Tag Archives: Eric Robert Nolan

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Trump tells reporters that what he says to Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit is “none of your business.”

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Jesus Christ.  Watch this video.  Did he also imply at the Faith & Freedom Coalition that he was happy John McCain was dead, and suggest that he was in hell?

Am I hearing the president correctly?

Of course it is America’s business what its president says to Putin — especially about Russia’s election meddling.  And especially considering that the president needs to be babysat by people who are less suggestible when sitting down with the former head of the KGB.

Recall, please, what happened when Trump met with Putin at the G20 summit in 2017.  He emerged from his meeting saying they’d discussed a joint “Cyber-Security unit” with Russia.  He then downplayed the idiotic idea after the predictable uproar.

It’s … it’s probably a very good idea if we keep track of what the president plans on doing with Putin, right?  Am I alone here?  Throw me a bone here, people.

A friend of mine just chimed in on Facebook with a point that is far more relevant than mine above:

“Don’t you just love when the man who said that he would accept foreign help from adversaries to win an election and met with them multiple times tells us that it’s none of our business what they are discussing?”

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Pitfall!” for the Atari 2600!

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“Pitfall!” was quite the hit when Activision released it in 1982.  (I’m a little unclear on what I’m reading about the relationship between Activision and Atari … it looks like the former was a group of defected employees who were then sued by latter, but who then inadvertently pioneered the third-party-developer arrangement for video games.)

“Pitfall!” hit the shelves the same year that the priceless “Raiders of the Lost Ark” galloped through theaters, which I’ll bet helped with the popularity of the jungle adventure game.  But the game became a bestseller because of its own merits.  Wikipedia informs me that its took a lot of innovation by its creator, David Crane, to get his newer, more advanced graphics stored and operable on a 4-kilobyte game.

And I could kinda see that, as a kid.  “Pitfall!” was far sleeker and seemingly more complex than other Atari games my family had, like “Combat,” “Missile Command,” “Frogger” and “Donkey Kong.”  And it was a lot of fun.  See for yourself; you can play the original game for free right here at the Virtual Atari website.  (Seriously, the people who set up that site did something really cool for the rest of us.)

When I sat down to write this, I actually got my memories of “Pitfall!” confused with a later, more advanced side-scrolling PC game called “Impossible Mission.”  I played that in high school, and I loved it even more than “Pitfall!”  The two games look pretty similar; I wonder if anyone else gets them confused.

By the way, does that kid in the pith helmet in the ad below look familiar to you?  That’s because he’s none other than Jack Black, age 13.

 

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A short review of “Child’s Play” (2019)

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“Child’s Play” (2019) actually surprised me by being a little more ambitious and well rounded than the typical reboot of an 80’s slasher franchise.  Screenwriter Tyler Burton Smith tries to present audiences with a fresh, updated horror film with funny, engaging, likable characters.  And he mostly succeeds — it helps that the cast is roundly quite good in their roles.  (The voice of Chucky is none other than Mark Hamill.)  There is some discomfiting dark humor here, too, that makes for some great, guilty fun.

But this “Child’s Play” is doomed to suffer in comparison to the 1988 original.  The very first “Child’s Play” was a particularly scary film, even if its sequels were much less so; I remember people screaming in the theater when I saw it with my high school friends.  This new movie doesn’t come close to matching it in that manner.

Smith’s update abandons the admittedly campy premise of the original, in which a serial killer employs voodoo to transfer his soul into an interactive doll.  Smith gives us something that is more plausible — a malfunctioning A.I. that turns homicidal partly because its programming leads it to.  His take is interesting … Chucky is even a little sympathetic at first — he’s a childlike, vaguely cute robot, and his mischievous young owner is at least partly responsible for his early, less frightening transgressions.

This all works on a certain level.  It’s smarter than its 80’s source material.  It might have been gold if it had been fleshed out by a science fiction screenwriting master like Charlie Brooker, of “Black Mirror” fame.  Or, better yet, why not the writers for HBO’s brilliant “Westworld,” which proceeds from essentially the same basic story concept?

Alas, we can’t have our cake and eat it too, at least in this case.  The new Chucky is a more intelligent story concept but a less menacing bogeyman.  He just can’t hold a candle to the voodoo-infused, sociopathic demon-doll voiced by the legendary Brad Dourif so long ago.  The new “Child’s Play” isn’t quite scary enough for our expectations, and that’s a serious criticism for a horror movie.

All things considered, I’d rate this a 7 out of 10.

 

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Roly-Poly Millipede!

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The return of summer means the return of these squiggly suckers.  (Yeah, I know I called them centipedes the last time I snapped a pic, but my high school friend who is now science teacher corrected me on that.)  Turns out they curl up into little orange leggy balls when they feel threatened.  I meant to get video of this guy unfurling, but my camera started running too late.

I showed this clip to the little boy next door, with whom I usually have a really nice rapport, and asked, “Isn’t that cool?!”

He responded flatly, “No.”

Well, I thought it was cool.

On another wildlife note, I swear I’ve got a muskrat or a mink or something right around my house.  (Or maybe a weasel?)  I’ve seen him several times from my window, crossing the road in precisely the same place.  People keep telling me that I’m only seeing another groundhog, but this guy is svelte and lengthy, not round and goofy.  He’s a graceful animal.  I’d love to see him up close.

But I still haven’t seen a bear, people, and I been in the Roanoke area for two and a half years now.  I was led to believe there would be bears.

 

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OBAMA IS FUNDING LIBERAL COLLEGE PROFESSORS TO ATTACK WHITES.

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(I didn’t create this meme; I got it from Facebook.)

The last time I discussed a theory like one of those you could generate below, I asked as neutrally as I could for evidence.  I was told that “Good people are just now stepping forward.”

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Somebunny almost got stepped on.

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These little Roanoke fur-twerps need to be more careful about getting underfoot.  We not-quite-middle-aged New Yorkers aren’t used to animals darting about our feet.  And we … can’t see quite as well as we used to, either.

 

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Throwback Thursday: the Atari 2600’s “Berzerk!”

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“Berzerk” for the Atari 2600 was one of my favorite games in the 1980’s.  It wasn’t exactly high-concept … you shot at robots who shot at you, in a series of redundant maze configurations.  To mix things up a little, both the robots and the walls were electrified, so you had to make sure your little monochromatic avatar didn’t touch either.

The more difficult levels added another threat — a giant happy face (like the famous 1970’s t-shirt design) named “Evil Otto.”  It … sort of bounced through the maze, and was also electrified.

“Berzerk” was an unusual game, too, because you could take a break from it.  The game didn’t have a “pause” function; the Atari 2600 was far too rudimentary for that.  But if you killed every robot in a room, you could just allow your little guy to stand there before walking him into the next maze.  You could get up, go outside and play, call your mother from the landline, or make a peanut butter sandwich on toast (considered a delicacy at the time.)

If you want to play the original “Berzerk,” you can play it for free right here over at Virtual Atari.

 

 

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This joke is so weak, it would perish in the jungle.

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Sooooooo, whenever you order the strangest item on a menu, it’s a Darwinian selection.

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A review of “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” (2014)

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“Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” (2014) is easily the least of the Tom Clancy adaptations.  But that shouldn’t be enough to indict the film; the other film treatments of the author’s books have all been roundly excellent.  (Okay, 2002’s often-reviled “The Sum of All Fears” might be an exception, but I still like that flick even if I’m in the minority.)  I’d rate this outing a 6 out of 10.

It isn’t a bad movie … it’s just an average, generally undistinguished boilerplate spy thriller that seems half-heartedly rewritten as a reboot of the Clancy films.  Screenwriters Adam Cozad and David Koepp pay cursory attention to the title character’s background, and a key plot development from the books that I will not spoil here.  But the film utterly lacks the mood, detail or methodical plotting of anything Clancy created.

It’s all very generic stuff.   We’ve got a generic, telegenic, twenty-something action hero (Chris Pine), his generic hot girlfriend (Keira Knightley), the expected Russian bad guy (Kenneth Branagh) and a by-the-numbers climax — including the last-second requirement to divert a bomb from its target.  Rounding it all out is Kevin Costner, the most generic good guy ever to behave predictably on screen — he characteristically projects the expected, wholesome gravitas.  Even this film’s title is generic — it sounds like the name a marketing department would come up with for an entry in a video-game series.

There are plot elements that are painfully implausible, even by spy-movie standards.  Jack Ryan’s new girlfriend, for example, surprises him by arriving in Russia in a flourish of quirky-girlfriend spontaneity, only to discover his secret career and then be fully enlisted in a spy operation.  Branagh doubles as the movie’s director; his work here is surprisingly problematic.  This is yet another movie in which important action sequences are barely comprehensible because of frequent, rapid cuts.

Oh, well.  It certainly isn’t all bad.  There isn’t a single bad actor in the film, for example.  If I don’t like Branagh’s directing, I love his acting.  The guy is magnetic — he alternately and convincingly projects menace and charisma to perfection.  Alec Utgoff shines too, in a small role as a soft-spoken, ironically disarming Russian assassin.

People tend to either love or hate Costner.  I like him quite a bit.  No, he doesn’t always demonstrate an incredible range.  But his acting is competent and he’s likable and consistently convincing.  He’s the actor equivalent of that old American sedan that isn’t flashy but always starts reliably when you need it to get you to work.

Hey, you might like this movie far more than I did.  I was an obsessive fan of the books, so my standards may be a bit high where they are adapted to the screen.  Your mileage may vary.

 

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A very short review of the premiere of “NOS4A2” (2019)

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So I checked out the first episode of AMC’s “NOS4A2” last night, after the ubiquitous ads successfully piqued my interest.  (I frequently get turned off to shows or movies when they’re overexposed by a bombardment of marketing, and resolve not to watch them out of spite.  Seriously.  But “NOS4A2’s” creepy trappings and the promise of Zachary Quinto as a child-abducting vampire were enough to get me to sit down with the first episode.)

This was decent!  I’d rate it an 8 out of 10.  The writing, directing and acting were all quite good, the protagonist’s troubled family drama was a lot more compelling than I expected, and this looks like a horror-fantasy series with some creative stuff going on.  I had a little trouble buying the 26-year-old Ashleigh Cummings as a high school student, but she’s great in the role.  And Quinto chews the scenery just fine as the vampire who apparently feeds off of the life force of the kidnapped children while they sleep.  (The character becomes more interesting when he grows younger — and the talented Quinto then infuses his interpretation with a manic, evil energy.)

The jury is still out with me, however, on this show’s horror elements.  They’re creatively conceived, but they might be a bit too campy and stylized for me.  (You know what I mean if you’ve seen the ads.)  “NOS4A2” was adapted from an immensely successful 2013 young adult novel by Joe Hill, and I suspect that the fantasy-horror mashup here is exactly what made the book appeal to fans of the YA genre.  It remains to be seen whether it will be too corny for more mainstream horror fans.

 

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