Atomic Nerds

I seem to have accidentally dedicated my day to socializing in Gunblogger Conspiracy, a short thing. I have driven Stingray crazy by pointing this out, now it’s your turn.

MGM Lion. Watch him. No, seriously, don’t look at the majestic lion in the logo, watch his face.

Glances to the left- at his trainer. Cued commentary, not a roar (a very different noise with a specific context) but the big cat equivalent of a dog barking on cue. Glances back- no treat? Second cue?- okay- same trick. Glances back at the very end- where’s my cookie, dammit?

Theoretically you know the lion is a trained animal, but once you start watching his face the feel of the intro changes a lot and it becomes impossible to unsee.

So between heading down to Santa Fe to purchase yeast to rescue a struggling batch of chocolate honey porter, listening in for this show and committing the rest of the evening after dinner to this show, blogging is still suffering. I haven’t even had time to begin DRAFTING my next planned beast.

So, I’m going to borrow from Jay and punt: guilty pleasures.

1. Those horrible, only sort of foodlike in the right light “nachos” they serve at gas stations, stadiums, and movie theaters. I am aware that is not so much cheese as a safety-orange shaded petroleum product. I am aware the chips are basically plywood with simpler carbohydrate chains. I adore them, and I cannot resist them.

2. Disco. I possess a “Best of the Village People” album and several hip-hop remixes of “Stayin’ Alive”. Jay says he’s ashamed of his hair metal habit; I welcome my hair metal side as it is far less embarrassing than the disco.

3. Old video games. You know how Tam has hers in a box in the attic because they won’t play on the new systems? Ours are in a box in the closet, along with all the old systems that are still in working order, though the NES needs several voodoo rituals before it will consent to work properly. They are not on the shelves hooked up to the TV because the mood comes and goes and there’s not enough room for them. But the Gamecube is still wired in, largely because of Super Smash Brothers, the best drinking game ever released.

4. Alcopop. I don’t buy it anymore because it’s way too sugary and we have way more beer than we actually drink (our friends get the bulk of that brewed, because dude, it’s five gallons at a time), but Mike’s Hard Lemonade? That was some damn tasty stuff. Hell, I even liked Smirnoff Ice and I’d still take that over, say, a Miller.

5. AMV Hell. It’s random! It’s based on a lot of anime I haven’t watched and quite a bit of some I watched after seeing the first few Hells! For some reason they are hilarious to me and I like to watch them late at night! I don’t understand why!

6. Really, really over the top action movies. The over-the-topness is the appeal. I adored both Charlie’s Angel movies, gold-plated dual-wielded 50.-cal Deagles and all. Loved Shoot ‘Em Up. Kung Fu Hustle is a Hong Kong cinema masterpiece. I can’t wait for The A-Team to come to DVD. I dislike the new James Bond movies partly because I hate shakycam, but mostly because I think James freaking Bond should be saving the world from nuclear prostitutes and laser-guided bears, not involving himself with some sort of incomprehensible intrigue involving Bolivian water supplies. Screw realistic torture scenes, I want to watch him jump out of a plane into another plane while driving an Aston Martin and smoking three cigars.

More light content. I am finally being dragged kicking and screaming into upgrading to Windows 7, and since it’d be a good idea for a number of reasons to do a complete wipe and reformat of my hard drives, this means I have to spend today and possibly part of tomorrow moving everything I actually care about over to the house media box. Woe is change-resistant me.

Okay, so technically Legion cost FAR too much to be considered a B movie, but in terms of spirit and execution it was. It was an exceptionally shiny and special-effectsy one, but it still embodies pretty much the same spirit of “let’s go with this because it’s fun for an hour and a half, never mind the details.” It is best described as a cross between Terminator and zombie apocalypse films with Christian trappings. It is, depending on your state of sobriety, your appreciation for shout-outs, and your willingness to forgive a movie all sorts of failings because it’s fun, either so bad it’s good or just a very pretty yet awful movie.

I landed on the side of “so bad it’s good”, though what I would actually describe it as is a series of cool scenes that are, as a movie, substantially less than the sum of its parts. If they’d been able to decide on an overall coherent plot arc and an ending that made sense before shooting the cool scenes, it might possibly have qualified as a decent action flick, and if they’d decided to make the characters more interesting than the best the actors could squeeze out of cardboard (which in some cases- Dennis Quaid- is actually quite a bit), it might have qualified as a good one.

This movie has an exceptionally high degree of gun porn, which was what initially made us sit up and go “ooh, do want” instead of nonstop snarking at it, up to and including a scene that inspired a shout of “OLD SLABSIDES SAVES THE DAY”. EVERYBODY gets a gun, including the teenage waif and the pregnant lady whose survival the plot hinges upon, and this is universally presented as not just a good idea, but the only good idea. It also, sadly, contains a cringeworthy scene in which the only human character who carried a gun for personal protection BEFORE the apocalypse started is ruthlessly grilled on why he’d have such a thing… which is so incredibly out of place amid the rest of the aggressively survivalist movie that the actors themselves look downright confused and angry about having the conversation.

What merit the movie has is in a few funny moments and a series of great action scenes and sequences. There is stuff blowing up, there is creepy shit being shot, there is toe-to-toe supernatural badass brawling, and there are plenty of shout-outs to classic action and horror movies like Jacob’s Ladder. What the movie lacks is characters who are remotely interesting or all that sympathetic (the few who are do not survive), and ending that makes a single lick of sense, and overall a reason to exist beyond the action sequences.

If those are enough for you, grab your alcoholic beverage of choice and some popcorn or nachos (we went with nachos), at least one friend, and give it a rental. It’s not worth buying, but it’s fun enough for a watch.

So this post is late, and short, because instead of banging around trying to blog something, we went out to catch Iron Man 2.

During the credits while we were waiting for the inevitable stinger, a section for consultants regarding the sequence of action scenes at the end of the movie came up, and out of two or three names, one of them was Genndy Tartakovsky. Which is a memorable sort of name, and it rang a bell in the way the others didn’t.

Why… why…

Oh yeah.

It explained a lot, really. And from now on, so far as I’m concerned, Iron Man is powered by Chemical X.

I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, to observe that Hollywood is currently undergoing a compulsion to produce anti-war, frequently outright anti-American movies that subsequently tank at the box office, and then wind up and do it again. Nor am I the first or last to observe that these movies do so poorly at the box office not merely because people don’t necessarily want to watch something with an overtly anti-war or anti-current-American-government message, but because as movies they just plain suck.

If you bring this up to the sort of people who keep on doing this, they’re liable to accuse you of instead wanting the overtly pro-war, pro-American movies that came out of studios in earlier times. Which, no, I don’t. I think movies that portray American soldiers and causes in a more sympathetic light are fine, but the thing is they really aren’t any more interesting as movies than the other kind are. I’ve tried to watch a few of them. Stingray can tell you about my shot-with-tranquilizer-dart response to movies that bore me; actual pharmaceutical depressants don’t put me to sleep as quickly or surely.

The fundamental problem is that Hollywood, which is in the business of telling stories for money, is frequently unable to see anything in any terms other than as narrative, including politics, history, and life itself, including war. You can’t make a movie or a show without a narrative; there’d be no point. You can’t even make a documentary without a narrative; all documentaries are making some kind of point, though the point might be subtle or poorly executed and dull. Actual life, history, and warfare don’t really have a narrative unless one is imposed on them; real life is too chaotic, too wandering, and frankly too nonsensical to make a coherent or satisfying story until you hire a professional narrative-crafter to come in and sort it all into one. One of the distinguishing features of fiction as opposed to reality is that fiction has to make sense.

There is absolutely nothing wrong, in and of itself, with narratives, even narratives about Big Important Issues. It’s what we’re paying Hollywood (and every other source of fiction) to produce; a narrative to entertain us for awhile. Where things go wrong is when the crafters of entertainment not only assumes that the audience shares the entirety of their point of view (or are so stupid they themselves lack one), but manages to roll narrative and message into one big, sticky ball. Thus we get a dozen movies since 2001 whose story is, in its entirety, “WAR IS BAD AND THE PEOPLE IN WARS ARE BAD.” Agree with this statement or not, it’s a really fucking boring story- and audiences, who are not interested in paying ticket price plus concessions price to be bored, respond predictably.

This is one expression of a fundamental writer’s sin, just an ideologically satisfying one: story should be in service to character, with message expressed through the interaction of the two. “War Is Bad, The Movie”, whatever the actual title may be, is invariably character and story in service to message- everything that happens and everything anyone does occurs in order to further the message. People don’t behave like people, they behave like an army of straw men, because they were animated in the first place to service the message rather than created as characters. History only becomes something interesting to watch when we can relate to the players as people; this is impossible when they are walking plot devices forwarding a chosen historical narrative rather than characters.

If you can think of any satisfying war movie, what makes them satisfying is that war itself is more of a setting than anything else; the narrative may have a point of view about the consequences of war, but it lets the characters move through the chaos and speak for themselves rather than frog-marching them to the message*. Dark movies with screwed-up or actively malevolent characters can be perfectly interesting to watch IF you spend your movie exploring the characters and the setting rather than just justifying everything with “because this is the sort of thing that evil people do”. You don’t even necessarily need to explain your evil characters; Dark Knight worked as well is it did because it was ultimately about the responses of flawed but complex people to actual unadulterated evil.

You can tell a story about things that aren’t morally neutral and not have it be a bad story. You can even make your story with a clear ideological point of view and have it still be a good story. What you can’t do is tell a two-hour “story” that is actually a message alone. Just because you think something is, in general, good or bad doesn’t make that the sort of narrative you can expect people to pay twelve bucks plus popcorn money for. Movies that stick to the principles of good storytelling will always sell, no matter what the point of view.

*This can be done poorly as well, the classic example being Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, which Roger Ebert aptly described as “a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle”. It doesn’t so much take away from my point as illustrate that, if you want to set a love story in a war rather than give a love B-plot to a war story, you better make damn sure the love story is more interesting than the war is.

So y’all have had a chance to go over LabRat’s more cerebral take on the cinematic wet turd Lil’ Jimmy Cameron plopped out to nearly take Best Picture. By popular request (two people), it’s my turn. Let me preface my review with the note that I was across the room from the screen and (thankfully) couldn’t hear every last syllable over the tattoo machines, and the fact that rather than try to absorb the whole showing of “Fern Gully” I frequently had my nose buried in either a tattoo magazine or a book. So no, I didn’t see the whole thing, in all it’s, um, “splendor.”

And thank fucking $deity for small favors.
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So, I finally got around to seeing James Cameron’s shiny, shiny story of awesome blue cat-people in space versus human marines. It would be something of an understatement to say that I did not like it. I will grant it was a rather unique experience in that it made me furious from a diverse array of political perspectives, however.

A disclaimer: Yes, I know it was very pretty, and I probably would have been visually enthralled had I seen it in a theater. I did not see it in a theater. I saw it when the other artist in my tattoo studio decided that that would be what played on the shop TV during my and another fellow’s session, as apparently both he and Jason are of the “works better with something blowing up in the background” school. I sympathize, as I used to do homework with James Bond movies on in the background for this very reason. However, it also turned the experience of the movie from something I watched on a very large screen in comfort with popcorn, which puts me in a forgiving sort of mood, into something I watched on a rather small screen while Jason spent all three hours of it drilling on me, followed by a 90 minute car trip spent brooding on the movie rather than the throbbing in my leg. This did not put me in a forgiving sort of mood.

So, if you liked it, or feel it was awesome just as long as you remember not to take it seriously, this is probably not going to be the post for you, as I am about to take it spleen-bustingly seriously. Archives are to your right.

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Yeah, you can pretty much tell from the timestamp I got nothin’. Again. So in the interests of somethin’, yet another “you should totally be watching this” pimp post. Most of what’s on TV follows Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crud”), but we keep watching for the other ten percent.

Breaking Bad, coming out of, surprisingly enough, AMC. The premise is not particularly promising; the basic plot is that a high school chemistry teacher who’s led a very dull and overall “safe” life and has a recently pregnant wife, a teenage kid, and some debt issues is told that he has terminal cancer and maybe a year left to live. Desperate for something to leave his family, he starts cooking meth, with all the purity and potency someone with actual chemistry lab skills can apply. Hijinks ensue.

Like I said, not a terribly promising premise. What it has going for it are acting, and writing. The lead is played by Bryan Cranston, who had previously achieved such lofty dramatic heights as the bumbling dad on Malcolm In The Middle; he seems out to prove he’s been hideously underused, and he seems to be living up to it. The rest of the cast are not quite as standout, but they’re all good enough to convey quite a lot with slight changes in expression or tone, and very believably. Instead of the standard TV Clenched Jaw and dramatic music, scenes that are meant to be intense actually come across as intense enough to be unnerving to the viewer. The music itself, while used, is never made to do the work of conveying the emotion of the scene and instead exists to speed along show-don’t-tell scenes that would otherwise be relatively boring.

The writers themselves seem to be largely folks who made their bones in the X-Files showing what they can do when they don’t have to write in service of Chris Carter’s last weed-and-cheetos binge. While it’s possible to see the basic outlines of the plot just as a logical outgrowth of the premise, things vary between funny, tense, and dark as appropriate, and while the series starts off seeming like more of a black comedy than anything, things get very black at points without remotely veering into wangst or narm territory. What I like best is the characters- while we’re quite obviously meant to be most interested in the lead, even characters that initially seem one-dimensional or living plot devices get far more development than even the main characters in some series. It’s also nice in that we’re not necessarily meant to sympathize or demonize anyone just based on whether they’re likable or not; very often people that are profoundly unlikeable are on the right side of a central point of contention, or people we’ve been sympathizing with the entire time are deeply in the wrong. No plot-induced stupidity or out-of-characterness seems in sight.

Happily from our perspective, it’s also deeply local- it’s set and filmed in Albuquerque, and they go to tremendous pains to get everything right. Occasionally they jumble geographic details, but the local culture is spot on and we quite often spot examples shot in locations very familiar. Even tiny details such as last names that are common among native-born hispanics here but nowhere else in the US are attended to.

I don’t care for many dramas, because for the most part they can’t tell what’s dramatic and what’s just plain stupid, as well as the difference between someone who happens to be the protagonist and someone who is actually interesting on any level to follow. I do like this one, very much. If you want to see the genre done right, give this one a shot.

Last night, LabRat and myself parked before the idiot box, wanting to cockpunch the cuntpickle that invented daylight savings relaxing, the most puzzling of things appeared before us, an advertisement.

I know, I know. Ads on television? Next you’ll tell me that there are naughty pictures on the internet. What a world.

Anyway, this was yet another spot for some big money house or other. TDMorganBarneyPrudiTrade or some such. Who can tell ‘em apart? They droned on about dreams and goals, pointing out that careful management and sound advice, good research and top notch customer service, blah blah blah. What struck me was the part about “We’ll help you meet your goals.” Why did this strike me? Because aside from some truly hardcore hippies and communists (who don’t count as people anyway- they just put “Groovy, Comrade” on their census forms), at the root of things, everybody’s financial goal is “To have more money than god and do whatever the hell I want.”

Obviously this goal is more achievable for some than others, but once you strip away all the pretty little social lies like “get a vacation home,” or “retire early,” or “obtain enough firepower to make the ATF seriously nervous,” that’s pretty much what it boils down to. All those lovely little dreams take assloads of cash, now how am I gonna get some?

And that’s the problem with these ads. Having identified my goals as “be rich enough to buy all of congress,” let’s not beat around the bush, hmm? Where’s the ad for the investment company for me?

Start with a shot of a beautiful sunset on the beach. A lovely beverage sits on a table next to a lounge chair.

Voiceover: “What is best in life?”

The shot pans out, and we see an inconvenience of BATFE agents in chains being whipped in the surf.

Voiceover: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”

The shot switches to the floor of the stock exchange. One broker waves furiously to make a buy, acquires a surprised expression, and cautiously lowers his paddle. The camera pans to show another broker wearing a StingrayTrade jacket holding a knife against his ribs, and successfully making the buy.

“At StingrayTrade, we know what your goals are already, and we’re ready to help you achieve them. If kicking our own grandmother in the teeth will get you a half percent portfolio gain, we’ll be putting our boots on. Why? Because we get a cut, and we have the same goals as you do.”

A new image appears, in the boardroom. Members of StingrayTrade are on one side of the table, engaging in heated negotiations with the opposing board. Suddenly, IRS agents rush the room, dogpile the other company, and haul them out under armed guard, while a StingrayTrade negotiator smiles and hangs up a cell phone. The newspapers in the next shot exalt the suddenly improved fortunes of StingrayTrade at the expense of Crappy Co.

“We’re not going to waste time holding your hand. Holding your hand takes resources we could be using to make you, and by extension us, money. Wealth is not a finite pool, so for all of our benefits, we’ll get as much of it as we can, by any means necessary.”

The final scene turns to a fortress on a volcanic island, with a giant laser rising out of the crater.

“Any. Means.”

Keep the fees competitive and I’ll sign up in a heartbeat.

- You know you’ve got writer’s block when you find yourself trawling through the comments of blogs you don’t even read that often, looking for a bit of archetypical dumbassery to refute.

- Springtime in New Mexico: transferring roughly 40% of the state’s valuable topsoil from outdoors to indoors.

- Having a female dog in heat really drives home why we use the term “bitch” or “bitchy” the way we do. From mood swings to clinginess to irritability to exaggerated pathos to bloody-mindedness, it’s like living with a menopausal Barbara Streisand.

- Gandhi: not necessarily such an awesome dude. An oldie but a goodie.

- Want to know how you can make your online gaming experience even more like a job? Become an officer in a guild/alliance/whatever. Bonus points for doing so in a guild that raids or PvPs. I have new sympathy for anyone in management of any kind, as well as those in Human Resources.

- Our latest TV thing, thanks to the #gunblogger_conspiracy folks, is Spartacus: Blood And Sand. It’s very firmly in the “so bad it’s good” category. It’s a great big bowl of sex and violence smothered in cheese sauce. I don’t even like the protagonist. I don’t like anybody except maybe the gladiator instructor, whom we last saw being kicked down a well. The entire purpose of the show’s existence seems to be getting the Starz network to pay for softcore porn so long as they match the sex parts with equal amounts of violent parts. I can’t look away.

For a bit of a trip in the Wayback Machine, I ran across a disturbing news story yesterday. It may have happened back in July, but fortunately this doesn’t hinge on any sort of timetable to find today’s forehead-vein-stimulator. Cast your browsers over yonder and have a quick look.

For our ADD-afflicted audience, the upshot is a teacher apparently clicked on “Naked sexy fuck time” instead of “Class Trip” when putting together a DVD of the year’s activities and sent the disc home with a bunch of 5th graders. How exactly she managed something so profoundly weapons-grade stupid, and whether that sort of stunning intellect should be in charge of bringing the next generation through the indoctrination education system is a very good question, but it still remains that it was a legitimate mistake, despite being dumber than trusting a Chicago politician. People fuck up, it happens, do what you can to make it right, and move on. She wasn’t fucking the kids, so far as the story is presented it was just some consenting adults on film. No big whoop. No, today’s WTF comes from the parents in this little episode of Hot For Teacher.

First up, we have this little excerpt describing what happened after the DVD cut from “The wheels on the bus” to “Bow-chicka:”

“We were up till midnight doing the ‘birds and the bees,’” he added.

Not having any kids of my own, I’m of course better qualified to tell this guy how to do his job as a dad than he is. But I will note that I got the school approved version, in the classroom and with the filmstrips and everything when I was in fifth grade. My parents not being idiots had already explained the mechanics and such quite a while sooner. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about younger and younger kids getting sex-ed in the schools, how this one managed to miss the bus is quite a conundrum. It gets better though.

Joe doesn’t care if the teacher keeps her job, he’d just like some help from the school.
“Maybe offer some sort of counseling for my children, ask me how my children are doing,” he said. “I want somebody to ask me the kind of questions my kids are asking me.”

COUNSELING?! Look, jackass, unless the video included an albino midget covered in ranch dressing peeing on a pile of stuffed animals while the teacher and a couple other folks used 3′ dildos as light sabers to determine the fisting order, I’m gonna go out on a limb and call counseling a bit of an over-reaction. Two people fucking may be (hopefully) unfamiliar to a fifth grader, but if that’s all it takes to traumatize the little shit that badly, maybe it’s best if you take the fragile little thing out into the woods, and give it a sandwich and best wishes. If you’re an eco-nut and love the wolves and all, maybe rub some tenderizer on it first. It’s certainly appropriate for the parents to be pissed off, and for the school to apologize, which they did, and to put out a proper dvd, which they did, but hand-holding and nose-wiping is not in the list of chores they need to be concerned with in this manner, ESPECIALLY when that hand and that nose is the PARENT’S. As for “I want somebody to ask me the kind of questions my kids are asking me,” the stunning lack of ability to grasp the obvious is, well, stunning. Excuse me, Mr. Crybaby-Pants? YOUR KIDS ARE ASKING YOU THE KIND OF QUESTIONS YOUR KIDS ARE ASKING YOU. On top of that, if the school administration starts asking Joey Wusswuss here how pee-pees and bajingos fit together like his kids presumably are, we have entered into an entirely new level and area of fucked up. To go a step further in thinking this through, fifth grade is not so far back in my memory that it plays as some glossed-over “Yes, this technically happened, here is an approximation of what it most likely was” reel. Had this happened to me at that age, the school intervention necessary would have been threats of discipline if we all didn’t stop cracking jokes about it, not counseling. Ok, maybe a little counseling on account of my fifth grade teacher was not by any stretch of the imagination an attractive woman, but seriously, nothing an episode of “Baywatch” wouldn’t cure.

I feel sorry for the teacher. Obviously that was a huge and humiliating fuckup. I feel sorry for the reasonable parents, who aren’t hand-wringing nancies. The one I feel most sorry for though, is that kid. With a dad like that in the ring, that boy is gonna have some serious issues in the bedroom later in life.

Inspired by Doqz who probably did not give in to the completely understandable urge to smack someone upside the head who was apparently under the impression that Tyler Durden was a heroic or even sympathetic character.

(Disclaimer: If you have not seen Fight Club, this post will be spoileriffic, but man, you have had a LOT of time to see it, so if you actually still care I’d get on that, were I you.)

Look, I like Fight Club a lot too. It’s a fun, fast-paced, and interesting movie, and contains two talented actors having more fun with their roles than should be legal, which always makes for an entertaining viewing experience. We have the DVD, watch it every so often when the urge strikes. It’s a good movie and Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, and the central premises of the story, are what make it so. But their characters are not supposed to be good guys- if it weren’t for the obvious technicality it would be a straight up case of a villain protagonist.

The basic premise of the character(s) is that a guy who feels unloved by his father and abandoned by his mother blames his meaningless life on the entire rest of society as a whole, purposely targets the most vulnerable other men he can find, and eventually turns them into a terrorist organization whose purpose boils down to the destruction of civilization. YES, Tyler’s got a point from time to time, which is what makes it an interesting movie and what makes it possible for it to work with that whole “villain protagonist” thing- but pulling society screaming back into the dark ages because daddy didn’t love you and your Ikea collection isn’t fulfilling isn’t supposed to be an admirable goal.

For that matter, the question of what’s supposed to be so much more fulfilling about beating the shit out of strangers is begged, and if you’re paying attention, answered- aside from the adrenaline rush, the people involved wind up pawns for a megalomaniacal sociopath, and in many cases killed. “Space monkey”, indeed.

but I know what I like.

And if anybody knows the artist, I’d be obliged if you’d comment.

Halloween means horror movie season, on the cable channels, in the rental stores, and pulled from our shelves. Horror remains a perennial money-maker of a genre; if you want to make something on a budget and get some sort of release, you’ve basically got two choices: arty indie film that no one outside of Film Studies will ever watch, or a B horror flick. And, as we’ve stated before, we are definitely fans of the latter genre; while most of it is dreck, it’s often fun dreck, and the nature of it means a cast and crew with more talent than money can make something great if they have the skill to, without the pressures of a major studio release. The last one we had the pleasure to come across was Behind The Mask.

We are pleased to report we’ve come across another such direct-to-DVD gem in Trick ‘r’ Treat. We’d seen previews for it on other of our DVDs of the same general B movie family, but it took two years to come out and missed theaters. Apparently the studio was jerking them around. The studio’s loss; this was better than most if not all the theatrical horror offerings this year, and I can see it as having been a smash at the box office if had been released at this time of year.

This movie takes the classic and now-neglected scary-movie format of the anthology piece and breathes a little fresh air into it. Creepshow was the last great example, and Trick ‘r’ Treat does it one better by weaving its four stories together. This would have been a recipe for complete and utter disaster in less skilled hands, but Michael Dougherty (and possibly Bryan Singer, who was the producer, but I don’t know the extent of his involvement) pulls it off about as well as I can imagine it being done. There’s a bit of chronological confusion at points, but by the end of the movie the viewer that has been paying a little bit of attention can figure out the order of events; it’s not a keep-you-guessing gimmick as it is in some movies, but it doesn’t spell everything out in alphabet letters either. Overall, the movie’s motto is “show, don’t tell”; it embraces the concept that having a creepy-looking monster crawl out from under the stairs and start some mayhem is more attention-getting and scarier than having a big long explanation for the revenge-seeking spirit of a drowned little boy (or whatever), followed by the appearance of the now-diminished baddie to come do some things that are now more predictable for having gotten the backstory. There’s only a real storyline for one of the vignettes, and even then the viewer is left to paint in the most tantalizing details for him or herself.

What I really loved about it, though, was another thing that has a classic, eighties feel; the movie is scary, but it’s not about wrenching the viewer around and making him jump out of his seat or fight the urge to turn away from the screen, it’s about being a fast, exciting ride. Far too many horror movies of late have been about gore-porn and coming up with the most viscerally revolting and disturbing images they can get past the puke test; this one has some gore, but it’s not the point. Next to any of the Saw franchise it might as well be rated PG, but it’s far more watchable, because the sensation that’s aimed for isn’t so much “Oh god, what’s coming next” as “What next, what next!” It’s about being scary and fun, not scary and disturbing, and that’s refreshing as all hell. There are some twists and subversions, but they’re not about turning the entire thing upside down as it would be with one of Shyalaman’s (increasingly desperate and increasingly ludicrous) movies; it remains very much true to the genre the whole way, just not necessarily as the viewer initially expects.

The other thing I really like about it is the characters. We don’t get to know any of them very well, and that’s okay; we’re not meant to, and besides there wouldn’t be time. What they are is another thing that’s increasingly rare in horror movies: likeable, up to and including when we really shouldn’t be sympathizing with them. All too often horror movies give us people we’re meant to hate so much it’s gratifying when they get killed off, either because they’re loathsome or because they’re annoying. These people come off much more as just people, and not particularly saintly or awful ones (except in the cases where they really are awful). They react believably, and there’s not an idiot ball to be seen. There are, however, lots of shout-outs- which for once are done with more of a subtly raised eyebrow than a leering “SEE WHAT I DID THAR?!”

Oh, and also it did what I thought was impossible- live up to the creepy image on its poster. Two thumbs up, we’ll be buying this one and, I think, making it a seasonal tradition. Watch with beer and a bucket of cheap candy.

Sorry for the light content; between overall block and being wrapped up in various projects that consume time but don’t produce much in the way of commentable material, the blog hasn’t been as priority as it should. I HAD something to rant about- namely how completely ludicrous the administration’s crusade against Fox News has gotten- but the news item I was planning to hang it all on is now in question, so that the whole thing remains stupid but the outright insane part may not be true.

So, with that idea having therefore been blown apart, here’s a random assortment of things I have learned over the course of watching MTV’s Scarred. For those that have not yet discovered this little gem of distilled schadenfreude, Scarred* is one of those video clip exploitation shows, in this case of skateboarders, BMX bikers, rollerbladers, and other practitioners of applied physics getting horribly fucked up on camera. While these kinds of shows are a dime a dozen, there’s just something about this one- and it’s the part where the victims apparently sent the tape of themselves getting horribly mutilated and screaming for their mothers voluntarily, and usually go on to say cheerfully that taking an entire handrail up the ass hasn’t daunted them in the pursuit of doing physically improbable things on other people’s property. Their sheer immunity to aversive conditioning is somewhere in that uncanny valley between heartwarming and horrifying.

In any case, after a few episodes there are enough similarities between accidents that they all start to blur together unless the self-victimizer managed some sort of uniquely nauseating wound or managed to shriek in a new and record-setting high pitch. Either way, I feel I’ve learned a few things from these similarities, despite remaining firmly ground-bound at all times when using wheeled transportation.

1. If you are about to do something that relies upon precision timing and control in order to pull off without having gravity make you its bitch, “just going for it” is a bad idea.

2. Likewise just going for it after you roll up on it a few times to appreciate the physical improbability of your task more fully.

3. Friends with video cameras in such situations are the single most useless lumps of carbon in existence when gravity wins out. You may well have to dial 911 with your own shattered limbs because they’ll still be standing around going “DUDE! SICK!”

4. It is also a bad idea to, immediately upon finishing months of physical therapy subsequent to surgery that involved multiple staples, pins, and plates, try the exact same stunt again just to see if the laws of motion have changed during your time off.

5. Operating wheeled transportation on objects and surfaces owned by someone else that are not designed for such use and whose maintenance records you don’t know is also a bad idea. Unwanted encounters with The Man are FAR from the worst thing you should be worrying about; having the rail you were grinding enter your scrotum after the welds fail is.

6. Helmets are useless when your primary point of impact is your face.

7. Hauling the video camera out with the purpose of making a demo tape is also an extremely bad idea when you are not at a skate park doing stunts that you’ve practiced dozens of times while wearing full safety equipment, but rather at some random rail or set of stairs with nothing but a bad haircut between you and the aforementioned gravity.

8. No matter how many layers of reinforced filth is in said haircut, it will not function as a helmet.

9. Setting your video to metal music will not make it awesome. It will just be apt when something brutal happens to you.

10. There is an inverse relationship between the degree and number of horrific orthopedic injuries sustained and the likelihood that the injured will have a paying job.

*Link to show includes links to full episodes. Enjoy.

…feel free to download and enjoy the efforts of four idiots and LabRat discussing the US Constitution on the latest Vicious Circle. Also covered: ACORN, mainstream media’s extreme suck-fu, and a guest appearance by Phlegmmy near the end.

Update: No Phlegmmy, ’cause Alan sucks and hates us.

Who wants a patch?

I’ll get a ballpark count here, then hit up Larry for contact info for the folks what did his, and we shall go forth and slay demons and other scum with isotopes not available to other hunters!

Minor update: I don’t have a good answer yet on final costs, but using the first MHI patch run as a rough guideline, I’d suspect these will come in around $4-6 each. I’ll have to talk to the patch shop before I get hard numbers.

…to vote for our patch for inclusion in Monster Hunter International 2: Vendetta. C’mon, none of the other patches have a backstory, and so far as I know, no one else is planning on actually making a run of their patch if they win. Vote! Tell your friends to vote! Get the hobos in the library to vote! Do you want happy nerdy scientists, or angry nerdy scientists? I’ll build that death ray, I mean it!

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, voting is now open for the patch going in as a fan-addition to Monster Hunter: Vendetta. Follow the link over and vote for Monster Hunter Los Alamos, Exite! Chemicus Sum!

C’mon, we can’t let those Utah County guys win. Who do you think they get their nukes from if the vampire infestation is too bad?

(And since a few folks are still asking, yes, that translates to “Back off, man. I’m a scientist.”)

INCENTIVE FILLED UPDATE: Ok, remember how Larry did a run of the official horned-smiley-face patch to go along with the first book? If our patch wins, I’ll do a run of it for all you patch-junkies to add to your collections! Be the envy of everyone else at the range/grocery store/cemetary/giant-spider filled library!

Having finally gotten word back from hosting that the earliest we’ll see our data back (not the earliest you will see the missing posts, of course- I still have to un-fuck further once I get the original database) is Thursday, the only thing to do is keep on keeping on. And swearing. Swearing a lot.

So in that spirit, I’m bringing Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International back for another romp through the limelight. LabRat already reviewed it, and I’m pretty sure I said a few words about it further back (short version: It rocks. You buy it. You read it. You thank me later).

Now Larry being hip and wise and in tune with his readership, he found on Facebook that folks who enjoyed the book were designing their own Monster Hunter unit patches, much like military unit patches. So just like any modern businessman, Larry sued the bejesus out of everybody who even looked at the book in a store for copyright infringement started a contest to become part of the official Monster Hunter canon. The rules were short and simple, design your unit patch however you like, as long as it’s in subdued colors suitable for a military-like unit. Get it to him by email or facebook (the page is called Monster Hunter International, Hunter Unite! – sorry no link, I don’t twitterfacemytubespace), along with the region/town the team represents. Full rules are at the link above, but if you didn’t know about it till now, it’s probably too late- entries close today. The winning patch will be mentioned in Monster Hunter International 2, currently estimated out sometime in 2010, along with an autographed copy of the first book.

Lacking utterly in the visual creativity department, I drafted a friend into service turning the image in my head into something suitable for submission. The Monster Hunter Los Alamos entry was submitted last night. Since I had some extra creativity juice left over from not having to get my hands covered in pixels with photoshop or gimp, I spilled it onto a screen and came up with a little back story for our local unit.

By 1943, the Manhattan Project was well underway in the quiet mountains of northern New Mexico. Scientists working around the clock were in a race against time to develop a weapon which would end the war. While the outcome of the project is well known, history has quietly overlooked the options on the table that were competing with the atomic bomb for priority.

Members of tribes local to the area for thousands of years were quietly hired on as support staff- janitors, cooks, maids, the usual jobs that folks with PhDs tend to look down on. Security was tight, but every small community gossips, and hints of what was going on behind all that razor wire eventually trickled out to a Bruja in Espanola, the next town over and home to most of the natives working for the project.

Standard Bruja rap sheet. Feared in her community, powerful and mysterious, responsible for deaths, losses, failed crops, and on one occasion, a particularly memorable tarantula mating season. The Bruja sensed an opportunity for great power, and convinced a research team of the possible weapons benefits of her talents.

MHI Los Alamos was founded as a direct result of this team’s led-astray research. After what was from then on only referred to as “Decision Week,” three top scientists were dead, a dozen lab workers were insane, another twenty were simply missing, and the Army security forces were literally decimated, with one man in ten missing, insane, or mutilated. Scientists tinkering with the most powerful forces in the universe sometimes achieve unexpected results. Sometimes dealing with these results requires specialized talents, combined with extraordinary intellect.

Since Decision Week in June of 1943, the Los Alamos team of Monster Hunter International has had a motto. In the midst of utter chaos and carnage, a physicst working under Dr. Feynman stared calmly into the eyes of a Skinwalker and told it, simply, “Back off man. I’m a scientist.”

Click for big. Leigh did a fantastic job on this sucker.

Update: Vote here!