Archive for July, 2007

Go see Transformers

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

I don’t gen­er­ally ask too much of you, Internet, but this I ask of you for your own good: go see the new Transformers movie and go see it now. I saw the new Transformers movie at the ear­li­est pos­si­ble show­ing, last night at 8pm, and was com­pletely blown away.

The new Transformers movie is every­thing that the first gen­er­a­tion car­toons and movie were and so much more. With this new movie, the trans­form­ers have finally become every­thing that they should have been before. Now, under­stand, as I say these things, that I have loved and wor­shiped the first gen­er­a­tion car­toons since I was a child.

The new Transformers movie improves on the old car­toons in a num­ber of ways and adds depth in ways I could not have imag­ined. The biggest improve­ments come as a result of the free­doms found in PG-13 movies tar­geted at teenagers and twenty-somethings, specif­i­cally the shear bru­tal­ity of the Decepticons and inter­per­sonal inter­ac­tions that haven’t been dumbed down or overly cleaned up. Where Megatron was once a greedy and self-serving mega­lo­ma­niac, he is now a cruel and bru­tally vio­lent sadist; it feels as though Megatron has come into his own as never before. There is a depth and amus­ing fish-out-of-water awk­ward­ness to the Autobots that makes them both endear­ing and sur­pris­ingly human. Michael Bey has done a fan­tas­tic job of direc­tion and, com­bined with fan­tas­tic cin­e­matog­ra­phy, every scene appears to come across as total per­fec­tion; there are times when the ten­sion is pal­pa­ble, oth­ers when the comic relief smooths things over, slow-motion at just the right moments and then the action sequences are amazing.

From about five min­utes into the film, clear through the end, I was stuck in a deer-in-headlights state of paral­y­sis, unable to escape the onslaught of awe­some­ness that was bom­bard­ing my senses. The cul­mi­na­tion of all my expec­ta­tions and the majesty of the films orches­tra­tion left me, quite lit­er­ally, in tears as the cred­its began to roll. If you’ve already seen the new Transformers movie, I’m sure that you already know that I’m right, but if you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t under­stand why you’re still read­ing this instead of going to see it right now. Seriously, go now; it’s more impor­tant than any­thing else you could pos­si­bly be doing.

Posted in movies & tv | 1 Comment »

On Ice Blocks

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

Mid-afternoon yes­ter­day, I noticed that it was an absolutely gor­geous day — as many have been recently — and, hav­ing not made evening plans yet, I decided that it was to be a night for ice block sled­ding. Wondrously, the weather held out pretty well, with a clear night sky and warm air. Furthermore, it was a near full moon last night so we had plenty of light to see by.

Ice block sled­ding, for those that don’t know, is a fan­tas­tic sport that involves no more than some blocks of ice, some tow­els and a hill with well mown grass. In some parts of the world, ice blocks aren’t the eas­i­est thing to come by but, in Woods Hole, the local liquor store sells them in order to acco­mo­date peo­ple with house boats and old fash­ioned ice boxes. I’ve got plenty of tow­els, so that’s no prob­lem. The well mown grass hill is where Woods Hole really shines; we have a fancy golf course with a very steep hill in the mid­dle of Hole 13’s fair­way. Once you have all three com­po­nents, they must be put together cor­rectly; the cor­rect orga­ni­za­tion is to put the ice block on the top of the hill, put a folded towel on top of the ice block, sit on the folded towel, set off down the hill and try not to fall off. I should have men­tioned, the ice blocks are about 12“x6“x6”, which is to say not very big or easy to stay on.

Having acquired all the req­ui­site com­po­nents, plus a few beers for good mea­sure, the troops (friends that I had called ear­lier in the day) were gath­ered and the fun com­menced. We had a lit­tle trou­ble with the golf course sprin­kler sys­tem ini­tially but, once that passed, we had a hill that was slightly moist­ened, which serves to make the ice blocks go even faster. Having been ice block sled­ding many times over the course of quite a few years, there’s only so much appeal to going down by myself, whether it’s on my butt, stom­ach or what­ever. The next level of thrill is for­ma­tion ice block sled­ding; there are quite a few ways to arrange two peo­ple with two ice blocks and even more with three. In our case, we had five ice blocks, so we didn’t come any­where near exhaust­ing our pos­si­ble for­ma­tion arrange­ment. It was a fan­tas­tic night and a fan­tas­tice endeavor.

If you can find some way to get your hands on blocks of ice, you will be doing your­self a severe dis­ser­vice not to go ice block sled­ding some­time. Of course, if you ever visit me on the Cape and the weather is decent, you prob­a­bly won’t have a very hard time con­vinc­ing me to take you out ice block sledding.

Posted in adventures | No Comments »