Month: November 2008

Posted on

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Here we go:

:: What management idiot thought this up?! And to not even spell “tries” right?!

:: Not a web find, but something I saw on the way home from grocery shopping last weekend and I got a picture with the phone:

It’s kind of hard to make out because it was raining, but it’s one of those street corners that is covered with signs because a business down the road is having some kind of massive blow-out sale of the type associated with going-out-of-business. However, in this case — it’s a furniture store — the signs don’t say “Closing” or “Going out of business”, but rather, “Remerchandising Relinquishment”. And I have to note: I have absolutely no idea what this means. None. Is that a new way of saying “Going out of business”, or does it mean something else? What the heck is “Remerchandising Relinquishment”?

And while I’m on the subject, does anyone besides me ever wonder about the people whose job it apparently is to stand at street corners holding placards for stores having their liquidation sales? Are these actually employees of those businesses, or is there some firm that actually contracts out their employees to hold these placards up at street corners, or are they poor people being paid under the table, as it were, to do what must be a freakishly boring job that requires standing in one place, doing nothing, in potentially ugly weather (like a cold November rain)?

:: I’ve been long trying to decide what contemporary gizmo it is that forms the justification for our species’s existence in the first place — i.e., what we were created to invent. I’ve now decided that it is USB. I want each and every item in this wonderful post.

:: Hey, wanna know what life was like for political prisoners in the Soviet Union? Latvia’s got you covered! (via)

Enough for this week. More next!

Share This Post

Posted on

Ladies and Gentlemen, behold: a link-dump.

I bookmarked a bunch of things while I wasn’t blogging, and now I figure I’ll just dump ’em all here, either without comment or with short, pithy comment.

:: There’s a gadget called The Typealyzer which analyzes the writing in a blog and spits back — really quickly — the Myers-Briggs personality type of that blogger, based on the writing. They peg me as an ESFP, while when I’ve taken quizzes for my type, I’ve always come up INFP. Hmmmmm. I suspect that I actually am a little more extroverted on the blog than in real life. (via)

:: Back in October, Nettl posted a very nice story about Barack Obama. Because I love me some Barack Obama.

:: There’s a dating site for Objectivists. Read some profiles here. One wonders what the pillowtalk would sound like, from couples formed thusly…. (via

:: Jacob Weisberg on the Death of Libertarianism. It’s a pleasant thought, but nothing will ever kill libertarianism. Just reading the comments over at Alan’s blog on a normal day proves this. For some reason, Alan’s got a bunch of libertarians among his regular commenters, and as always, they are always able to trace the roots of any problem back to the government, somehow, some way. One of them was actually citing something Woodrow Wilson did as a root cause of our current economic troubles. There will always be people who think that the markets can solve any problem (or that the markets are sacrosanct, and screw your problem anyway).

:: The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace. Long, sad article about the recently-deceased writer, who committed suicide.

:: Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel won Best Novel at the World Fantasy Awards. I reviewed it way back when.

:: A while back there was a really cute, and obviously very smart, woman on Jeopardy! named Meredith. For some reason I wondered if she had an online presence at all, and turns out, she does. No, I haven’t contacted her or anything (unless linking her journal here constitutes contact). That would be creepy. Or something.

:: George W. Bush: persona non grata. Can’t say I’m surprised.

:: For film music lovers, the big thing of late is probably the release of the Indiana Jones Score Collection, which gathers the expanded scores of all four movies in one place. It’s not a perfect release, unfortunately; for some reason, on Raiders, this set uses the original album edited cut of “The Desert Chase”, instead of the full track as heard in the film (and available on an expanded CD that was briefly available in the 1990s). Worse, the film version of the End Credits to Temple of Doom isn’t heard in its entirety here; instead, the finale is broken over two tracks on two different discs (!), and it omits about thirty seconds of wonderful stuff where John Williams blends the Raiders March with Short Round’s Theme. Oh well. It’s still a very nice set, though.

:: Somebody I know linked this article about women who pattern their lives to ridiculous degrees on decades past, but I don’t remember who. Anyway, I find this incredibly creepy.

:: For Belladonna: a history of pie throwing. Splat!

:: I may have linked this before, but maybe not; I can’t remember when I discovered it or even how, but Marooned is an entertaining sci-fi webcomic with a lot of sardonic humor. I like it. It updates twice a week; check it out. It doesn’t take long to get caught up.

:: My favorite recent xkcd installment. This one seriously cracked me up. I always wondered what would happen if I did that….

:: I’d love to own a copy of this ruttin’ map, but it costs almost twenty-seven goram dollars. Gao yang jong duh goo yang!

OK, that’s it. Consider these links dump’d!

Share This Post

Posted on

Something for Thursday

And time to resurrect this weekly feature.

Older readers will know that I have some respect for the old disco sound, even if an awful lot of disco was crap and generally speaking the disco sound couldn’t really lead anywhere other than where it was when it started. It always was a musical dead end, and a lot of its tropes are easily mocked, but I will go to my grave believing that the disco era, brief as it was, really did produce some good songs. And this is one of my very favorites. This song just makes me all happy inside.

Here’s Donna Summer, singing “Last Dance”.

Last Dance – Donna Summer

Dance with me!

Share This Post

Posted on

To Boldly Geek

The official first trailer for JJ Abrams’s Star Trek reboot is out. Having watched it, I can say once again regarding this project: Meh. I’m still not sold on the idea of rebooting Trek in the first place (If we’ve gotta have Trek, surely we can tell lots of new stories without tossing aside established continuity, and why do we even gotta have Trek in the first place? It’s a wide wonderful SF world out there, let’s go see some uncharted planets!), and as far as this particular project goes, I’m still less than enthusiastic. Here’s the trailer:

It’s a nice looking trailer, especially the space battle stuff, although I do pine for the days when every Trek tale on the big screen didn’t need to have the Big E out there, phasers and photon torpedoes a-blastin’ away. I’m more concerned with the character stuff. The trailer alternates a bit between Kirk and Spock, first showing a Kirk who’s apparently a hothead kid who is constantly flouting the rules. Then we see that Spock’s main trouble is the fact that he’s half-human and half-Vulcan.

As to the latter, well, duh, and frankly, after the entire run of the Original Series and six feature films with the original cast, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of more interesting comment to be made about this. Yeah, Spock is the product of two worlds, and not entirely comfortable in either. If Abrams really reboots everything, resetting the entire Trek continuity to zero (as some rumors have him doing), then the entire arc of Spock’s life as a character is gone too, and that bugs me a bit. In the last two “Original Cast” Trek movies, we get to see a Spock who finally figured out his place in both of his native cultures, and the character didn’t suffer for the lack of all that angst. Maybe this can be handled interestingly, but I fear that it will seem like a trip into familiar territory.

And then there’s the former, James T. Kirk. The popular concept of this character is that he’s a womanizing rule-breaker, but I’ve always thought that the rule-breaking idea of him is overdone a bit. Kirk is a man who takes rules seriously at times, sidesteps them at others, but he’s a guy with a fearsomely strong moral compass. I’m worried that Abrams’s movie will defuse this a bit, turning Kirk into the archetypal hothead who learns to tamp it down a little. I saw somewhere online the analogy that the trailer looks like “Top Gun in space”, and that’s not off the mark. In truth, I hated the Kirk-as-a-kid-driving-the-hotrod bit. How does that square with the notion, established in the original series, that Kirk as a young man was incredibly straight-laced, so much so that his best friend (and future first officer) Gary Mitchell would describe Academy Cadet Kirk as “a stack of books with legs”, or that one particularly gleeful troublemaker named Finnegan would decide that Kirk was such a stick-in-the-mud that he made Kirk the butt of all of his jokes? What was always so interesting to me about James T. Kirk was that underneath the veneer of a handsome young man who had an eye for the ladies, who had the bright smile and the twinkle in his eye, and who would always err on the side of what he thought was right even if the regulations said something different, one could find beating the heart of a very serious man. A man who took duty extremely seriously. The trailer doesn’t really suggest that’s what Abrams is doing with Kirk, and that potentially bothers me.

(Now, of course, we are just talking about a trailer here, and trailers are notorious for not accurately showing what movies are really like. Maybe Abrams has a very serious Kirk indeed, but it’s hard to square that with Kirk engaging in life-threatening stunts like driving a car to the brink of a cliff, and it doesn’t help the impression I have of Abrams’s Kirk that every production still that’s been released so far has Abrams’s Kirk making a very smug facial expression.)

Finally: where the Hell is Dr. McCoy in this trailer?! I think I got a glimpse or two of him, but that’s about it. And if that’s any indication of the role McCoy plays in Abrams’s reboot, then he can have his reboot and I’ll keep my eight bucks next summer when this comes out. The key dynamic that made the Original Cast work so well wasn’t the chemistry between Kirk and Spock, but the triple-chemistry between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. These three men have an extremely deep friendship that survived Edith Keeler, an extremely deep friendship that compelled two of them to set aside their entire lives to go after the one they thought dead but still in need. Dr. McCoy is every bit as important in Original Cast Trek as Kirk and Spock. If Abrams moves him into the background at all, making him more along the lines of Scotty and Uhura and the rest, I’ll be irritated.

Again, I’m basing this all on a two-minute trailer, so maybe I’ll end up full of bird poop on all this. That would be fine with me, but to the extent that past performance indicates future results on stuff like this, I’m still not enthused, because I’ve just never found the JJ Abrams Kool-aid to be my cup of tea. Alias was mildly entertaining, but it never grabbed hold of me, and for my money, LOST is just a bunch of people brooding on an island. I’m certainly not thrilled about a state of affairs where Firefly is dead outside of comics but we’re getting JJ Abrams’s take on Star Trek.

We’ll see.

Share This Post

Posted on

Love and Death, or, What Movies Are For!

Back a few months ago Entertainment Weekly had themselves a big old list-fest, in which they compiled a bunch of lists of pop-culture stuff. At the time I commented on their teevee shows, and the movies and books lists. They did a whole bunch of these, but there are two lists I wanted to comment on at the time, and hey, I can still comment on them.

First up, they did a list of Romantic Gestures of the Last 25 Years. Here’s that list, with some comment:

The spectral Patrick Swayze lifts a coin across the room for Demi Moore in Ghost (1990).

I haven’t seen this movie in a long, long time, but I really liked it back in the day. I wonder how it’s aged? I think that the movie got taken a little more seriously than it should have; I found it a perfectly nice piece of supernatural melodrama. This was a good moment in the movie.

:: Robert Redford washes Meryl Streep’s hair in Out of Africa (1985).

I haven’t seen this movie, even though I have a copy floating around here somewhere.

:: John Cusack blasts Peter Gabriel outside Ione Skye’s window in 1989’s Say Anything…

This image has become pretty iconic, hasn’t it? My adoration of this movie is long established, but it’s still, for me, one of the most romantic love stories ever made. I love how chivalrous Lloyd Dobler is, how it’s not just something he does because it’s the way the script is written but because the script knows that this is hard-wired into his very being. For me, though, the most romantic part of the film comes when Diane Court comes back to Lloyd after the breakup and tells him that she needs him. He asks if she really needs him or just someone, and before she can answer, he just says “It doesn’t matter” and takes her back anyway.

:: Heath Ledger finds and keeps the shirts Jake Gyllenhaal had saved from their first trip to Brokeback Mountain (2005).

I haven’t seen the movie, but the short story is all kinds of brilliant – however many years of searing emotional life captured in less than thirty pages.

:: The beauty (Molly Ringwald) gives the rebel (Judd Nelson) her earring in The Breakfast Club (1985).

Yeah, sure. But I’ve always had mixed feelings about the way Andrew (Emilio Estevez) comes to his attraction to Ally Sheedy. I’d have preferred it if somehow they could have had him attracted to her “goth” side, as opposed to the makeover that, however cute, isn’t her. Does anybody think that she’s going to maintain that look on Monday morning when she’s back at school?

:: Leonardo DiCaprio draws Kate Winslet in the nude in Titanic (1997).

Oh, heavens, yes. I know we’re all supposed to hate this movie now, but this is just one beautifully executed moment. DiCaprio is so good in this scene (the whole movie, really): he starts out easily enough, since he’s drawn lots of nudes; but then he becomes terribly nervous when it’s the girl he loves nude before him. And then he shifts again, once he manages to focus his attention on the task at hand: capturing her in pencil strokes. Plus, the scene has the movie’s musical highlight: the solo piano version of “My Heart Will Go On”, played without a lot of lame embellishment by James Horner himself.

(By the way, when Lovejoy comes into the stateroom to see if Rose is there and behaving herself, why didn’t Jack just hide in a closet while Rose sat in a chair pretending to read a book or something? That might have been more productive than leading Lovejoy on a chase through the ship. And when they decide that they have to tell everyone about the iceberg, why did Jack have to go along? I know, so he could be there for Lovejoy to plant the diamond in his pocket, but that’s the point in the movie where I can always feel the Heavy Hand of Plot pushing us along.)

:: Ewan McGregor breaks into ”Your Song” while wooing Nicole Kidman in 2001’s Moulin Rouge (2001).

:: Larenz Tate offers an impromptu beat poem to Nia Long in Love Jones (1997).

:: Amélie (Audrey Tautou) setting up a wild goose chase for her beloved Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz) all through Paris in Amélie (2001).

Haven’t seen these.

:: Glen Hansard buys Marketa Irglova a piano before he leaves to find his other true love in London in Once (2007).

I hadn’t seen this before I saw the movie, but now I have, and I must say: this is a wonderful moment, but the really incandescent moment in this movie is much earlier, when they’ve just met and play an impromptu duet in a music store.

:: Julie Delpy sings a song (”Waltz”) she wrote about him to Ethan Hawke right Before Sunset (2004).

A good moment. I should watch these movies again soon. I wonder if they’ll ever revisit these characters again?

:: Zhang Ziyi leaps into the clouds for her true love at the end of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).

I really need to see this all the way through.

:: Richard Gere climbs up the fire escape to Julia Roberts’ window in Pretty Woman (1990).

Hmmmm. It’s a pretty corny end to a pretty corny movie. A fun movie, sure, but one of the best romantic moments of the last twenty-five years of movies? I dunno.

:: After her beloved Pedro (Marco Leonardi) dies making love to her in Like Water for Chocolate, Tita (Lumi Cavazos) eats matches, literally igniting her inner flame and burning her whole ranch to the ground.

Yes. Another movie I should watch again.

:: Ellen Page as Juno (2007) leaves orange Tic-Tacs in Michael Cera’s mailbox to make up with him.

You know what? The names of these characters are so perfect for the characters themselves. “Juno” is a perfect name for a girl who’s something of an outsider but who’s content to be that; and “Bleeker” is a perfect last name for the gangly kid who somehow blunders into losing his virginity with a girl named Juno.

:: Joey Lauren Adams buys Ben Affleck a painting in a diner in Chasing Amy (1997).

Note to self: watch Kevin Smith’s movies.

:: Steve Carell, i.e., The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), sells his toys on eBay to build his life with Katherine Keener.

I was surprised how sympathetic this movie was to its characters. It didn’t go the cheap and easy route of making us laugh at the Steve Carell character; nor did it require him to completely change his life to be with the woman he falls for. He makes some changes, but he doesn’t alter everything. (Plus, the Bollywood-style ending cracks me up more than anything else in the movie.)

:: The Beast gives his library to Belle in Beauty and the Beast (1991).

I’d go earlier, actually: when he manages to set aside anger to say “You’re welcome” when she thanks him for saving her life. But then, I tend to find romance in the very small moments when the seed of love is planted, rather than in the big gestures that show it in full flower.

:: Billy Crystal hunts down Meg Ryan on New Year’s Eve in When Harry Met Sally (1989).

Well, duh. I’ve always wondered, by the way, if the original script had the bit about “I love the little crinkle you get above your nose when you’re looking at me like I’m nuts”. If so, did they have to look at actresses on the basis of whether or not they had that little crinkle above their nose? Or did Billy Crystal notice that while filming and throw that in there?

:: Daniel-Day Lewis unbuttons Michelle Pfeiffer’s glove in The Age of Innocence (1993).

I don’t really remember this moment, since it’s well over ten years since I saw this movie.

:: Adam Sandler and Billy Idol serenade Drew Barrymore on a plane in The Wedding Singer (1998).

Didn’t see this. I’ve heard good things about it, so maybe I should. I never liked Adam Sandler until Spanglish, in which I liked him very much (even though I didn’t like the movie itself).

:: Ralph Fiennes carries Kristen Scott Thomas out of the cave in The English Patient (1996).

I think I owe this movie a reappraisal since I read the book and found it amazing.

:: Colin Firth buys Renée Zellweger a new diary at the end of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001).

:: Campbell Scott gives Kyra Sedgwick a garage door opener in Singles (1992).

:: As his fascist punk pals look on, Daniel Day-Lewis secretly licks the ear of his Pakistani lover (Gordan Warnecke) in 1985’s My Beautiful Laundrette.

I haven’t seen these. But hey, here are some moments I find pretty iconically [that’s not so much an actual word -Ed.] romantic from the last twenty-five years:

:: Ashitaka carries a wounded San out of Iron Town in Princess Mononoke.

:: James Bond holds a terrified Vesper in the shower in Casino Royale.

:: Jude sings “I’ve Just Seen a Face” in the bowling alley in Across the Universe.

:: John Book (Harrison Ford) teaches Rachel Lapp to dance to “Wonderful World” in Witness. The last shot of this scene, after Eli takes Rachel away, has Book dropping his sweat-covered brow to his shirt sleeve in a gesture of physical heat and embarrased realization that he’s done something he probably shouldn’t have. This remains Harrison Ford’s finest achievement as an actor.

:: President Andrew Shepard tries to send Sydney Ellen Wade a bouquet of flowers in The American President.

:: Will Turner literally gives his heart to Elizabeth in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. (I liked At World’s End a great deal, and never found it a “mess”.)

:: Thinking death is soon to come, Samwise Gamgee remembers Rosie Cotton and the flowers in her hair in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

:: Young Anakin Skywalker asks the girl who’s just walked into his master’s shop if she’s an angel.

OK, those are the romantic scenes. Now let’s tackle EW‘s list of Great Death Scenes:

:: Steve Buscemi + a woodchipper + the pure white snow of 1996’s Fargo = arguably the most hilarious ooky death on film.

Well, sure! Nobody looks at woodchippers the same way since this movie came out. But was anybody else surprised that it apparently takes a good deal of effort to get a body through a woodchipper? I heard that this movie had a “putting a guy through a woodchipper” scene before I saw it, and I kind of figured it would be over in seconds; guy goes in, bloody goo flies out the other side.

:: The T-1000 pulls a Wicked Witch of the West (via a vat of molten metal) at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

Yup, that’s a good villain demise, right there.

:: Bill Murray throws a toaster in the tub, steps in front of a moving truck, and swan dives off a bell tower in Groundhog Day (1993).

Gods, if only they’d cast someone other than Andie MacDowell in this movie! I’ve always found something very off-putting about her.

:: The heroines of 1991’s Thelma and Louise drive over the edge of the Grand Canyon.

Roger Ebert made the case that the way this scene is edited hurts the film by fading to credits too quickly. I tend to agree.

:: Mel Gibson, sans intestines, bellows ”Freeeeedommmmmm!” in Braveheart (1995).

Well, that happens a minute or so before he dies, really. His actual death has him seeing his beloved Murron wandering through the crowd, holding his gaze, while the axe descends toward his neck.

Al Pacino’s Scarface (1983) introduces seemingly half of Miami to his ”leetle friend” before getting a bullet in the back of the brain.

I haven’t seen this and have little intention to do so, since mob stories aren’t my cup of tea, and I’ve heard this movie described either as brilliant or a giant turd with nothing in between.

:: Samuel L. Jackson is speechifying to the rest of the cast of 1999’s Deep Blue Sea about survival when a super-shark leaps out of the water and — CHOMP! — no more Samuel L. Jackson.

This is the only good thing about this movie. The rest of it’s a forgettable exercise in gore. OK if you like gore, I suppose. I’m not opposed to gore, but that’s this movie’s entire purpose. It’s like going to an ice cream parlor and being told, “We’re out of ice cream so here’s a bowl of hot fudge.” Ewwwww.

:: Bruce Davison gently coaxes his AIDS-stricken lover to ”let go” in Longtime Companion (1990).

Haven’t seen this.

:: Chris Sarandon uses The Machine to suck 50 years of Cary Elwes’ life away in 1987’s The Princess Bride.

OK, that’s a decent scene. But we’re talking death scenes here, not mostly death scenes. So I disqualify it on that basis. We’re looking for all dead, not mostly dead.

:: Gollum follows the Ring of Power right into the scorching depths of Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).

Watch the movie again, EW! Gollum doesn’t follow the Ring, he precedes it. I’ve always been of two minds on this scene, anyway, as Peter Jackson filmed it. I don’t mind Frodo coming back at Gollum for one final attempt to get the Ring, but what makes it so amazing in the book is that what happens is that Gollum is so ecstatic about regaining The Precious that he completely loses perspective and doesn’t realize he’s gone right over the edge. I’d have preferred the movie to retain that aspect of things by maybe having Gollum holding the Ring, grinning, preparing to slip it on his finger – and only then realizing that he’s about to land in the pool of lava.

:: Warring exes Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner fall to their doom on a chandelier in 1989’s The War of the Roses.

OK, I guess.

:: A human sacrifice watches his own heart get ripped from his chest in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).

OK, again, it’s not a “death scene” if the guy isn’t dead after the thing happens that we’re talking about. It’s the lowering into the lava that does him in. Mola Ram’s death scene is a nice villain death, but there’s a subtlety there that’s often missed: if you listen to the sound in the film closely, every time someone is awakened from the Black Sleep of Kali by fire there’s a very specific “burning hiss” sound. This sound is heard when Mola Ram tries to grab onto the glowing Sankara Stone just before it drops to the river, implying that at that moment Mola Ram awakens from his own Black Sleep, realizes what he’s been doing…and then plummets to the hungry crocodiles. But anyway….

:: Darth Vader, after defying the Emperor and saving Luke Skywalker’s life, decides he wants to see his son’s face with his own eyes at the climactic end of Return of the Jedi (1983).

Oh, absolutely. And John Williams does something typically brilliant by having a single harp plucking out the Imperial March as Vader expires.

:: Scar (Jeremy Irons) tosses Mufasa (James Earl Jones) into a wildebeest stampede in his quest to become The Lion King (1994).

I’m not as big a fan of this movie as some, but this is one amazing moment. There’s always someone evil in Disney movies, but this is really evil.

:: Jennifer Jason Leigh is quite literally pulled apart by two semi-trucks at the end of 1986’s The Hitcher.

Haven’t seen this. Doesn’t sound like my thing, either.

:: With his dying breath in L.A. Confidential (1997), Kevin Spacey speaks two words to his killer — ”Rolo Tomasi.”

I liked this movie a lot. I don’t recall the exact details of Spacey’s demise, but good movie.

:: Will Ferrell crosses Dr. Evil, gets very badly burned, shot, and then shot again — all off camera — in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997).

Heh.

:: Jack telling Rose not to say her goodbyes before freezing to death in Titanic (1997).

Wow, are there a lot of well-done deaths in this movie! I always liked how we don’t see Jack die; we see him talking, and next time we see him, he’s gone. Plus, the other deaths on the ship: the old couple cuddling in bed for the last time, the last bedtime story for the children, Captain Smith alone on the bridge. Why do we all have to hate this movie, again?

:: First, Emil (Paul McCrane), is doused with a horrifically disfiguring batch of toxic waste. Then he’s literally liquidated by his boss’s car in 1997’s RoboCop. Bad day.

Yup, that was a great moment.

:: Lucy Liu losing her head to Uma Thurman’s blade in Kill Bill Vol. One (2003).
:: The Bride killing Bill at the end of Kill Bill Vol. Two (2004).

I haven’t seen Kill Bill yet.

:: Martin Sheen going splat! after getting tossed off a roof in The Departed (2006).

Again, a movie I’m not likely to see.

:: Cedric Diggory dying by Voldemort’s wand in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005).

Well, I don’t know about this one. Half-Blood Prince is likely to outdo this particular death, I think.

:: Dan Hedaya stubbornly refuses to die in Blood Simple (1984).

:: An underwear clad Paige (Paris Hilton) is chased through a factory warehouse and eventually killed by a wooden spear thrown through her forehead in 2005’s House of Wax.

I haven’t seen either of these.

So what would I add?

:: The Apollo 1 fire at the beginning of Apollo 13. All you really see is one astronaut’s hand, desperately pounding at the hatch that can’t open.

:: Michael Ironside gets his arms pulled off in Total Recall. This is one of my favorite “gross-out” bad guy deaths ever in a movie.

:: They don’t count because they’re only “near death” scenes, but two amazing acts of self-sacrifice in The Abyss: Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) allows herself to drown so Briggman can swim her back to the Deep Core, and later on, Briggman goes on a one-way journey to defuse the nuke dropped to the bottom of the deepest trench on Earth. I love The Abyss.

:: Aragorn declares the honor of the Dead restored in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and the thousands of dead warriors finally pass to the death that has been denied them for a thousand years.

:: Dr. Whatsisname, the guy whose research on the arm left behind by the original Terminator would lead to Skynet, sacrifices his own life to save John and Sarah Connor.

:: Harry (Bruce Willis) in Armageddon detonates a nuclear bomb manually to destroy the asteroid threatening Earth; not to be outdone, an entire space shuttle full of astronauts do exactly the same thing in Deep Impact, one of them noting “Hey, look at the bright side. We’ll all have junior high schools named after us.” (One of my greatest weaknesses as a human being is that even though I know Armageddon is total crap, I can’t not watch the thing when it’s on. A few weeks ago it came on one of the local sports-free channels at the same time as a Bills game in which the Bills were playing badly. I kept clicking back to Armageddon, but hey, bad SF is always better than bad football.)

So, what love and death scenes to you all like?

Share This Post

Posted on

The Balance in the Blood (part two)

Continuing a serialization of a horror novelette. Part One here.

Willem arrived at precisely 4:53. He found Doktor Muething sleeping on a folding cot in the corner with a book in his hand. There were more open books and papers piled atop the Doktor’s desk, and the only light came from the desk lamp. In that dim light the surgical table cast an eerie shadow over half the room and the far wall. The place was quiet except for the Doktor’s light snoring.

Willem drew toward the glass cabinet with the formaldehyde-preserved specimens inside. There was a fetal pig, a cow’s eyeball, a partially vivisected frog. He had seen all of these things before, so he turned his attention to the desk and the books that lay there. Instead of medical journals and texts, he found books of European folklore. Some of the titles were familiar; Uncle Gunther had owned copies for his pleasure reading. Why were they here?

He glanced down then at the floor beside the desk. Sitting open there was a black medicine bag, also just like Uncle Gunthers although Willem supposed that all medicine bags looked alike. He peered into the bag without touching it. There were various medical instruments – scalpels, forceps, a stethoscope – neatly secured in leather pouches. There was a small book in the bag. In the shadows he could not quite make out the lettering on the spine, but he could see that the title started with ‘V’. And there were two vials, each stoppered and labeled. Willem wondered what was in those vials, and he extended a hand down to draw one of them out….

CUCKOO!!!

Willem jumped back with a startled gasp. He hadn’t noticed the tiny cuckoo clock that hung on the wall above the door. The clock sounded five, and Doktor Muething awoke.

“Is that you, Young Schliemann? Ah, good!” The Doktor stood up. “And you are on time. Wonderful.” He strode past Willem and stuck his head out the door. “Bring the subject in, please,” he said to whomever was out there. Willem heard a muffled “Yes, sir” as Doktor Muething closed the door and turned back inside. “So, what new rumors about me today? I’m sure you’ve heard some whisperings by now. At dinner, perhaps?”

Willem considered being politic and denying it, but he chose otherwise. “You’re trying to cross a Jew with a monkey.”

“At the expense of the monkey, I assume,” the Doktor said with a scowl. “I’ve heard that one before. Not one of my favorites.” At that moment there was some commotion from outside. The door swung open, admitting two soldiers who dragged an unconscious prisoner between them. It was one of the six Jews from earlier. The Jew had been recently beaten; his face was heavily bruised and he was bleeding from several cuts.

“I’m sure the beating was justified,” the Doktor said.

“Inflicting punishment on the enemies of the Fatherland is always justified.” This came from Commandant Reger, who had just stepped in behind the two soldiers. His jacket was unbuttoned, his shirt collar loose – he had just risen himself.

“Put him on the table,” Doktor Muething said to the two soldiers. “Restrain him, also. Young Schliemann, in the bottom drawer of that bureau you will find a selection of appropriate clothing. Now, Commandant” – he turned to glare at Reger – “I seem to recall making clear that their blood was not to be spilled and their teeth were to be intact. Will you be ignoring all of my directives?”

Willem opened the drawer and selected a smock and gloves, trying not to appear as if he was listening.

“I believe you will find that my men left his canines undamaged.”

“And that,” the Doktor snapped, “is the most of my worries.”

Willem put on the smock as the two soldiers finished restraining the unconscious Jew. Then they returned to the door, behind the Commandant.

“Shall I stay and watch the proceedings,” Reger said.

“I doubt very much that you want to stay and watch the proceedings,” the Doktor said as he pulled on his own smock.

“Touche,” Reger said. “Good luck then, Herr Doktor.” He escorted the two soldiers outside, closing the door behind him.

“Contemptible man,” the Doktor muttered. “Jew or otherwise, death is not a plaything.” He pulled on a pair of gloves and turned to the unconscious Jew, who had been carefully restrained with wire-and-leather straps at the wrists, ankles, waist, and forehead. “Take a closer look. Tell me what you see.”

Willem stepped closer to the Jew and looked the man over. “What I see?” he asked.

“What you see,” Doktor Muething repeated. He was filling a syringe from a large glass bottle of clear fluid. “Describe him, as you would any patient.”

Willem nodded. He had done this for his uncle many times, after all. “This is an adult male, middle aged. There are beginning symptoms of malnutrition. His skin appears to be infected in places – there are lesions which have not received proper attention. A number of bruises and wounds around his upper head and torso indicate that he was recently beaten. He has suffered direct injury to his jaws; examination of his teeth—”

“That won’t be necessary,” Doktor Muething said as he came over, the syringe in his hand. “Will you please administer this? In the arm will do.” He held the syringe out to Willem.

“What is it?” Willem asked as he took it.

“A soporific. I want to see your technique.”

Willem had administered injections before, under Uncle Gunther’s watchful eye. He bent over the Jew and saw that the man’s gaunt condition made his veins easily visible. He pinched a fold of skin on the inside of the Jew’s elbow, and just like that a blue vein appeared. He slid the needle into the vein and depressed the plunger.

“Well done,” Doktor Muething said as Willem withdrew the needle. “Now, monitor him,” the Doktor said. “It won’t take long.” He handed Willem the stethoscope from around his neck.

Willem felt again the pinch of realization. “That drug will kill him, won’t it?”

Doktor Muething nodded. “I found that drug in Africa – frightful place, I’m glad it only took a few months – and I spent a great deal of time and effort at Trilenska refining it.” Trilenska was another concentration camp. “It will slowly halt his respiration. When that happens death will follow within seconds, and at that moment you must alert me. There is a moment, you see, between life and death when he will be both and neither.” He turned away then, back to the desk and the black satchel. Reaching in, he pulled out one of the flasks of dark liquid. Willem monitored the Jew’s slowing heartbeat as the Doktor filled another syringe from the flask. The heartbeat became slower, slower, slower….

“I think he will be gone soon.” The words caught in Willem’s throat. Uncle Gunther had said so many times: “Our work is preserving life if it is possible, or making it bearable if it is not.” And yet he had just ended a life – a Jewish life, but a life nonetheless. He felt sick.

Doktor Muething came over and listened to the Jew’s chest. “Yes, he is almost gone,” the Doktor said in a very low voice. He stood back up and came around the table, to stand next to Willem. There they stood looking on the dead Jew.

Willem had seen old people dead of age, adults dead of accidents, children dead of things in the water. Again he heard his uncle’s voice: “You must always accept death, but if you ever become accustomed to it, you must put aside your instruments for your useful days as a doktor are over.” Willem blinked. How could he ever become accustomed to this?

“Death is the last phase of life, young Schliemann,” Doktor Muething said. “Always think of it thus, and it will never defeat you.” With that, he took the dead Jew’s arm, found a vein, and injected the body with the dark fluid in the syringe. Then he handed the spent syringe to Willem and began administering compressions to the dead Jew’s chest.

Willem stared, confused. “Are you bringing him back?”

The Doktor paused compressions as he considered the question. “No,” he said. “Diverting him on his journey.” Satisfied at his own answer he resumed the compressions. “Move around the other side, young Schliemann. You won’t be able to see from where you are now.”

Willem came around to the opposite side of the table. He was struck just then by the Jew’s pallid coloration. This man had been dying for years, as had thousands of his brothers.

“That should be enough,” the Doktor said suddenly as he stopped compressions and stepped away from the body. “Now time will tell.” He walked around the laboratory and closed the shutters on all the windows, completely obscuring any light from outside.

Precautions for what? And why the secrecy of shuttering the windows? Willem wondered as he leaned over the dead Jew and studied the man’s features. He had learned long ago that every person died with a different expression. Some looked serene when they died, others looked frightened. How could he describe the expression on the Jew’s face? It certainly wasn’t serenity that he saw there. Anger? Fear? Resignation? Defiance? Willem couldn’t tell at all.

And then the dead Jew opened his eyes and met Willem’s gaze.

Share This Post

Posted on

Awards! I get yer awards here!!!

In the last week, I’ve been given two awards by fellow brethren in Blogistan, which I take to mean that I didn’t return to blogging with any rust on my mad blogging skills whatsoever! Yay me!

First up, SamuraiFrog has given me the Superior Scribbler Award, whose award icon looks like this:

…and whose rules for use run thusly:

1) Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to their most-deserving Blogger Friends.

2) Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.

3) Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains The Award.

4) Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we’ll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives
This Prestigious Honor!

5) Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

So, I now will name five other Superior Scribblers.

1. Snell of I Expect You To Die! has been doing all kinds of wonderfully written commentary on all things James Bond. He has another blog, Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep, but I can’t express my appreciation for his Bond stuff enough.

2. Heaven knows how long he’s going to remain active before going off into another of his work-related long hiatuses, but Mr. Jones of A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy is, among other things, a very old friend of mine (I’ve known him more than twenty-seven years now) and a fine writer with a keen eye for what he likes and what he doesn’t.

3. I just plugged him in Sentential Links yesterday, but Jeff of Psychosomatic Wit blogs his heart out, almost literally. I greatly admire his deeply personal writing.

4. I think I give these awards to Belladonna every time I get one, but hey, I can do what I want. Mind-muffins is what I tend to like most about blogging: she’ll write about anything that enters her mind, she’ll think “out loud” in a terrific way, and she has this optimism that bubbles through even her sad posts.

5. And, of course, Mental Multivitamin, who somehow makes it look effortless.

So there are my Superior Scribblers. Next up, Lynn Sislo gave me the “I Love This Blog Award”, whose prize looks like this:

1. Post the award on my blog

2. Link to the person who gave me the award

3. Nominate at least 4 others

4. Leave a comment on their blogs so they can pass it on.

Cool! Here are four other blogs that I love.

1. Maybe this is cheating, but Angela Martini’s Flickr photostream is very blog-like in its approach. I think it counts. She’s got quite the cast of characters in her home: herself, her husband, her cat, and the One Chihuahua To Rule Them All.

2. Lynn gave this award to Incurable Insomniac, so I’ll give it Steph’s significant other’s blog, Life in Shades of F-Major. Nettl’s blog is just as wonderful as Steph’s.

3. I’ve become addicted to the weekly movie quizzes at No Smoking in the Skull Cave, and I’ve loved Becca’s other content, too.

4. Simple Tricks and Nonsense: a terrific geek blog. Jason writes a lot of well-considered opinion on topics wide and sundry.

Congrats to the honorees!

Share This Post

Posted on

Why do I keep giving up my Sundays for this crap?!

I had this big, long post written about NFL football this year so far, but I’m not going to post it. I think football is slowly losing me. Maybe part of it is that the Buffalo Bills have been bad for almost an entire decade now, but really, the game’s just not that interesting to me anymore, and devoting every Sunday from September to February to watching it is seeming to me less of a wise thing to do every year. So, just a handful of observations:

:: Why are the Bills so bad? I stick with my pet theory, which has been my pet theory about them every year I’ve been blogging them: the offensive line is always crap on a stick. Trent Edawrds isn’t playing well right now, but really, if your team is lining up in shotgun formation on third and one on a consistent basis, that pretty much says it all. It says you don’t respect your own running game’s ability to get a single yard, and that tells the opposing defense the same thing.

:: I’m really sick of hearing things like “They’ll never get a better chance than this year to beat New England, with Tom Brady out!”. That’s a meme I’m hearing way too often this year, on sports radio and in print. Jeez. Brady’s a great player, a no-brainer Hall of Famer. But he’s not the reincarnation of Achilles. He’s not the greatest clutch QB in the universe, he’s beatable (the Giants did it last year, remember?), and I think he’s probably already peaked, anyway. But even setting that aside, it’s a dumb thing to say. If you want to be the best, you have to be able to beat the best. I hate the notion of accepting that the Bills can do no better than 2nd place as long as Brady’s under center in New England, unless their plan is to go 14-2 with the two losses being against the Patriots. Ugh.

OK, I’m done. Barring something supremely weird happening, I won’t be posting about football again until the Super Bowl, if even then.

Share This Post

Posted on

Sentential Links #148

At last, the franchise returns! Hooray!! Or not. Anyway, some linkage to good stuff:

:: The more women I meet, the more I realize that most are not worthy of what I have to give.

:: Will I hide my head in the sand or try to bolt the door when hurting comes calling? Or will I open the door and let it in with equanimity?
And what will that mean for me?

:: I always wondered about extremely long wars. In year 37 of the 100 Years’ War, do the leaders remember what the point was. By year 73, all the leaders are most certainly dead, and all there is to hold onto is an abstraction. “For England!” or whatnot. (This was addressed on an Original Series episode of Star Trek, called “A Taste of Armageddon”. The Enterprise arrives at a planet that’s been at war with its neighbor planet for 500 years, and they’ve refined war to the point where the computers decide where the bombs have gone off and who has been killed, and then the people who have “died” are required to report to disintegration booths to be really killed. Kirk, of course, tosses the Prime Directive aside and intercedes.)

:: I was thinking about David Crosby the other day. Is there, could there be a bigger horse’s ass, out of all the notable musicians that came to prominence in the 60’s?

:: Q. Why does a Yugo have rear a window defroster? (Wow, the Yugo is gone. Between that and the discontinuation of Zima, I feel like…well, that the world actually got a bit better!)

:: It suddenly hit me at a little after 8 o’clock last night that I have a slightly horrifying amount of food in the house.

:: Now, setting aside that it’s always better to edit, we can still ask — was the book better for losing those six pages of character and story? I don’t know. But it seems damn silly to bend storytelling to a format sold almost exclusively in low-attendance, often creepy specialty shops scattered across the nation.

:: A good date movie shapes the subsequent emotional responses so it needs to be chosen with thought. With that in mind, allow me to guide you through the steps of a relationship, movie by movie.

:: Jesus Christ, when did I become older than James Bond? When exactly did that happen? (I’m not! I’m younger, by three years! Huzzah!!!)

And that’s all for this week. We’ll be back next week. I promise. Unless I’m lying.

Share This Post

Posted on

Street Musicians


Grafton Street, originally uploaded by brigid_shine.

I was randomly surfing Flickr a bit this morning, and I loved this photo, so here it is. I’ve never seen young and pretty street musicians before; the ones I’ve always seen are older, gnarled a bit by their years, with their skill with their instruments varying directly with the degree to which they’ve been gnarled by their years. But it doesn’t have to be that way, right?

Share This Post