Uncategorized – Page 58 – Late to the Theater

Flavoring your Brainmeats: The ‘Mr. Condom’ TED Talks

I’ve seen some amazing suggestions over the years; one idea was teaching crows to pick up trash and paying them with food, through the use of these crow-targeted ‘vending machines.’ The crow puts in a bit of trash, metal, or paper, and the machine spits out a peanut. HOW AMAZING IS THAT IDEA? People used to use animals for heavy lifting, hauling and protection; what if we used technology to put them to work cleaning up garbage or picking walnuts or something?

Man cannot live on bread alone; we need wine, cheese, tacos, pesto, ketchup, Chinese food, or sometimes just a can of Pringles.

Your brainmeats are the most important organ you have–feeding it the same old boring crap over and over leads to blandness and eventually, decreased brain function. You have to give your brains a little flavor once in a while to liven things up and get them energized. Your brain grows the same way muscles grow and get stronger–with exercise.

And one great way to flavor your delicious brainmeats is with something like the TED talks, such as this totally amazing TED video about one man’s crusade to make condoms available throughout Thailand.

How amazing was that? 13 and a half minutes of awesome. And family growth down from 7 children per household to 1.3 in twenty years! A 90% DROP in NEW HIV/AIDS CASES!

90%!!!

If you aren’t familiar with the TED talks, they are always worth checking out. They’re basically these global conferences where people go to showcase some mindblowingingly interesting idea that they need funding for. And of course, you don’t just show up with some bullshit scribbled on the back of a napkin and then pass around a bucket for pocket change. TED stands for Technology Entertainment and Design, and the people who showcase their ideas are usually people whose ideas have already borne fruit, like Mr. Viravaidya.

I’ve seen some amazing suggestions over the years; one idea was teaching crows to pick up trash and paying them with food, through the use of these crow-targeted ‘vending machines.’ The crow puts in a bit of trash, metal, or paper, and the machine spits out a peanut. HOW AMAZING IS THAT IDEA? People domesticated animals for heavy lifting, hauling and protection; what if we used technology to put them to work cleaning up garbage or picking walnuts or something? And their involvment is voluntary, and they teach their offspring and other individuals within the species the behavior; it becomes sharing culture instead of domestication.

Anyhow, the TED talks are a great way to renew your faith in humanity and give your brainmeats a little flavoring.

Mr. Viravaidya is a goddamn genius on many, many levels. Only one of them is the condom thing–

–he mentioned something about ‘labor as collateral’ for people who have bad or no credit history. This BLEW MY MIND.

Think of all the homes sitting around right now that have been foreclosed on, which are now owned by banks. Many of them are falling into disrepair, making them LESS likely to sell to a buyer who ins’t already interested in either a fixer-upper or bulldozing the whole thing in order to build a McMansion. Maybe that’s why the bank isn’t interested anyway–they’d rather get someone in who’ll bulldoze a 250k house so they can build a 4 million dollar shitbox.

But think of how many people are out of work right now, in debt to those same institutions or others. The banks could easily swap labor as collateral for loans!

You apply for a loan, you voluntarily perform some task in order to qualify for it–be it manual labor or some kind of service, and you get your money and the bank receives your services in exchange. Sure it wouldn’t be a perfect option–not everyone has services or training to swap or is able to perform physical labor, and the opportunity for exploitation is huge–but it’s at least SOME kind of option for people with no or poor credit history, so long as you’re serious. Public Works projects, like fixing up crappy schools, parks, roads, or government buildings could be an option.

Anyhoodle, I saw that video and wanted to share.

If Mr. Condom bringing birth control to Thailand isn’t your cup of tea, then just go to the TED talks search function and type in something mildly interesting to you. There’s probably a great video on it right now.

Even MORE Mustache Rides: Quigley Down Under

19th Century Magnum PI — Pretty much Magnum PI in the 1880s, but still fun.

Ignore the tag to my immediate left–Quigley Down Under is so much better than that terrible copy.

One of the more interesting premises for Westerns in the last thirty years has got to be the premise behind Quigley Down Under:

A Wyoming sharpshooter responds to an ad in the newspaper and winds up in Australia–which was undergoing its own frontier experience very similiar to the US’s Old West, complete with mass murder of the natives.

This last point is very important later on.

Basically, Quigley can shoot with pinpoint accuracy from a distance of just over 1200 yards–which is pretty goddamn impressive NOW. Back in the 19th century that was the equivalent of being pyrokinetic.

Along the way, Quigley picks up the deranged Cora, played with an effusive energy by Laura San Giacomo in an early role. She insists on calling him Roy and seems to think they have some kind of relationship.

Quigley has been on a boat from America for three months, and catches a wagon for several days’ ride into the interior to the ranch of Elliot Marsdon, played by consummate bad guy Alan Rickman–it’s kind of amazing how Rickman’s career in the 80’s was comprised of getting beaten up by American action stars, but it worked for him and he’s still cruising along now, so more power to him. I freaking LOVED him as the snide Sheriff of Nottingham in the Costner version of Robin Hood. Pure camp.

Elliot Marston — The acting may be camp, but the mustache is all business.

Here lies the gruesomeness behind what seemed to be an otherwise light-hearted film: Marsdon’s plan is to have use Quigley’s sharpshooter skills to kill the Aborigines that have been attacking his ranch–you know, the indigenous people who have been put off their native land and were slaughtered just for being there in the first place.

Let it sink it. I’ll wait.

Quigley is understandably horrified by the plan.

Marsdon’s fawning fascination in Quigley’s personal experience with the American West grosses him out further. He puts Marsdon through a window, and Marsdon has his thugs beat Quigley and drive him to the middle of nowhere and leave him for dead. Some fool has brought along Quigley’s super badass experimental rifle, an 1874 Sharp’s Buffalo Rifle, which Quigley quickly retrieves and uses to make the guy very dead.

There are a handful of things that make Quigley Down Under stand out as a worthy watch: one is Tom Selleck’s somewhat rakish perfomance. Although a total good guy through and through, there are little hints that he wasn’t maybe the guy in the white hat his whole life. He has a moment where he almost leaves Cora behind, and threatens a dying man with torture. Despite being sold as a leading man, I never really found Selleck attractive, but he has a definite charm and a disarming smile that made the character really come to life. He was just a cool guy, and made for a well-conceived, realistic hero.

The other thing that makes QDU stand out is the movie’s main conflict, and the dark subject matter explored as European expansion meant relocation or death for native peoples.

There’s a particularly gruesome moment when a small group of Aborigines, including women and children, are straight up driven over a cliff to die on the rocks below.

This isn’t fiction, or some filmmaker’s conceit.

That kind of monstrous shit really happened–the history of every nation is written in red ink, any student of history knows that, but seeing it in action, even dramatized, is enough to make one sit back and reflect on the human condition as a whole. You don’t need to stand on a street corner and scream about it, but instead let that consideration inform your decisions going forward in life. The world would be a better place, I like to think.

But we were discussing a movie.

The other gem of the film is Lara SanGiacomo’s performance as Crazy Cora, who was shipped to Australia by her husband as a punishment for a simple accident. The event left her mad, prone to erratic behavior, and insistent on calling Quigley ‘Roy.’ Her depiction of someone mentally unbalanced is refreshingly real; someone with real mental problems doesn’t hold up a little sign or provide some other shorthand to let you know when they’re crazy, so you don’t know to dismiss what they’re saying until the sign goes back down. You just have to put up with them and hope for the best.

The movie suffers, to be sure. A slightly corny ending, old school one-dimensional villains, and it isn’t sure if it wants to wander into comedy territory at times, despite dealing with some pretty heavy shit.The costumes and acting hold up well, and don’t seem dated despite the movie being 20 years old.

It’s still one worth catching though, if you find yourself on a Saturday night with a bowlful of popcorn and two hours to kill.

Quigley Down Under is available on Instant Watch.

The Ultimate in Mustache Rides: Tombstone!

Cleaning up this town, one pushbroom at a time — According to director George Kosmatos, every single mustache here and elsewhere in the cast was real. No fake mustaches were used in this movie. Believe it.

WESTERNS!

I love me some westerns.

I enjoy the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns (think 60’s, or Clint Eastwood) more than the more classic 50’s and before ones. I think it’s because I can’t see the west as just ‘Americans triumphant over the empty frontier’ because the frontier wasn’t empty, it was full of indigenous people wondering who the hell all these new, violent people were. Nevertheless, I love a Western where the hero throws down and then has a belt of whiskey after.

Since Clint Eastwood’s Ultimate in Postmodern Westernness, Unforgiven, Westerns have been few and far between, and they’ve largely been dour affairs about unforgiving landscapes, Native American genocide, and miserable people. The only exceptions to this would be the last ten minutes of 3:10 to Yuma (seriously, that last segment getting whatsisname to the train should have been the whole frigging movie), and Deadwood, which barely counts because it’s about the end of the cowboy era.

1993’s Tombstone, directed largely by Kurt Russell but credited to some other guy, is a sort of last hurrah for those classic Westerns. Although Russell’s Wyatt Earp is certainly conflicted about killing people and violence and whatnot, he and his brothers still seem like fun guys to hang with.

The Earp brothers–being Wyatt, Virgil (Elliot) and Morgan (Paxton) head for Tombstone in an attempt to give up their careers as lawmen and make an honest living working in casinos. Their attempts are complicated by the presence of a huge gang– headed by Mustache King Powers Boothe– who have moved into the town and use it like their personal playground.

Also complicating matters is Doc Holliday, played by Kilmer so awesomely that if the movie was a little better he probably would have won an Oscar.

Take this hat seriously. — Why yes, you ARE my huckleberry!

If you’ve already seen Tombstone, than Kilmer’s ingenious performance has probably stuck with you. Effeminate, drawling, moist with flopsweat, Kilmer presents Holliday as a man cheerfully shambling down the road to his own destruction; the real Holliday was a practicing dentist who moved out west in an attempt to lessen the affects of his tuberculosis, and there found a penchant for gunfighting and gambling, despite his very frail frame. The real man is described as being possessed of a blend of cheerful despair, probably hoping that a gunfight would kill him before the tb did. It’s a a great character: a man who goes around picking fights with strangers in an attempt to get himself killed, but who doesn’t quite have the nerve to let himself lose, either. He’s also an easy target–incredibly fey, a snappy dresser, and prone to calling people ‘hucklberries’ or ‘daisies,’ he couldn’t have drawn more attention to himself by dressing like a chicken and pinning a giant paper bullseye to his back. Like iron filings to a magnet, crazy, gun-waving scumbags are drawn to him, unable to help themselves.

It’s a testament to Kilmer’s performance that he is still attractive even while gaunt, pale, sweaty and with red circles around his eyes. He’s also the most fun thing about the movie; when he’s not onscreen, the movie is still excellent, but his presence just makes things more interesting.

With Holliday’s presence and the already belligerent troublemaking cowboys hanging about, Wyatt Earp struggles to be the man he thinks he should be, an honest faro dealer, and the man he is, a dude who’ll beat the shit out of a bad guy and can’t seem to avoid trouble. As the cowboys step up their efforts, his brothers take up the silver stars of lawmen, and he finds himself drawn in. Also complicating matters is his laudanum-addicted wife and his attraction to an actress.

Tombstone is a virtual parade of who’s who–besides the four principles, there’s also Powers Boothe, Billy Zane, Dana Delany, Thomas Haden Church, Michael Rooker, Paula Malcolmson (Trixie from Deadwood!) and even a young, pudgy Billy Bob Thornton.

Tombstone is also a weird movie. As I said, it’s one of the last remnants of the spaghetti Western, before things got all post-modern and angsty. It’s a movie where the good guys are still allowed to have fun–it seems today like the only people having fun in Westerns are the bad guys, and this might seem like an odd thing to say, but that’s just not American. We fucking well CREATED the Western, and our behatted, gunslinging heroes now are miserable, conflicted, and hate violence. No wonder Clint Eastwood hung up his spurs.

It’s not impossible to write a character who is engaging and still conflicted about his use of violence–Wolverine in the first Xmen movie comes to mind.

I hope to God that the upcoming Preacher movie understands that and gets it right. If I see Jesse Custer whining about how he has to use violence to uphold the law, I just might give up on Hollywood completely.

The Wayback Machine: Joe Dante’s ‘The ‘Burbs’

Ah, Comedy-era Tom Hanks.

Quite honestly, I got a little burnt out on Dramatic Tom Hanks–I can name the ones I’ve seen on one hand, probably–I realized while watching The Burbs, Joe Dante’s 1989 comedy, that I liked League of Their Own and Forest Gump, and figured Hanks would get back to comedies.

I’m still waiting.

Often considered the heir to Jimmy Stewart’s Everyman throne, it’s fitting that Hanks stars in a film about a bored man conflating the importance of his neighbors’ activities; Stewart’s version of this was Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window,’ and I’m not really saying the two are comperable outside of ‘they are kind of similiar thematically and they both contain carbon-based life.’

I won’t lie, I love The ‘Burbs, but I was surprised how low it scored on Rotten Tomatoes. I suppose it might be considered a nostalgia piece, and except for one very interesting idea:

That reminiscing on the glorious good old days is a total crock.

Sound familiar? That’s because similiar territory was covered in the Coens’ existential masterpiece, No Country for Old Men, and is the cornerstone of current academic thought on history.

There’s a moment in the Burbs where we hear the story of Skip, a suburbanite who for all intents and purposes is happy with his soda fountain job, white picket fence and 1.8 children or whatever the percentage is. But then we find out the horrible truth–Skip wasted his family with an ice pick one fine summer day, and the story has become the kind of small-town lore they don’t include in the Chamber of Commerce literature. It’s the kind of thing ALL small towns have–violence, scandal, and intrigue are nothing new in the course of human events, and every small town has some kind of American Gothic weirdness going on that gets whitewashed when people talk about the Good Old Days out on the porch.

Skeletons in the closet, toys in the attic, ants at a picnic–however you qualify it, something is rotten in the state of Surburbia.

The Human Hive — From Suburbia come delicious, free-range humans, delivered overnight to your local supermarket.

Hanks and his team of misfits –Rick Ducommen and Bruce Dern, with Corey Feldman checking in now and then with an ‘Awesome!’, ‘lame!’, or other 80’s era teenspeak– become more and more obsessed with the notion that all is not well next door. When they cross the line, Walter Fielding (Hanks) is an unwilling participant, but quickly takes up leadership of the group when evidence surfaces suggesting the Klopeks might be up to something unsavory.

I could easily see The Burbs being remade, if it were handled properly. IT might be fun to mix up the setting a little–set it in a little town in England and the Hanks/Ducommon duo could be reimagined with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, of Hot Fuzz/Shawn of the Dead fame.

‘The Burbs is a fun, tightly-directed and performed comedy almost anyone can hang out and enjoy.It occasionally wanders into ‘zany’ territory, but strong comedic performances from Hanks–especially his breakdown at the end–help ground it and keep it from straying into wacky land.

The Burbs is available on Instant Watch.

Coraline and the color palette of childhood

Here’s the short version of this entry: I just love Coraline.

There haven’t been a lot of movies made in the last ten years that I can watch over and over again and still enjoy, that offer a really escapist feeling, that I’m not distracted by overblown production values or weak performances; Coraline definitely falls into that category.

There’s something beyond reproach about it. That’s not to say it doesn’t have flaws, but when you’re completely engrossed in the liquid grace of the stop motion puppetry, the textures of the world, sharp writing, brilliant characterizations, and beautiful music, it’s easy to forgive.

There’s also the beauty of the color palette.

We first meet Coraline as she moves into a depressingly drab house on a gray, late-winter day. Dead trees cluster in the background, and a slate sky drops rain. Her parents are just as drained, with good reason: her beige-sweater sporting Mom was recently in a car accident and also wears a neckbrace, and Coraline’s dad resembles the microwavable version of Adrien Brody.

Coraline's Dad — I shouldn't make fun, I'm only a few steps away from this myself.

From a child’s standpoint, Coraline’s parents might be viewed as selfish and neglectful; an adult looks on their attempt to focus on their desperately-needed work and sympathizes. After all, without the catalogue, the family doesn’t eat, since they’re freelance writers.

There were even a few moments when their plight seemed more serious than Coraline’s, and her whining for their attention made her less sympathetic and seem overly-self centered, even for a child.

It’s a depressing world for anyone, and an intelligent child like Coraline is doubly affected.

Which is where the color palette comes in.

The Other Mother in her Lair — I'd watch this cooking show. Hell, it's less terrifying than anything Paula Deen can come up with.

When the Other Mother builds a world to tempt Coraline, she fills it with lush, warm colors and luxuriant textures. The delicious food, the wallpaper, furniture, clothing, and plants of the Other World radiate color, almost drown the viewer in hues. My DVD came with a 3D version of the movie (and glasses! SO COOL!) and I haven’t given that a spin yet, but I hope it’ll be worth all the kerfuffle.

The color palette of childhood is simple, visceral. We want to wear our straw hats with our green pinafore and orange sweater and blue sock, possibly while wearing fairy wings or a tail, if we’re fairly young. Therein lies the appeal in the colorful mishmash of Coraline’s outfits: her pink dress and green tights, or the green and orange gloves she covets which her mother initially rejects have an individualistic charm to them, but also symbolize the time in our lives when we still did things for ourselves rather than others.

Once in high school a girl in my class was horrified with embarassment when a teacher pointed out the girl was wearing brown shoes with a black belt. I took this lesson to heart and swore never to make the same faux pas; now I could give a shit, although I do tend to shy away from bright colors.

From early high school until just two years ago, I wore black, gray, and if I was feeling saucy, purple or red. That was it. I was terrified of wearing The Wrong Thing together, and those four colors made me feel safe. Somehow, I forgot that wearing clothing had everything to do with what I liked, and nothing to do with what other people wanted. Inch by inch I’ve crept away from that security blanket, and now wear bright greens and blues, as well.

Now, I am seriously covetous of Coraline’s Other Outfit, which the Other Mother has made for her.

The Whole Gang — Cringing Genius Nerd and Horrific Ghost-child sold separately.

Part of the reason I like it is because the stars remind of me of the character Eleanor from Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House.

You don’t need to know the whole story of Hill House if you don’t already; what you need to know is that Eleanor is a shy, vulnerable woman bullied for years by her mother, who decides to take part in an experiment mostly as a way of asserting herself. As she drives to the house, she imagines a destiny for herself that is extricated from her overbearing mother: she’ll have a house some day, with stone lions guarding the front door, and she’ll drink from a cupful of stars. In short, she’ll do what SHE wants, HOW she wants, WHEN she wants.

The cupful of stars thing has always stuck with me, and when I saw the color and design on Coraline’ shirt it reminded me forcibly of Eleanor’s cupful of stars. It reminded me of those childhood things I’d given up or lost, most of all the intangible ones.

A person can live without their old toys, but not without the imagination that brought them to life.

There’s merit to the putting away of childish things as you become an adult, but finding a balance–neither giving up entirely on childish things nor retreating back into them–is what most people struggle with.

So I’d like to raise a cupful of stars to Coraline, for helping me find some of those things I thought I’d lost.

I actually found a woman on Etsy who’ll make the sweater, and while the child part of me wants it now, NOW, the adult part of me insists I wait until I actually can afford to drop 150 dollars on a sweater.