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In my continuing struggle to connect everthing together and develop a Grand Unifying Culture GUC (pronounced “guck” like the white stuff on the sides your lips, yeah that’s right). I discovered that the slightly obscure 80’s classic Dr. Detroit starring Dan Akroid was written by Bruce Jay Freidman a writer who is credited with begining the dark humor trend. Now Dr. Detroit is a strange 80’s movie and to be honest these movies are why I hold the firm stance that the 80’s is the best decade for films to date. Anyway stranger connections have been made but I’m still waiting for the sequel Dr. Detroit II: The Wrath of Mom. Good grief, good stuff . . . or is it just that my mind has been so poisioned by this dark humor that I can’t tell the difference anymore?

P.S. Co-star Fran Drescher, soundtrack by Devo. I rest my case.

Today is my birthday at 10:18 PM I’ll be a quarter of a Century old. I’ll admit that I didn’t know where I’d be by the time I hit this foil wrap around cover issue (comic geeks should get it, rememeber how Magneto pulled the adamantium out of Wolverine?). I guess in this fast paced world where we live longer, enduring the ever expanding progess of the society and coping with the associated ailments (badly) it makes sense that I might feel a certain melancholic ennui about the whole affair of passing away from my “best years”. Certainly things have not passed as I might have planned nor would they ever or should they even in the best of all possible worlds. I suppose my New Years resolution toward some kind of unabstract attempt at peace of mind is at best a noble goal and at worst a futile one (like how I finally worked the titular line in there?) so it goes. I’m sure I’ve got a few more years to work something out but who is to say anything will work out? We’ll that’s the big Existential crisis that we all must deal with sooner or later best to be done with it. I have a meeting, later.

I was just reading this Month’s Wired and they have a list of the top 50 Robots.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/robots.html?pg=1&topic=robots&topic_set

Now here we have a different issue. With movies the question is genre, with technology and in this list we have that which does exist and that which exists only in the annals of science fiction (does not exits, hence the fiction). I do not think that a list containing real robots can fairly be compared (at least not yet and in the future the issue might be moot at least for talking cars, etc) to a list that contains fantastical ficticioal robots. I’d have to say that if you want a robot then get a robot, if you want to fantasize about how cool robots will be, might be, then watch or read some good science fiction. I mean Forbes did a list of the richest ficticional characters but they did not compare them to Donald Trump and Bill Gates. That said and Done I will say that Astro Boy rules!

Yeah for sure, IGN just put out their top 25 list of hero movieshttp://filmforce.ign.com/articles/676/676647p1.html

most of them are just wrong. There have been some really good movies about heroism and the super form is usually great fan fare but Blade 2 (the one with the Sun bombs) and Hulk (the Jungian father relationship of the decade) are just bad movies. I’ll admit that they have some of the good ones there including Spiderman 2 and Superman but for the most part either they were stretching too thin when it came to figuring good Super Hero movies OR the core conceptual themes that make up a good super hero movie is not what the list was about. I mean for sheer spectacle and explosions some of these might be great but many are just badly made movies. I thought I was a geek but maybe I just don’t get why people like Hell Boy so damn much? I’m waiting for 2006 when Superman Returns. http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/supermanreturns/

‘Tis the season for people to partake in the company of loved ones, goodwill and cheer but when that wears off you can turn to some commerciaized emotional hyperbole (movies) that along with the Charlie Brown and Nat King Cole ought to keep the season jolly.

10. Lethal Weapon (Mr. Joshua: “It’s Christmas!”)

9. Ernest Saves Christmas (one of the best Ernest movies out there second maybe only to Goes to Jail)

8. Rocky IV (Sly must go train in the cold Siberian tundra for his fight with Drago on December 25)

7. Elf (It was a cute movie and you need a few of those)

6. Die Hard (Argyle playing Run DMC is worth it alone)

5. It’s a Wonderful Life (Bruce Wayne from Batman TAS episode 102 Christmas With the Joker – “It’s not relentlessly cheerful is it.”)

4. Home Alone (slap stick Pesci style)

3. Mirale on 34th Street (1947) (gotta love screwing the Government with it’s own legal loopholes)

2. A Christmas Story (It had Darin “The Night Stalker” McGavin as the gruff dad)

1. Scrooged (The Night the Reindeer Died)

Bonus: Santa Claus (my favorite when I was a kid) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089961/

Have a good one.

http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/674/674712p1.html

They’ve done another one about comedies. PersonallyI have some problems with anything Steve Martin every did being called “funny” but that’s a subjective thing (no it’s not . . . but differ to diplomacy). Also any list of comedies that does not include Leprechaun http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107387/ is missing some angle on humor. I think the next step is to finish off the solid lists and get into post modern genre combinations like top 25 Space Musicals or something. I myself am thinking that a version of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes set in space and given the edge of some Ice Pirates http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087451/ and an homage to Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom for the big number would be something fun, just Busby Berkley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busby_Berkeley it up (yeah it should be a verb). They pay for concepts in Hollywood don’t they?

I just stumbled across this http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/673/673392p1.html at the IGN website. It is a list of 25 of the best action movies. The list has some variety of style, genre, etc. You may disagree about some placements but this is a list that gets it right and stays within the easily definable bounds where such subjective lists belong.

I just got a link
http://www.empireonline.co.uk/features/50greatestindependent/50-41.asp

from my good friend Eripsa. This link lists the top 50 or so “Independent Films”. This term has been in dispute ever since the mid 90’s when Mirimax made a name for themselves by distributing these films that were not seen as being part of the studio system: MGM, Universal, etc. Soon the Independent Film Channel followed and later another Sundance. They were seen as a place to showcase the independet sprit of filmmaking and all that. However, along the way as is to be expected and in a perfectly sensibly fashion following the success of Mirimax’s indie hook, a whole new crops of autuers appeared and the independent label perhaps got a little blown out of proportion. It is my firm belief that “gay cowboys eating pudding” is not inhernently indie. I do not prescribe to this ideal about the “sprit of independent cinema”. Today I think, more so than not, what people might think of as independent cinemas just isn’t. For my two cents a film is truly independent if it is produced and financed outside of the Studios (i.e. the big Corporation with money) entirely. It is the sort of film like Kevin Smith’s Clerks or David Lynch’s Eraserhead where they had difficulties getting the money and where the likelyhood of the film getting made, let alone distributed and released to the public, was not at all certain. We’ll that’s my new rant have at it! I have to go finish my own independent film now.

A few weeks ago I saw a rather artistic looking commercial. It was “artistic” in the sense that there was clearly care taken to consider a film stock and to set up and film the commercial on whole. Essentially the setting is sort of a ghetto “war torn” like city area mostly in grays and blues. As the activity of the commercial begins we see children in small groups become engaged in what escalates to a massive water balloon fight. Ironically the music used in the commercial is Teddy Bear’s Picnic. Ironic because this song is usually associated with children in gleeful play out in nature and here we have children who in a juxtaposition are gleeful while the surroundings and composition of the commercial seem to elicit the dirty documentary style that was employed during scenes of rioting in such films as The Battle of Algiers. The subject matter of this film being that that the native residents of French occupied Algeria are using terrorist tactics to fight for their independence from a French occupation that subjugates the the native people.

Okay so this is all pretty involved. On one level, albeit the “deeper” level, the commercial plays as a political commentary about guerilla warfare. However, on the surface the commercial shows children not suffering but playing. In large numbers the young people are enjoying the warm sunny day while having a water balloon fight. No one is shown to be crying or having a bad time, the occasional adult walks by and is oblivious to the fun that the youths are having with their picnic in the ghetto.

So what the hell was this commercial all about? It wasn’t a commercial for water balloons, it wasn’t one of those government PSA’s about getting outside and playing with other children. This commercial which though it had underlying themes of collective warfare, was really just about children playing outside and having fun on a sunny day, was for the new Xbox 360.

I suppose it is a romantic notion that children can play and have fun outside in the numbers and in the environment shown in the commercial. Still I am quite concerned if we have become such a technophilic culture, so detached from our physical world with sunlight and wetness from water balloons, and the laughter that comes from playing with other people that a commercial that features all of this so prominently is used as an advertisement for a video game box where you sit inside and play with people who are somewhere else.

I will concede this point. One of the more popular games for this sort of video game system is Halo which is a war game where an individual or a team fight to save the world, etc. I just don’t think the sytlism of riotous warfare made parody of in the commercial (which I will admit people in this day and age would associate with movies, video games . . . the news) is more strong than the “sense of play” that is conveyed in the content of the commercial.

Okay this site might be cool.

http://www.channelfrederator.com/

The problem with success is that it can lead to mediocrity. As Cartoon Network begins to air live action movies like Tim Burton’s Batman there is a legitimate concern http://news.toonzone.net/article.php?ID=6885 that soon Cartoon Network will suffer the fate of Music Television.