April’s DVD reviews, Part II
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 2, Disc 2 - Prognosis: It’s not that bad, but not that good either. Why do I watch? The title character’s affect is as flat as her ass, but guess which I’m paying more attention to? (See the title of the show for clues.)
Threshold: First and (thankfully) only season, Discs 1-4 - This came out around the same time as vaguely rip-off sister-shows Invasion and Surface, but was perhaps the worst of the lot. Simply no clue where to go with a potentially promising premise, it devolves into a cop drama without any awareness of how to spool out enough mystery to string along viewers (see Lost for an example of a successful version of just such an on-going experiment). It’s no surprise it dipped below the Nielsen threshold well before even the first run of shows was finished production and the series was canceled.
An Evening with Kevin Smith, 2002 - I’m not saying he should be in front of the camera, but clearly his talent isn’t so much behind it as telling stories about generally being around cameras and the folks who finance his (often inept) use of them.
Cujo, 1983 - Not as good as I remembered it when I was a kid and we watched it on VHS, but it’s still fairly effective at exploiting a legitimate fear. This was, of course, back when Stephen King still had some not-complete-contrived fears left to write about.
The Ten, 2007 - Dammit, Paul Rudd, you’re capable of better than this. Not that I didn’t like it for what it was… a throwback to the slapstick comedies of the late ’80s that TBS reruns at 4am, only with folks you’d recognize from Comedy Central today.
Nip/Tuck: Season 4, Discs 1&2 - This show is more in need of rejuvenation than the patients on it. To say that the plots have gotten sillier and more soap opera-ish would be to indict the entire series since that’s a good description of what they’ve always been. No, it’s something about the execution so far this season that’s guilty of malpractice.
Tom Green: Inside & Outside the Box: Disc 3, 1997 - They never reveal it, but the premise here was to give an unfunny Canadian a talk show and tell him he has to do anything he can to make teenagers laugh or they’ll shoot him. Clever he isn’t, but he makes a fool of himself the way most folks do when there’s someone off camera giving commands down the barrel of a gun.
I Am Legend, 2007 - Not legendary, sorry. It’s an updated (i.e., CGI this time around) version of The Omega Man (1971), one of the three speculative fiction flicks Charlton Heston made (the others being Planet of the Apes (1968) and Soylent Green (1973)) that really got you thinking about the future the first time you saw them. This doesn’t. It’s about as substantive as the piece of shit War of the Worlds remake we were subjected to a couple years ago that, along with this one makes me welcome an alien invasion or apocalyptic virus.
Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!: Season 2: Disc 2, 2004 - What more can you say about this show other than they call ‘em out and shoot ‘em down. These guys should get funding for this kind of public service, especially when they nail the government itself.
Van Halen: The Van Halen Story: The Early Years, 2003 - Documentary video produced from old interviews with the principals and new interviews with the peripherals (read: roadies and the Pete Best of the band). Boring for most of the world, but great stuff if you’re living in the past and willing to accept anything reminiscent of it not matter how mediocre… much like those folks who bought tickets to the comeback tour this year.
Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 6: Disc 2, 2007 - You like this show or you hate it. Either way, it’s probably a good litmus test about how you feel about me, so screw you.
Battlestar Fracking Galactica: Season 3: Disc 2, 2006 - Don’t waste your time watching anything other than this show for the next couple years since everything that follows will be a pale imitation.
David Gilmour: Remember That Night: Live at the Royal Albert Hall: Disc 2, 2007 - Extras, mostly. High-quality home movies, in fact, if you want to know the truth, but if you dig Dave, then you’ll enjoy a lot of this. There’s even a fairly lengthy jam session with him and Rick with a bass player and drummer sitting around in a barn that’s worth the price of admission even if you don’t care for all the behind the scenes stuff.
The L Word: Season 4: Disc 4, 2007 - Nothing memorable. Remarkably less drama than I’ve come to expect from this much estrogen with no men to blame.
Candid Camera: 5 Decades of Smiles: Disc 8, 1949 - More good stuff. The idea behind the show was always good, but it took until in my lifetime before we got to the perfect storm of the technical sophistication of pinhole cameras and wireless micro mics coupled with clever set-ups that were funny in and of themselves. It could only be better when the Japanese took the idea and ran with it in a society not nearly so litigious.
PICKS OF THE LITTER: Okay, I don’t think The Ten knocks it out of the park, but there’s a lot to like here. An Evening with Kevin Smith gets the same description; fans of his will love it, all three of them who haven’t seen this yet anyway. Similarly, hardcore Floyd fans will love all the extras on Disc 2 of David Gilmour: Remember That Night, all three of them who haven’t whacked off to it yet anyway. And if you haven’t put Battlestar Fracking Galactica in your queue, you must be a fracking toaster.
Another Ten Grammar Annoyances
Starting sentences with “I think.” Okay, we get it already, Decartes. But unless you’re offering an opinion formed of pure speculation, don’t begin EVERY FUCKING SENTENCE with “I think” because you probably don’t very often or at least very fast. I think you’re just buying time until you can. But that’s just my opinion.
Who vs. that. Whenever anyone uses “that” in reference to a person, I’m always unsure if they’re dealing with a non-living entity, like maybe I didn’t get the newsletter about that individual having an operation to turn into a vampire or a robot of whatever’s the rage these days. “That” should apply only to objects or people who use “that” instead of “who” and therefore have the IQ of an inanimate object.
Then vs. than. Why is this so hard to puzzle out?
Prepositions used in conjunction with abstractions. This doesn’t bother me so much with English, but once you try to translate anything either to or from (<-- those are prepositions, btw), the choice for which preposition is no longer obvious. Why is it (in English anyway) you're "at" the store but "in" your house? We say we're "from" the United States but "of" [insert ethnicity] decent. When you try to figure this shit out, you're fucked in/up the ass.
Grooving with “picts.” I abbreviate “picture” all the time as “pic,” but who are these numbskulls who go around talking about commenting on their “picts”? Apparently they’re ancient Scottish. I’d like to shoot them with something other than a camera.
Thought through though. When morons type one, a different one always comes out as through they had though something completely different.
“Which” is “that”? Conversely, while I have a solid understanding of the difference between “who” vs. “that,” I don’t have a clue what the difference is between “which” and “that.”
Random capitalizers. Worse even than those who adopt the “no-Shift key” policy are those who randomly capitalize Words. I spend all my time trying to puzzle out the secret message that these letters deliver in anagram form, but I don’t have a clue. Or maybe I’m not the one lacking the clue; it’s the authors of these cut-and-paste ransom notes.
Ditzy blondes. Another one I don’t get is the use of the word “dizzy.” If you’re dizzy, you may be disoriented to the point you’re going to puke. That makes sense, but that isn’t what you mean. You mean “ditzy” as in completely stupid or the type of person who would describe someone as a “dizzy blond.” You make me want to puke.
When worse comes to worst. Look, if you haven’t grasped them yet, I don’t know how to explain superlatives to you at this point. If it was “worse comes to worse,” it wouldn’t be any worse than it was before, so there’s nothing to comment on. And if you’re writing/saying shit like that, then it’s too late. The worst has fucking arrived.
Making Contact with Chicane
Something I made. Enjoy.
Film: This is the opening sequence of the film Contact (1997) by Robert Zemeckis, based on Carl Sagan’s novel which features a pull-back very similar to the first half of Charles and Ray Eames short film “Powers of Ten.” The original audio was removed, the point of which was to show the dispersion of human-generated radio signals across the universe (i.e., we haven’t been transmitting long enough to make ourselves known very far from home). By about two-thirds of the way into the segment, there’s nothing but silence. I saw this three times in the theater around the time it came out, and that silence was so loud every time, I get chills thinking about it.
My only edits were to remove the title and introduce a slight fade-in. Originally it “blasts” you visually much as the audio does with the aforementioned radio cacophony, and that didn’t gel with the music here.
Music: Arizona Pt.2 by Chicane. No edits were made. Things lined up surprisingly well so I used this instead of a couple other tracks I preferred but would have had to manipulate.
Untitled drunk story No. 1
The week before the semester starts, it’s not the nerds but the hardest partiers who have already moved into their dorm rooms. After all, when finals are over at the end of the semester, there’s just no time to do anything other than pack up and move out. But before classes begin? Well, that’s another story.
Granted, I was in a boring demographic between those two extremes, but I was there on campus with the wild bunch. I was a junior, but like the freshmen, I had to come up early for orientation. Having just transferred, I had to go through a similar program that admittedly I was skipping out of a lot of the time. I had no obligations by this point in the night, however. It was late, probably mid-way through orientation week, and I was hanging out in the lobby with some relative strangers. We were just B.S.ing about nothing in particular when four guys passed through, one considerably drunker than the other three. The stand-out of the group was louder than the rest and had pretty much lost any sense of decorum or, frankly, any sense of where he was in order to find the appropriate level of it.
I’m not sure where all they had been that night, but clearly there was much alcohol involved. They could have been coming from any of several bars on the edge of campus or maybe they had just been doing shots in someone’s room. Whatever the case, they were heading out the front of the dorm into the campus.
The drunkest one wasn’t the main point of interest though, just the most salient member (at least from a distance). When they got up close, it was immediately evident that one of the more sober guys was the leader here, and he had something specific in mind.
“We’re going camping,” he told the drunk guy.
“Camping!” the drunk guy agreed. It was like watching George subtly manipulate Lenny into the path of the bullet.
By this point there was a small crowd of us following them. We could all see there was a plan to this ostensible madness, and we wanted to be there when it unfurled to whatever end the ring leader had in mind.
The next set of dorms across the way from ours was arranged in a horseshoe at the end of a cul de sac. There was no thru-traffic normally, and virtually none at all tonight with so few folks on campus. The crowd of spectators (myself included) held back while the group led their mark up into a planter in front of one of the dorms. With us out of earshot (and the drunkest one too far down his tunnel vision to notice anyone or anything more than an arm’s reach from him), we were able to talk more freely. Someone in the crowd apparently knew a bit of the back story here. All four of the guys were from Alabama, but only the not-completely-plastered three knew one another previously. The drunk guy was someone they had “befriended” and gotten tanked up specifically to mess with. Now it was playing out in front of us.
By this point they’d talked the drunk guy into laying down in a bare patch of the planter.
“We’re camping out under the stars,” the leader said quietly.
“Camping under the stars,” the drunk guy repeated, his enthusiasm giving way to slumber.
“We’re going to sleep under the stars,” the leader said. It was a mantra.
“Yeah, sleep under the stars,” the drunk guy whispered. His lids were getting heavy. He was almost out… but then he wasn’t.
He jumped up and said something loud and too jumbled to make much sense. The other guys calmed him down. “We’re camping out under the stars,” the leader reminded him.
The cycle of slowly, deliberately hypnotizing the drunk guy began again. The leader of the group had clearly done this before with some success. The patience in his efforts testified to his confidence that he’d gotten it right on several occasions and would here again if he persisted long enough.
Over the course of calming him down, they managed to get the drunk guy to undress down to his boxers. They set the example doing the same themselves. They took off their shoes and placed them under their heads like pillows. With no volition left in him left to anything but whatever he could mimic, the drunk guy followed suit. If you’re drunk enough, reality is like silly putty, and as far as he was concerned, he was having the best camping trip with his buds.
After only a few minutes of lulling him into a calm, he was passed out for good. They could have carried him anywhere they wanted and he wouldn’t have noticed. But they didn’t. They quietly gathered up all his clothes except the boxers he was wearing and the shoes under his head. Then they just tip-toed away.
The crowd watching this were giggling before but were in total awe of what these guys had just pulled off now. We didn’t see this coming at all. Though they seemed drunk enough at first, it was clear now that it was pretty much an act on the parts of all but the one now left lying half-naked in the planter. We all took off back to our own dorm and left this party casualty to his mosquito bites and whatever else was in store for him.
I didn’t think anything more about this incident for many months afterward. In the meantime all of us who were there that week had started classes and had gotten settled into life on the campus. I had made some friends who lived in the dorms in the cul de sac. Some of us got to telling drunk stories one day about a year later, and before I could even bring this one up, my friend Maggie told us how the week before classes started when she was a freshman last year, she had woken up one morning, looked out her window, and there was a half-naked guy passed out in the planter in front of the dorm cattycorner to hers.
“What happened to him,” I asked, giggling now even more than when we witnessed him being planted there.
“I called the cops, and they came and picked him up,” she said. “Why?”
