The Diamond Island

While I was watching some of the Karin episodes on YouTube, I remembered an anime I saw back in the early eighties called The Sea Prince and The Fire Child.  As luck would have it, numerous bits of it were available on the YouTube experience.  I’d forgotten the details, so it was nice to renew my contact with this rare gem.

In a nutshell, Brother Water (a kind of Poseidon-sea horse dude) and Sister Fire (winged faerie sun fire Goddess) were close friends until Evil Brother Air (a giant octopus) put bad blood between them.  Fire created a magical fire that as long as it burned would keep water and fire separate and at peace (and the air octopus dude in limbo).

Enter the Sea Prince (son of Brother Water) and the Fire Child (daughter of Sister Fire).  They meet each other and fall in love despite the historic enmity between their two parents.

Spoiler alert: Ahrrooo!!

It’s a Romeo and Juliet kind of story, with the two lovebirds dying horribly (in other words, it’s a tragic anime) — fire and water destroy each other, but the two siblings kind of make up so that water and fire can be one again in the reflection of water, even if they can’t be as close as they were again.  The two lovers get to shine as a star in the sky as an inspiration to all other suckers who think crossing the line will end well.

The movie is a beautiful piece of animation, and at times extremely poignant.  There are parts that don’t hold up so well, because the premise assumes nobody figured out evil brother air was responsible and he ought to be the sole one punished.  Of course, where is evil brother air’s earth sister counterpart – wouldn’t he be much better served if he were given a date?  The two siblings could have caused a lot more righteous havoc had they conspired to get the octopus in touch with his own bad blood self.

The movie carries an important message – how much we are in thrall to forces beyond our command, and how much nature moves us against and for each other.  If it’s a tragedy, it’s an acknowledgment of how limited we are and how the only thing moving us forward is the (vain?) hope that things will get better, or that the sacrifices of the past will improve the horrors of the present.

How much of the differences between us are manufactured, with vital clues left out for some personal image of what we want?  The parent-child relationship can turn dangerously wrong and damage people beyond repair.  If only we thought more about the consequences of our actions to our descendants.

And perhaps we should consider what might happen when we project upon others our own inner turmoil.  Much harm, I think, has been done when we let loose our own energies upon the world without care or thought to the effects.  A difficult thing it is to reclaim our own problems and acknowledge that the fault lies with us.

Back in the late seventies, when my folks and I arrived in the Northern Virginia-DC area, I started watching a lot of WDCA Channel 20. There was this oddball character named “Captain 20”, who presided over the afternoon-to-evening cartoons and shows of the day.

He was a vulcan kind of character in a starship uniform who did contests, displayed viewer artwork, and did various announcements in between shows. I thought he was the coolest, most offbeat character I’d seen hosting television shows yet. I could hardly imagine a neater thing than a local channel with it’s own futuristic character binding your show-watching experience together with imagination.

I got to see the King Kong cartoon, Marine Boy, Ultraman, Starblazers, weird B movies and a whole host of other shows you’d never see on television today. If the guy had been nothing more than a face for the magical, hope filled studies I performed as a young creature, he would have been a worthy soul I would fight to make a place for in my vision of the Valhalla-afterlife warm up.

My folks started watching a late night horror show on Saturday nights called Creature Feature. I joined in, because the show was playing movies that had the sort of dreams I wanted to experience. Okay, so Attack of the Mushroom People was a horrible movie, but hidden within the crumminess of such movies are realms of experience accessible only through the small budget seriousness that fails.

The sacrifice of the artist creates a void inside of which the sacrament of horror is transformed into miracles.

Back in the day, before the rulers of corporate television got the insane idea that they could make more money by having a monopoly on bad programming, local channels could get pretty inventive and interesting.

For Creature Feature, Captain 20 put on a cape and scary makeup to play Count Gore de Vol, the host of the show. In between the commercials and the movie segments he would crack bad jokes, read letters from fans and respond, talk back to the cameramen telling him to get a life, and have guest stars like Penthouse Playmates or local fans.

One such guest star I saw on the tube was a person I didn’t know at the time, but would later in life. By day she is honeysuckle, but by night she’s the Incorrigible Witch. We met each other at our mutual employer, and in a twist of fate that can only be called Twilight Zone meets Funky Town, discovered we both loved the Count.

As I stared at her photo album of her visit to the Count, I discovered I’d seen her on TV. I mean, it’s one of the more vivid memories I have of those days – her getting into the Count’s Coffin to gag jokes from the studio staff while her friend looks on in shock. Life is weird.

We both look up Count Gore, and find out he has a website. Then we find out he’d moved back to Northern Virginia! She manages to get a “date” with him and catch up on old times, since she finds out they live in the same area. This is freaking me out. I got to hand it to the Incorrigible Witch, she’s got some real brass and isn’t afraid to get into the thick of strange adventures!

The Count, as his daytime alter-ego, drops by our office and gives me a genuine autographed picture. Can you dig it? We both miss him, because he’s a ramblin’ man who strikes like a fiend in the night, but the fact that he stopped by means a whole lot to me. If as a kid, I’d known that one day I’d meet that girl on TV, and get an autographed photo from the Count, it would have made me levitate for days. Not that my folks would have minded.

All of us have the potential to be horror hosts of our own monster theater. Some of us, like the Count, are naturals who show us the way to our own individual formula for happiness. Exposure to such rare minerals at an early age leads to a healthy, productive life of beneficial insanity!

This development has my Mirage’s fungus prints all over it. Horror and scary stuff really isn’t my thing, but in the spirit of Halloween and Celtic New Year I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense. I can only guess what my Mirage is cooking up, with his strange ways of doing things. Yikes, Scoob!

In the meantime, I raise a glass of cold draft cider and toast to your good health, Count! Such as it is, being undead or something. There is no other horror host like you in my pond of memories. Wolfman Jack and Ghoulardi get props from me for the ground they broke in my psyche. But it’s your weird, wonderful imagination that stands the test of time in my dark soul!

I’m driving to the parental unit’s batcave with K, and while we are waiting at the stoplight, we hear bagpipes.  I search in vain for the source.  It’s coming from the woods, and it sounds like some kind of battle march.  Well crumbs that about sums up the times, doesn’t it?

All the transmissions coming in seem to carry a certain amount of radiation identified as belonging to the economic Three Mile Island that never was.  I keep hearing denials along the lines of “this is not the great depression.”  Well, no duh buddy!  That ship has sailed.  I don’t think it’s the “Very Great Depression” either, as some econ blogs have been naming it either.

What if it’s The Depression?  As in, the one big monster that overshadows all other “adjustments” in the rich soaking the poor?  As some may know, anything preceded by “The” in its title, at least in the faerie lands, is way more powerful than any other combination of names.  This ain’t “Big Dude Depression” or “That Depression thingee”, this is THE thing.  The one that all others will be measured by.  Hope you’re ready for the barter system.

Started thinking about a movie I saw a few times as a kid, back in 1974.  Rumplestiltskin.  The dwarf that spins hair into gold for a girl who has been jacked by her father’s unrealistic image of her.  The impossible task.  I think no matter what the rich people do, the train wreck is happening.  This country’s AAA rating is toast.  We’ll never guess that name in time to send the dwarf into the center of the earth in fire.

So I watch an In Search Of… episode on YouTube.  The one about the Loch Ness Monster.  Great stuff.  Delving into the deep like a deep-sea diver for the one shot that will give us some information about the unknown.  That’s where I’m at.  But all I get from that are blurry motion pictures and straight up shots of bubbling mystery that could be anything.  I still believe there’s something going on there.

Despite the attempt to destroy the public’s attempt to be relevant, I come across a public access channel on my folk’s cable channels.  Heck, if there were more channels like this, I’d actually subscribe.  But the one channel can’t handle the weight of 99% need, and some of the programs don’t do it for me.  I understand.  Trying to break through is tough.

Amazing stuff is going on in the underground.  All you have to do is remain open.  Seek, and you shall not find.  Sit down, and wait patiently – the mystery shall give you clues.

I found the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films by Peter Jackson and company a let down. The first movie was good, the second okay, and the third awful. But as far as being anything approaching Tolkien well, better minds than I have already deconstructed the movie to the pain.

This is a (mostly) family show, so I won’t go into sordid detail about today’s rave. But I think the soft-core movie Lord of the G-Strings is a fine movie. When I think about the nine hours plus of sprawling dung that Hollywood dropped on my head, all I need for an antidote is to think about this little gem of a movie. Everything is transparent to something else, praise Bob.

Bildo Saggins (played by cult soft-core figure Misty Mundae) and her horny throbitt friends are charged by the drunkard wizard Smirnoff to destroy the mighty G-string. Anyone who wears the thing threatens to destroy the kingdom with the lust this item inspires. Therefore it must be destroyed to restore peace, or something.

Arrayed against our stalwart heroines are Smirnoff’s traitorous friend Sour-azz and the pervert Ballum. Yes, the awful names and images never cease.

Michael Thomas (which I’m not sure is a real name) plays an inspired performance as Smirnoff.  I would match his spoof performance of Gandalf any day against Sir Ian McKellan’s serious portrayal in Lord of the Rings.  Both are truth.

I’ve seen several of the other offerings by the company that gave us this weird movie. Playmate of the Apes, Spider Babe – all trash! It’s as if a rare combination of usually worthless materials combine to create a movie that is an instant classic. For me, it’s all about the discovery of the unusual and original.

Now, mind you, I’m not fond of this movie for the nakedness factor. That’s all part of the absurdity of the film. What I embrace is the way this movie takes a venerated icon of fandom and subverts it. The entire trilogy is condensed into one movie, with some extreme liberties taken with the eventual story for the sake of budget. That is, whatever little budget there could have been in a production like this.

The throbitt party has all manner of silly encounters as they walk through the same back yard forest over and over. They meet the cowardly lion and beat him up because he has no courage. The orcs pursuing them get lost and ambushed by hillbillies. At one point, they meet another party of women adventurers with a quest to destroy an artifact going in the opposite direction, and argue over who is really on a wild goose chase.

An effect similar to Monty Python and the Holy Grail is achieved; where through the use of comedy on sacred cows of adventure, certain truths emerge. Smirnoff’s bumbling, lecherous incompetence makes him human and believable. Bildo’s (naive?) acceptance of a ridiculous quest that is part of Smirnoff’s plot to get rid of a piece of junk reflects the way we operate in the real world.

How many movies does it take to tell a story where you are dumping a prop off with the studio crew, anyway? Let’s just get to that backyard renn faire at the end and have a party, complete with stupid cheap computer animation effects. The ending suggests Bildo is not as dumb as she seemed, and maybe the power objects have over us is all in our minds.

K and I haven’t been to a movie since Pan’s Labyrinth. We go to about one movie every year. She’s given up on movies, while I still cling to the hope that the next movie-going experience will be different. I’m always reaching for that 1% chance of something great.

The buzz for the new Batman movie got me caring enough to try and convince K to go with me. She agreed, we bought a pair of matinee tickets online, and got ready to try our luck again. Don’t ask me to remember the title, all the Batman movies seem the same to me now. Batman’s Big Day Out, Batman Goes To Camp, Batman’s in the Army Now, etc.

Wow, a matinee costs seventeen bucks. Okay, there’s a two-buck service charge for the convenience, but Good Lord. Seven-fifty a ticket? The normal price is ten bucks. We spend fifteen bucks on a large soda, a hot dog, and large popcorn. So that’s thirty-two dollars.

By comparison, K and I could buy or rent a DVD for ten bucks or less, and use the rest to buy a pizza and a six pack of beer. We wouldn’t have to be crammed into sardine-size seats, be distracted by jerks and their bright cell phones texting away, have idiots backing their seats into our knees, breathe air reeking of sweat and farts, and watch twenty minutes of ads and previews for movies that reek or recycled thought-vomit.

The movie is two hours and twenty minutes long, plus the twenty minutes of advertising and ten minutes you spent finding a seat away from the mutants. Judging by the silent, immediate way the audience left at the end to relieve their bladders, it was a long three hours. And no Gandalf or Eyes-of-Frodo to squee at, neither.

I’ll summarize the entire plot in one sentence, so if you hate spoilers, take the tape out now. The plot of the movie is “Batman becomes the bad guy because he isn’t good at anything else.” The entire movie is about Batman failing at everything so he can claim the title of “The Dark Knight”, the “hero people deserve”, that is – the unstoppable thug we all wish we were when it comes to revenge-justice power fantasties.

Never mind how stupid and unheroic this is, it’s boring and it’s outdated. I want to see Batman kick butt and solve crimes, not wallow in nonsensical melodrama and mindlessly react to villains who outthink him at every turn with two bit plans that wouldn’t fool the average person, never mind The World’s Greatest Detective.

That’s probably the worst thing about Batman Mark XVIII, he’s an impotent character that nobody can care about on any level – butt kicking, police work, human drama – nothing. Christian Bale is miscast; he is unable to bring any weight to his portrayal of either Batman or Bruce Wayne. Every time he growled his raspy voice as Batman, I wanted to cringe.

I think the only reason he got the Batman part was because of his role in American Psycho. The casting agents must have figured he could play a one-note lunatic, so why not a complicated psychopath vigilante like Batman.

There’s a scene where the Joker (the main bad guy), played by Heath Ledger, is dangling upside down from a line. It’s the final showdown and the Joker has “lost”, or rather, he’s out of unlimited instant-trap points. Heath’s upside down performance as the Joker dances circles around Christian Bale’s weak attempt at being Batman. The Joker may as well have been talking to himself.

During this scene, I realized Batman was still using his raspy batman voice during the back-and-forth. Even though the Joker isn’t scared of him and knows Batman’s real identity! How stupid is that? Batman hasn’t got squat to say to the villain. As usual in all Batman films the villain has the best lines and scenes. Is the movie about Batman or the Joker?

Heath’s performance as the Joker is the only good thing about the movie. He reinvents the villain as a diseased mind incapable of caring about anyone or anything except his schemes to stir the Batman into action. His portrayal is mesmerizing and scary while at the same time sympathetic. I would say the Joker does a better job of portraying the inner id of people who want to cut loose than Batman’s rich, effete snob.

The movie’s creators wisely choose to leave Heath’s Joker an enigma. His past is never explained, and the police are unable to dig up any information on him. Like a true fool, Heath’s joker moves through every boundary and into any situation without pause. Every time he is on screen the movie picks up intensity and he forces his co-workers to stop phoning it in.

It’s a sad state of affairs when it takes a suicidal actor to convey art of any substance in a Hollywood movie. Thank goodness Heath’s amazing performance was in this movie, because otherwise we’d be stuck with a horrible, unmatchable mess.

And what a mess it is. Whenever the Joker is off screen, the movie reverts to a dragging bloat of multiple plots and unbelievable contrivances. The Joker seems capable of creating instant traps at any time – warehouses full of gasoline barrels rigged to blow, hospitals lined with hidden explosives, and an endless array of “crazy people” who do his bidding. The whole Joker enterprise is hard to believe – Batman passes up this huge organization of psychos to take out the mob? Huh?

I’m also bored with the same old female character that exists only to be put in jeopardy and/or die to motivate the hero. With no personality of her own. It’s old, its crummy writing, and it’s just not full of pathos anymore. Every time I saw Maggie Gyllenhaal, I kept thinking of her role in Secretary and wanting to see that movie instead. Sad.

Aaron Eckhart, who plays Harvey Dent the noble prosecutor who falls, is also miscast. He’s too good-guy to play a man with a twisted dark side that comes out under tragedy. His background and reasons for falling never make sense to me. I get the movie’s message that “anyone can fall”. I just don’t buy it here. The guy goes from noble and dedicated throughout most of the movie to random psycho in a matter of minutes.

His look as Two-Face the villain is laughable – where as Heath’s Joker in ordinary grease paint comes off as creepy and unsettling, Harvey’s Two-Face looks over the top and distracting. I mean, the giant eyeball and bones showing through were ridiculous. What, it wouldn’t have been enough for him to just be scarred? Some marks don’t need to be gore fests to cut deep into the psyche. That was the point of Harvey Dent in the original “Dark Knight”.

Basically, despite the hype that this is a “reinvention” of the franchise, it’s exactly like all the others before it. You have multiple villains clogging the screen (the Scarecrow from the last film even has a cameo). Multiple plots competing for dominance. And a Batman who never makes any sense as a character.

Batman only reacts to the villains. He never shows any brains, deductive reasoning, or foresight. He can drive a car or a motorcycle like greased lightning to get to the next death trap in time to watch himself fail, and he can beat up thugs and SWAT members when it has nothing to do with the plot, but he can’t show any sign of emotion when the circumstances call for it.

His love interest is murdered and the most grief we see is him sitting in a penthouse with a glass of (presumably) alcohol. His friend and supporter on the police force is (apparently) assassinated saving the mayor, and the most we see is him beating up some thugs to show how “angry” he is. The man who represented hope and was supposed to let Batman retire and live a normal life is maimed and brutalized for life, and Bruce Wayne spends about sixty seconds consoling the guy before leaving. Granted Batman is a psychopath, but if he doesn’t care about his contacts even as casualties in his maniacal war on crime, why should we?

The super high tech gadget that erases civil liberties so Batman can have a chance of finding the Joker fails to find the villain in time for his next plot (despite the fact that there must be literally dozens of careless crazy Joker operatives throughout town setting up the ferry trap, complete with hacked power systems and cargo holds full of explosives). Batman breaks the law and invades our privacy, and he still can’t find the bad guy. How sad is that?

At the end of the film, we have this cockamamie speech from Batman about how he must shed his “good guy” image and become the Dark Knight. I still can’t make heads or tails of the logic. Harvey Dent turned evil, but people must believe he was good, so Batman will take the blame for the man’s death, even though Harvey as Two-Face killed several people, and the Joker totally whupped Batman’s behind with a belt, and now Batman can be the hero people deserve, because he’s not a hero and Harvey is the real hero, and now the police must send the dogs after Batman, because he’s bad now and taking the blame he doesn’t deserve. Run Batman, run!

Please stop.

K and I watched the latest James Bond movie.  The movie could be best described as “stink, stank, stunk”.  Daniel Craig has got nothing going for him in this film except looks.  Yeargh, and the story was a lengthy hodge-podge of boring and nonsensical scenes.  This movie is further proof that Hollywood cannot make good movies except by accident.

I’ve read all the Ian Fleming books, and I have most of my favorite Bond films in my DVD collection.  Not all of them are good, nor are they necessarily paragons of morality or maturity.  The whole enterprise is nothing more than adolescent romanticism, so I don’t buy into Bond movies expecting realism.  I’ll watch Sandbaggers if I need a dose of hard-hitting espionage storylines.

James Bond is about boyhood fantasies.  Exotic travel, license to kill, short term love affairs handled with flair, the thrill of dangerous escapades, competent high stakes gambling, high tech gadgets, black and white morality, and stylish clothes.  This is the playboy’s life, lived without consequences, reflection, or restraint.

Enter the newest incarnation of Bond.  Apparently this movie wanted to push a more realistic version of the secret agent.  Gone is the fantasy element, now it’s all about being a thug.  Violence and destruction without purpose are ends in themselves.  Relationships of any kind are scenes for Bond to show his contempt for anyone but himself.

Gone is the witty reparte between Bond and Villain.  You won’t get scenes with titan actor Christopher Lee and distinguished actor Roger Moore:

Francisco Scaramanga: You get as much pleasure out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?
James Bond: I admit killing you would be a pleasure.

Instead you get crummy stuff like this:

Le Chiffre: You changed your shirt, Mr Bond. I hope our little game isn’t causing you to perspire.
James Bond: A little. But I won’t consider myself to be in trouble until I start weeping blood.

Villain weird!  Bond smash!  Blah, blah, blah.

Perhaps that’s the biggest thing missing from the franchise now.  The charm and unflappable nerves of Bond are what make him interesting.  Daniel Craig isn’t given a decent line in the entire movie.  He’s played as a “blunt instrument”.  But that kind of mentality belongs to the nameless thugs Bond used to trounce in earlier films.

As for the “realism”, I have to laugh.  Putting a lot of cuts and bruises on Bond’s face, after he went through a series of acrobatic maneuvers that would break bones, does not make for “realism”.  A Bond with a lot of hit points and no style is not cool.  It’s lame.  There were scenes where I watched Daniel Craig jump down from heights the earlier, unrealistic Bonds NEVER leaped.  When Daniel Craig landed on solid concrete, I kept thinking “Oh!  That snapped both ankles into bone fragments.”

The basic plot of the original story of Casino Royale by Ian Flemming is pretty standard fare.  Bond goes to the casino of the title to beat the villain in a long-term card game for high stakes.  The idea is to make an example of the villain to his supporters and to deprive them of funding.  The villain is trying to raise money for an evil plot by bilking money from various high rollers who are participating in the game.  All of the intrigue takes place in the casino or the town it’s located in.  Unlike a lot of other Bond stories, this one is fairly static and is more about plots and counter-plots, with the action taking place at the gambling tale.

Of course, Hollywood thinks this kind of thing is boring, so the first hour and a half of the film revolves around a lot of sub-plots that lead to the casino action.  There’s chases and shootouts that don’t make any sense, and brief investigative scenes that a Spy-kid could figure out.  It’s all unaffecting fare, without any stakes.  By the time we get to the casino action I’m starting to squirm in my seat.  And I’m at home with a six-pack of cold draft cider and a slice of pizza!

The final confrontation comes and goes in a gambling display that is as crude as it is unbelievable.  Then the movie goes off on a tangent for another hour!  The end of the film comes just as Bond is about to kick some butt.  That’s what you get.  Two and a half hours of boredom for one minute of fun, then the movie ends.  It’s so lame I can’t believe it.

There’s always a “Bond Girl”.  Usually the female operatives are competent in some way, even if they are minimized in their role.  But the young woman in this film is so inexperienced I can’t believe she’s been sent on such a dangerous, important job.  She seems incapable of defending herself, and lacks any kind of interesting background that might explain her finding a place in a secret agency.

The gadgets blow.  None of them are actually cool or useful.  The whole “we’re always in touch with Bond using total surveilance” thing is stupid and undermines Bond’s independence and intelligence.

Come to think of it, the whole British Secret Service crew comes off as pretty incompetent and clueless, instead of the professional, dignified bunch they’ve been in the past.  Bond’s boss, “M”, is disrespected by Bond at every turn, when in the past “M” was both a harsh taskmaster and a strident supporter of Bond’s activities.  Bond listened to the guy, even if he didn’t always agree with his rules.  And he never, ever “put one over on the old man”.  “M” was sharp and no fool, established in the very first Bond film.  I just wish this “M” was comparable.  One wonders how or why she’s head of the double-0 branch at all.

Ugh, I give this movie the finger.

I take a look at my hall pass, and the lifeclock is a big fat black color.  For whatever reason, the boog-a-loos don’t come descending on my head.  They haven’t departed.  The house is still haunted with weird stuff.  The faucet in the kitchen is now leaking.  I have to get that taken care of.  The electrical guys haven’t been back to finish the work.  I guess I’m just learning to live with wacky toilet time, the creaks and groans at night, and the bugs that appear to plague me.

K and I used last weekend to organize and unpack from our emergency move a year and three months ago.  We got good work done, and cleared some space, which was a help.  I got some of my piles of papers back into line, and came across a poster from back in the day.

The poster came with an Alien doll I got back during the craze of the movie that came out in 1979.  It’s a drawing of scenes from the movie with a few artistic licenses thrown in.  That movie was all the rage with my classmates in 6th grade.  A group of folks from a rival class tried to put together a home movie based on their devotion to that science fiction classic.  Crumbs, if only they’d had YouTube back then.

I dug out my Alien baseball trading cards, a complete set except for number 61 – “the chest-burster”, and gazed at all the pictures.  The puzzles got me to thinking about back when movie trading cards were all the rage after Star Wars.  I have to organize these darn cards of mine someday – Blue, red, yellow, green and orange Star Wars cards to name a few.

I had to trade that one for card number 1.  Back then number 61 cards were a dime a dozen, so I figured I’d be able to get another one easy.  Unfortunately, the series stopped being sold on my next trip to the local seven-eleven (which is a hair salon now, go figure), and I’d somehow given away all my extras.

I meditate on the movie, and recollect memories from my young fascination with the film.  I decide to go to Best-Cry and buy the DVD for ten bucks, as I haven’t yet added it to my collection.  K and I have an evening where we watch the movie and have a blast.

I remember seeing Alien for the first time at a late show in D.C., at a theater that sadly, no longer exists (though you can see it in Exorcist III – the main character and his best friend go there for their yearly mourning ritual to watch It’s a Wonderful Life).  Alien scared the pants off the crowd several times.  It was awesome.

The DVD has several deleted scenes that I’ve never seen, and which are actually pretty good.  I feel like I’m seeing an old friend again, and discovering something new about them.  I rethink my old experiences in light of the new scenes and how I might have thought.

My copy of the novel comes off the shelf and I read it three times to get every nuance.  A line from the scene where the remaining crewmembers are talking to the decapitated head of Ash the android sticks out at me.  He asks them if they’ve tried to communicate with the alien.  It’s a dead end for the crewmembers, but I wonder if Ash, being an android with a gender-neutral point of view, isn’t speaking of something outside the crew’s immediate experience.  He was probably trying to mislead them, but he might have thrown them a crumb from the limits of his artificial brain process.

I get to obsessing over the film.  Then I start looking up Bigfoot movies that I suddenly remember watching on Channel 20 WDCA during that channel’s glory years.  There’s this movie where a bunch of college students uncover a mummified Bigfoot and it comes back to life to rampage.  I used a tape recorder to tape the sound when I was a kid, and I listened to it at night with my blankets over my head for years until I recorded over it.  I use the mighty power of the internets and find out it’s called Curse of Bigfoot, and it’s available on Amazon.

My investigations go deeper.  There’s a Bigfoot movie called Creature from Black Lake that I’ve never seen, but I think I might have and forgotten.  See, there’s this scary music hook that I can always remember and associate with Bigfoot.  But I don’t know where it’s from.  So I Netflix the movie and see if that leads to anything.  K shakes her head at my poor taste in B-movies, but I think Creature from Black Lake actually is a decent monster movie.  It does not produce the music I’m straining to remember, however.

I finally go to YouTube and find an old show called Monsters, Mysteries, or Myths, which was narrated by Rod Sterling of Twilight Zone fame.  It’s a TV show that tried to explore Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, and the Loch Ness Monster from a “somewhat” scientific viewpoint.  There’s a three to five second sound bite where the music that’s stuck in my head plays, and I recognize it.

It’s weird, because that one brief sound bite has stuck in my head since 1975, and only now do I reconnect with it and get into the vibe with a show that scared me so bad I couldn’t sleep for weeks.  The show was re-edited with a different narrator and shown again in the early 1980s as The Mysterious Monsters, which I think I saw and that probably dredged up scary memories.

What this adds up to is that old scary spooky feeling again.  I’m getting the shakes, and yet I can’t stop looking this stuff up and re-experiencing it.  In particular, the self-destruct part of the Alien keeps replaying in my head.  The last crewmember’s endgame and final confrontation with the monster, all while experiencing nearly unbearable panic and fear.

I wonder if my mirage is up to his old tricks again.  Come to think of it, my garden troubles might be his doing.  He does know weeds and soil like the back of his hand, and it would be a laugh-riot if my folks got a bumper crop while K and I got a crummy harvest.  I just discovered the parental units have planted corn and it is already almost ready.  The stalks were hidden by their tomato plants.  Argh!  The garden beat-down knows no depths.

In a certain sense, the movie Alien is about discovery, both of something new and different (even if it’s a horrific one in terms of what happens to the crew), and Ellen Ripley’s inner resources.  It’s a message, one that I observe and reflect upon.  I don’t get the sense that I’m supposed to do anything more than that.

I have a dream.  In it, I encounter the creature from the movie.  It jumps on me like a cricket, and we wrestle in a dark place for a long while.  In Alien, the creature is more than a match for any human because it has inhuman strength and snap-reflexes in addition to claws and slime-lubricated teeth.  But in the dream, we’re equally matched somehow.

The alien snaps it piston-like teeth into my cheek, and instead of eviscerating my face, I resist and slide out of its grasp.  Some sort of understanding passes between us, and all of a sudden I’m “one of its kind”.  We lay on our stomachs together, cheek-to-cheek, and listen to the darkness.

I always get a kick out of how popular Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail (Holy Grail for short) is today.  It’s become an enshrined icon of popular culture (and rightly so, I believe).  Geeks everywhere can spout off lines from a half dozen scenes on command, and many can do much more than that when it comes to reciting the litany.

But it wasn’t always so.  My folks used to take me to all sorts of movies when I was a little one.  The kinds that could only be seen at student cinemas in universities.  This was before the era of video cassette, DVD or online distribution.  Sometimes you’d see a movie and not see it again until twenty or thirty years later.  That’s how crazy it was back then.

I went with my folks and their best friend BK to see a new movie called Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.  I was little, but I recall quite vividly taking in the various scenes from the movie and finding it all ridiculous and true.  I also remember students all around us looking disgusted or confused.  Some were getting up and leaving, dismissing the film with a gesture of their hand just like in those movies where the heroes’ film is trashed by the audience because they don’t understand the genius.

My folks thought it was brilliant, so I saw the movie again in a different university cinema.  I liked it (even though I was hardly old enough to have a deep understanding of what I was watching).  The reaction was the same.  Hippie students dissing the film and making fun of the scenes (“is this supposed to be funny, man?”)

When I was in college, I got a chance to see the movie once more in a university theater with fellow “hip” students.  The reaction couldn’t have been more different.  Genuine enjoyment, reenactment of key lines, copious laughter.

I think about all the icons of culture generated during that time period and how they’ve become assimilated into the mainstream or acquired devoted followings.  The individualized aspects, I think, get lost as people take up the compensatory message of the artistry and celebrate what the icon means in a participatory way.  But the conscious understanding of what the icon is telling us is seldom understood.  You can’t take Holy Grail seriously; it’s just a comedy, right?

Wrong.  It’s truth.  The movie’s a statement of where we are right now, on this planet.  That’s why it’s so “funny”.  You laugh, because otherwise you’d cry.  Or you’d scoff and say, “I don’t get this man.  Pass me that doobie.”

As I’ve mentioned before here, I don’t much care for the movies that are released in theaters. I believe the entertainment industry is incapable of making good movies except by accident. It’s the medieval printing press formula of spitballing. That is, mass production of a large number of products in the hope that something will stick and make enough money to make up for the tremendous losses of everything else that bombed.

You see it books, television shows, video games, and popular music. A whole lot of garbage, and a few lucky shots. Yet the industry, with its medieval guild system of cutting off free markets via the control of distribution, refuses to diversify for its own financial survival. All I see is consolidation into large, inefficient corporations that struggle to make the margins. It seems like in the news the only game to play is buyouts.

Without the propaganda machine known as the entertainment public relations industry whipping up public interest, the struggling entertainment industry (again, that term, which suggests craft, but conjures up images of sweatshop smokestacks) might be in worse shape. The mantra is always that it takes “the big boys” to make quality, and since they take all the risks, they deserve all the profits.

Well, hey, if that’s true, how come I’m not entertained? Where’s the “quality” I keep hearing about? All one has to do is read the first sentence of The Da Vinci Code, listen to ten seconds of Britney Spears’ “Gimmie More”, or watch a minute of any show on the SciFi Channel to know this doesn’t pass the laugh test.

The decline comes not just from a longstanding contempt for the public and what it wants, or the exploitation of artists and craftsmen desperate to make a buck, but also from an emerging sense by a new generation of people trained in the computer. These young people are growing up with tools not available even ten years ago that are cooperative, creatively open, and allow you to do work that used to take entire studios of people to produce.

It’s entirely possible now, for example, for a group of people to put together an original, entertaining show, if not better than a mainstream one, using a computer. Sound, video, special effects, and the portability, along with a massive distributor called the Internet, you can do it. You can even set up a website and charge for it if you want, or just post it on YouTube for people to enjoy simply for the love of sharing. It’s all about creating, passing it along, and getting involved.

The iron hand of oligarchy may yet crush this sentiment of the unwashed masses as they evolve towards freedom from coercion. It wouldn’t be the first time. If you look back through the centuries at the history of newspapers, pamphlets, and hootenannies, you’ll see how the owners seized control of popular culture. But as always, one can never tell how things will turn out, it’s anyone’s guess.

But I digress.

I saw a movie called “300”, which is a story about a battle between a small group of Spartans (the good guys) and a gargantuan army of Persians (the bad guys). The battle decides whether the last stand of the good guys inspires their allies to band together and have a chance at remaining free, or they fail and the leader of the Persian army conquers everyone (this is bad). That’s the movie in a nutshell, and it’s been lauded as a macho man story of serious butt kicking and decried as a historically inaccurate appeal to patriotism.

I think both sides are completely wrong. It’s just a really, really bad movie that people are throwing their own projections upon, either because they feel powerless and want to watch some pump up, or they expect disappointment in today’s movies and this one grants them the opportunity to complain.

To the people expecting “quality”, “historical accuracy”, or even things like “realism” or “authenticity”, you are deluding yourselves. This is a fantasy, adapted from a trade paperback taking liberties with history to start with. All you have to do is look at the cinematography, with it’s green-screen generated landscapes and phony-baloney colors stolen from every music video filter of the nineties, to know this is an internal story, not an external one.

The characters move and speak like figures from a daydream or an idle fancy. The outrageous wolves with glowing eyes or rhinos decked out in battle armor are exaggerated monsters of the unconscious with no relation to real world animals. The crazy maneuvers during the fight scenes have nothing to do with physics and everything to do with how adolescents play with action figures.

I’m not knocking this approach. I’m just saying you can’t expect such an overt disregard for reality to hold up under anything more than a loose, subjective viewing. You can say such a shallow presentation neither nourishes the soul hungry for art nor makes for fascinating intellectual analysis, and I’d agree. See that industry treadmill spewing out offal? Yes, it’s gross, and it’s useful to consider the ways in which it falls short (ahh, that sulphurous, rotten egg smell of a group of men pushing an armored elephant right off a cliff). After all that, it’s time to start talking about alternatives.

To the people who think there’s a lot of kicking of butts, I think you need a reality check from Patton: “Now I want you to remember that no *#&!#%$ ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb *#&!#%$ die for his country.”

Sure, there’s a lot of awesome battle moves going on, the Spartans inflict huge losses against an outlandish array of revved up opponents, and they all die fighting. That’s not kicking butt, that’s losing with a flourish.

Yes, their heroic sacrifice inspires the wimp allies to stand up to the invaders, but we never see if that final battle leads to victory. Without final victory, you lose. Yes, you can say we know what happened in history, but remember this is a fantasy. If it isn’t on screen, we can’t imply anything. It’s a complete let down.

You want butt kicking? After a long movie of fighting down to the bitter end, the superhero leader of the good guys gets a chance to spear the bad guy leader — and clips the bad guys ear. He missed (if the guy’s not dead, you failed). Since the movie is a shallow fantasy, the symbolic effect of such an act in real history means nothing (but having a Man Who Would Be King scene would negate the movie’s premise and ending).

This pathetic miss occurs in an interesting context. There’s an earlier scene in which a lesser character performs an amazing feat of throwing ability.  His spear lands dead on against a huge, armored rhino at least a hundred feet away, exactly enough to kill the creature so that it slides to a stop inches from the guy.

And it’s strongly implied that this lesser character’s weakness of “needing his father’s approval” is what leads to his horrible death. The movie’s implied moral statement is “anything that makes you weak makes you worthless”. Things like feelings other than murderous rage, not being a Spartan, and having a disability.

The leader of the Spartans, who embodies the butt kicking principle to the utmost, should at least be able to duplicate the dead loser’s killing shot from what, twenty feet? Right? This is for the win, leader dies, army falls apart.

Failure = 100%

I don’t watch “butt kicking” movies to watch the heroes lose. I watch to see the good guys inflict major hate and discontent. That’s what my subconscious primitive is paying to see.

One of the greatest movies ever made is a humble little gem called Captain Ron. It’s a comedy, about a stressed out office chump who inherits a large sailboat from his “weird” uncle. The chump, played by Martin Short, decides to bring the ship to a port where an agent will buy the boat from him and he can pay off his looming bills. He also decides to bring his dysfunctional family of working mom, doofus sun and bratty daughter down with him. The idea is that he will be able to bond with them during what he imagines will be a vacation for the family.

They hire a local captain to operate the boat for them (they are the typical clueless white middle class dual-income family), and that is where Captain Ron, played by Kurt Russel, comes in. Captain Ron is a trickster archetype who throws everyone’s expectations and views upside down. He has a laid back demeanor and appears simple-minded. Yet he’s handsome, self-assured, and skilled.

Through subtle interactions, he gets the family members to confront their problems and learn how to be skilled boaters. He frightens them while at the same time expanding their consciousness to include things beyond their narrow experience.

The Captain becomes a headache for the chump, who sees Ron as a personal threat to his self-image. His family’s adoration of the man, and his own repeated bumbling brings out all his insecurities. He begins to work at getting the Captain fired; yet despite his many mistakes the Captain always comes out on top and smelling of roses.

The conflict comes to a head when during an island carnival the chump loses his temper and fires the Captain in front of a large crowd. Unfortunately, he angers a pirate leader in the process, and in the next scene the boat is stolen from the family. They are left adrift in a raft, where they realize how much the Captain has been a force for good in their lives, and how much he has been keeping them safe from harm.

By a twist of fate, they run into Captain Ron who gives them a chance to steal their boat back. This time, the family works together and use the skills they’ve learned to get the boat away from the pirates and out into the sea again. During this affair, Captain Ron feigns a broken leg and forces the chump to do the work.

All of a sudden, the chump realizes Captain Ron has been teaching him to be the Captain. Ron hasn’t just been a decent human being to them, he’s something more. They’ve all learned how to be their own Captains and break out of the lifelessness of their problems. The Captain, seeing that his work is done, leaves them in a tearful farewell. It’s up to them now, and they are ready.

At the end, they decide to live on their sailboat and leave their lives behind. The boat has been transformed from a ruined near-wreck to a lively, operating entity with all the quirks of a family you’d expect. Watching from the wings is Captain Ron, who smiles as he takes on a new group of people in need of help. Their boat expedition is just beginning.

It is at this point I realized Captain Ron is an archetype of the Transcendent Function. He resonates with a powerful energy that brings people together and solves problems that defy solution. How do you really get your head back together, once you’ve bought into the labor workforce drama of marriage – kids – house – old age – death? The secret is a profound mystery. But its fun to watch Captain Ron show us how to be complete human beings. He always knows how to approach somebody’s hang-up and get them to back out of it under their own power.

Someday, you might go on a journey and meet your own personal Captain Ron. Are you ready to be Captain?