Here is an example of how a well “produced” movie without any artistry is a disaster. Here is a crew with access to some incredibley cool shit – inside the annual “TED” conference will all sorts of inventors, scientists, futurists, architects, musicians, bloggers, Al Gore and more in attendance. And it is shot and cut like a Queens public access show. An embarrassment.
No Insignia
Oh, Dear God. I can handle the occasional romp through the holodeck, but when the holodeck comes to life. And for no friggin’ reason! And when the big disaster at the end is solved by Sisko saying “clap your hands if you believe in fairies.” Eegads. Awful. And Avery Brooks is starting to tick me off again. I can’t tell if he’s an awful actor or not.
Dr. Crusher thinks she’s Quincy in this dopey whodunnit. It is cool to see an unorthodox Ferengi but I dunno if Crusher is a good enough character to support a whole epsiode.
It is very important that IDrinkYourMilkshake.com achieve top ranking in Google for searches of the phrease I Drink Your Milkshake. A blog post like this can only help.
YouTube really does have everything.
Dear God, I love Biff Rose – anyone who can make Van Dyke Parks seem commercial is a fascinating beast.
I try to keep away from lashon hora, but I can’t hold it in anymore. The Cup is the worst restaurant in Astoria.
No – it isn’t just that the food is bad (actually there’s a Mexican place on 30th Ave and around 29th St that is far worse; and there’s a Chinese place on 23rd Ave also on 29th that, seriously, is serving poison) it is the WASTE. What a perfect location! Right across from the Moving Image Museum, right near the big-ass mainstream cinema, near the subway… And what a sizable place! And the food is just….awful!
Awful!
A good writer cites examples, but I don’t want to remember the dread of putting their food in my mouth. How do you fuck up french fries???! Ugh.
I know I’ll be going there again – the location is too perfect – but I’m only ordering toast and soda.
I thought I knew everything about cookies. I mean – just take a look at me!
But who knew there was a whole type (a whole religion!) of cookie out there. Straight outta Winston-Salem, NC – Moravian cookies.
The 1766 recipe still lives. Learn more about the history of the Moravian Church (the Protestant’s Protestant!) here.
After back to back to back masterpieces (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago) hubris is bound to set in. A tiny soap opera of a story is blown out to 3+ hours of dreadful tedium.
The location photography is gorgeous. And that’s about the only nice thing you can say about this. Poor David Lean went into hibernation for fifteen years before redeeming himself with A Passage to India.
Do yourself a favor and trust the reputation. Borrrrrrrring!
Don’t get me wrong, this movie is a piece of shit – but a somewhat entertaining one. It is so carelessly stupid that you can get swept away in its cyclone of cheap thrills. If there were a visual point of view (why oh why didn’t a young Sam Raimi get his hands on this script?) then this’d be a cult classic. As it stands, it is a forgotten film that could have been more fun.
Here’s a movie that had been totally marketed incorrectly to me. I had no idea it was going to be a formalists’ wet dream. Nor did I realize it was going to be funny! (It is, at times, supposed to be funny, right?) Any movie that has two major scenes at a Tad’s Steak is okay in my book. This movie is so much to 2007 as Godard’s La Chinoise was to 1967. I very much mean that as a compliment to Julia Loktev’s eye.
Stereo is my favorite unwatchable movie. Whenever I come home really, really late and I’ve had a few drinks and Ann is already asleep I reach for Stereo. Five minutes later, I join her aslumber. This film is painfully boring and pretentious, but, as my recent interview with David Cronenberg proves, he is, indeed, kinda kidding.
Here’s what I’ve written about Stereo (or, in its even-heavier-than-Lucas full name Stereo: Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosiac) in the past:
Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Jack Messinger, Iain Ewing, Clara Mayer.
The Deal: After some short films that only a true and dedicated completist should see (when the best one is all set in a bathtub that’s sayin’ somethin’) David Cronenberg wrote and directed an hour-long, black & white, non-synchronous sound meditation on consciousness and identity. If it sounds heavy, it’s cause it is heavy. Very ’60s heavy. Experiment subjects move into the “Canadian Academy of Erotic Inquiry” (which looks like well-funded planetarium) and submit to observation (and telepathic tinkering) by the unseen Dr. Luther Stringfellow. Romantic encounters of every polygon ensue. It is a hybrid of clinical science and flower-power freakout. Things end badly with much cavorting amidst the inhuman, futuristic and angular architecture.
Most Cronenbergian scene: I gotta be frank, this movie is a tough one to sit through. I love it in the abstract, but it is way slow and very dense. One scene that strikes me is when three people are making out and things are lit in such a way that you can’t differentiate who is what gender. That’s heavy. But the badge of Cronenberg is felt throughout this piece in the voice over – it is all narrated with laughingly obtuse scientific psychobabble. Yeah, it is meant to be taken seriously, but then again, he knows he’s pushing his luck. This tactic will be repeated many times throughout Cronenberg’s career.
Stereo is nearly all-silent, so if you wanna see how a noise-core band uses it at background, see below:
For twelve years now I’ve been consistently playing the baffling and almost daringly unlikeable album Orange Crate Art by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. There’s something about it that fascinates me so deeply. It is both horrible and wonderful at the same time. I can’t recommend it flat out to just everyone, but to people with an open mind and patience, you might just find yourself with a new desert island classic as I have.
My interview with Van Dyke Parks from 1999.
I take back all my nasty comments about Major Kira. She’s had a rough life. She’s put in a troublesome spot, with a yanking the settlers out of the West Bank type o’ thing. I think Nana Visitor was just a little uncomfortable wearing that Bajoran nose and made all those goose-y faces in the early episodes trying to find her way. But TNG was a mess in Season One, too, so all is forgiven.
Anyway, back on the station Nog and Jake get involved in some business involving Cardassian Yamok Sauce, then self-sealing stem bolts and, finally, a land deal. Entertaining. I like Nog enough to make up for not liking Jake in his green and blue pajamas showing off his just-barely pubescent package.
Wait, if this isn’t real, then how can I do THIS?
Riker gets all Memento in this wheels-within-wheels mind control episode. Normally I like this kind of stuff, but for some reason this one felt cheap to me. If everything is a hallucination then there’s no anchor. They shoulda cribbed more from Total Recall, which, I’m learning, is among the greatest stories ever told.
Here’s an example where the A and B story are equal. Sisko must moderate a Bajoran land dispute. One of the tribal leaders is a young girl who runs into mischief with Nog and Jake (Odo’s bucket filled with oatmeal. Wahh wahh waaaaaah.) O’Brien and Dr. Bashir go to a small Bajoran village where the town elder is dying. Turns out he “tells the story” to keep the place safe from the Dal’Rok – a gaseous anomoly that shoots gas balls. O noes! O’Brien saves the day, but not the way you think.
You won’t hear me admit this much, but I can not deny that I had trouble following this episode. While the emotional core is about Picard and his regret over a life not chosen (and the death of a mentor) the “chase” as it were concerns…what again? I think it was that the dna strains of various “seeded” planets will reveal some special prize. And somehow (this was the part that was never clear) even though it was a human doing the research, the Klingons, Romulans and Cardassians all found out about it at the Exact same time. So much shenanigans ensue. Then there’s the usual punchline at the end. I dunno. A little baffling, but fun all the same – and it is fun to see the humans and Klingons work together.
1/2
Trapped on a planet engaged in endless and deathless war, Sisko gets a chance to kick a little ass and preach pacificsm. A good episode that you’ll feel like you’ve seen before. Also: Major Kira gets to act a little bit – maybe she doesn’t remind me of Edith Prickley so much after all.
