gwax's rumblings

The insanely awe­some (awe­somely insane?) tele­vi­sion show Wonder Showzen is back for sea­son 2. My first expe­ri­ence with Wonder Showzen was in the form of a won­der­ful lit­tle file that I came across on, the now defunct, suprnova that had a file name of kidshow2.wmv and a descrip­tion of “kids show (not for kids)”. Kids Show turned out to be a pilot episode, which got picked up by MTV2 and turned into the glory that is Wonder Showzen. The entirety of Wonder Showzen sea­son 1 was pure genius and hope­fully sea­son 2 will meet the high expec­ta­tions set forth for it.

Now, we all know copy­right vio­la­tion is bad, so it would be uneth­i­cal for me to tell you whether or not mini­nova can help you find tor­rents relat­ing to pre­vi­ously aired episodes of Wonder Showzen and, as such, I won’t (tell you if you can find Wonder Showzen tor­rents at mini­nova, that is).

Communists invade Colorado, Patrick Swayze and the high school foot­ball team fight back. The plot is bril­liant, the exe­cu­tion is bril­liant and this is one of the finest movies ever pro­duced… ever.

I am, of course, talk­ing about the movie Red Dawn. I first saw the movie about 6 years ago and, at the time, only half appre­ci­ated its epic glory but now I have gone back, rewatched Red Dawn and am pre­pared to say that this movie is a work of genius; those of you that have not seen it should seek it out by all means pos­si­ble. This has been gwax’s pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment of the some recent time period.

I went to see V for Vendetta with some folks ear­lier tonight and I came away with one pedan­tic crit­i­cism and a sim­ple analysis:

Pedantic Criticism: In the fight scene, near the end, when ever­thing else is run­ning in slow-motion, the blood spurt­ing out of peo­ple is spurt­ing at reg­u­lar speed.

Analysis: Yeah, I’ve read 1984 already.

I just recently watched the fan­tas­tic anime, Steamboy, which I highly rec­om­mend. There were two things that ini­tially drew me to Steamboy: it was directed by Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira and Memories fame) and it’s steam­punk. Steampunk is a sub-genre of a type of fic­tion that I really like; the term is deriv­a­tive of cyber­punk but instead of being an imag­in­ing of where elec­tron­ics will take us, it is an imag­in­ing of where steam power would have taken peo­ple of the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion. Steampunk is one of the many sorts of fic­tion based around the idea of apply­ing a fan­tas­tic sci­ence fic­tion lens to some period of his­tory. Another exam­ple of such a sub-genre that I’m quite par­tial to is Science fic­tion Westerns, which includes such great works as The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.. There are a plethora of other such sub-genres and works, which I could yam­mer on about but it’s time to get back to the cen­tral themes of this post, Steamboy and Steampunk. Steampunk does the truly won­der­ful job of cre­at­ing all sorts of bizarre con­trap­tions and machines that aren’t sci­ence fic­tion because you could almost con­ceive them being built today, or even a cen­tury ago and then throw­ing these machines at you in all their glory, mak­ing you want to go out and con­struct them in your work­shop, or for that mat­ter, get myself a work­shop to build stuff in. Steampunk is a genre that wows and, in this regard, Steamboy does not dis­ap­point. The early devices one comes across in the movie are a lit­tle fan­tas­ti­cal, but not the least bit beyond fea­si­bil­ity and for the most part, every­thing remains mostly within the realm of what could be done, though there are some ele­ments that push things well beyond the pale. Ignoring the machines, the art is very well done and the story is quite good, though the cen­tral theme does get a lit­tle over­fo­cused at times. All in all, Steamboy is a truly won­der­ful movie and you should all do your­selves the favor of watch­ing it.

I have just fin­ished watch­ing the delight­ful anime Samurai Champloo and I would like to rec­om­mend it to all you peo­ple out there. I would def­i­nitely rank Champloo up there with Cowboy Bebop and Trigun; in fact, I might go as far as to say that it’s the best of the three. So all you folks out there, if you haven’t seen Samurai Champloo, go get on it. Oh, and to all the many peo­ple that rec­om­mended that I watch it, thanks (you know who you are).

Transformers: The Movie came up in con­ver­sa­tion at work and one of my cowork­ers for­warded me a link to a rant about how much the movie sucks. I love that movie and I was expect­ing a stu­pid read that I would thor­oughly dis­agree with, but instead I find myself agree­ing with every­thing said. The rant is absolutely spot on in point­ing out that Transformers: The Movie sucks and I find no fault in the dia­tribe; even so, I love the movie and am going to take pas­sion over ratio­nal in this case.

Gautham sent out a link to the X3 Announcement Teaser with the sug­ges­tion that some­one might pick the thing apart, so I’ve taken it upon myself to do so. Without fur­ther ado, here’s my analy­sis of the X3 Announcement Teaser:

• They men­tion try­ing to cure mutants, which com­bined with the pres­ence of Angel, is a por­tent of the X-Men sto­ry­lines that involve Apocalypse.
• They have a large per­son wear­ing a hel­met, com­pletely bound up, who appears later in the trailer and, absolutely, is Juggernaut. I dis­agree with their inter­pre­ta­tion and think he should be a good 1 – 2 feet taller and about twice as broad.
• Phoenix is def­i­nitely in the movie.
• Beast is in the movie too.
• I’m pretty sure I saw the Scarlet Witch, which means the pos­si­bil­ity of some great bizarroness and that I prob­a­bly also saw Quicksilver.
• It looks like Colossus may be tak­ing a more dom­i­nant role this time around.
• The scenes with young chil­dren may imply that they’re going to try to draw in some of the younger gen­er­a­tions of mutants, prob­a­bly for spin-off pur­poses later. Storm is hug­ging one of these chil­dren near the end, this may be The Spike. I’ve read that they’re already plan­ning a Wolverine spin-off, so we may be look­ing at a great big fran­chise here.

That’s the extent of my spec­u­la­tive pow­ers as regards see­ing things and pick­ing apart the con­text. Looks like it’ll be fun and I hope I’m right about the spin-off fran­chise bit.

In my con­tin­ued pol­icy of watch­ing a whole bunch of movies rang­ing from very good to highly dubi­ous in qual­ity, I justed watched Tremors 2, 3 and 4, hav­ing seen the first many years ago. I can eas­ily say that the first one was fun as far as bad hor­ror movies go. Notably though, the first one had Kevin Bacon in it. The sec­ond and third ones fol­lowed the trend of hor­ror movie sequels being worse than the orig­i­nal, but still fun in a campy kind of way, sort of. The fourth in the series, goes and com­pletely redeems the sec­ond and third by being set in the Wild West and hav­ing Billy Drago, of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. fame. Things don’t get much bet­ter than a Western with giant killer sand worms that doesn’t take itself seriously.

Ok kids, it’s that time once again; time to play good movie, bad movie, worse movie:

• Good movie: The Hudsucker Proxy
• Bad movie: The Punisher
• Worse movie: Jason X

Actually, worse is a pretty big understatement.

Joe Versus The Volcano

Man oh man, I want me some lug­gage like that.

I saw The Aristocrats yes­ter­day and it was even bet­ter than I expected. Well, truth be told, I had mixed expec­ta­tions but the movie turned out to be really funny. It’s cer­tainly not for chil­dren or those who find dirty (and I mean truly dirty) humor offen­sive. For those that haven’t heard of it, The Aristocrats is a doc­u­men­tary about a joke, one joke, that has a long his­tory of being told by come­di­ans for come­di­ans. You might not think that a movie about a sin­gle joke would be funny all the way through, but this one is and I highly rec­om­mend it.

James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty on Star Trek, just died at the age of 85. (Reuters, Bloomberg, Ars Technica)

I saw Revenge of the Sith (Star Wars: Episode III) today and it gave me a thought that Spiderman 2 gave me: I am decidely lack­ing in the four robotic arms depart­ment. Aside from that, it was a fairly pretty movie with amuz­ing fight­ing and spe­cial effects. As far as plot­skis go, it’s pretty much a lin­ear inter­po­la­tion between the end of Attack of the Clones (Star Wars: Episode II) and the begin­ning of Star Wars (Star Wars: Episode IV).

If you want a real review, bug some­one else. If you can give me robotic arms, for the love of god, please do.