liberty punk
"the irony of the information age is that it's given new respectability to uninformed opinion."


Saturday, July 26, 2003  

You Know What They Say About Helicopters...

So this afternoon, I'm all set to go see '28 Days Later,' even though nobody's around and it looks like I'm gonna have to go by myself. No big deal-- at this point, I'm dead set on seeing this flick under any circumstances. I check the paper for the listings for the theater (sorry, "cineplex") by me... it's not listed. I go online, moviefone.com, check my theater to make sure... no '28 Days.' 'Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and C'mon, Who Really Gives a Shit' was playing in two separate theaters all through the day and on into the night, but '28 Days' was no longer being offered. Even though it's being advertised everywhere that there's an alternate ending now being shown after the credits, and even though these ads all say "NOW PLAYING: EVERYWHERE," it was not in fact playing, now, everywhere. My stupid complaint for today is that movies don't stay in theaters long enough, though I take some amount of comfort in the fact that they also hit video stores faster than ever these days.

'Daredevil' arrived in theaters when, a couple of months ago? The DVD hits stores this Tuesday. No joke.

So anyway, I saw 'Terminator 3' instead, and liked it. I kind of wish the My-So-Called-Life girl wasn't in it, because she gave it a sort of "bad sitcom episode" flavor. Only a little, though. What I focused on in 'Terminator 3' was all the myriad creative ways an assortment of machines, appliances, vehicles, and buildings were smashed to Hell. I think I can say I have not seen a better two hours' worth of smashing. In a fight scene between Arnold and the Terminatrix girl, he cracks her across the face with a porcelain urinal, shattering it, and then seconds later, slam-dunks her headfirst through a toilet bowl. Right through it, and several inches into the tile floor underneath. That is pure action-movie-fight genius. POW! Urinal, then POW! Toilet bowl. There was a car-chase involving a fire engine and an enourmous two-lane-wide crane truck. Millions of dollars in property damage to countless parked cars and sides of buildings. Stuff blowing up, people yelling a lot. Later, a helicopter crashes through a big metal bunker door and screeches to a grinding, fiery halt, only to be crushed by an even bigger helicopter that comes lurching through the hole an instant later.

(That rule, about a movie's quality being inversely proportional to the number of helicopters in it... I never really bought that.)

This movie out-smashfest'ed 'Hulk,' I can say that much.

Also, it stuck with and progressed the storyline from the first two, I think.

You're gonna wish you hadn't wasted your time reading all that when you realize you should have been reading this guest post over at A Small Victory, written by Ben Weasel, who was lucky (or unlucky, as the case may be) enough to see '28 Days Later' before it was plucked from the theaters to make room for an extra five showings of 'Legally Blonde 2: Who Is Legally Responsible For This Sequel Having Been Made?'

Oh well. '28 Days' will be out on DVD in a couple of minutes anyway. I can wait.

(A Small Victory's Michele is in the middle of the 24-hour 2003 Blogathon right now. Stop by and give her some love, and some sponsorship too, if ya can.)

posted by geoff | 7:24 PM |


Friday, July 25, 2003  

I Can't Think Of A Good Title For This Post

I just entered a contest on AlkalineTrio.com to win a Dan Andriano signature-model GPC bass.

If any of you out there are of the God-persuasion, please throw a prayer to [insert name of your deity here] to help me win it.

It might improve my chances of winning the sexalicious mint-green bass if, somewhere in your prayer, you say something like "I'll never ask for anything else as long as I live." If I were God, I'd listen to those prayers more carefully and would probably more inclined to grant them, because then those people would be off my fucking back for good, giving me more time to answer the prayers of gamblers, wanna-be ex-alcoholics, and last-minute death-bed repenters. And more time for smiting. If I were God, you bet I'd be smiting things left and right.

Thanks!

Hey-- go check out Dr. Frank's site. He's been updating from the studio where the new Mr. T Experience album is being recorded. It's neat to be able to peek into the process, and when the record comes out and you listen to it, you'll be able to say "Hmm, so that backup vocal by Joe King was recorded while Dr. Frank was away doing a solo show!" and "the sounds that I am listening to right now have, in the past, been sent electronically through the very same mixing board as a Steely Dan album."

Being privy to little facts like that is a cool thing.

posted by geoff | 1:54 PM |


Thursday, July 24, 2003  

14 Eberts and 14 Roepers...

...Or would that be 7 Eberts and 7 Roepers? If they're each allowed to use both of their thumbs in criticism, then I suppose...

Eh. Either way, Ben didn't like '28 Days Later.'

Though I trust his judgement, I'd still like to check this movie out for myself. I feel that the last ten years owe me a good zombie movie, and since 'Resident Evil' simply must have been horrible, I'm still holding out hope for '28 Days...'

posted by geoff | 4:48 PM |


Wednesday, July 23, 2003  

Win Some, Lose Some...

So the record store where I work just got a bunch of copies of the new Alkaline Trio live-on-Halloween DVD in, even though it streets (that's hipper-than-thou indie-store slang for "will officially be released") on the 29th.

MY STORE: Score modifier = +1

However, we still don't have the new Riverdales album in stock, even though it was released yesterday. This could be because it was only released to distributors, who then have to send the copies to the stores, but I really have no idea. The bottom line is, we don't have it yet, which means I don't have it yet.

MY STORE: Score modifier = -1

FINAL SCORE: 0

As Apu said on last night's Simpsons: "Eh, take a penny, leave a penny..."

posted by geoff | 2:40 PM |
 

Quote of the Day!

"I don't mind dreaming about zombies because it is my firm belief that all good things in life point to zombies eventually." - A Small Victory's Michele, 7/23/03

That's just so beautiful, I had to quote it here.

posted by geoff | 10:43 AM |


Tuesday, July 22, 2003  

20 Greatest Americans...

So John Hawkins over at Right Wing News caught some shit from a fellow blogger the other day, apparently regarding the lack of wimmin on the '20 Greatest Americans' list that he posted the other day.

Even though I just spelled 'women' with two i's and two m's, I am in fact a little sympathetic to Hawkins' critic's viewpoint. Well, not sympathetic, so much as I think I can understand why she has such a viewpoint, and how she might have come to think she'd be right in saying that there's a "boy's club" in the blogosphere, and that the blogosphere is "sexist," as though that list of 20 (male) Americans, chosen by readers of Hawkins' site, was some kind of proof.

This is hit-me-in-the-temple with-a-two-by-four obvious, or at least it should be, but... For a signigicant portion of America's 200-some years of existence, women weren't allowed to do all that much.

Let that sink in...

...then realize that it's significantly harder to do anything like invent a light bulb or a crazy flying machine while you're busy scrubbing your kids' bloomers on a rusty washboard all day long. Hey-- it must have been hard enough to find the time to not be able to vote, even. This is a matter of history, nothing else.

Simply: While there have certainly been COUNTLESS absolutely ASTOUNDINGLY AMAZING women throughout America's history, there were no women on that '20 Greatest Americans' list because quite frankly, the men were more astoundingly amazing. Because they could be. The women weren't allowed to be as amazing. So no, this isn't about sexism in the blogosphere, it's about acknowledging history the way it was, not the way we wish it had been.

Of course, "greatest!" is a subjective term. A man might not give a tin shit about Gloria Steinem and a woman might not give a flying frog's fat ass about Ronald Reagan, but I can at least understand why Hawkins' readers chose the male-majority that they did.

Besides, in the year 2075, assuming America hasn't plummetted into a feelgood socialist Hell by then, someone will compile a list of the Fifty Greatest Figures In American History, and you know as well as I do that there will be women on that list. Women who deserve to be, not because other women felt jealous of the men getting all the attention, but because their accomplishments --things that women in the earlier part of America's history couldn't do-- would warrant inclusion on such a list.

And there you'll have a true and 'fair' history, without having to go into the past to revise it.

UPDATE: Check out what Mrs. du Toit had to say on the subject, in the comments under this post over at Margilowry dot com. I think The Mrs. is right on. Some extremist people might call her response a sell-out to the patriarchy, or some other such horseshit, but to those people I would politely say "go fuck yourselves," and I don't doubt that Mrs. du Toit would say the same.

posted by geoff | 11:11 AM |


Sunday, July 20, 2003  

Beat 'Em Or Burn 'Em...

What Kind of Zombie Are You?

I was a Romero zombie.

I cheated on the quiz, though, because I knew what answers I'd have to check off in order to be a 'Romero/Night-Dawn-Day-of-the-Dead Zombie.'

'Resident Evil zombie' should not even be on that list. I tell you this as the purest of zombie purists. Fantastic Playstation game, but shit-ass-awful movie. I tell you that as someone who only had to see the previews to know it would be a testicle-twisting abomination. I don't care if it wasn't; it was. The other zombie-types in the quiz were acceptable. Evil Dead, Dead Alive, Lucio Fulci's Zombie... they are all excellent, in their own distinct ways. The Italian 'sequels' to Fulci's movie get progressively less frightening (and increasingly similar to mid-1980's movies starring such people as Michael Dudikoff or Rutger Hauer) as the number following the word "Zombie" gets higher, but they're still worth checking out. Even Hong Kong's comical Bio Zombie has some noteworthy moments.

However...

As far as I'm concerned, George A. Romero invented the modern zombie. Granted, he wasn't the first filmmaker who choked on his coffee one morning at the thought of "Holy damn! I oughta make a movie about the shambling undead!" (see I Walked With A Zombie, or White Zombie, fer instance), but he laid the ground rules for how to make a zombie flick that's horrifying, funny, action-packed, apocalyptic, and with the aid of Tom Savini, gory as shit. The Return of the Living Dead series, while completely unrelated to Romero's movies, and while brazenly ignoring his zombie 'rules', were hilarious, because they featured zombies saying witty things like "I know you're in there, because I can smell your brains." No joke.

I've said it here before, and as sure as shit rolls downhill I'll say it here again, but... Dawn of the Dead is the best zombie film ever made, in addition to being one of the best all-around horror movies ever to pass before my eyeballs. Though there's not much that carries over between Night of the Living Dead (the first in Romero's 'trilogy'), 'Dawn', and Day of the Dead, other than the increasingly-unbalanced ratio of humans-to-zombies, you could do a lot worse for yourself some Friday night than to get comfortably drunk and watch the three movies in order.

In related news, I still haven't seen 28 Days Later. Hopefully I'm going tonight.

In other related news, here are some on-set pics from the upcoming 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. I have not yet formed an opinion about this one, though I will say I don't think the movie needs a remake, in the same way that Casablanca doesn't need a remake. Tom Savini remade 'Night' in 1990, as director, and the results were not self-mutilatingly bad, so... we'll see.

Random thought: If the Alkaline Trio ever record a song about zombies, and put it out on a limited-edition 7" picture-disc with a photo of a zombie on it, I'll probably go fucking berserk with zombie glee.

(Zombie quiz link via Michele)

posted by geoff | 6:14 PM |
archives
links
bands
hehe, etc.
Site Meter