Ursus Pacificus

Star, Star, Star, Star, St

Generally I’m not a Jack Black fan. We can set that to the side. Ben Stiller can be a mixed bag. He wins here. Robert Downey Jr…. I kinda liked him before this. He was brilliant here. Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. Jackson filled out the “platoon” really well. Steve Coogan … don’t really know his work prior to this, but he did a great job here.

Lighting, camera, sound, music… spfx, makeup… locations… even the story… Excellent.

The gore… the explosions… Lovely… and then there’s the fearlessness. Excellent.

…Although, I have to say I thought the comedic “actors thrust into the reality of their play” thing was a little better executed in Galaxy Quest…

All in all… four and a half out of five stars.

… Oh, and Tom Cruise.

The Ascent of Money, a (looks like) 2-hour program on the origins, evolution and current state of money and finance. The preceding link points to the page on PBS.org, where you can watch the whole thing.

I found it very interesting. I was also very satisfied with Niall Ferguson harping on the idea that the value of modern money is entirely dependent on the the faith of those exchanging it in its having value.

I was also satisfied with the frankness of the discussion of World War II’s impact on the US economy, and the post-war period, with the “expansion of the ‘American Dream’” (i.e. expanded home ownership). Of course, frank discussions of such periods, especially when talking about the financial standing of individuals (or groups of individuals) really can’t help touching on race. As an example, Ferguson touches on a region in Detriot, MI, where poor African Americans were concentrated and walled off. The ostensible reason for the segregation was creditworthiness, but Ferguson points to racism as the root of the problem.

One viewer commented:

01/14/2009 :: 12:04:23 AM
Former Contributor to PBS Says:

The racism of this program takes away from the message. Mr. Ferguson made it seem as if the current mortgage crisis is due to minority homeowners, particularly in Detroit and Memphis. The camera shots of minorities further supported his theory. Mr. Ferguson should have looked further to Florida, Arizona and Nevada where white homeowners were defaulting in waves. The problem was that many people, whites included, bought homes that they couldn’t afford. If there truly were loans for people with no jobs, income, and bad credit, then everyone would have a home now. And that surely isn’t true.

Well… I think “Former Contributor to PBS” may be reading a little much into this. A), It seems to me that, in order for the program to inform you, it must contain some information you don’t already know. Perhaps the example presented by the situation in Memphis (or Detroit) is so complete and so extreme as to be an excellent “example”. B) White homeowners in CA, AZ, and NV may be defaulting in waves, but I’d be willing to bet you that most of them are gainfully employed, but just stupid (i.e. have overextended themselves and gotten into debt loads they were only tenuously capable of supporting going forward) as opposed to poor people being preyed upon by credit vultures (viz Memphis and Detroit). I think that the frank discussion of the abuse of the poor is more interesting, and valuable, than the plight of greedy Californians trying to elbow their way into the biggest McMansions they can possibly come close to affording, and ignoring the possibility of anything buried in the reams of paperwork coming back to bite them. I have little sympathy for the McMansion set.

I think this one is worth getting the DVD and the book.

The actor who played Biff is Tom Wilson, and he’s also a stand-up comic.

Here’s a pretty entertaining song he does about the lingering impact of that role on his life.

OK… I received this beauty as a holiday gift from my girlfriend. I had expressed interest in it, as I am something of a Disaster Flick buff. This movie is 30 years old, and it’s no less awful than any of the other Airport flicks. In fact it’s far, far worse. It’s really, really bad. It’s terrible. It’s painfully, terribly, painfully, awfully, grievously, miserably, badly, horribly, terribly, disgustingly, ridiculously, wildly, marvelously awful.

Wait… what? Marvelously awful?

Yes.

It combines much of the “intrigue” (sabotage, decompression at altitude, plane falling apart in flight, forbidden (or at least ill-advised) romances, and so on) of all three predecessor movies into one “compelling” “story” with unmatched “editing”, “stunning” “special effects”, and an … “involving” score.

The dialog? Absolutely horrid. I’ve seen some bad movies in my day… This has to be the worst dialog, start to finish, of any movie I’ve ever seen. This makes the stilted, wooden exchanges between Charlton Heston and Karen Black in Airport 1975 seem downright passionate.

Casting? Well, William Batliner and Robert J. LaSanka , responsible for casting such blockbusters as “Heartbeeps”, “The Nude Bomb” and “House Calls” really left their mark on this beauty. Jimmie Walker as a philosophical atheist jazz saxophonist?! Charo? Never mind what her character is supposed to be (which I don’t recall it ever being revealed in the film)… Charo? In a supposedly serious disaster flick? Please. David Warner as the Flight Engineer? Uuuuhhhh… Interesting choice… I mean the character is completely flat and meaningless… David Warner would go on to play Jack the Ripper in “Time After Time”, Dillinger/Sark/MCP in “TRON” and Chancellor Gorkon in “Star Trek VI”… Already a fairly established actor in 1978/79… given this worthless role? Martha Rae as the incontinent old woman (that’s all we know about her…. she’s “comic relief”)? Avery Schreiber (a commedian) as Soviet Olympic coach Markov, who appears to have nothing at all to do with being an Olympic (something) coach… he’s only (deeply) involved with his deaf daughter. Makes sense. John Davidson?! Just having him in the movie is kinda stupid, but as a TV journalist having an affair with a 24-year-old Soviet gymnast???!! That’s just flat-out ridiculous. Robert Wagner as a crooked defense contractor?! Lest we forget, the perennial George Kennedy as “Joe Patroni”… not just a mechanic, now… no, he’s an airline pilot. It goes on and on.

The dialog is abominable. Flat, pointless, and vapid. The French stewardess, who’s bonking the French pilot, tells him and Patroni (in bad Frenglish), “You pilots are such… men!”, to which Patroni replies, “They don’t call it the cockpit for nothing!” When did he become such a douchebag? The French (and other European) accents fade in and out. The shoeleather is laid bare. Scenes which seem to require some emotional gravitas from the dialog have none. Some of the actors are clearly trying to service their dialog as best they can, but to no avail. It’s THAT bad! Even more agonizing is the fake fictionalized “news broadcast” in the first 10 minutes of the movie.

The special effects are neither special, nor effective. TV’s “Battlestar Galactica” (1978.. the Lorne Greene version), which re-used battle sequence elements so much as to be utterly laughable, was far more credible. Compositing is positively inexcusably bad for that era. Practical effects are atrocious… The keypad on the lower cargo door.. see that and refrain from laughing hysterically. I dare you!

The score is … unbearable…? It tries to push emotion into scenes which are barren of it.

The editing is just plain awful. The movie advances like a standard soap opera, with little snippets intended to tease the viewer into watching just a few minutes more to see how things shake out, but with the dialog as hackneyed as it is, this technique leaves the viewer wondering why we couldn’t just stick with a scene long enough to resolve something.

Then, there’s the story arc (or lack of it). There are no heroes. There is no tension among the characters (except… the poorly manufactured tension between Robert Wagner’s character and reporter Maggie Whelan.) There is no agnst. There is no hunger. There is no motivation (other than Robert Wagner’s character’s desire to both kill and bed Maggie Whelan). In the end, the Concorde lands in a snow field, and everyone survives, and RJW’s character apparently commits suicide, never bring tried. The film, if it can so be called, ends with a shot of a Concorde flying over the cloud deck at sunset (or sunrise)…. what?!!

“The Concorde… Airport ‘79″ is unmitigated excrement, and yet, it is almost impossible to not watch.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night, promoting his new movie, “Doubt“. The first thing I thought when I saw him walk out on stage was, “Holy crap! It’s Orson Welles!”

The film looks interesting, and Hoffman gives a good interview, viz:

…then peruse these pictures.

As someone who’s tweaked a couple photos in my time, viz:

Yes, all five of them are me.

… I feel I must direct your attention to this blog, a.k.a. http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

Further, you must read the whole thing. Archives and all. Wicked funny.

Stars: 5/5

As you may recall, George Carlin died almost 2 months ago. At long last, his final HBO Special has been released as a CD, called “It’s Bad For Ya”.

Well, What can I say? It’s excellent. It is, I think, the best Carlin recording I’ve heard. It combines the youthful wonder and apparent naivete of works like “Class Clown” and “Occupation Foole”, the the sophisticated middle-aged observations and language studies of Carlin On Campus and Playin’ With Your Head, and the shamelessly frank exposes of the human tendency toward delusion and sheeplike behavior that drove Back In Town and Your Are All Diseased. It is a tour through what what those of us who loved Carlin loved about him, without being a nostalgia trip, just rehashing old material.

I really think George peaked on this one. He went out with a bang. He frankly discusses death and religion, getting lots of laughs. He takes merciess swipes at modern American parenting and the soul-crushing structure imposed on kids today. He lays bare the illogic of life after death and “being helped by the dead”. He leads us by the hand to the realization that “swearing on The Bible” and religious rules about when to and when not to don headgear are pointless, foolish, and without any value. Finally, he takes us on a tour of our non-existent rights.

…and he gets laughs. A lot of them.

Carlin was a human being, with flaws and frailties like any of us. Not everything he did was pure gold, but he did manage to produce a voluminous body of mostly excellent work, and “It’s Bad For Ya” is the culmination of his fifty years’ experience in show business, and it is good. It’s like the family matriarch, famous for her Thanksgiving dinners, having recovered from a stroke, gathers up all her best, offers up one last extravaganza, enjoys it with her family and friends, and dies in her sleep that night. Sure, it’s bittersweet. It’s sad he’s gone, but he gave us one last great show before he went, and it’s something to be thankful for. I just hope he knew how much he was appreciated.

Thanks, George. You’re missed.

This is a review of the Caedmon unabridged audio-book version, as performed by Jay O. Sanders.

Catch-22
by Joseph Heller

Somehow I managed to escape childhood, adolescence, and a stint in the Navy without being exposed to this classic.

Catch-22 is the story of John Yossarian, a US Army Air Corps bombarier during World War II, and the absurd, murdurous cruelty of wars and the people who run them.

The cyclical nature of the novel can be a bit disconcerting, as the reader may feel, like some of the characters, that he’s been here before.

Yossarian spends much of the novel trying to avoid flying more (and still more) combat missions than are required by top-level orders, while his immediate superiors repeatedly raise the number of missions needed, in order for men to be rotated out.

While Yossarian and his fellow aviators deal with their demons, the commanders scheme to improve their own images, and Washington Irving, pointless death and Nately’s Whore seem to be lurking around every corner.

I realize this book was published decades before Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was released, but, since I was exposed to the two works in reverse order, I found the themes of bureaucratic absurdity and individual futility deeply reminiscent of Brazil.

The character of the central plot device, “Catch 22″, is revealed bit by bit, in seemingly unrelated situations, sometimes explixitly, and sometimes implicitly. The case of the dead man in Yossarian’s tent is a prime example of Catch 22 making an unannounced appearance.

All in all, Catch 22 is both darkly humorous and deeply sad. Yossarian seems to represent the struggle against imaginary constraints imposed by “so-called superiors”… like an elephant tethered to an inadequate stake by a flimsy rope or chain. The elephant has been conditioned to believe in the futility of struggle, and so, it does not struggle. Yossarian, too, spends much of the novel weakly tethered to norms and expectations he knows are insane, but he has been conditioned not to struggle against them.

Yossarian, though, is the aparently sane one in the bunch. He merely want to be left alone to live his life. He has no desire to hurt anyone. His world is populated by a wild array of megalomaniacs, introverts, weak innocents, tortutred souls, scheming savants, and self-serving climbers, and all but a precious few are busy telling him he’s insane, which he’s perfectly willing to admit, if it’ll get him out of flying more missions. …but there’s a catch. Catch 22.

As it turns out Yossarian thinks he’s the only sane one in war, but there’s one among his colleagues keeping his sanity a secret.

The Audio Book, performed by Jay O. Sanders is well done. Sanders’ mostly subtle voice characterizations help keep the vast cast of characters organized during the novel’s many involved passages of dialogue. The pace is good and the tone of the performance is consistent across the book’s 15 CDs.

The only thing that bugged me about Sanders’ performance was the way he pronounced around 30% of the “f”s in the book. It sounded like either 1) he normally wears dentures and forgot to put them in, or 2) he was trying not to pop the microphone with the “f”s. Trivial? Perhaps.

All, in all, I give this work a 4.5 out of 5 rating.

Originally posted a long time ago on Paul’s Reviews Page

I’ll be rating movies on a three zone, 5-star scale. Each movie will be rated
on “Visual Appeal”, “Audio Appeal” and “Story Appeal”. Each of these three
zones can be rated up to 5 stars (or asterisks…. they load faster than
.GIFs)

Monsters, Inc.
V: *****

A: *****

S: ****

Synopsis: A “parallel Universe” populated by monsters and powered by the screams of nightmare-afflicted children in our world is turned upside down when a child sneaks through the the portal the monsters use to come and collect her screams.

Thoughts: Pixar magic of the highest order. What more do I have to say? Yet another fantastic Randy Newman score. A great story with a great twist. The one Pixar offering to date that really didn’t do it for me (A Bug’s Life) was a bit too kiddish for my taste. While “Monsters, Inc” is no “Shrek”, it does seem to be the most adult-targeting feature from Pixar to date.

While the story, music, sound editing and voice-acting were all top-notch, it really is the character design, animation and simulation (Sully’s fur and Boo’s t-shirt, for the most part) that give this movie it’s heart. Like the two previous Toy Story films, this is a buddy movie in which the buddies learn something about each other and themselves through some unexpected trial. With each successive film, Pixar’s capacity for subtle, expressive facial animation grows by leaps and bounds.

Since PDI-Dreamworks’ “Shrek” is something of a benchmark CA film for me, I’ll mention a few areas where PDI-Dreamworks and Pixar seem to diverge: 1) Realism. From what I’ve seen from the two studios, PDI-Dreamworks has the market cornered. Pixar seems to be content with a certain doll-like aspect to its characters, whereas PDI-Dreamworks seems to focus on skin texture and tone, pliability of skin and plausable deformation in forming facial expressions. There are too many looks and expressions in Shrek for me to count, which set me off laughing or getting all misty-eyed. 2) Story. Monsters, Inc. is something of a departure from the common Pixar formula, in which the thematic content is mostly light. This is the first Pixar film I’ve seen with believably sinister bad guys and starkly dark and frightening content. “A Bug’s Life” discussed death, and I think an ant or two may have gone over the horizon, never to return, but that was nothing compared to the termite battle in “Antz” from PDI-Dreamworks. Personally, I like a little dues-paying in movies I watch. The thing that got me in “Monsters, Inc.” was when Sully was coerced into giving a scare demonstration by Mr. Waternoose, and he inadvertantly exposed Boo to his “Game Face”. This, to me, is like a child seeing what his or her dad REALLY does (or is trained to do) for a living, and dad is a soldier, or special forces type, or some other “ugly” occupation. 3) Characters. PDI-Dreamworks characters, even their fairy-tail creatures, are typically cynical, pragmatic and/or pensive. Pixar’s characters are typically a bit less three-dimensional, although Sully from “Monsters, Inc.” seems to be something of a departure

All-in-all a great flick, one to keep on the shelf at home, even if you have no kids.

Originally posted a long time ago on Paul’s Reviews Page

I’ll be rating movies on a three zone, 5-star scale. Each movie will be rated
on “Visual Appeal”, “Audio Appeal” and “Story Appeal”. Each of these three
zones can be rated up to 5 stars (or asterisks…. they load faster than
.GIFs)

The Clan of the Cave Bear
V: ****

A: ***

S: ***.5

Synopsis: An orphaned Cro-Magnon girl is taken in and raised by a Neandethal Medicine Woman.

Thoughts:
Many times I had seen VHS and DVD copies of Clan of the Cave Bear in stores, and was curious…. it had a certain B-Movie air about it that left me thinking it probably wasn’t all that good. Daryl Hannah is not one of my favorite actresses. And, more times than I can count, I’ve seen good intentioned attempts at portraying primitive or aboriginal peoples botched to the point of being unwatchable. Recently, I saw a copy on DVD for $6.99, and I finally decided to give it a chance.


Clan of the Cave Bear is the story of a little girl who gets separated from her own people and ends up being adopted by another group. It would be one thing if she was just another race… but the girl was Cro-Magnon and the people who adpted her were Neanderthal. This posed some deep conflict issues, and presented some serious challenges.


My initial suspicions about the B-Movie feel were somewhat allayed, and the portrayal of the culture and people was reasonably plausable. The story had some meat to it, and there were some worthy themes. The score, by Alan Silvestri, was, for the most part, fitting and mostly transparent.


One thing I found enjoyable about the movie, and this may just be me, is the fact that the Clan had their own language, which consisted of a combination of utterances and gestures. The viewer’s window into the meaning of the language was sparse subtitles. Once a basic gesture or utterance was presented a few times, the subtitles for it seemed to taper off. More involved “dialog” still had the subtitles, which was very helpful.


Over all, I found Clan of the Cave Bear engaging and satisfying. If you can find it at a reasonable price (I’d say $6.99 is pretty darned reasonable), I’d recommend it.