“CLOUD ATLAS”: THE MOVIE

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Jul 262012
 

We’re going off topic with this post, but for a good reason: because your humble editor just watched a movie trailer that caused a few thousand micro-strokes, leading to one big fuckin’ head explosion.

Cloud Atlas is the name of a novel by David Mitchell that was published in 2004 to considerable critical acclaim. It seemed like it would be a fascinating read, so I bought the book. I’m pretty sure it’s lying around here somewhere, probably underneath some animal pelts or unread magazines from 2005. Anyway, I didn’t read the book and forgot all about it, until today.

And today a friend sent me a link to the trailer for a movie that has been made from the Cloud Atlas novel. It stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, James D’Arcy, Zhou Xun, Keith David, David Gyasi, and Susan Sarandon. It was co-written for the screen and co-directed by the people who made the The Matrix trilogy (Andy and Lana Wachowski)  and Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer).

Trying to describe the plot is difficult, but from what I’ve read, it involves interlinked stories spanning centuries (and extending into the future) about six characters, including a voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer struggling in Belgium between the wars; a journalist in 1970s California; a vanity publisher fleeing gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and a young Pacific Islander witnessing the downfall of science and civilization.

I have no idea how these stories connect, though some time travel seems to be involved. Maybe it will turn out to be a confusing mess — some people who’ve read the book are fearful about that. But I can tell you that based on this long trailer, the movie LOOKS fucking awesome. Continue reading »

SNOW CRASH: THE MOVIE (!?!)

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Jun 172012
 

Okay, I’m gonna show a little bit of my age now: I read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash when it was a new book, and it turned my brain inside out. It affected a lot of other people the same way. Though not as seminal a work in the cyberpunk oeuvre as William Gibson’s Neuromancer, it was still pretty damned influential.

At long last, Snow Crash is going to be made into a movie. When I say “at long last”, that doesn’t mean I’ve been eager to see this happen. In fact, I think the odds of a book like this being turned into a good and faithful movie are slim. I mean that the movie rights to the book were first acquired by Paramount in 1992, and the project was later transferred to Disney, where it seemed to die.

The development of the movie is now back at Paramount, in the hands of Kathleen Kennedy (Kennedy/Marshall) as producer and Joe Cornish as director. Cornish is the guy who directed a highly buzzed-about alien invasion movie named Attack the Block, which I haven’t seen but which I heard good things about. He seems to be a hot property, and Paramount seems to have made this production a priority, so this is probably going to become a reality.

I hate to be a pessimist (which in fact goes against my nature), but I have some anxieties because there are so many ways this can be fucked up, starting with selection of the actor to play the book’s half-black, half-Japanese, sword-wielding hacker protagonist, Hiro Protagonist. Yeah, that’s his name, and don’t laugh until you’ve read the book. Continue reading »

MEMORIAL DAY MATTERS

 Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  21 Responses »
May 282012
 

Here in the U.S., it’s Memorial Day, a national holiday established long ago to commemorate the men and women who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.

Even though my own long-dead father was himself a decorated Marine Corps vet and my brother-in-law is a veteran of the Gulf War, I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me a while to separate my feelings about people who served in combat from my feelings about the wars in which they served — or about war in general. About the only time I feel warlike is when I’m listening to warlike metal. I think the last war that was worth fighting (for my country) was the one in Korea, and sometimes I’m not even sure about that one.

I did finally realize what should be obvious to people smarter than me — that soldiers and sailors and airmen do not start wars or decide which wars are worth fighting. They simply do their duty, and they become maimed, suffer mental trauma, and die because of decisions made by others who put them in harm’s way. They deserve to be honored for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the causes in which they sacrifice themselves are worth their sacrifices. They deserve to be remembered and supported even when the conflicts in which they have served are insupportable.

Memorial Day should be a day not only for remembering the dead but also for remembering the living — not only people who are currently serving in the Armed Forces but also veterans. The U.S. has done a piss-poor job of supporting its military veterans. Our government is willing to spend trillions of dollars to finance wars and huge defense establishments, but what we spend to support people after they’ve served their purpose and been discharged — especially those who have been disabled during their service — is shameful. Continue reading »

LONDON HOMESICK BLUES

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May 122012
 

Even though I live in the Pacific Northwest, I’m not a native of the region. The place where I was born and lived until I finished high school is Austin, Texas. My mother and brother still live there, and I go back there to visit a couple times a year. I’ve traveled around a fair amount, and if I could reverse time and have my choice of places to call my hometown, I’d still pick Austin.

In early April, I flew back to Texas to be at the wedding of a young woman I’ve known forever. The ceremony was performed by a good friend of mine (and hers) who got some kind of on-line minister’s license to perform lawful marriages in the State of Texas. The wedding took place outside at a farm in Brenham, Texas (which is about halfway between Houston and Austin). There were a couple hundred people in attendance on a beautiful afternoon. After the wedding, we partied hard. There was plentiful barbeque and beer and an ass-kicking band who seemed capable of playing any kind of music you could want, and playing it well . . . except for metal. But I had a fuckin’ good time anyway.

Somewhere around midnight, that band started playing a song I hadn’t heard since the Neolithic Era. There was a time when that song meant the world to me. When I first left Texas as a young idiot, I was homesick a lot, and that song reminded me of home . . . not the nasty, right-wing bastion that Texas has become in the minds of most people nowadays, but the tolerant, left-wing, dope-smoking, laid-back, open-hearted, music-loving place where I grew up.

The song was written by Gary P. Nunn. It was made famous (at least in Texas) through a live 1973 recording of the song by Jerry Jeff Walker and The Lost Gonzo Band, which appeared on an album called ¡Viva Terlingua! That whole album is chock full of win, or maybe it’s just chock full of nostalgia for a displaced Texan like myself. Gary P. Nunn was part of The Lost Gonzo Band when the album was recorded, and he, rather than Jerry Jeff, did the vocals on the song that’s the subject of this post. But I have a slight preference for Gary P.’s own recording of the song, so that’s the version I’m going to play for you right after the post.

The lyrics are awesome, so I’m including those, too — though my British friends may not find them so awesome. They’re about a Texas musician finding himself in London and missing Texas.

This is not metal — not even close — but the song has been on my mind since April (the chorus is still one of the catchiest things I’ve ever heard), I woke up thinking about it this morning, and so fuck it, I’m devoting this post to it. Continue reading »

GOD WILL FUCK YOU UP

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Apr 202012
 

At some point, long ago, my family taught me not to discuss religion or politics with anyone unless I just felt in the mood for a pointless argument in which reason wouldn’t enter into the discussion. Of course, I ignored this advice for a long time, as I ignored all sorts of other advice I got, most of which concerned drinking, drugs, and women.

Hey, I don’t think I turned out any worse for ignoring all this advice, though it definitely is true that almost no one who cares about religion or politics is going to change their beliefs by debating the wisdom of what they believe. For a long time, I just really enjoyed pointless arguing, especially when drunk or drugged. As time has passed, that got boring and/or painful (the part about debating religion and politics), and so now I stick to the advice I got when I was raised (the advice about debating religion and politics).

So, this post isn’t mainly about my own opinions on the subject of religion. I will say that I don’t see much point in believing in a deity who seems just as nasty, vindictive, and cruel as my fellow human beings. I doubt that any such being exists, and if he did, I wouldn’t want to empower him with my belief anyway (or debase myself either). I’d rather just take my chances.

But rather than pontificate about the subject of religion, what I really want to do in this post is play you a video that’s just out-and-out hilarious. Fuck, if you could get past all the “bad language”, it might even be fun to watch if you were a person who believed in an ornery God who punishes people for acting like . . . people. Though I wouldn’t know. Continue reading »

FILLER

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Apr 172012
 

I got nothing.  Except I got this.  So I got everything.

Translation: I’m short on time these days, so there won’t be as many daily posts as usual. I have ideas and projects under way . . . but not as much time as I’d like to get them done.  I will have at least one more post today, but it won’t happen for 5 or 6 more hours. I know that, somehow, you will survive . . . because if tiny monkeys can hitch a ride on a capybara, then anything is possible.

(Thanks to Tommy Wills (RXYZYXR), from whom I stole this photo.)

 

 

DISTRACTIONS

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Apr 142012
 

For reasons I explained yesterday, I haven’t been my usual upbeat self lately, and I’m still pretty down. NCS readers have been really understanding and sympathetic. Some of you have even sent me e-mails with links to videos and music, in hopes that they would prove to be distractions from my grief  . . . and they have been.

I’ve collected some of them in this post, in case  you might need some distractions, too. I’ve arranged them in order of increasing weirdness and depravity, with the finale being a NSFW video by a band of Finnish deviants named Turmion Kätilöt (pictured above). Nothing takes your mind off grief like depravity.

ITEM ONE

This item, and the next two, came my way from Ben C. (Church of the Riff). I liked his introductions so much I’m just going to steal them. Here’s his preface to Item One: “Meet Buck. He’s a deer, who’s dating a hunter’s daughter. It sounds tame, but this is seriously some Pixar quality shit.” And so it is.

You can probably guess where this one is headed, just from Ben’s description. The high points for me were the near-kiss in the tunnel, the hunter’s stoic bloodhound, and the final few seconds. There’s a metaphor in here. I think it’s a message about tolerance for interspecies love. What do you think? Continue reading »

MISERY

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Apr 122012
 

I’m getting a slow start on today’s NCS posts. We had to put our cat down yesterday, a couple of weeks after his 18th birthday.

He had gone downhill fast. He stopped eating about 5 days ago, stopped cleaning himself, and was having trouble walking. He didn’t seem to be in pain, yet, but he seemed miserable. The vet said he was most likely experiencing kidney failure, which she said is the most common cause of death in old cats. She said he could last a few more days on his own, or conceivably a few more weeks, even without eating. She said she could do some things to prolong his life, but that his time had come. She said it would be appropriate in her opinion to euthanize him.

My wife and I agonized about that for 24 hours, but we couldn’t stand to see him in the condition he was in. So late yesterday, the vet gave him an injection of something that rendered him unconscious in about 5 minutes. His eyes slowly closed and his small, dark head drooped onto his chest. She then put an IV in a vein and used it to inject something else that stopped his heart in seconds.

I’ve been in bad shape since then. Continue reading »

A PACKAGE DEAL

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Apr 052012
 

I thought I’d wrap up the posting day with a random assortment of goodies I found today. Nothing ties these three items together except that I found them all entertaining, in a slightly unhinged way. The first two would have made more sense in an installment of THAT’s METAL!, but I’m too impatient to wait for that. The third one is actually music, which is why there’s an album cover up above.

ITEM ONE

The BBC will screen remarkable footage of penguins flying as part of its new natural history series, Miracles of Evolution. That’s right, flying. Camera crews discovered this phenomenon while filming a colony of Adélie penguins on King George Island, some 750 miles south of the Falkland Islands.

The program is being presented by ex-Monty Python star Terry Jones, who said: “We’d been watching the penguins and filming them for days, without a hint of what was to come.

“But then the weather took a turn for the worse. It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do.” Watch what they did after the jump. Continue reading »

PROMETHEUS

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Mar 182012
 

Until today I didn’t know much about the forthcoming movie Prometheus. A lot of info has become available, but I wasn’t paying attention to it. I knew what I needed to know — that it was a sci-fi film and that Ridley Scott directed it. A sci-fi film made by the director of Alien and Blade Runner, and his first return to the sci-fi genre that launched his career in almost 30 years? Fuck yes, that’s a movie I was going to see, regardless of plot, actors, reviews.

Today I saw the first official trailer for Prometheus, thanks to a tip from Quigs. My reaction — the first two words that came to mind? “Holy shit.” It’s visually stunning, and the bits of story line that emerge are intriguing, to say the least. The trailer is also intense, and there’s a lot of screaming at the end. There was a lot of screaming when I saw Alien for the first time, too, most of it coming from me.

Having been sucked in this far, I decided to read more about the movie. It stars Noomi Rapace, (who was great in the Swedish original of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Michael Fassbender (who was great as Magneto in X-Men: First Class), Guy Pearce (who was great in Memento, L.A. Confidential, and everything else he’s done), Idris Elba (from The Wire), and Charlize Theron (who has been great in everything of hers I’ve seen, especially Monster and In the Valley of Elah).

So, lots of great actors. The plot also sounds interesting. Although originally conceived as a prequel to Alien, it has evolved into something more, though still set in the same universe as Alien. Continue reading »

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