Apr 19

You Know My Name

2006’s Casino Royale, the James Bond flick that introduced Daniel Craig as a new kind of Bond, was the Gandalf the White of 007 movies, if I may mix my metaphors. It was brilliant and new and unusual and better than any of its predecessors.

One of its more unusual features was having a title song (thanks to Chris Cornell) that didn’t sound like some cheezy lounge music with a braying female vocalist. I’m looking at you, ‘Gold-FIIIINNNG-er!’

Anyway, I just figured out today the character from whose point of view the song is written:

 

 

 

 

(spoilers below)

 

 

 

 

The character is M.

How else do you explain these lyrics:

“Arm yourself because no-one else here will save you
The odds will betray you
And I will replace you
You can’t deny the prize it may never fulfill you
It longs to kill you
Are you willing to die?
The coldest blood runs through my veins
You know my name.”

Apr 16

Review: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Nostalgia

You know how you have fond memories of a TV show or movie from when you were young, and when you finally get to see it again as an adult (or in this case, older adult), it isn’t quite how you remembered it? Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s amazing, but some other times, well, not that good. Or awful.

One of the first non-animated movies we got for the girls when they were little was The Goonies; Heather and I both loved that movie. When we sat down to watch it, it was every bit as awesome as we remember (well, maybe not every bit–back then I still held out hope of finding underground passages, booby traps, waterslides, and hidden pirate ships). But there was something neither of us remembered: profanity–and a whole $@#&! lot of it.

Some other memories haven’t fared so well, either. A couple years ago I found Bravestarr on Hulu. If you haven’t seen it, it was a cartoon that was basically a sci-fi western. It was awesome when I was 14. When I watched it recently, the animation and draftsmanship were still amazing, but what else would you expect from Filmation? Everything else, though, was absolutely awful. For so long Heather wanted Greatest American Hero on DVD. We never got it for her, getting her Dukes of Hazzard and MacGyver instead, but she finally found GAH on Netflix. She didn’t even make it through the first episode.

Glory Days

Back on topic. The year was 1991. I was in summer classes at CMSU (now UCM), taking Dr. Sample’s Drawing II (three hours a day, three days a week) and Dr. Leuhrman’s Watercolor I (four hours a day, five days a week). I absolutely loved my watercolor class. It was one of the few classes where I actually tried hard to learn, tried to please my instructor, and begged for honest critiques (unlike pretty much every other art class). I only remember a few people from class: Dr. Leuhrman, the instructor, who always wore whites and pastels, and never got a drop of paint on him; some big guy, whose name I can’t remember, but who had a giant mane of jet black hair, a jawline beard, and was one of the few people in art school that made me insanely jealous of his ability; a girl named Ashley; and a cheery young woman named Elsa, whom I would later name my firstborn after. The big hits that summer were Wind of Change by the Scorpions, and Bryan Adams’s Everything I Do, from the summer blockbuster Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

I think it was Wilxn , or maybe Wayne, who was with me when I saw the trailer for RHPOT (at the AMC theater inside Bannister Mall…remember Bannister Mall? Back before it went all skeevy and they tore it down?). Wilxn and I went to see it in the theater that summer. It was amazing. I think that was the day we went to the Swap Shop, saw two movies (the other one, I believe, was Mel Gibson’s Hamlet), and probably went just looking around for stuff. We got home late (when didn’t we?), and that was when we realized it really was possible to do too much stuff in one day.

Back to the movie–easily my favorite movie of the whole summer.

Back to the Present

Later I saw it a couple of times on VHS. I know I saw it once with Noodles, whose favorite line was at almost the end of the movie: “Reckanize this?”

A couple weeks ago I picked up a copy of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves on DVD. I have had Michael Kamen’s amazing soundtrack for years, but I hadn’t seen the movie in at least 17 years. Last night while I was working on a case for my new Bible I popped the movie in.

It was terrible.

The movie is so hammy, so goofy, and what I believe to be unintentionally campy it’s hard to believe I enjoyed it as a serious adventure flick. I’m not going to say anything about the movie’s most frequent complaint–Kevin Costner’s accent–because it didn’t bother me then and it didn’t bother me now.

Alan Rickman, who is awesome, chews scenery with the power of a thousand suns. His inflections in so many scenes are so funny, it almost seems like Kevin Reynolds (the director) told him, ‘Hey Alan, can you play the Sheriff of Nottingham kind of like Peter Ustinov played Prince John in Disney’s Robin Hood? That’d be great.’ Rickman’s Sheriff doesn’t just say ‘spoon,’ he says ‘speeooon!’

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, whom I remember being very pretty, um, I did not now think was very pretty (of course, all women are less pretty after being married to Heather).

Morgan Freeman was awesome as Azeem. One of my favorite parts of the movie, both as a young buck and now, was the part where Mortiana the witch busts in and and tries to impale Robin, and then Azeem busts in and throws that gigantic scimitar across the entire screen. I remember it caught Wilxn and me so off-guard I think we literally yelled in the theater. I guess we’re the kind of guys that Shakespeare had to make comedy relief for, for fear we’d jump up and stab an actor. Whatever. Lincoln would back me up on this.

Everyone else was fine, whatever. The movie’s real weakness is the goofy script and hammy directing.

Best part of the entire movie, then and now: the late Michael Kamen’s amazing score (he also did the incredible score for Hudson Hawk). For those of you who don’t think you could pick out anything from the soundtrack aside from Bryan Adams’s Everything I Do, I guarantee you have heard it, usually when you hear  that amazing fanfare accompanying the Magic Kingdom logo at the beginnings of a number of Disney movies.

The DVD Itself

The RHPOT DVD itself, well, is amazingly bad. You actually have to flip the disc over in the middle of the movie. This isn’t like Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, where the movie is so amazingly long that it literally won’t fit on a single disc, but the producers of the DVD realized this and made an elegant transition for you to get some more popcorn, go to the bathroom, come back and pop in the second disc. With Robin Hood, the disc-flip happens mid-scene.

For those of you out there who want to get into DVD production but you think your low IQ or lack of skill might keep you from realizing your dream, there is hope.

Apr 13

jesus vs. santans

One of my Facebook friends posted the following graphic:

I didn’t know who or what santans was or were, so I did some googling. It turns out that Santans is a commune in France (not a hippy commune, but our equivalent to a village). It has a population of about 300 people. Here is a picture from their travel page:

You would think they would make that cute little flower tree their logo, instead of the horned guy in the picture. Is that Mehrunes Dagon from Oblivion? Is Elder Scrolls really that big over there? I hope so; that would give me something in common with the French besides a love of André the Giant and being rude to people.

At any rate, the town sounds totally adorable.

It makes me sad, however, that I must pit my love of Jesus (or at least European, Catholic, long-haired Jesus) against my love of this little French town I’ve yet to visit.

Apr 10

fizzlesprung

n., presumably means, ‘malfunctioning.’

A customer called the other day saying, “This darn computer is fizzlesprung.”

Apr 07

What’s your favorite Tim Burton movie?

Mine is that one where Johnny Depp plays that weird pasty guy, and all that creepy stuff happens and Danny Elfman’s music is all ‘oompa OOMPA oompa OOMPA.’

I’m just kidding.

Really my favorite Tim Burton movie is Big Fish, probably the least Burtonesque movie he’s done. Second favorite? Probably Ed Wood, though I don’t watch either movie except in my Clearplay DVD player. Both of them certainly have a lot of weirdness to them, but each of them is about a real character you actually care about, despite their oddities. Each of the movies focuses on telling the story, and telling it well.

I honestly don’t remember the music from Big Fish, but the music in Ed Wood was amazing. It was done by Howard Shore, years before he did Lord of the Rings. Plus, the movie has so many classic lines, like this:

Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker): “Do I really have a face like a horse?”

Apr 04

Thankful for Twilight

It’s pretty easy and popular to hate Twilight: the hundred year old guy who hangs around a high school, the vampires that aren’t affected by the sun, the sparkles, Kristen Stewart’s expression(s). But the fact is I’m actually thankful for the Twilight series–at least the books.

I have always wanted my children to be readers (actively choosing to read–not simply lacking illiteracy). I got one of the girls hooked on reading at age 6 by lending her my Calvin & Hobbes books. One day she proudly announced, ‘This is the sixth time I’ve read this book!” So I decided that she was ready for something bigger, and gave her Bertrand Brimley’s Mad Scientists Club. She acted like I gave her dish-duty. She complained a lot, but eventually read it.

“Dad, that book was awesome!”

Duh.

The other child didn’t take to reading so quickly. She was 11 and still did not read for pleasure. Sure she sang and drew pictures, but I was obviously a terrible parent.

Then the Twilight books hit big, and suddenly she wanted to read, and she read the entire series. Now she reads regularly, and has polished off several much larger books, including Gone With the Wind. She has since professed a distaste for the girly vampire books.

In August of 1931 a 14 year old Forrest Ackerman–the man who would, among other  accomplishments, coin the term ‘sci-fi’–wrote a letter to Edgar Rice Burroughs regarding an argument he had with his teacher over what constituted ‘good’ literature. Two days later, the author of the Tarzan and Jon Carter books wrote him back. The excerpt below sums up my sentiments (emphasis mine):

“My stories will do you no harm. If they have helped to inculcate in you a love of books, they have done you much good. No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.“

You can read both letters in their entirety here at Letters of Note.

Apr 01

Lustin’ for a bustin’

Remember back in the old days when gullible people would email you ridiculous urban legends without checking the facts? You know the ones I mean: out of context photo with plenty of JPEG compression artifacts, inaccurate descriptions, poor spelling, lots of all caps and exclamation points, and a story that just seems a wee bit too pat. I have created an example for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure:


The great thing about email is that it was easy to quietly inform the sender about the error without calling them out in front of everyone.

But now everyone posts this junk on Facebook, and there’s no easy way to politely inform them that they are 1) believing and 2) spreading lies, or at best, half-truths. Plus, it’s made worse by the fact that I almost never post on Facebook, and almost never comment, either, so it will look like I just troll around waiting for someone to post something stupid.

I don’t. I like seeing the joys of my friends and acquaintances, I like knowing what they are struggling with so that I can better pray for them. Despite all the cheezy ads and game requests, Facebook really has made it easier for the most part to keep in touch with people–even if I rarely interact with them. Kind of like me in real life, I guess.

Anyway, the current legend going around shows a severely debrided foot and claims to be the result of some poor unnamed shmoe having stepped on a broken fluorescent lightbulb and had to get “mercury powder” flushed out for several months, and this is the kind of mortal danger the government wants to force you to have in your home and that’s why we stock up on incandescent bulbs that convert 95% of their energy into heat instead of light God bless America.

I want to show the kindness of releasing people from deceit, but I also want to show the kindness of, you know, simple kindness. That really is the challenge of Ephesians 4:15, “…speaking the truth in love….” Telling the truth is alone is setting the bar pretty low; you could probably swing a dead cat and hit a dozen people who use honesty as an excuse for malice.

But to be honest and kind–that’s takes a bit of effort.

Mar 29

Donkeys, horses, asses, and mules: part 3

The mascot of the University of Central Missouri (formerly Central Missouri State University) is the mule, and male athletes there are called mules. However, female athletes are called jennies (the name for a female donkey) instead of mollies (the name for a female mule).

Several years ago they had the mascot redesigned to be more kid-friendly (and, presumably, sales-friendly), because the existing one–a big, red, angry mule–scared children.

see part 1 and part 2

Mar 27

Quotable: Jenny from Big Fish

“No, it’s logical
if you think like your father.
See, to him,
there’s only two women:
your mother
and
everyone else.”

Mar 26

Quotable: Touchstone from As You Like It

TOUCHSTONE: This is the very false gallop of verses. Why do you infect yourself with them?
ROSALIND: Peace, you dull fool. I found them on a tree.
TOUCHSTONE: Truly, the tree yields bad fruit.