Posts

Posted on

Laser Brain


Laser Brain, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Here’s Lester, one of the resident cats here at Casa Jaquandor. The reason he looks all blurry is because he’s chasing a laser pointer. He just loves the laser pointer. I used to have one that I kept on a keychain, and he got to the point where he recognized the sound that particular keychain made when I picked it up, so he’d come running whenever he heard it because he knew he’d get to chase that bright red dot across the floor. Sometimes, of course, I was just picking up the keychain to get at something underneath it (I just kept it right out on my desk), so I’d look down and see Lester staring up at me, all wide-eyed.

The current laser pointer is actually embedded in a LED flashlight which has three settings: flashlight, laser pointer, and flashlight with laser pointer at the same time. Lester doesn’t yet recognize the sound of the flashlight as I pull it from my laptop bag, so I have to wave the laser around until it catches his eye.

Once I get him chasing the laser throughout the apartment, I like to get him in an open spot in the floor and then spin the laser around him, so he chases it in tight circles as though he’s chasing his tail. That’s what’s happening here. Cats plus Lasers equals FUN!

Share This Post

Posted on

Poppity pop pop pop!

I love popcorn.

Love it.

Popcorn is one of my favorite foods, and I’m simply incapable of seeing a movie at the theater without popcorn. If I’ve just come from a big dinner, as part of a “dinner and a movie” type thing, I’ll still buy a small popcorn. I consumed popcorn whilst watching Schindler’s List, which is as un-popcorn a movie as has ever been made.

At home, I love popcorn a lot too. For years we’ve used microwave popcorn exclusively — usually a “light” version of a “Movie Theater Butter” flavor. Not the healthiest alternative, obviously, but we don’t indulge in popcorn all that frequently; once a week, at most. But the trouble with the microwave stuff is that it’s full of chemicals and that butter flavor is pretty fake. (Yeah, so’s the “buttery topping” they put on the stuff at the theater.)

Part of our general approach toward food in 2010 is to rely less on processed, chemical-laden food products. This, we quickly realized, could also include popcorn. So, we bought ourselves a popcorn popper.

The Popcorn Popper I

It’s a StirCrazy, which we chose because that’s what we had when I was a kid. That old version worked wonders, and I realized that I missed that old, clean flavor of popcorn a great deal. The ingredients no longer include whatever chemicals and artificial flavorings go into the microwave stuff; now the ingredients are merely these: popcorn, oil, butter, and salt.

With the StirCrazy, you pour a few tablespoons of oil into the base, and then measure out your corn:

The Popcorn Popper II

Measuring is very important. Must always measure!

Then you pour that onto the hot plate as well and put the dome cover on top. The cover doubles as a serving bowl later on, but for now, it’s a cover and a butter-melter. Here it is:

The Popcorn Popper III

There’s an armature (basically a steel rod) that rotates at the bottom of the heat plate, constantly stirring the popcorn and oil. At the top of the dome cover is a well with holes in it; that’s where you put your butter. As the heat rise, it melts the butter, which then drips through the holes onto the corn. This arrangement works surprisingly well at getting butter all over the popcorn. (We use unsalted butter exclusively.)

Of course, one can attempt to help the process along by using heat vision, but success will be hard to come by:

The Popcorn Popper IV

In time the corn starts popping, slowly at first, but quickly filling up the entire dome cover:

The Popcorn Popper V

A minute later:

The Popcorn Popper VI

Once the popping slows, you unplug the popper, grab the handles, invert it, remove the hot plate, and voila! A beautiful bowl of popcorn. Salt, stir, and consume.

We’ll still keep microwave stuff around, because sometimes it’s just plain convenient to be able to nuke a bag as opposed to dragging the popper out. But generally, this stuff tastes so much better, with just good old unsalted butter, Kosher salt, and peanut oil. (I may try doing it with coconut oil sometime, just to see if coconut oil’s effect on popcorn is as pronounced as I’ve heard over the years.) The flavor was not only wonderfully clean and “unprocessed”, it took me back to my youth when we’d have a bowl of popcorn prepared just this way (using an earlier model of the same popper) during Family Teevee Night.

I can’t recommend this highly enough. If you have any love of popcorn at all, get a good popper. (And not an air popper, either. Those things result in crappy popcorn!)

Share This Post

Posted on

With great power….

As part of “Instead of the Buffalo Bills Theater”, The Daughter and I watched, on three successive Sundays, the Spiderman movies. And in digging through my archives, I found my original post on Spiderman, and my original post on Spiderman 3, but I apparently never posted anything about Spiderman 2! So here, I will rectify that.

(Before I begin, I have nothing really to add to my original posts on the first and third films.)

OK, Spiderman 2. This is, simply, one of the best superhero movies I’ve ever seen. It’s almost right up there with Superman. It’s good because, like the best superhero movies, it inherently gets what its hero is all about. Now, that wasn’t a problem with Spiderman, but where the first film seemed a bit hesitant to allow its hero to really get anywhere, Spiderman 2 had no such problems.

The key to understanding Spiderman, as is the case with all great superheroes, is understanding his regular life alter-ego, Peter Parker. Superhero alter-egos often tended to be people with good and productive lives as civilians in addition to their superhero antics; the central brilliance of Spiderman has always been that about the only part of Peter Parker’s life that is not a slowly unfolding train wreck is his life as Spiderman, and even then we’re not always sure. Peter’s a guy with problems. He’s brilliant and motivated, but somehow he can’t put those two things together into a life that doesn’t involve constantly scraping the bottom of the money barrel, desperately clutching on to – and failing to keep – a job as a pizza delivery guy, failing to keep simple promises like “Sure, Mary Jane, I’ll be there at eight.” Peter Parker’s life is a total, complete mess, and it’s the kind of mess we can easily relate to – well, aside from the spider-powers and being hunted by deranged supervillains stuff.

Spiderman 2 gets all of this. Take its wonderful opening sequence, which has Peter trying to keep the afore-mentioned pizza delivery job. He has to go some clearly absurd distance in some clearly absurd amount of time – something like fifty New York City blocks in twenty minutes with eight pizzas – and he’s on his last chance. Off he goes on his motor scooter, and he’s doing pretty well for a while, until something happens that makes the scooter trip impossible. What’s a guy to do? Why, have Spiderman deliver the pizzas! Of course Peter can traverse the remaining distance in mere minutes, right?

Well…wrong. Even as he web-slings his way across town in minutes, he fails to make the delivery guarantee, the receptionist rolls her eyes and says “I’m not paying for those,” and Peter gets fired. Ouch. And of course, as everyone well-versed in the comics remembers, Peter is brilliant and yet has a hard time in school; he’s ambitious and yet can only find semi-reliable money in selling photos of himself as Spiderman to the Daily Bugle; he somehow can’t manage to get any kind of relationship going with a girl; his best friend has sworn to kill Spiderman; and to top all of that off, Peter makes the acquaintance of another in what will be a long line of brilliant scientist-types who miscalculate in an experiment that goes so awry as to turn them into supervillains. This time, it’s Otto Octavius, whose brain ends up fused with the mechanical arms he’s invented for himself, thus making himself into…Dr. Octopus!

One of the film’s masterstrokes is in how it creates its villain. Whereas in the first film Norman Osborne was something of a loon even before he went all the way around the bend as the Green Goblin, in the second film, Octavius is depicted as not just brilliant, but also warm and very likable. His fall into horrible villainy is a tragic one, even as we can somehow understand his motives after he becomes Dr. Octopus. The first two Spiderman movies really handled their villains well, which is a huge reason as to why they both worked.

So why did I like Spiderman 2 more than the first one? As I noted years ago, Spiderman bothered me not so much in the shortcuts in took in the Spiderman story but in the way it took them. Spiderman 2 commits no such errors along the way. Yes, we’re in movies, so we can’t have everything we’d want in a Spiderman movie, but the film gets all of its little touches right, along the way.

The most important detail to get right in a good Spiderman story is that things never go quite Spiderman’s way. Ever. Things go wrong for Peter Parker most of the time, and on the infrequent occasions when they actually go right, they do so in such a way that not only does it look to everyone else that Peter’s screwed up again, but he can’t even set the record straight without revealing himself as Spiderman. So we have Peter ending up late to Mary Jane’s big acting debut because he had to stop and save some random pedestrian from getting run over by a car along the way. Or, in one of the best tiny moments in the film, in the pizza delivery scene early on, Peter realizes he’s not going to make it. So he ducks into an alley and pops out seconds later as Spiderman, with the pizzas! Yay! Except some random passerby saw him go into the alley and saw Spiderman exit, so he yells out, “Hey! Spiderman stole that guy’s pizzas!” A throwaway moment that illustrates the fact that Peter can never get the credit for anything.

Spiderman 2 also works because it doesn’t commit the somewhat vexing errors with regard to Spiderman canon that the first and third films commit, primarily with respect to Gwen Stacy. Basically, there was almost nothing in Spiderman 2 to distract me from the business at hand. (Well, maybe one thing – the scene where Spidey literally unmasks himself in front of an entire crowd of people. That strained things a bit for me, but I could forgive it.)

Spiderman 3 would go on to commit a pretty impressive number of errors, even though I’ve never been as down on it as most people seemingly are. Nor have I ever been as down on Kirsten Dunst as many people seem to be, either. So basically, I wish the original creative team could come back and continue the work they started.

(BTW, in watching the three Spiderman movies again, I was more favorably impressed with Danny Elfman’s scores with the first two films than I was originally. They’re actually fairly subtle scores, but not as themeless as I had first thought. They’re still not favorite scores of mine, but they’re not bad.)

Share This Post

Posted on

Star Wars Revisited

Last week I learned of the existence of a thing called Star Wars Revisited, which turns out to be a “Fan edit” — basically, some guy armed with a Mac put together his own version of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Well, OK, that’s simplifying a bit — he did quite a labor of love here, actually. Here’s a list of the changes “Adywan” made, using the Special Editions as his base film for moving forward. I was naturally interested in what this was all about, so I tracked it down, downloaded it, and gave it a viewing. I wasn’t exhaustive in watching it; I skipped forward a lot and basically watched what I felt like watching in about forty minutes. So what did I think?

Well, I’m not sure.

There’s some very cool stuff done here, make no mistake. It always surprised me that even when they did the Special Editions, Luke’s lightsaber still looked awful in the “training with the remote” scene. That’s fixed now. Other stuff that stood out? Well, Adywan added the two suns of Tatooine to the shot of the escape pod flying toward the planet. I thought that was kind of neat:

Most of the changes are small — looking at the list, in fact, many of them are things even I, who almost knows the film shot by shot at this point, wouldn’t have even thought of as errors that needed fixing. But even some of those changes are kind of cool, such as the new motion given to the ships during the Millennium Falcon‘s escape from Tatooine.

And this, the first appearance of the Death Star in the film, is pretty cool:

There’s a lot of stuff like that: new effects created by an amateur filmmaker that at this point look, for the most part, right at home alongside all the ILM stuff. There are some really nice new effects shots during the post-Death Star escape dogfight, for instance. And I’m sure most Star Wars fans will most appreciate this version of the film for two simple reasons: the Jabba scene that George Lucas “finished” and put back into the film for the Special Editions is gone again, and Greedo’s finger never touches the trigger of his blaster.

What didn’t I like? Well, for one thing, he completely resequenced the scene in Ben Kenobi’s home, where Luke first learns of the Force. Presumably this was to make the conversation flow better in terms of its topics, but…maybe it’s just that I’ve heard the original scene so many times, but it was horribly jarring. I think the original scene works fine.

There were also some things done with music that bothered me. When I was active on various film music discussion fora, it was funny to note that every time a rumor or report would show up about George Lucas tinkering with the Original Trilogy again, someone would immediately speculate as to whether Lucas would re-do the score of the original film to include the famous Imperial March that would only debut in The Empire Strikes Back. Lucas hasn’t done this, yet…but Adywan does. When we first see the Death Star, there’s the Imperial March, big as life. That bugged me — not only am I used to the film not having the Imperial March in it, but it also removes a key leitmotif from the ANH score at the moment when it needs to be heard the most. Didn’t like that. I also didn’t care for tracking in “Battle of the Heroes”, the dueling music from Revenge of the Sith, into the fight between Obi Wan and Vader. That just didn’t work either for me. Neither did some replacement of music during the Death Star battle.

What did work musically was a restoration of sorts. As the Battle of Yavin starts up, Red Leader says something like “Cut across the axis and try to draw their fire” as the ships engage in battle. At that moment, the score surges into a blazing rendition of the Force Theme in the trumpets. It’s as musically thrilling a moment as there is anywhere in all of Star Wars — but it was dialed down, and the ship engine sounds dialed way up, for the DVD releases of the films back in 2004. Adywan has fixed that, which makes me happy.

And for one last tantalizing thing: he’s re-done the destruction of the Death Star itself. Now, I kind of liked the Special Edition “Praxis Wave” when the Death Star exploded, but it’s gone. What’s really nice here is that Adywan has the Death Star exploding just as it’s firing its superlaser at the Forth Moon:

That’s a nice touch, there.

Of course, the existence of such a film raises the obvious question: how “definitive” is it? Nothing happens in it that changes any kind of Star Wars canon one iota, so is it a matter of viewer taste? Are we entering an era in which there will be more and more versions of films out there? Are we to pick and choose our personal Star Wars?

Share This Post

Posted on

Lowering the bar a bit, are we?

Here’s part of the AOL welcome screen that greeted me this morning:

Eight is Enough. “Classic” episode.

Sometimes the world scares me. Eight is Enough? Classic episode?! Are we now defining “classic” teevee as “that which was originally televised more than thirty years ago”? Because, if we are, the whole notion of shark-jumping is in for some unfortunate revision….

Share This Post

Posted on

Dizzney Quizz

I saw this on SamuraiFrog and on Cal’s Canadian Cave of Coolness, so it must be good. It’s about Disney movies.

Which Disney Princess film is your favorite?

Hmmmm…first I had to establish just what the “canonical” Disney Princess films are. For the purposes of this quiz, I’ll use the list here. And geez, this question turns out to be pretty hard. I’m going to go with Aladdin, for sentimental reasons (in college, I saw it four times with The Girlfriend (now The Wife)).

Which non-Disney Princess Disney Film is your favorite?

Peter Pan. I’ve always loved this movie, even with the awful racism of “What Makes the Red Man Red”.

Which Disney film makes you cry the most?

Hmmmm…hard to say. None of them really make me cry, actually, although Beauty and the Beast comes pretty close if I’m in the right mood.

Which Disney film makes you the happiest?

The Emperor’s New Groove. That movie is so unabashedly silly that it’s almost like the filmmakers were channeling the spirit of Chuck Jones.

Which Disney film has the best music?

In terms of songs, Beauty and the Beast — that’s when Alan Menken and Howard Ashman were at their best. In terms of score? That’s a little tougher. If we’re including the Pixar films, then Finding Nemo. Thomas Newman’s score for that film is amazing. (For the classic films, maybe Bambi.)

Which Disney film has the best love story?

I’ve always liked the bittersweet way The Hunchback of Notre Dame ends, so I’ll say that one. I haven’t seen the film in a long time.

Who is your favorite Disney Princess?

Cinderella.

Who is your favorite Disney Prince?

Who are the canonical Princes, anyway? Is Aladdin a prince? If so, that’s my guy.

Who is your favorite Disney animal sidekick?

Abu from Aladdin. And it’s not a question, but my favorite sentient inanimate object sidekick is the Magic Carpet from the same movie.

Who is your favorite Disney main character animal?

Main character animal…hmmmm…let’s go with Bernard and Miss Bianca, The Rescuers.

Who is your favorite villain?

Jafar, from Aladdin. For an animated character, he really seems to be one of those wonderful “chewing the scenery” types of film villains.

What is your favorite Disney song?

Oh boy…this is just too hard. My favorite song from all of Disney? That’s like choosing a favorite symphony. I’ll name one, just for the sake of the quiz, but I could name another tomorrow. Yes, I’m stalling.

Hmmmm….

Oh, all right. “Belle”, from Beauty and the Beast. It’s what every great musical needs: a curtain-raising ensemble number that introduces the characters.

What is your favorite Disney villian song?

Geez, these are hard! “Hellfire” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame is very chilling; Jafar’s reprise of “Prince Ali” from Aladdin is also highly effective. I’d go with either of those.

But then there’s “Gaston”…and “Poor Unfortunate Souls”….

What is your favorite Disney animal song?

Is this a song about animals, or a song sung by animals? That’s kind of tough. Hmmmm…I don’t much like The Jungle Book, but I guess “Bare Necessities” is kind of catchy. (I’d have like the movie better if it had just been about the animals, and let Mowgli get eaten by Shere Khan.)

What is your favorite Disney Princess song?

“God Help the Outcasts” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, even though I suppose Esmerelda’s not a Princess, is she? Hmmmmm.

What is your favorite Disney Prince song?

“One Song”, from Snow White.

What is your favorite Disney Prince/Princess duet song?

Mentioned above, but “A Whole New World” from Aladdin. I love the hell out of it.

What is your favorite Disney love song?

“How Do You Know?” from Enchanted. Amy Adams makes me all kinds of happy in that flick.

Share This Post

ForgottenStars.net

The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

Skip to content ↓