Farewell Old Friends

Today I gathered up dozens of old books and movies, some of which I've had for decades, and took them to Goodwill. It was hard, because I'm sentimental about such things, but I don't have infinite space, and I'm forced to admit to myself that there are many books I'll never read again, many movies I'll never see again; and so the time has come to pass those pleasure on to others. 

This reluctant culling will continue. But I take comfort in the many books I have yet to read, the many movies I have yet to see, still wrapped snugly around our walls. 

Revisiting Buck Rogers

Over the last couple of weeks I've been making my way through the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century DVD set that I picked up 11 years ago. 11 YEARS AGO? And I thought my book backlog was bad.

In any event, revisiting a show that I first watched as a 10-to-12-year old has been entertaining. Even as a kid I knew the show was, on some level, derivative, unpolished and badly written, but I still enjoyed it because, hey...spaceships, aliens, scantily-clad space princesses, Erin Gray as Wilma Deering. Whatever the show's faults, the producer knew their audience: young boys (and hopefully a few girls inspired by Erin Gray's steely performance of the first season).

Like Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers presents a potentially interesting central conceit marred by lacklustre writing. The setup is simple but poignant: frozen in time for 500 years, astronaut Buck Rogers wakes up in the late 25th century to an Earth still recovering from a nuclear holocaust (one that happened, as it turned out, just after Buck left earth).

The pilot and a handful of episodes touch on Buck's sense of loss; unique in the world, this is a man who has truly lost everything in a way no one else ever could: not just a loved one, but all his loved ones; not just a country and a culture, but an entire civilization and all its complexity. (In a second season episode we discover that the Pyramids, Chichen Itza and Mount Rushmore are the only human artifacts to have survived to the 25th century.) Aside from a handful of scenes, though, the dramatic potential of Buck's displacement is virtually ignored in favour of pretty standard space villainy.

Were I to reinvent the series, I'd spend a lot more time exploring what a post-nuclear holocaust world would look like after 500 years of healing, and how Buck adapts. I'd probably ignore outer space entirely, relying instead on experts to come up with the sorts of real-world challenges such a society might face. I imagine everything would change, from manufacturing to agriculture to relationship customs to art. The art would be fascinating, one would think. You could even borrow an idea from the second season of Buck Rogers, in which the format changes to a more Star Trek-like exploration show; just keep the setting on Earth and have Buck and Wilma take on an HMS Beagle-style scouting expedition, roaming the world to catalogue mutant life and castoff pockets of survivors, not to mention any remaining valuable resources.

(As a kid I stopped watching Buck Rogers early in the second season, right after the Mark-Lenard-removes-his-head episode. Aside from the sarcastic new robot Chricton, season two really doesn't have much to recommend it.)

With Twin Peaks and The X-Files coming back to TV, it's not too far-fetched to imagine Buck Rogers might come back. It might even be good this time around. 

The DVD Savant on Invaders From Mars

Several years ago Glenn Erickson, AKA The DVD Savant, wrote a beautiful analysis of one of my favourite SF films, William Cameron Menzies' surreal Invaders From Mars. Earlier this month Erickson expanded and updated his already excellent essay, and it's worth a read if you're at all interested in film history, science fiction or cult movies.

Part One

Part Two

Mystery of the Missing Miscellany

When you have a lot of books and movies, it's easy for one or two titles to slip through the cracks and disappear. I know for sure that I'm missing my copy of John M. Ford's hilarious Star Trek novel, How Much for Just the Planet?, and both volumes of The Outer Limits on DVD.

I only noticed the absence of the Ford title because recently Sean asked me if I could loan him some classic Trek books, and How Much is certainly one of the best. I discovered The Outer Limits set was missing when I had a hankering to watch "The Forms of Things Unknown"a couple of months ago.

These items, of course, are easy to replace, so their loss is no great tragedy. But I've misplaced at least three things in my life that I really do miss:

1) The Realm, a movie I made in high school with Keith Gylander and Mark Lede. I had the only VHS copy, and in a moment of foolish desperation I used it as part of a video resume while job-seeking in those desperate summer months of 1991, just after I graduated from the University of Alberta. Unfortunately the place where I dropped off my resume and video package was in an area of the city I wasn't familiar with, and to top it off I lost the newspaper ad I'd used to find it (and the prospective job) in the first place. The employer never called me back, so I had no way to get my stuff back. Pure idiocy on my part.

2) "Ozone" soda pop commercial, another short film I made for a communications class during high school. Besides the commercial itself, the tape had a whole bunch of footage of my friends at the school, footage I'd dearly love to have today. If my memory serves, I accidentally taped over this with an SCTV special, then threw the tape away in disgust when I realized what I'd done.

3) One of two notepads full of story ideas from the early 90s. The notepad I lost included a very detailed and funny as-it-happened record of "Scuba Trek," describing the time when the University of Alberta Star Trek and Scuba clubs travelled to Los Angeles in February 1992. I have no idea where this might have gone, and what a shame; I could have turned it into a couple of memorable blog posts.

I suppose it's possible that VHS tape with The Realm is still sitting somewhere in that office, and the notebook might still be kicking around somewhere. So if by some miracle someone spots this stuff, please let me know...

Why I Still Love DVD

Today I finally finished watching The Bionic Woman on DVD. It was one of the first television shows to feature a true series finale with narrative closure: "On the Run," in which Jaime Sommers, feeling monstrous because of her bionics and sick of OSI missions eating up her life, resigns from the organization and finds herself on the run from a government that sees her as property.

It's a great episode, far better than any other in the somewhat lackluster third season. But frustratingly, in the final moments, Jaime decides to keep working for OSI after all, with the stipulation that her workload be reduced.

Fortunately "On the Run" features an audio commentary by the episode's writer, Steven de Souza, famous for scripting later hits such as Commando and the first two Die Hard films. De Souza reveals that the episode as scripted ended with Jaime escaping a squad of government goons and running off into the sunset, free to pursue her own destiny. But the demands of syndication forced the inclusion of the coda so that viewers wouldn't be confused should the finale appear in the middle of the rerun schedule, as it inevitably would.

It's a shame that things turned out the way they did, but "On the Run" is still a pretty good episode, and as de Souza recommends, you can always pretend the ending was filmed as originally scripted.

Why do I still love DVD? Because from time to time the format can still offer compelling glimpses into the behind-the-scenes world of film and television production.

Desert Island DVDs

Imagine that capricious aliens conducting an incomprehensible experiment snatch you away from your home and plunk you onto a desert island. But the aliens are not insanely cruel; they create a small, comfortable home for you, with hot and cold running water, toilet facilities, a kitchen stocked with an inexhaustible supply of food, and oddly enough, a luxurious home theatre with 7.1 surround sound, a blu-ray player and a 100 inch high-definition display.

But there's a catch: the aliens will allow you to choose just one film per decade, beginning in 1900 and including the decade of the 20-teens, which we've just entered. Each film you choose will be made available in high definition for your viewing pleasure, even if it hasn't been released on disc by humans yet. Every decade you'll be able to choose one additional film from a list provided to you by the aliens. Of course, not having seen any of these films, your new once-a-decade choice will be essentiall random, excepting of course new films with titles that make the subject obvious - "Star Wars Episode VII: Legacy of the Force," for example, will almost certainly be a new Star Wars movie. "Hamlet" will probably be a new adaptation of the Shakespearian play.

You can't leave the island, nor are there other entertainment options, unless you decide to start writing or drawing for your own pleasure (the aliens have provided plentiful paper, pens and pencils) or craft some kind of sport from the island's natural resources. Your film choices are, therefore, quite important - these are the only movies you'll get to see for a long, long time.

Here then, are my choices:

19-aughts
The Great Train Robbery (Directed by Edwin S. Porter, 1903) - It's silent and 12 minutes long, but I've never seen it, and since there aren't a lot of exemplary choices from the early days of film, I may as well give this one a shot. Certainly it's one of a handful of films from the era to retain some awareness in the popular consciousness, so it must have some redeeming virtues.

19-teens
Intolerance (Directed by D.W. Griffith, 1916)
I've already seen Birth of a Nation, so Griffith's response to his earlier controversial film seems like a good choice. And it's three and a half hours long, which will eat up a tiny slice of the interminable years to come.

1920s
The General (Directed by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, 1926)
From here on out the choices get much tougher. I wavered between The General and Fritz Lang's Metropolis, but in the end I think Keaton's genius for slapstick humour would serve my long-term mental health better.

1930s
King Kong (Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)
A fantastic decade for film made this one of the toughest choices. This was the decade of the great Universal monster movies - Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man. It's the decade of The Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Chaplin's City Lights, the Tarzan films, Captain Blood and so many other wonderful films. But in the end, I chose King Kong, one of the great monster movies and one of the great tragic love stories.

1940s
Double Indemnity (Directed by Billy Wilder, 1944)
This was the decade of film noir, and Double Indemnity is one of the finest examples of the genre. The script is full of snappy dialogue, the mood is darkly atmospheric, the story is compelling, the acting superb. Eminently rewatchable.

1950s
The Searchers (Directed by John Ford, 1956)
The 1950s were chock full of fun B-movie science fiction thrillers and the best of Alfred Hitchcock's magnificent ouvre, as well as classic dramas such as The African Queen, Sunset Boulevard, Ben-Hur...in the end I had to choose The Searchers, a film whose power and beauty remains undiminished.

1960s
West Side Story (Directed by Robert Wise, 1961)
This is the decade of Lawrence of Arabia, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, the early James Bond films, the early Pink Panther films, the great exploitation cheapies of Roger Corman...but if I'm going to be on a desert island with only a handful of movies, I'm going to need a musical to sing along with. And West Side Story is my favourite musical of all.

1970s
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Directed by Robert Wise, 1979)
The 1970s started off as a time of experimental cinema in Hollywood, and then Jaws and Star Wars started the age of the blockbuster summer hits. My short list includes Dirty Harry, Network, The Conversation, All the President's Men, Mad Max, Logan's Run, Enter the Dragon, Chinatown, and most especially, Superman. But I need one Star Trek film on my list, because the characters and stories of the original series shaped who I am. Plus this first feature outing is the last time Star Trek really attempted to tell a true science fiction story, before lapsing into space opera. Choosing between this film and Richard Donner's Superman was the toughest choice of this entire exercise.

1980s
Big Trouble in Little China (Directed by John Carpenter, 1986)
These were my teenage years, and I remember many films of this era fondly - the Star Trek, Star Wars and Superman sequels (well, just Superman III, really), the Indiana Jones movies, a slew of great horror and science fiction films from John Carpenter and some of the best work of David Lynch. I chose Big Trouble in Little China because of its tongue-in-cheek humour and over-the-top dialogue and action. It's a ridiculous but fun film that will ease the burden of my isolation.

1990s
Pulp Fiction (Directed by Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
The 1990s is perhaps my least favourite film decade. Though there were certainly a number of good films - The Shawshank Redemption, Shakespeare in Love, The Big Lebowski, The Usual Suspects, Twelve Monkeys, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, among others - most of the decade's offerings haven't stuck in my mind. But Pulp Fiction does, with its non-linear storytelling and trademark Tarantino dialogue.

20-aughts
Serenity (Directed by Joss Whedon, 2005)
The first decade of the 21st century, on the other hand, has been great for film.The Lord of the Rings trilogy brought back the epic scale and feel of the big pictures of the 1930s.  David Lynch returned to form with Mulholland Drive. This was the decade of There Will Be Blood, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 2, Memento, the enormously fun new take on Star Trek, No Country for Old Men, and the delightful but flawed Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Serenity, though, is another film featuring familiar old characters I adore, characters who will help see me through the island's isolation.

20-teens
Source Code (Directed by Duncan Jones, 2011)
As unfair as it is for the aliens to force me to choose a movie for a decade that's only a couple of years old, these are the circumstances of the hypothetical. So I choose Source Code, a film I haven't seen, based on the strength of reviews and my admiration of Jones' first film, the enjoyable Moon.

Hawaii Five Final Straw

On last night's episode of Hawaii Five-O, the new Steve McGarrett had to deal with a hostage situation. He put on a disguise, but gave himself away, prompting the hostage taker to demand, "Who are you?"

"I'm Five-O," McGarrett answers, which is meant to identify himself as a policeman to the alleged criminal. But of course, as already explained earlier on this blog, in the fictional universe of this TV series there's no reason for the slang term "five-o" to exist. This annoying error, combined with the constant use of shaky cam even for the simplest dialogue set-ups (have none of these people ever heard of a tripod?), pedestrian, predictable plots and ADD editing, have put me off the show for good. I'll stick with the original series, most of which is now available on DVD.

For tarnishing the legacy of one of the great cop shows, here's my final verdict: book 'em, Danno - murder one.

New Year Padding Post

So very close to reaching 100 posts, a new Bleak House of Blahgs record. I feel terrible padding, but, dammit, what's a blog without pointless minutiae of interest only to myself?

I used my Future Shop gift certificates to pick up volumes 1, 2 and 3 of Warner's Camp Cult Classics collection. I can't wait to listen to the audio commentary on Queen of Outer Space. Now I can finally retire my old VHS copy.

I also bought The Bourne Ultimatum. Sylvia and I plan to watch it in lieu of going out for New Year's Eve. I'm just not up to a party this year...man, I wish I had a few more days off. Thank goodness I love my job, because it sure takes a lot out of a guy.

Tool or Weapon?

I'm listening to the audio commentary on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Gary Lockwood, who plays astronaut Frank Poole in the film, says something interesting about the famous sequence in which a prehistoric ape-man flings a bone into the air after using it to kill some rivals. As the bone falls to earth, Kubrick jump-cuts to a spaceship or satellite in freefall around the globe.

I always assumed that the sequence was illustrating the evolution of tools; crude club to sophisticated spacecraft. But according to Lockwood, the craft in the shot is a missle-carrying satellite, an orbital weapons platform. In his words, it's a "weapon-to-weapon shot."

Of course, just because Lockwood was in the movie doesn't mean that he's correct about Kubrick's intentions, but his insight is almost certainly more valid than mine. It certainly adds a more pessimistic flavour to the film.

True Romance, Comix-Style

"But why was that bow buzzard trying to ventilate YOUR beautiful torso?" What's with the weird emphasis? Should the bow buzzard (presumably Batman is referring to a super-villain with an archery motif, maybe Merlyn) be skewering other beautiful torsos?

By the way, "There are millions of stories in the naked city" alludes to the seminal 1948 film noir The Naked City, set in Manhattan, the real-world city upon which Batman's Gotham City is based. The actual quote, wryly delivered by the film's narrator at its conclusion, is "There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them."

This is relevant because Criterion, my favourite DVD studio (well, maybe next to Warner Brothers) is releasing the film in a special edition very soon. The film has been on my must-see list for quite some time, and I'm looking forward to picking it up, assuming I can scrape together some extra moolah/green stuff/bread.

Earl's on Film...Earl's on Film

A work in progress: cover for special edition DVD of Generous Nature


Cover for a DVD Field Guide of Chaos/Order Agents

One of the current frustrations in my life is my DVD burner's inability to, well, burn. It plays DVDs, loads software off DVD-roms, but will it actually do the thing I bought it for - namely, archive my home movies? NO.

So I work off some of my frustration by using Photoshop to fool around with DVD covers. The top cover is, obviously, a work in progress, a cover for the eventual DVD of a film we of the U of A Star Trek club completed back in...ye gods, I guess it must be 1988 or 89. Yikes. Anyway, I chose fonts that I hope evoke a Mob sensibility, and a black background to hint at the darkness of the story. A few stills adorn the back, but I'm going to need to put a blurb of some kind back there, too. The film itself is only five minutes long or so, a simple story in which Roarke Norway, played by the inimitable Jeff Shyluk, has his teeth ripped out at the command of the merciless "Boss," played by the irrepressible Tony Longworth. It's probably most famous for this exchange of timeless dialogue, by Shyluk and his future wife, Susan Neumann:

"Oh, Roarke! I love you so much!"
"And I love you too, my darling!"
"Oh, Roarke! Kiss me!"
"I WILL!"

And he does.

The second cover is for the eventual DVD archive of my completed Chaos/Order project - which is, believe it or not, moving forward, in between speeches, blog entries, and my entry into the Strange New Worlds contest.

If any graphic artists out there have suggestions or critiques, I'd be glad to read them.

Sylvia's Back

Oh, the Moon in June is a Big Balloon

Squishy McMonkey has returned from her trip to Fort St. John! I brought her balloons and a Dave Chappelle DVD, then gave her a good squishing. Victory is mine!

The End is the Beginning

Jim Hole once asked me if I ever skipped to the last page of a book to read the ending.

"I might as well read the whole thing backwards," I said, "you'd spoil the whole book, knowing the ending right at the start."

"Maybe," he said, "But the beginning would sure be a surprise!"

I thought about that conversation tonight as I was doing laundry and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I came to Buffylate; I started watching it in season five, kept watching through the series' end, while at the same time catching up on the old episodes by watching the earlier seasons on DVD. Tonight, having just finished the final episode of season four, I realized that I have come back to the beginning of my Buffy experience - smack dab in the middle of the series.

Watching the first four seasons while knowing the ultimate fate of the characters adds a certain resonance to the proceedings; every line, every action, every revelation is coloured by my prescient knowledge of what's to come. This is especially rewarding with a show like Buffy, where story arcs were planned so far in advance. Emotions are more poignant, and the story's texture becomes deeper, more rich.

I guess this is why I keep my books and comics; the stories are always new, even if I've read them many times before. Reading A Princess of Mars at twelve is very different than reading it at thirty; you could even argue that the book was read by two entirely different people, two individuals merely perceived as a single entity because we share a few common memories and some physical characteristics. Whether Earl at twelve and Earl at thirty were the same person or not, the experience of absorbing that book was different each time, and each experience had its own rewards. We start out younger than major characters, seeing men and women in their twenties as impossibly wise and ancient; and then we suddenly discover, years later, that we have become a year or two older than those same characters. Our heroes and villains become our contemporaries, even our peers.

Stephen Hawking once theorized that at the end of the universe, time would start running backwards, and it would seem quite normal for us to assemble from ashes, grow younger and more vital, then smaller, smaller, more and more helpless, until at last we retreat into the womb and shrink to nonexistence, finally dividing into sperm and egg. If time really does work this way, if our experience of life is an illusion forced upon us by our physical limitations, then maybe reading books or watching television shows out of sequence isn't such a crazy idea. Perhaps we'll get to see it in the "right" order, eventually...even if we have to wait a few billion years.

I guess when you read a book for the first time, the book informs your life and alters your perception of the world. But when you read it again, your experiences suddenly alter your perception of the book, and the expected suddenly defies all expectations. We see what was once invisible, and perhaps lose sight of what once was clear. The same must be true when we examine any work of art.

I have a pretty large collection of books and movies, and sometimes people ask me if I've read them all, and why I don't just sell them off after I've seen them once. I think I have my answer now. My books, my comics, my movies - they are a part of me. They've helped me grow. They connect me to my past and hint at my future, and I hope that when at last I die, I'll have just finished a wonderful story, perhaps a tale that takes me back to the very beginning of it all.

I'll read The End, and then...

The End.

The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy

DVD ALERT!

HOLY SMASHAMOLEY!!!! The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy is out on DVD!!!!!

I've seen the preview for this little-known film perhaps100 times, and it never gets old. As a clunking, clanking contraption of rivets and steel drums menaces mankind, to the rescue comes - THE AZTEC MUMMY! A shambling monstrosity, now mankind's ONLY HOPE!!!!!!! :-O

In the preview, the announcer screams, "The ROBOT - versus the AZTEC MUMMY!!!!" And that's just what I'm screaming now! The ROBOT - versus the AZTEC MUMMY!!!!!! Let's get ready to RUMBLE!!!!

Since there are several "Aztec Mummy" films, I'm betting the Aztec Mummy wins, but even so, I can't wait to see this little gem. I mean, judging by the preview, it has several elements true cinephiles drool over:

1) A fake-looking humanoid robot that wreaks all kinds of havoc, sending villagers into a wild panic
2) An aztec mummy
3) An aztec mummy smashing through walls
4) A robot fighting an Aztec mummy
5) Underground tunnels
6) Loopy, completely insane dialogue delivered with the utmost gravity

Shout it out, my homies! THE ROBOT - VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY!!!!!!