| Tuesday Top Ten |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|05:50 pm] |
It was election day today, and here in Long Beach (or at least in the part where I live) there was exactly one thing to vote on: a special property tax assessment for the school district. There aren't a whole lot of pop songs about property tax assessments, so instead I present the
Top Ten Songs About School
1. "My Old School" - Steely Dan
2. "Grade 9" - Barenaked Ladies
3. "Rock'n'Roll High School" - the Ramones
4. "Teacher, Teacher" - Rockpile
5. "Happy Hunting Ground" - Sparks
6. "Corduroy" - the Previous
7. "Charm School" - Elvis Costello & the Attractions
8. "School's Out" - Alice Cooper
9. "Schooldays" - Starjets
10. "Hot for Teacher" - Van Halen
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| I'm not sure if this sign is ironic or just alanic ... |
[Oct. 31st, 2009|07:20 pm] |
That's a link, so you can click on it and see a bigger version if you can't read the sign.
Brandyce and I went to the Long Beach Historical Society cemetery tour. It's during the day, so they don't have people jumping out at you and shit. Instead, they have people dressed up as people who are buried in the cemetery and they tell you their life stories. It was all interesting, and most of the actors were good, although a few of them could have worked on voice projection a little bit more. It was sometimes hard to hear if you were at the back. Also, props to current Long Beach mayor Bob Foster for portraying "controversial" (in the sense of "crooked, but not universally reviled") local politician Emmet Sullivan.
More pictures of the cemetery are available on my Flickr page.
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| Tuesday Top Five |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|04:58 pm] |
It's almost Halloween, and I was going to do some kind of Halloween costume list, but I couldn't really think of anything clever. Since I did a Halloween playlist last year (or was it the year before that? I'm too lazy to check.), I figured I'd go with movies this time.
Top 5 Black & White Horror Movies
1.) The Haunting (1963)
2.) Psycho (1960)
3.) Dracula (1931)
4.) Night of the Hunter (1955)
5.) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921)
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| Tuesday Top Ten |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|07:05 pm] |
Top Ten Self-Referential Songs
1. "Hook" - Blues Traveler
2. "The Song That Goes Like This" (from Spamalot) - Eric Idle and John DuPrez
3. "Title of the Song" - Da Vinci's Notebook
4. "This Song" - George Harrison
5. "How to Write a Song" - The Frantics
6. "Song for Whoever" - The Beautiful South
7. "I Bought A Flat Guitar Tutor" - 10cc
8. "The Grunge Song" - The Vestibules
9. "This Is Not a Love Song" - Public Image Ltd.
10. "Please Play This Song on the Radio" - NOFX
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| Tuesday Top Ten (on Wednesday again) |
[Oct. 14th, 2009|10:56 am] |
Forgot to post this yesterday.
Top Ten Bob Dylan Covers
1. "All Along the Watchtower" - Jimi Hendrix
2. "My Back Pages" - the Byrds
3. "This Wheel's On Fire" - Siouxsie and the Banshees
4. "Crawl Out Your Window" - Transvision Vamp
5. "I'm Not There" - Sonic Youth
6. "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" - Mike Ness
7. "I Threw It All Away" - Elvis Costello
8. "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" - Shawn Colvin
9. "Absolutely Sweet Marie" - Jason and the Scorchers
10. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" - Ken Bishop's Nice Twelve*
(*Completely mostly** unavailable. It was in an episode of The Young Ones but due to licensing issues, isn't on the DVD.)
**Thanks to Ian for the correction.
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| Tuesday Top Ten |
[Oct. 6th, 2009|06:36 pm] |
Top Ten Out-of-Context Simpsons Quotes for All Occasions
1. Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm?" Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important?
2. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
3. You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true.
4. Oh, yeah, what are you gonna do? Release the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark, they shoot bees at you?
5. Chief Wiggum! Don't eat the clues!
6. Troy McClure? You said he was dead.
- No, what I said is that he sleeps with the fishes.
7. No Frank-Gehry-designed prison can hold me!
8. Bon jour, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys!
9. My story begins in nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" because the Kaiser had stolen our word "twenty."
10. And I'll never get my comeuppance! Do you hear me? No comeuppance!
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| Tuesday Top Five |
[Sep. 29th, 2009|08:35 pm] |
Okay, so here's the list I was going to do last week. The Top Five Underrated Movies of ... well, not all-time, I guess. Recent Memory, let's say. How did I decide a movie was "underrated?" Through a very thorough and scientific process of looking stuff up on the Internet. Any movie I gave 4 or 5 stars to on Netflix and which has at least one of a.) an average Netflix rating of 3.0 or less; b.,) an average IMDB rating of 6.0 or less; or c.) 60% or less ("rotten") on Rotten Tomatoes. So, here's the list:
Top Five Underrated Movies of Recent Memory
1. City Heat. (1984). Netflix: 3.0, IMDB: 5.1, Rotten Tomatoes 25%. Part of the problem with City Heat is that the trailers made it look like the kind of movie that it's actually a parody of. So people who would have liked it didn't see it, and the people who saw it didn't like it. And yet, it's genuinely funny, with Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood spoofing their respective tough-guy images, and Madeleine Kahn, who's always funny, doing the Madeleine Kahn thing. This may be damning with faint praise, but it's certainly better than anything else Burt Reynolds did in the '80s, and certainly better than most of the truck-driver with a monkey/Bronco Billy/Dirty Harry treadmill that Eastwood was on.
2. Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead (1995). Netflix: 3.3, IMDB: 6.6, Rotten Tomatoes: 35%. The knock on this one seems to be that it wants to be a Quentin Tarantino movie, but it isn't. But, you know, it's not like Tarantino invented hard-luck criminals and quirky dialogue. Also, it's a lot more plot-driven than Reservoir Dogs, which is the QT movie it's supposedly "ripping off."
3. Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966). Netflix: 2.8, IMBD: 6.2, Rotten Tomatoes: N/A. Apparently people are down on this because it's "boring" and has "too many sub-plots." It is very much of its time, and so it's kind of like a lot of mid-to-late '60s movies like, say, The Graduate or The Sterile Cuckoo (if that's the movie I'm thinking of), where the main characters are kind of alienated and adrift from mainstream society. Except that here, James Coburn's character is actually a cynical con man playing on that soulful loner image to hustle up the seed money so he can put together a heist to rob the bank at LAX. So I guess I can see where if you were expecting a caper comedy like Big Deal on Madonna Street or Topkapi or something you'd find this to be not what you wanted.
4. Tapeheads (1988). Netflix: 2.8, IMDB: 5.7, Rotten Tomatoes: 75%. Well, the critics are with me on this one. This is another movie that's very much of its time, very hip and ironic in that late-80s way. It's also absolutely hilarious, in a way that lets me (although clearly not everyone else) overlook the way it kind of falls apart in the third act.
5. The Cat's Meow (2002). Netflix: 3.0, IMDB: 6.4, Rotten Tomatoes: 72%. I've looked at some of the user reviews, and I still don't get why this is rated so low. Again, the professional critics seem to be with me. A great cast, tight script, based on a true story, set in the Golden Age of Hollywood. What's not to like?
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| An open letter to CBS Sports |
[Sep. 27th, 2009|09:34 pm] |
Dear CBS Sports,
Everybody likes the ticker that runs across the bottom of the screen during football games and shows the scores of other games. There is one way you could make the ticker even better and more informative. During the afternoon games, in addition to showing the scores of the morning games that are over and thus unlikely to change, you could also show the scores of the other afternoon games that are currently in progress. I don't think this should be too difficult, as I believe that's the way the ticker already works during the morning games.
Thank you,
Steve |
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| Tuesday Top Ten |
[Sep. 22nd, 2009|08:27 pm] |
This actually started out to be a completely different and much more positive list. It was going to be "Top 5 Underrated Movies" and I was going to base it on the discrepancy between my Netflix rating and the average for all Netflix users. I may still do that, but while researching that I accidentally discovered this list, which allows me to be all cranky and elitist and stuff.
Ten Movies I Hated That Have Average Netflix ratings over 3.5*
1. The Terminator (4.0)
2. Lethal Weapon 2 (3.9)
3. Bram Stoker's Dracula (3.8)
4. Moonraker (3.7)
5. Total Recall (3.7)
6. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (3.7)
7. Back to School (3.6)
8. Tron (3.6)
9. Conan the Barbarian (3.6)
10. Rambo: First Blood Part II (3.6)
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*On a scale of 1-5. For comparison, the following movies are rated at or below 3.5: Annie Hall (3.4), Broadcast News (3.5), The Constant Gardener (3.5), Lost in Translation (3.3), and Night Moves (3.2). Casablanca gets a 4.2. Citizen Kane is 3.9. The Godfather and Star Wars are tied with Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog at 4.5.
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| Tuesday Top Ten (on Wednesday) |
[Sep. 16th, 2009|03:39 pm] |
The "Better Late than Never" Playlist
1. "It's Too Late" - Carole King
2. "All of a Sudden (It's Too Late)" - XTC
3. "Lifetime Too Late" - Peter Himmelman
4. "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby" - Louis Jordan*
5. "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" - Bob Dylan
6. "It's Too Late" - Jim Carroll Band
7. "Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)" - Louis Prima
8. "Save it for Later" - The English Beat
9. "Better Never than Late" - Jon Astley
10. "Late in the Evening" - Paul Simon
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*You know. "I got a gal who's always late ..."
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| Tuesday Top Ten |
[Sep. 8th, 2009|09:04 pm] |
Top Ten Out-of-Context MST3K Lines for All Occasions
1. "Hey, beanie boys! Shag out there and fix that whoop-whoop noise!"
2. "A hamburger sandwich with a french-fried potato garnish."
3. "It's nice that they're giving the dead girl a second chance."
4. "Big old buttery moon ..."
5. "Renaissance Fairs of the Old West!"
6. "That was one unstable octopus."
7. "Wait! Don't shoot, we don't know if we don't understand it yet."
8. "Rex Dart, Eskimo Spy."
9. "Also in there is a poisoned sammich!"
10. "This door sounds brown."
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| Vacation, all I ever wanted |
[Sep. 7th, 2009|09:40 pm] |
For Labor Day weekend, Brandyce and I drove up to Santa Cruz. We got a hotel literally right across the street from the boardwalk, which has lots of cool rides even for a mild acrophobe like myself, and a very short walk from the municipal wharf, which is chock full of really good seafood restaurants with surprisingly reasonable prices. One of the really cool things about Santa Cruz (other than being the world capital of guys with grey beards and ponytails) is that you can get onto a train at the beach (actually on Beach Street, right in front of the boardwalk) and in an hour find yourself in a redwood forest in the mountains. We had a good time, and there are pictures up on Flickr. Traffic wasn't bad at all, except for LA-to-Santa Barbara on Saturday morning and the general Santa Barbara area this afternoon. Turns out you can get from Fucking Oxnard or Some Place (the last time we stopped for snacks and a restroom break) to our house in Long Beach in just under an hour and a half with mild traffic, so that's good to know I guess.
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| Tuesday Top Ten |
[Sep. 1st, 2009|09:09 pm] |
The "Get a Clue" Playlist
1. "Mean Mr. Mustard" - The Beatles
2. "Scarlet's Walk" - Tori Amos
3. "Peacock Suit" - Paul Weller
4. "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" - Mission of Burma
5. "Bought a Rope" - The Minus 5
6. "Chelsea Dagger" - The Fratellis
7. "Still in the Kitchen" - The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy
8. "Lines from the Library" - Shriekback
9. "Mr. B's Ballroom" - Devo
10. "Looking for Clues" - Robert Palmer
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| Tuesday Top Ten |
[Aug. 25th, 2009|06:04 pm] |
"Sticking it to the Man" Edition
1. "I'm the Man" -- Joe Jackson
2. "The Man Who Invented Himself" -- Robyn Hitchcock
3. "I'm the Man Who Murdered Love" -- XTC
4. "The Man Who Sold the World" -- David Bowie
5. "Working Undercover for the Man" -- They Might Be Giants
6. "The Man With Two Surnames" -- John Wesley Harding
7. "The Man With the Black Moustache" -- The Monochrome Set
8. "The Man With the Child in His Eyes" -- Kate Bush
9. "The Man in the Dark Sedan" -- Snakefinger
10. "The Man in Me" -- Bob Dylan
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| Oh dear |
[Aug. 19th, 2009|06:45 pm] |
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If you've got a website where you're trying to sell me a book, you shouldn't use "right" when you mean "write." |
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| Tuesday Top Five |
[Aug. 18th, 2009|08:44 pm] |
Inspired by my recent bafflement at the existence of the new Halloween II:
Top Five Remakes and/or Sequels that are Better than the Original Movie
1. The Maltese Falcon (1941). (Remake). I'm starting off with a bit of a cheat, because I've never actually seen the 1931 version, so I'm really only saying this is better than Satan Met a Lady (1936), where Sam Spade becomes Ted Shane, Bette Davis plays the Caspar Gutman role, and a jeweled ram's horn fills in for the falcon.
2. A Shot in the Dark (1964). (Sequel to The Pink Panther.) The first movie is a nigh-unwatchable shambles of a '60s farce, with way too many characters. Peter Sellers' (relatively minor) role as Inspector Clouseau is the one redeeming feature, and of course spawned a series of sequels (including three ill-advised installments made after Sellers died). This is the first of those, the first movie where Inspector Clouseau is the main character. He's clumsy and not too bright, but nowhere near as cartoonishly stupid as he would become in the later films.
3. The Italian Job (2003). (Remake). This is the controversial part of the list, for those of you keeping score at home. Yeah, the 1969 original has Michael Caine and a great heist/chase scene and a hilarously literal cliffhanger ending, while the remake has Marky Mark and takes place mostly in Los Angeles, despite the title. On the other hand, the original also has Benny Hill (as apparently the only man in England who knows how to mount a 12" tape on an IBM mainframe) and a bunch of pointless scenes with Noel Coward while the remake has ... a plot.
4. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). (Sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture.) Like a lot of people, I used to parrot the "even-numbered Star Trek movies are good, odd-numbered Star Trek movies are bad" line, but on reflection, this is the only really good Star Trek movie I've seen. To be fair, the last one I saw was Star Trek IV, so don't go by me.
5. Evil Dead II (1987). (Officially a sequel to The Evil Dead, but also kind of a remake.) So, you've got some more money now and a few years more experience as a filmmaker. Why not revisit an earlier project, tone down the gore a little (yeah, really -- the original was "unrated" and this was an "R"), bump up the humor a couple of notches and see if you can parlay that "cult classic" into mainstream success? Worked for Sam Raimi anyway, who eventually wound up directing Spider-Man and stuff. Rumor has it there's another remake or sequel or something coming out next year, which strikes me as going back to the well one time too many, but we'll see.
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| An open letter to Rob Zombie |
[Aug. 17th, 2009|08:21 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | movies | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | snarky | ] |
Dear Mr. Zombie,
I appreciate the fact that you, like the directors of earlier Halloween sequels, have appended a Roman numeral to your film's title so that we can tell them apart. However, that benefit is completely negated if you give two of them the same number. There already was a Halloween II. By my count, your movie is Halloween X. Please make the appropriate corrections.
Thank you,
Steve
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| I have reached a conclusion |
[Aug. 17th, 2009|05:24 pm] |
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The suffix "for Managers" or "A Manager's Guide" in a book title mean basically the same thing as "... for Dummies" except way, way less useful. |
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| Tuesday Top Five |
[Aug. 11th, 2009|07:26 pm] |
Top 5 Bad Movies I Love, and Why
Being as I'm a grown-up, I can make a distinction between "things I like" and "things that are good" and a similar distinction between "things I don't like" and "things that are bad." I'm not saying there are hard-and-fast, universal, objective standards of quality in art. I'm saying that by my own standards, these movies are not very good at all, and yet I love them anyway. Sometimes it's because they're laughably incompetent and I love them in a MST3K kind of way. And sometimes it's because despite their serious flaws there's something about them that I find genuinely and non-ironically entertaining on their own terms. Usually it's that first thing, though, as with Item #1.
1. Starcrash. This is almost indescribably terrible. I mean, there are plenty of cheap Italian knock-offs of American blockbusters. There were probably at least half a dozen other Italian Star Wars clones in 1978 alone. But only this one has David Hasslehoff (in basically the Princess Leia role). And Marjoe Gortner. And Christopher Plummer as the Emperor (except they mix it up, see, 'cause here the Emperor is a good guy!). Plummer gets one of the most ridiculous lines in movie history: "I wouldn't be emperor of the galaxy if I didn't have a few powers at my disposal. Imperial Flagship ... halt the flow of time!" And as if that weren't enough, he gets the topper when he explains that he can halt the flow of time, but only for five minutes. Yeah.
And then there's the fact that the title of the movie refers to an actual maneuver that you can use in starship combat, where you deliberately crash your spaceship into the other guys' spaceship. And then jump out and fight them with swords. It just gets goofier and goofier and goofier by the minute, to the point where you can't believe that anybody got paid for any of this. Did I mention the "comical" robot sidekick with (in the English-language dub, anyway) the bad "Texas" accent? I didn't, did I? Well, there's also this ... oh, you know.
2. Phantom of the Paradise. So Brian de Palma decided to make a musical that kind of combines the stories of Faust, The Phantom of the Opera, and ... I don't know, Valley of the Dolls or something. And you thought he only did lame Hitchcock "homages." And he got Paul Williams to write all the music, and play the Mephistopheles character, and double as the singing voice for the Faust/Phantom character. The story makes almost exactly no sense at all and the lead is completely unsympathetic either before or after his transformation into the vengeance-obsessed Phantom, but some of the songs are actually pretty good, and the spoofs of '70s-era pop music fads (fake '50s nostalgia, fake '60s nostalgia, glam, earnest singer-songwriters, and Alice-Cooper-style metal) generally hit their targets. With a hilarious performance by Gerrit Graham as "Beef," who gets most of the genuinely funny lines, like "I know the difference between drug-real and real-real!" and an endearing one by Jessica Harper as "Phoenix," the object of the Phantom's obsession. And just so you don't forget Brian de Palma directed it, there's a spoof of the shower scene from Psycho.
3. Head. So the Monkees TV show was basically the Beatles movie Help! as done for children's TV, only with less plot, worse music and no Leo McKern. Head, on the other hand, is like Help! on acid. Really, really, a lot of acid. You know a movie is weird, weird, weird when Frank Zappa shows up as the voice of reason. There are some good songs, and some not-so-good songs, and a lot of off-the-wall surreal humor, and a young Teri Garr, and a giant Victor Mature. Apparently they (and by "they" I mean producers Bob Rafaelson and Jack Nicholson -- yes, that Jack Nicholson) called it Head so that if it was successful they could advertise their next movie as "from the people who gave you Head."
4. House on Haunted Hill. The 1959 William Castle original, you heathens. I'm gonna spoil this right away by pointing out that it's a "weird menace" story -- i.e. all the apparently supernatural events have mundane explanations. Or, well, "mundane" isn't the right word for building a giant marionette contraption with a skeleton on the end of it, or having a giant vat of acid in your basement, or really any of the completely unmotivated things the characters in this movie get up to. Maybe "non-supernatural" is better. And, just like on Scooby-Doo, the "explanations" don't really match up with the phenomena they're supposed to explain. The direction and pacing are pedestrian, and even though it's only a hour and fifteen minutes long, it seems to drag in places. So why do I love it? Vincent Price. Vincent Price is having so much fun in this movie, that it's impossible not to go along for the ride. He's in some much better movies, and some much, much worse ones, but Price just really picks this one up and carries it around like an hors d'ouevre tray.
5. Clue. This is actually a lot like House on Haunted Hill, now that I think about it. A bunch of strangers go to a creepy house for a dinner party, people start dropping dead, and the ending is pulled out of a hat. Also there's a gimmick. House on Haunted Hill had "Emergo-Vision" where in specially-equipped theaters, a glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton would pop out from behind the screen and fly over the audience when Vincent Price's skeleton (actually his fake skeleton-marionette, as spoilered above) comes out of the acid. In Clue, there were the three different endings, selected randomly by theater or something. I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I do know that when I saw it in the theater, our tickets said "You will see Ending C." Some really good actors given not enough to do, a few too many running gags, but still something about it just makes me happy. Maybe it's Tim Curry and Leslie Ann Warren arguing about how many bullets are left in the revolver ("One plus two plus two plus one." "No, one plus one plus two plus one." "Even if you were right, it would be one plus two plus one plus one"). Maybe it's the Jane Wiedlin cameo. Maybe it's the fact that I originally saw the best of the three different endings.
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