She faced the worst monsters imaginable with no superpowers whatsoever — outside of earnestness, good old American pluck, and the uncanny ability to stop lambs from screaming. Pretty sure she’s like four feet tall, too.
AND WE WERE THANKFUL FOR WHAT WE HAD.
On our drive home,
your voice was song. Your lips
pursed to form the perfect overture.
(c) 2016 Eric Robert Nolan
Photo credit: By Jonnyboyca at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Rschen7754 using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17916742
Here’s another bizarre relic of Boys’ Life magazine in the 1980’s — an ad for what was apparently a $4.95 do-it-yourself hovercraft. (Kids needed to read that entire ad to understand that what this company was selling you was not the “AIR CAR” itself, or even its parts, but only “plans and photos.”)
A pal of mine in the Cub Scouts had his heart set on this, but I wisely cautioned him that you couldn’t always trust advertisers. (I’d learned my own lesson a couple of years prior from the duplicitous marketers of “Sea Monkeys.”) You’ve gotta read the whole thing through, I told him. Pretend that you’re dealing with the least trustworthy kid on the school bus. It was one of those truly rare moments in my life when I counseled circumspection to others instead of vice versa.
He was pretty zealous in his desire for this thing. For some reason, he really wanted to take it out over the Long Island Sound (to … Connecticut, presumably?) I’m still not sure why he didn’t want a jet ski. We indeed had those in the 80’s. Oh, well. As dreams go, it wasn’t the worst that a kid could have.
He never wound up sending away for it. I’m not sure if that’s because I talked him out of it or not.
But here’s the stunning O’Henry-style postscript — I’ve read a few Reddit and Twitter posts from men in their 40’s who also remember this Boys Life ad, and who actually sent away for the plans. A couple of them claim that they successfully built this device, and that the damned thing actually worked. (Cue the theme music for Christopher Nolan’s 2006 “The Prestige.”) It certainly couldn’t hold 100 pounds, they qualified, but it technically still worked.
I guess if I ever run into my old friend from the Cub Scouts after 40 years, I owe him a hovercraft.
I really want to try that new viral trend in which people throw cheese onto babies’ heads.
But I don’t have any kids, so I’m headed to the mall with a package of Velveeta and looking for families there.
Sorry, but for me “Velvet Buzzsaw” (2019) was a bust. I’d rate it a 3 out of 10 for being an interesting and ambitious Netflix horror film that nevertheless failed to hold my interest.
My interest was piqued along with everyone else when I first saw the trailer for this earlier this year. It looked amazing. It was a high-concept supernatural horror film with great visual effects and a cast that included Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo and John Malkovich. (The cast also includes Toni Collette, who I’ve recently come to understand is a damned good actress.) It looked funny too.
But “Velvet Buzzaw” fatally suffers from the characters that it depicts. All of the above actors portray profoundly irritating characters, and not even their formidable talents make these characters any fun to watch. The movie takes place in the Miami Beach art world, and the major characters are artists, critics, or gallery owners and employees. (The plot device here is a collection of haunted paintings that kill their owners.) With the exception of Malkovich’s artist (“Piers”), these characters are so cloying, trite and pretentious that seeing them on screen is nearly nerve rattling. You don’t care much that they’re imperiled. You just want to see them die, so that the movie will be over.
This would have been a far better movie if screenwriter Dan Gilroy chose to depict its events mostly from Piers’ point of view. I suppose that would have been difficult; he isn’t central to the plot. But it would have been worth it.
There are some things to like. Malkovich and Russo re always fun to watch, a lot of the special effects are quite good, and the final demise in the film is actually very well rendered. (Given the mediocrity of the movie as a whole, I was surprised at how clever and unsettling this was.) A college buddy of mine with excellent taste in horror actually liked “Velvet Buzzsaw” quite a bit. So maybe this is just a matter of taste.
I can’t recommend this, though.
“Hereditary” (2018) is a difficult movie to review. It’s an exceptionally well made horror film, enough for me to rate it at least a 9 out of 10. But its content is so disturbing that I’m not sure that I can actually recommend it to others.
From a technical standpoint, the movie is almost perfect. It’s an astonishingly good first feature film for writer-director Ari Aster, it’s gorgeously shot in the hills and deserts of Utah, and it’s masterfully directed. The performances are uniformly perfect. If I were to name each actor who hands in a fantastic performance, I’d simply be reading its cast list. I can’t remember the last time I watched a feature film in which every single major performance was exemplary. And “Hereditary” gets damned scary in its third act. (Seriously, give it time.)
The only flaws that I can think of are extremely minor. The pacing isn’t perfect. (The story occasionally seems to slow when events should be accelerating.) I had problems with the way that one key character was portrayed, and there was one plot point that gave me trouble. (I can’t say more for fear of spoilers.) But these things are so forgivable that they hardly merit a mention here. You simply can’t argue that this movie was expertly assembled.
Yet I didn’t always enjoy “Hereditary.” I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t state that. I shut it off more than once, and then came back to it when I felt more able to stomach the brutal events it depicted.
“Hereditary” is more than a “dark” movie; it’s gut wrenching. Even if you have read its reviews and you’ve seen the movie’s marketing, then you still aren’t anticipating what will transpire on screen. (I’d even go so far as to say that the film’s marketing was misleading, but I can’t specify why here.) Yes, there’s a obvious “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) vibe, and it’s sometimes reminiscent of “The Exorcist” (1973), but the movie pushes well past the boundaries of those films, and it does so fairly early on. If I, a lifelong horror fan, was turned off by this, then I’m willing to bet that it would also be too much for a lot of casual film goers. (And indeed, while critics loved this film, audiences last year generally hated it.)
I’m closing with a little bit of trivia. Toni Collette gives a tour-de-force performance here as the troubled mother. If she looks familiar to you, that might be because she’s also the mom in another well known supernatural horror film — M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” (1999).
I had a subscription to Boys’ Life magazine for a couple of years when I was a Cub Scout in the early 1980’s. My parents canceled it after a year or two, and I can’t blame them — I just wasn’t reading it. Boys’ Life was the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, and it was pretty wholesome stuff … it just didn’t offer the excitement of my comic books or the occasional copy of Fangoria that I manged to get my hands on.
But there was one feature of Boys’ Life that I followed religiously — the serialized comic strip adaptation of John Christopher’s The Tripods book trilogy. (Christopher published the first three of his books in the late 1960’s; he added a prequel novel in 1988, but that was long after the Boy Scouts and Boys’ Life was behind me.)
The Tripods was cool, dark dystopian stuff. The story opened with the first book, The White Mountains, to find humanity settled into an agrarian, pre-industrial age in which their overlords were the titular “tripods” — massive three-legged vehicles piloted by unknown beings. Humans were ritualistically “capped” with a brain-altering device when they reached age 14 — thereafter becoming docile and conformist and easier for the mysterious machines to subjugate.
The White Mountains followed a trio of 13-year-old boys who escaped the “capping” to seek out a human resistance movement; the second book, The City of Gold and Lead, shows two of these protagonists infiltrate the city of the tripods’ operators. (Spoiler — they’re grotesque aliens.) The third book, The Pool of Fire, presumably picks up from there, but my Boys’ Life subscription ran out before the magazine got to that.
I recently, however, used this Interwebs thingamajig to discover what looks like a real gem of a find — a 1984 BBC mini-series adaptation of the books. I started the first episode and it looks quite good. If I get around to watching the whole thing, I’ll review it here.
I’m not really clear about when the renovation was completed. (Was it last summer?) But it looks absolutely gorgeous.
Check out the pictures here at the Glave & Holmes Architecture website.
“Captain Marvel” (2019) has a couple of weaknesses, but mostly rises above them in its second half to become an entertaining big-budget popcorn movie. It generally succeeds, and I had a lot of fun with it. I’d rate it an 8 out of 10.
At first, the movie comes off as a mild disappointment — a boilerplate, made-to-order space opera with a thin script, simplistic dialogue and sometimes average acting. (I personally don’t think that Brie Larson has the most depth or range of any actress in Hollywood.)
But the movie has a few surprises for us, both in terms of its story and its ability to win us over with humor and its sense of escapist, comic book fun. Larson does have a lot of onscreen presence and charisma, and she does fine conveying anger and urgency. She also has great deadpan comic line delivery. After seeing the film, it’s difficult for me to picture anyone else in the role.
The special effects were nothing short of fabulous. I didn’t expect to see a Marvel film with a space battle that could compete with those of the “Star Wars” franchise. The fan service and the continuity with other Marvel films is also terrific. Speaking of fan service — the Stan Lee tributes were genuinely touching. One of them was a threefold reference to Lee, Kevin Smith and the 1990’s, when the story is set. Talk about understanding how to please your target audience.
I’d recommend this.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 