My Top Five - Bad Films

Sure, top five lists are cliché, consider this an homage to one of my favorite movies of all time, High Fidelity.


Number 5 - Plan 9 from Outer Space

Featuring the writing of Ed Wood, and starring Bela Lugosi (and Mr. Wood's chiropractor playing Lugosi after he died during the filming), Vampira and the massive bulk of Tor Johnson. This film was acclaimed the worst movie of all time by the book The Golden Turkey Awards. Tim Burton, made a film about the making of the movie with a star-studded cast. 

My favorite "actor" in the film is The Amazing Criswell, a talk show psychic who didn't shy away from making precise predictions. In 1968 he predicted the end of the world would occur on August 18, 1999 when all the oxygen would be sucked from the Earth by a black rainbow. Obviously this is absolutely true and all this business about 2012 is a lot of hog wash. You can also listen to May West sing about Criswell here. And you probably should. More Criswell from the intro to Plan 9:

The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club!

Number four: The Omega Man - A Remake of The Last Man on Earth

This is a remake of the vastly superior Vincent Price classic, it's pure 70s and pure pain. Essentially a zombie movie, but the zombies aren't slow or mindless - they're an active, cunning opponent. Something that can't be said of Charleton Heston, the movie's lead.

Number Three: Space Hunter, Adventures in the Forbidden Zone

Sadly, I can't find a trailer for this one. You might be able to find quite a bit more than the trailer elsewhere. Hint. Hint. I remember seeing it as a kid, it has to be one of the worst movies of all time and features a young Molly Ringwald as the plucky sidekick. In this 3-D film Peter Strauss plays Wolff the space adventurer who must rescue a trio of shipwrecked super models from the clutches of Overdog.

Overdog, played by Michael Ironside is probably one of the most perplexing and disturbing villains ever played on screen.

Number three: Strays

As tempting as it would be to list the Vin Diesel movie, this isn't it. I'm bending the rules - this one is made-for-tv, but it still counts.

I originally saw this on Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater, and it has to be one of the silliest horror movie plots ever conceived. Written by former Hardy Boy Shaun Cassidy, this movie is the standard American family buys a dream house but there's something wrong. In this case the trouble is a pack of feral house cats. I wish I was kidding. One of the most unintentionally funny movies you'll ever see.

Number two: The Beast

Another made for TV classics, hawked endlessly by the Sci-Fi channel along with its desperately unnecessary sequel. A giant squid terrorizes a small fishing community in the Pacific Northwest. I'm sick of the squid.

And the number one bad film is . . . the envelope please . . . .

Zardoz

This movie was the impetus for this post. A friend of mine mentioned that she has seen this, and quoted the famous line:

Which isn't the sort of thing you normally hear when you're doing your shopping. But I was wrong, I could've sworn that Burt Reynolds was the lead in this movie. It seems like the sort of movie Burt Reynolds should star in. I guess I'd prefer to remember Sean Connery as 007.

Down to business, in this film Sean Connery plays an "exterminator" in the post apocalyptic future. Sworn to the god Zardoz (that'd be the giant floating head that carries on about wangs), a man who kills the underclass known as "brutals." In a way it is Teenage Cave Man meets the 1970s. In time, he discovers the shocking (read: not-all-that-shocking) truth about his civilization and his god.

Catching Up

Or at least catching my breath. I want to review my progress thus far, and talk about some things that have been on my mind lately.

This has been a pretty hectic term, that was kind of my intention going into it. I've had a pretty laid back schedule for the past two or three years in terms of work and school, I wanted to see if I could handle it. I've done pretty well, but I think I'm ready for a break next term. I'm going to take a class on javascript, and I really want to focus my attention on it.

I've learned the value of back ups the hard way this term. Overall, I responded well to my iMac (the machine I do most of my school work on) dying, I'm thankful I have this Macbook available as well. Most of the things I've been working on are located in Google Docs or in SPC's Angel system, so I didn't really lose anything. I wish I hadn't freaked out so much about it though - I lost a lot of time to that, and well, it really wasn't very productive. The video card was still just as fried, ya know? On the upside, I'll be getting it back in the next couple of days.

In terms of this class, I feel bad. Because I spent so much of the first part of the term being so slammed, I don't think I produced good work. What I turned in was often rushed, and in the case of my outline, incomplete. Whether I like outlining or not (and I don't) isn't the issue. I've got a couple of student's that I'm helping, and I don't think they got my best efforts either, though I'm sure they'll do fine in any case. It's mostly a matter of confidence.

This blog has been really enjoyable, I had intended to start blogging this year one way or another, and getting a measure of extra credit is just icing on the cake. I think I need to take more time in proofing and editing the articles I post here. I need to watch my temper, I'm far too easily outraged and am likely to go launch a rant when I'm in that state. Being passionate about something is okay, but I suspect people have a limited tolerance for ranting.

I'm looking forward to going back to school on Monday. See you there.

Seven Hundred and Fifty Words

I've been wanting to talk about this for a while, but events have overtaken me.  750words.com is a great tool for Composition students or anyone interested in writing. The premise is based on a technique popularized by The Artists' Way by Julia Cameron. While I'm not thrilled with the flash on her homepage (can flash rendered pages just die already? they are not big, nor are they clever), the exercise is sound enough. Write 750 words, about three pages every morning. The original appears to call for long hand writing, I'll take the web version, thanks. Writing long hand for any extended period is a very painful exercise for me (as I've recently had to rediscover), and frankly I end up focusing more on trying to make my print legible than anything else.  The website tracks your writing, and scores you based on how much you write (up to 750 words - it does provide an average total number of words as well), and whether you allow yourself to be distracted. The idea is to simply free write in one continuous session. You can sign into the service via your Google account (my preference), Facebook connect, or through a Yahoo account.

It also provides a wide variety of stats. How fast you completed your words versus the site average, how many distractions, how fast you typed. It also analyzes your word choices in a variety of ways. You can sign up for a "challenge" each month, and you can assign a reward for completing the challenge as well as a penalty for failure. I like the idea of the challenge, but I'm not sure how comfortable I am with rewards or penalties. I feel I'm more apt to learn when I'm just allowed to play with no consequences. Luckily, the challenge section is totally optional. I think the creator of this web app's personal page is just as interesting as the application itself, check it out.

The writing environment itself is very sparse and minimalist. It is very much as it should be. You do get options on a separate page for setting font and point size, but the default was just fine for me. I'm playing around with going to arial 12 for tomorrow and I'll see how that works out. So far, I'm having a really good time with the site and I expect it's going to help my productivity as a writer.

The toughest part of any writing project is getting started. The temptation is always to check one more source, to do another outline (if you're into that sort of thing, it's not my cup of meat really . . .), or otherwise procrastinate in delivering the paper. I think continual, deliberate practice takes the intimidation factor out of writing. I always imagine it as that moment when you're standing at the edge of a diving board, but have not yet started your jump. That moment is intimidating, it is an obstacle - it is all too easy at that moment to turn around and walk down the ladder. Maybe do a few laps, or have a soda. But if you practice overcoming that moment without fail everyday, it will cease to be a problem. I'm particularly fond of this way of doing free writing as it feels like a game, and that in itself is sufficient motivation to keep me going. I'm placed at 715th and climbing!

Really Simple Syndication, Google Reader and Students

Despite the fact that I'm roughing it tonight, I'm just going to soldier on. We need to talk about Really Simple Syndication or RSS. As a student, this is something you need to know about. RSS allows you to know when a website, like this blog has been updated with new content. It's used all over the web from Boing Boing to ZDnet. In order to take advantage of RSS you need to subscribe, either through your browser's RSS feature or through an RSS reader. To do this in a browser you click on the feed symbol.

This is what the RSS symbol looks like in Safari on Mac OS X 10.6.2.

This is the standard broadcast symbol for RSS.

Often, syndicated content will have a link in each post asking you to subscribe as well.

This is what Lifehacker's subscription page looks like when you subscribe in Safari.

This is the RSS screen in Opera 10.

I don't use a browser to read RSS though, I prefer a reader. There are a variety of local readers available for just about any operating system, but my preference is Google Reader.

This is Google Reader. I like it because it can go anywhere you do. It works on your desktop, notebook and many internet connected mobile phones. This can be a real advantage when say, your desktop dies, as mine just did. I didn't lose any of my RSS feeds and everything stays up to date. It's also integrated with Google's new social networking product Buzz - as you can see in this picture. This allows people I follow to share their favorite articles with me, and vice versa. In Reader, you just copy the address you want to view in reader, press the add a subscription button, and paste. Then you can organize it with folders like I have, and it's immediately available for reading.

You can also have persistant Google searches show up in Reader, this is a real benefit for students - you can put in a term that you're writing a research paper on, see the initial search hits and see if new ones turn up each day. It's like having a research assistant right in your browser. It also allows you to see stats, hence why I know that I have three subscribers on this blog, though it doesn't say specifically who they are (I know two of the three subscribers I have personally.) You can see how often each blog you're subscribed to updates, how much of each blog you've read and a variety of other information. If you're into that kind of thing, and I most certainly am.

In addition to using a search engine like Google, Google blogs, or Technorati to find blogs you're interested in, Reader will also suggest blogs based on what you're currently subscribed to. Again, if you're doing research this can be invaluable. Best of all, it's free. I've experimented with a few local (as in on your computer's harddrive) readers, but none has impressed me as much as Google's.

If there is an RSS reader you're using, I'd love to hear about it or maybe you have a question, please let me know in the comments.

Burning the Midnight Oil

It's very late, and I'm outrageously tired. I just finished up the final draft of my annotated bibliography for Composition II and have been busy propagating it for the past couple of hours. I've made a number of changes, the most import of which is a change in my term for forwarded emails/statuses/tweets, and a somewhat more focused title.

I also changed how I created the document. In my last attempt, I wrote my annotated bibliography in Google Docs and downloaded it to my local word processor, NeoOffice. This time I created it natively in Open Office format, saved a PDF copy and uploaded to Google Docs. This preserved the formatting which was my goal to begin with, but there are no options for editing or publishing here directly. I don't view either of those as a serious issue, though losing the ability to share editing is a bit disappointing.

Trying to upload in .ODT still mangled my citations, so I deleted that one, I'll play around with it a bit more after I've had a bit of shuteye. In the meantime, you can find my final draft here. If you have a moment, I'd appreciate any critiques or comments you could provide.

As always, you can find information on my sources, and the link I provided above through my delicious.com account here.

Thanks for staying up with me, I'll see you next post!

Geek Issues: Star Wars, Trilogy vs. Trilogy

In my last post about Star Wars, we talked about what was great in the original trilogy. Now let's look at what I find disappointing about the new trilogy. The answer isn't as simple as "Jar Jar," no matter what arguments I might have put forth in the past. It really comes down to characterization.

I want you to think of the words "The Empire," not even the full and proper name for the bad guys of the original trilogy. It's sharp and evocative. When you think of those words you can see the Death Star, hear the Imperial March, and the clattering armor of a platoon of Stormtroopers. Darth Vader strolling through a fire fight, and his asthmatic breathing, looming over everyone else in his stark, black armor. The whine of a tie fighter as it flies off camera. An Imperial Star Destroyer dwarfing Princess Leia's transport after immobilizing it with a tractor beam. The Empire is monolithic, ubiquitous and a sharp contrast to the Rebel Alliance.

The waters in the prequel trilogy are considerably muddier. We have the Trade Federation, and seriously, who are they? They sound like a rotary group. Not exactly the stuff of nightmare. There's the Sith, who at least after we've seen Darth Maul seem a little more threatening, but you get very little back story. Sidious (Palpatine), Maul, Tyranus (Dooku) are the only Sith who are clearly identified, and none of them are very intimidating save Maul who doesn't last very long.

When we compare these villains to Darth Vader, they come up decidedly short. Vader was the stuff of our worst fears long before Lucas created him. Large and physically menacing, Vader was played by a Swedish wrestler. Sweden seems to have a history in producing science fiction and horror villains, Tor Johnson who was also a Swedish wrestler, was a staple villain in many older films. Vader was clad in black body armor, which provided both a mythic hook to hang the villain on from the countless legends of men in black and dehumanized him, as the armor obscured his features. His asthmatic breathing reminded us that he was a living being, not a mere machine. His evil is clear and unambiguous. He commits both murder and genocide by the time the credits roll in A New Hope. Despite the fact that his origins are purposefully obscured, Vader moves into his role as the principle villain of the original trilogy with little effort.

I understand that the evil presented by the future Emperor Palpatine is purposefully different. He's from the "evil mage" school of villainy. But I feel both trilogies and especially the prequel trilogy fail to present this well compared to more conventional fantasy. His evil in the prequel trilogy is subtle, but as in comic books, subtlety is not a device that works well in fantasy. In fantasy there is typically a very stark contrast between absolute good and evil. In this genre, evil even when it is not strong in the physical sense, must have the appearance of overwhelming strength of some kind - typically it should appear a great deal stronger than the heroes. Palpatine as a character fails in this, both in the final movie of the original trilogy (in which he is killed by Vader, Luke resists temptation and Anakin is redeemed), and in the prequel trilogy. We never see him as powerful, in fact, we usually see him as weak. This is communicated in both trilogies through his frail frame. Granted, he does best two Jedi and feigns weakness as part of his plan to bring Anakin Skywalker to the dark side, but overall he seems to be a one trick pony. Force lightning, Force lightning and failing that, yet more Force lightning.

We could compare heroes and see many of the same weaknesses. In fantasy however, villains tend to be more emblematic than the heroes. For instance, in Lord of the Rings, Sauron or even the One Ring itself is more representative of the story than any of the heroes. But I believe that the heroes in the original trilogy are stronger than the prequel in any case.

I believe almost anything Lucas had followed the original trilogy with would have disappointed. Similar to Joseph Heller spending his whole writing career living in the shadow of his most famous work, Lucas was too successful with the original trilogy and there was too much time between it and the prequel trilogy. By the time The Phantom Menace was released, the original trilogy was part of my generation's childhood, and changing anything in regards to those memories is to wander into dangerous territory.