Tag Archives: Movies

Getting introduced to Pink Floyd’s music

I’m nowhere near Pink Floyd’s biggest fan. I own several albums,  (The Wall, Dark Side of The Moon, and Wish You Were Here) and enjoy them very much, but as you can see there is a lot I do not have. What this story is about is how I first listened to Pink Floyd.

It was the mid 1980s and I was an usher at a movie theater, UA Glasshouse 6 – no defunct and long out of business. I was involved with a lovely redhead and she and I were going through rough times. My shift had ended at the theater, but I really did not want to go home. I suffer from depression, and already in a black mood I knew it would get worse because she was not going to be there.

A life lobe love of movies had given me the avenue of escape through film. A good movie was my preferred method of getting away from my troubles and out of my head. It was late at the theater and the midnight movies would be starting soon. Free movies as an usher was the best benefit for working at the theater. I scanned the titles and found nothing I knew and flt strongly about, still I knew I did not want to go home.

hmmm, The Wall, My pal ray had told me that The Wall was a very good film and he and I tended to have similar tastes, so The Wall it was.

I was not prepared for a film that was entirely music and visual, but I settled in and let the film wash over me. Quickly disturbing parallels between ‘Pink’ the subject of The Wall and myself revealed themselves. We both lost our father’s when we were young, a devastating event, we were both artistically inclined, we both kept most people at a distance, had lovely redheaded girlfriends, but relationship troubles, and both given to wild mood swings. (ahh yes, One Of My Turns is a song I very much identify with.)

This movie was NOT cheering me up. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of depression and that to quote another song, “he was killing me softly.”

I made it through the screening with my wrists intact, and my head throughly spinning. The music stuck with me. The songs reverberated in my skull and while my depression lifted, as it always will do given enough time, the impact of that film and those songs did not.

Being horribly depressed is not my recommended introduction to Pink Floyd and The Wall, but it did work for me.

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Sunday Night Movie: Think Fast, Mr. Moto

Technically this is a Saturday Afternoon movie as the film I tried to watch Sunday Night could not hold my interest and I crawled off the bed rather early. (A weekend filled with Universal Studios, Harry Potter 7.2, fantastically lucky Scrabble games makes for a very short Sunday Evening.)

When I was younger I watched a lot of the old Charlie Chan films. Sometime ago I learned about another Asian detective from Hollywood’s less than enlightened period, Mr. Moto. Think Fast, Mr. Moto is the first in a series of movies starring Peter Lorre as a Japanese Businessman and dilettante detective. Made in 1937, before Lorre absolutely stunning job in The Maltese Falcon, Lorre, a Hungarian raised in Austria is of course cast as a Japanese detective because at this time Hollywood would never stoop to have an actual Japanese actor in a lead.

If possible this film is more insulting in its portrayal of Japanese peoples than the Chan films were of Chinese peoples. It seems that the script writers had a default rule, when in doubt has Moto say, ‘Ah so‘ for absolutely any and no reason at all. Lorre’s small stature made stature, fake buck teeth, and round glasses all added to the stereotypical image Americans had of the Japanese in these pre-war years. (While far from an expert in any manner shape or form on Japanese culture I saw nothing that indicated any research or study of the island nation by the writers. as shame.)

This mystery worked out in a standard B-mobvie plot kind of way. Moto is brilliant and two steps ahead of the crooks at nearly every turn. Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects to this story is that Moto plays at being a villain to gain information and trust, a subtly of performance that Lorre does admirably. (That would be no surprise to anyone who had seen in the Fritz Lang’s M.)

However, as much as I like Lorre, this series offers too little to entice me to watch the other seven film.

 

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A pleasant Saturday

Even though I have a spot of back pain today has been a fairly pleasant afternoon. My sweetie-wife and I watched a 60’s caper/comedy called Gambit. It stars Michael Caine and Shirley MacClaine, though we were more amused by the three supports all who had appeared as guest stars in the Original Star Trek series. So the caper/Comedy had a god like alien, a mass murderer, and a swindler as supporting cast.

 

Now I am off to a Sheena Easton concert here in San Diego. Good night all.

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Movie review:Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

So this will be a fairly brief review, the hour is late and I need my sleep.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is the 4th film in the franchise inspired by a ride at Disneyland. I’m a big fan of the first film, owning it on blu-Ray disc, but I did not like the two sequels. In my opinion the second and third films suffered from an over abundance of cynicism, while the first film frolicked in its love of fun and whimsey.

This 4th film, while not as good or self-contained as the the first is much better than the previous sequels. The sense of fun has been restored and that alone made this a watchable movie.

It suffers from being a bit long and having a few subplots that were better edited out at the script writing level, and characters that seem to have no real bearing on the story other than as macguffins.

That said I enjoyed the flick, was happy to see it and I may even see it again. I am told by my sweetie-wife it bears little resemblance to the novel that suggested the script. I have the book, On Stranger Tides. It is by one of my favorite authors and I look forward to reading it when I finish my own novel.

 

 

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Recovering

Well, the cold/bug that has bedeviled me and my sweetie-wife seems to be abating. She’s going back to work in the morrow and I’m starting to feel well enough to return to my chores and duties.

I am not well enough to stay up late watching movies tonight so there shan’t be a Sunday Night Movie Feature this week. However I will still talk film tomorrow with a  brief review of Pirate Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, whihc we saw this morning and enjoyed.

I also hope to return to editing and writing on Love & Loyalty tomorrow. This cold/bug has had me so fogged that I could not think creatively.

Speaking of my writing, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades has been submitting for distribution through smashwords. In a couple of weeks it should be available through all the major eBook sites, Amazon, B&N, Sony, Apple, etc, and today I made it available through Smashwords as a free download for part of their Operation eBook which supplies free eBooks to services men and women deployed overseas. Hopefully I can lift a few spirits and make tedium less tedious.

 

p.s.

My sweetie-wife has decided to wait until after Worldcon, in August, before getting herself a new pet bird, but I am happy she will get herself another pet. She does love her birds and I miss the little fellow too.

 

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Very Busy

No Sunday Night Movie this week as I was way too tired after spending the day at JPL to watch a film past 10 in the evening. No complaints from me on this score, the JPL open houses are always fun affairs for a geek like me.

I’m pretty busy tonight. The work on Love & Loyalty is going quite well and I hope to have a beat read copy of this version produced soon. Also my sweetie-wife finished the copyedits to my anthology Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, so I am working on that as well.

 

All in all, I am busy.

 

 

 

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Still Busy

Today I visited my headache doctor, met with his physician’s assistant and we went over my progress. It’s been over two weeks without any headaches and that has made me really happy.

I have continued to work on Love and Loyalty. I will certainly be re-ordering the events of the novel based on the feedback from my writers group, but I still hope to have a beta copy ready in a couple of months.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades is coming along. I’m learning how to operate photoshop. I have plans for combining elements from a couple of NASA photos to create my no-cost cover. This experiment in self-publishing is going to end up costing nothing but time.

 

I watched part of movie Sunday night, but grew too tired to finish it. That is a shame cause 1941 is one of my favorite films.

 

 

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Symapthetic Villians

I think one area where I seem to out of step with a lot of fandom is on the subject of Gollum, and just how much sympathy did that character deserve in The Lord Of The Rings. I have heard from numerous people that they view Gollum as a sympathetic character, and like Frodo, they view him with pity. Color me unconvinced.  I’m with Sam on this, he is Slinker and Stinker and neither of those aspects generates much in the way of pity for me.

Those who argue that Gollum deserves pity usually take the tack that fate dealt him a cruel hand by putting the ring in his path, and that the ring perverted him, turning him into the miserable, evil creature that we meet in both the revised The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings.

Bullocks!

Let’s take a look at the characters and their interactions with The One Ring. Continue reading →

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Movie Review: Paul

Because I was feeling poorly last night I was unable to watch a film before bed and so that means there is no Sunday Night Movie post for this week. To make up for that to my half dozen of so readers I will present a short review of the film Paul that my sweetie-wife and I saw yesterday morning.

Now, as you can see from the screen capture to the left, Paul is not a film that takes itself very seriously. Written by Simon Pegg and Nick frost, the talented writer/actor duo that brought us both Shawn of The Dead and Hot Fuzz, Paul is the story of an alien stranded on Earth and the friendly and not so friendly natives.

Where Shawn Of The Dead skewered the zombie genre and Hot Fuzz did the same to the buddy cop movie, Paul is this pair’s love letter to geek culture. I adored Shawn of The Dead, it is one of the best zombie movies every made while still being a top flight romantic-comedy. Provided you can handled fairly intense violence, I would not hesitate to recommend Shawn Of the Dead to you. Hot Fuzz did not work so well for me. I smirked and laughed a bit, but it was not as funny as Shawn Of the Dead and perhaps I was not the right audience. I admit that I seen few cop buddy films, so there could have been layers of humor just skimming above my headspace.

That was not the case with Paul.

Paul is a movie layered with geek references,  they come at you visually, musically, franticly, and endlessly. The film opens and close with scenes set at the world famous San Diego Comic-Con. It is not a film that laughs at geeks, though the geeks perpetually fish out of water experience in the real world is a source of humor, but lovingly this film  embraces the heart, soul, and intelligence that is at the heart of geek culture.

There is no doubt I will be buying this film on blu-ray, and I may go see it again in the theaters. I loved it just that much.

 

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