between them and winning brings them quite a prize.
This movie is part of the 'MGM Midnite Movies' series and SRP is $14.95 but can be found for $9.95. Like the original, the movie is presented in 16 by 9 enhanced widescreen. The image is good, but it is also a dirtier looking copy than the original which was nearly crystal clear. While never getting awful, it is a little distracting at times. The sound remains solid unspectacular mono. There are a couple alternate language tracks and a trailer as the only extras. Like the first, I suggest not watching the trailer until after you've seen the film as it gives too much away.
There is talk that at one point a third Phibes movie was planned but never made. While I'm sure I'd enjoy another movie with this character, I'm also pleased with the way it ends the series. It allows you to believe what you want about what happens next.
Again, highly recommended.
(Please note that I wrote this review some years ago already and the pricing information may possibly no longer be accurate. Beyond that, I still agree with the review.)
Story in Brief: The moon and planets slide into a specific configuration bringing Dr. Phibes back! Time is of the essence as the planets will soon reach another pattern, one that will unlock ancient secrets hidden away in Egypt. If found these secrets will lead to renewed life for Phibes' beloved wife Victoria as well as eternal life for Phibes. There are those who are in Phibes' way. Unfortunately for them, Phibes has already proved himself willing to kill for his wife and will not hesitate to do so again...
Thoughts:
Sequels almost never live up to the original. Chances are you can count on your fingers the number of sequels you enjoyed. That's not really a problem with 'Dr. Phibes Rises Again'. The original is a grand film and the sequel manages to be more of the same whilst being totally different.
Phibes' character is the same, as well it should be. His main focus in life remains his wife Victoria. Everything he does is related to his wife in one way or another. The only difference I could pick out is that Price is allowed (or was called to, I've no clue who's idea it was really) to be a bit more amusing, a bit more like the image of a Vincent Price character. While I like Vincent Price and the 'image' people seem to have of him being a big ham (I rarely see it happen to the detriment of the movie or character he's playing) I am glad to see that this change is minimal. Phibes is still Phibes. There are a few moments, especially early in the film, when he seems to be speaking without using the special voice apparatus he made to recreate his voice. It is possible that these are meant to be mental musings, but he tends to gesture as if speaking. It's also possible that these moments were originally meant to be silent and dialogue was later dubbed over rather than have more narration. These moments are a bit distracting, but they do disappear as the movie plays out and the memory of them fade as the movie grabs your interest.
The main variation between this film and the original is the motivation for the killings that we see, despite the fact that in both movies Phibes kills for his wife. In the original Phibes kills those he feels are responsible for his wife's death. He seeks, and gets, revenge. In this movie he kills those that are in his way. There is nothing personal to these killings. If the people in his way had simply gone away at the first death, he would have gladly left them alone. In the original, had a target hid, he would, and did, track them down. While it seems like a minor point, afterall people die in both movies, it does change the theme of the movie. In the original, he can be pitied, but he is definitely the villain. In the sequel, he's more of an anti-hero. His intent is noble and it becomes easier to support his goals, despite the fact that most who oppose him do so unintentionally. It's an interesting, if subtle, shift.
The change of location helps make the movie feel different as well. Once the characters start reaching Egypt, the movie starts to feel a bit like an action/adventure film that just happens to have a relatively high number of deaths. There's a hidden tomb, secret chambers and ancient texts that point to the powers of long forgotten gods.
Phibes also has a more specific enemy in this film. While the police chase him in both films (simultaneously serious and used as comic relief) they never seem to be his primary foil. While in the original film the head surgeon can be seen as his primary opponent, this fact is only due to the fact that this surgeon happened to work on his wife. In this film, Biederbeck is Phibes' opponent because they both quest after the same river of life. They butt heads because of this goal, not because of chance. While they share very little screen time together, their actions continually affects the other. They play a game between them and winning brings them quite a prize.
This movie is part of the 'MGM Midnite Movies' series and SRP is $14.95 but can be found for $9.95. Like the original, the movie is presented in 16 by 9 enhanced widescreen. The image is good, but it is also a dirtier looking copy than the original which was nearly crystal clear. While never getting awful, it is a little distracting at times. The sound remains solid unspectacular mono. There are a couple alternate language tracks and a trailer as the only extras. Like the first, I suggest not watching the trailer until after you've seen the film as it gives too much away.
There is talk that at one point a third Phibes movie was planned but never made. While I'm sure I'd enjoy another movie with this character, I'm also pleased with the way it ends the series. It allows you to believe what you want about what happens next.
Again, highly recommended.
(Please note that I wrote this review some years ago already and the pricing information may possibly no longer be accurate. Beyond that, I still agree with the review.)
14 October 2008
'The Abominable Dr. Phibes' review
'The Abominable Dr. Phibes' - 1971
Story in Brief: In mid 1920s London, doctors are turning up dead, killed in strange ways. These particular dead doctors point towards one specific case and therefore one primary suspect. There is only one problem facing the police: he's dead. Isn't he?
Thoughts:
I've inherited a number of things from my father. My basic physical appearance, the sound of my voice, an interest in growing large sideburns, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, a bunch of things I can't recall at the moment, and this movie. As I was growing up, I remember my father waiting for this movie to show on television and catching it whenever he could. At the time, it seemed like it and the sequel played every month or so on local television. I remember the first time I saw part of it. We were at my grandparents house, it was near the end of the movie and the suspense was building. We had to leave before the movie ended. That hurt. Years later, it would be one of the first movies I would record upon getting a VCR. I like this movie and knew that going into purchasing the DVD.
This was also, as far as I can remember, my introduction to Vincent Price. It is not quite the typical Vincent Price performance where he smiles and his voice drips and purrs. For storyline reasons his expression is almost constantly blank and his voice is projected through a speaker. This leaves his eyes as the only true way he can express himself. He does. What little variability is left in his voice is used to its best effect, to express longing for his dead wife, to express bitterness at his situation, to curse his enemies.
Phibes' character is rather unusual for this type of movie. It would have been particularly easy to have him be deranged for the sake of being deranged and just killing a bunch of people. Phibes' has motivation for what he does. He may well be out of his mind but in his own mind his actions are totally justified and logical. His reasons for arranging the deaths of all this medical personnel are given to us bit by bit as the movie progresses making them easier to understand and accept. It also allows the viewer to empathize with him. He isn't a simple cold hearted killer that we want to see destroyed at the end of the film like, perhaps, Jason from the 'Friday the 13th' series. He's a sad crazy little man that needs to be stopped, but not necessarily destroyed.
The methods of killing are generally quite clever. When animals are part of the equation, the shots are fleeting so as to help preserve the illusion. There are a couple methods of execution that require a certain amount of disbelief suspension, but considering there is an influence from the 'Avengers' television programme amongst the creative staff and the general strangeness of that programme, this is perhaps not surprising.
The acting is top notch. Price, as noted, is more serious in this film than he's generally perceived to be. Joseph Cotton, as the head surgeon and therefore last target, displays his incredulity and then his concern well. Terry-Thomas is, well, Terry-Thomas, full of bluster and amusement with but one serious moment.
The movie is clever with a serious tone, but moments of humour arise to round out the film. For instance, the policemen assigned to the case are allowed to be serious characters but the people they interview are often quite strange. In addition, their boss is overbearing, loud and, well, seems to lack intelligence without being an idiot. Since most people have survived through a situation like this at their work, it makes the eyerolling the policemen get to do behind their superior's back very amusing and familiar.
The ending is a bit, well odd, and I've long had some issues with it but it doesn't wreck the film for me.
Very simply, I recommend the movie itself and encourage you to view it. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
Had the presentation of this film been substandard, I may have toned down that recommendation. It is not. The film looks beautiful with a minimum of nicks to distract the eye. The colours are bold and deep. The widescreen ratio looks correct and it's 16 by 9 enhanced. It looks grand.
The sound is good too. It is clear and crisp, and nothing appears to have been done to meddle with the original mono sound. Occasionally the 'processed' sound disappears from Phibes' voice, but every time I've seen the movie on television it has played that way. It is evidently a fault from the original voice-over recording.
This film is part of the 'MGM Midnite Movies' line and SRP is $14.95. It can often been found for $9.95 and is a deal at either price. The only extras are a few alternate languages and a trailer. I do not recommend watching the trailer first if you've never seen the movie before as the trailer gives too much away (but it does have some 'alternate' voice-over moments and should be watched).
Highest recommendation to get.
(Please note that I wrote this review some years ago already and the pricing information may possibly no longer be accurate. Beyond that, I still agree with the review.)
Story in Brief: In mid 1920s London, doctors are turning up dead, killed in strange ways. These particular dead doctors point towards one specific case and therefore one primary suspect. There is only one problem facing the police: he's dead. Isn't he?
Thoughts:
I've inherited a number of things from my father. My basic physical appearance, the sound of my voice, an interest in growing large sideburns, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, a bunch of things I can't recall at the moment, and this movie. As I was growing up, I remember my father waiting for this movie to show on television and catching it whenever he could. At the time, it seemed like it and the sequel played every month or so on local television. I remember the first time I saw part of it. We were at my grandparents house, it was near the end of the movie and the suspense was building. We had to leave before the movie ended. That hurt. Years later, it would be one of the first movies I would record upon getting a VCR. I like this movie and knew that going into purchasing the DVD.
This was also, as far as I can remember, my introduction to Vincent Price. It is not quite the typical Vincent Price performance where he smiles and his voice drips and purrs. For storyline reasons his expression is almost constantly blank and his voice is projected through a speaker. This leaves his eyes as the only true way he can express himself. He does. What little variability is left in his voice is used to its best effect, to express longing for his dead wife, to express bitterness at his situation, to curse his enemies.
Phibes' character is rather unusual for this type of movie. It would have been particularly easy to have him be deranged for the sake of being deranged and just killing a bunch of people. Phibes' has motivation for what he does. He may well be out of his mind but in his own mind his actions are totally justified and logical. His reasons for arranging the deaths of all this medical personnel are given to us bit by bit as the movie progresses making them easier to understand and accept. It also allows the viewer to empathize with him. He isn't a simple cold hearted killer that we want to see destroyed at the end of the film like, perhaps, Jason from the 'Friday the 13th' series. He's a sad crazy little man that needs to be stopped, but not necessarily destroyed.
The methods of killing are generally quite clever. When animals are part of the equation, the shots are fleeting so as to help preserve the illusion. There are a couple methods of execution that require a certain amount of disbelief suspension, but considering there is an influence from the 'Avengers' television programme amongst the creative staff and the general strangeness of that programme, this is perhaps not surprising.
The acting is top notch. Price, as noted, is more serious in this film than he's generally perceived to be. Joseph Cotton, as the head surgeon and therefore last target, displays his incredulity and then his concern well. Terry-Thomas is, well, Terry-Thomas, full of bluster and amusement with but one serious moment.
The movie is clever with a serious tone, but moments of humour arise to round out the film. For instance, the policemen assigned to the case are allowed to be serious characters but the people they interview are often quite strange. In addition, their boss is overbearing, loud and, well, seems to lack intelligence without being an idiot. Since most people have survived through a situation like this at their work, it makes the eyerolling the policemen get to do behind their superior's back very amusing and familiar.
The ending is a bit, well odd, and I've long had some issues with it but it doesn't wreck the film for me.
Very simply, I recommend the movie itself and encourage you to view it. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
Had the presentation of this film been substandard, I may have toned down that recommendation. It is not. The film looks beautiful with a minimum of nicks to distract the eye. The colours are bold and deep. The widescreen ratio looks correct and it's 16 by 9 enhanced. It looks grand.
The sound is good too. It is clear and crisp, and nothing appears to have been done to meddle with the original mono sound. Occasionally the 'processed' sound disappears from Phibes' voice, but every time I've seen the movie on television it has played that way. It is evidently a fault from the original voice-over recording.
This film is part of the 'MGM Midnite Movies' line and SRP is $14.95. It can often been found for $9.95 and is a deal at either price. The only extras are a few alternate languages and a trailer. I do not recommend watching the trailer first if you've never seen the movie before as the trailer gives too much away (but it does have some 'alternate' voice-over moments and should be watched).
Highest recommendation to get.
(Please note that I wrote this review some years ago already and the pricing information may possibly no longer be accurate. Beyond that, I still agree with the review.)
13 October 2008
Me No Like
What I said about the digital tv conversion goes double for the election ads.
Makes me happy I ignore commercials on instinct. Double talking finks.
Makes me happy I ignore commercials on instinct. Double talking finks.
12 October 2008
Hope I Wake Up Sometime Today
Some days you wake up bursting with energy, feeling great, ready to take on the world.
Some days you wake up tired, sore, fighting a headache.
Guess which day I'm having today.
Meh.
Some days you wake up tired, sore, fighting a headache.
Guess which day I'm having today.
Meh.
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