League Assignment: Bring it Back!

Hmmm. modern reboot? I thought about this a few separate times this week and kept hitting a wall.  80's properties and even those of the 90's have a certain flavor and feel to them that can't be duplicated...the decade they were imagined in is just a strong theme in their execution as the show's characters and plots.   I wondered if something like Visionaries or Inhumanoids could be rekindled today, how successful could they be?   I kept running into a "Poochie effect" thinking these things taken into a contemporary setting with "modern" vernacular would be more unbearable than anything.   Take something today like Regular Show or Adventure Time and those plots, scripts and characters work because they are aware of the time they exist in and are certainly products of the 21st century.  

Arab Spring hit early at the Twin Pines Mall

Very rarely do reboots work in my mind and more often than not I feel these things strive to impossibly achieve a paradox by appealing to a new, young audience raised on smartphones, Obamacare and Gangam Style and still trying to hit the nostalgia mark for the 30 something, disposable income, toy buying demographic raised on WWF, Just Say No, and Peter Jennings.   You can't really hit a reboot on the head like that...Take the 2012 Ninja Turtles...I really like some of the directions they took the series but correct me if I'm wrong that every time you hear Raph talk you think "Why is Donatello's voice coming out of him?"  or when you saw Baxter Stockman, you were thinking..."so is he EVER going to turn into a fly?" or "what is with the mech suit" (honestly, who doesn't have mech suits anymore?) Christ, think of if they did this with Back to the Future! It would never work now.  2015 is 2 years away...do we even have a far off optimistic view of any future in our modern sense of time?  Who really cares what 2055 would look like?  Does anyone think its going to be anything worth looking forward to at all besides insane inflation, mass unemployment, more war and bankruptcy?  Probably a lot less people than those watching BTF2 in 1989.  Oi.

so...much...wrongness, I wanted a ninja turltle badguy not a character from Shadow Complex.

So what old property would I like to see with a 2013 spin?

Like the intro to the movie...as a series...that never stopped ruling.

Original G.I. Joe (series with look and feel of the pre 1990 episodes)... with the ridiculous plots, awesome characters and vehicles and terrific voice acting.  Something like Resolute without the obligatory Japanime feel to it (and without Dial Tone being a 20 something girl) and the Bad Dudes version of Ronnie Reagan being the commander-in-chief.

Robocop...live action, animated, it don't matter.  With some really triple A production muscle behind it, Delta City would never be so relevant, I'd buy that for a dollar!  Plus a modern Robocop tie-in video game would always be nice.

Surf Nazis Must Die or the the Toxic Avenger...If there's one thing Hobo with a Shotgun or Dead Snow taught me, it is that campy, super violent, trash film really goes underserved to a film watching population very hungry for it.  The thing is, as jaded and "super cool" audiences think they are, those movies have stuff in them that make ratings boards and focus groups still squirm in their chairs.  I say MORE heads run over by cars.

Bucky O'Hare - cuz we don't have nearly enough high-quality anthropomorphized space rabbits and quad-armed ducks on the airwaves! Speaking of ducks...

Count-God-damned-Duckula! Chocky-Bickies...need I say more???

InfiniteHollywoodTime - Exo Squad (very much agree!)
Cool & Collected - Buck Rogers
AEIOU&WHY - Land of the Lost

Everything Must go Sale!

Selling a ton of my collection to downsize, create space and generate some scratch for the summer.  Check my ebay profile or the sidebar for some nice vintage and modern items.

League Assignment: Slumber Party!

The League poses the question from last week; what pop culture home would you want to spend the night in?

Some of these seem like no brainers but I didn't want to be too obvious....I already talked about vacationing in Dark City and the Deitz House but that would be for simple sightseeing...I wouldn't necessarily be comfortable staying there...I mean really...Pee Wee's playhouse is fun but like, where would you go to the bathroom? Wayne Manor would kick ass just to hang out but does this imply that Bruce would just let me into the Batcave?  Is he home? Is Alfred my butler too?



Freaking Awesome!



The place I'd love to stay the night for comfort sake and to take it all in would be from two Wes Anderson films.  Steve Zissou's Ship, the S.S. Belafonte and the Tenenbaum mansion are neck and neck.  The Belafonte reminds me of drawings that smart (well, at least imaginative) kids did in art class packed with amazing details and almost neurotic intricacies.  The ships design weaves a tapestry that one could get enjoyable lost in and you would never be short of good company...strange how I love this movie and I absolutely hate pirate radio.

The Tenenbaum house weaves another lovely tapestry of gorgeous detail and encompasses everything one could want in a house.  I've gone through viewings of this movie to just look at the architecture and catch the plethora of detail festooned about this literal "storybook" of a home.  The question is, what room would I stay in?  You actually could take a look at the real out of doors setting of the Tenenbaum House on 339 Convent Ave. in NY as opposed to 111 Archer Avenue in the NY of Holden Caufield or whereever Wes Anderson lives in his head.

League Assignment: The Oscar Goes to...

Honestly the last time I cared about the Oscars was around the time Fargo, L.A. Confidential and Good Will Hunting were major contenders...as of now, the "it" crowd in Hollywood just seems like an unjustifiably overprivileged group who throw this annual shin-dig to further line their pockets, stroke their egos and give themselves prizes for existing...cynical, no?  Seriously...each nominee gets 47,000 dollars worth of Swag???? and that is a major drop from the 103,000 worth they received 2 years ago!  I guess 20 mill a picture just isn't enough...

Honestly, I think back to my high school years when there just seemed to be a whole lot more movies worth seeing coming out...maybe that was because tickets were 4.90 a piece and my friends and I saw like 3 movies a weekend no matter how shitty.   Even the first years of college had some stuff that was really worth seeing in the theaters, Fellowship...Memento, Snatch, the Royal Tenenbaums

It was such visceral experiences seeing those now formulaic war, action and graphic styles that seem to be everywhere when you caught Saving Private Ryan, Sin City, 300, Saw, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Kill Bill for the first times.

It pissed me off the year No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood were big winners and everyone called it the "downer year"...sorry that the filmmakers were out of sunshine and farts for the shiny,happy crowd.

Eh, stuff like this just makes me a crabby bastard so I'll just level off with some Oscars I do like...

Oscar Wilde, Oscar Madison and Oscar Barret

 

League Assignment: Spies (catchup)

Well, you thought you were getting a week off, but I ended up stretching it to two, sorry. This week’s assignment from the League of Extraordinary Bloggers, should you choose to accept it:
–
“Spies.”
—
Warning: This assignment will self destruct in 3… 2…. 1…

Hey there people,

If you didn't read, I previously posted this week that I've been a bit reclusive over the past 14 days due to the birth of my son, Luke.  I'm now going to try to play a quick game of catchup to cover my dereliction of league and blogger duties.   What better way than through some lists of Spies I'm fond of.

Spies - Command and Conquer Series - These little guys wreaked havoc on the battle fields...just keep them away from Dogs who could sniff them out.  I loved when they infiltrated a building and there was the perfect effect of muffled gunshots and the building turns your color.  Way to take out those guards and capture the structure, Mr. Spy!  They were Red Alert's version of the GDI commando who sounded surprisingly like Yukon Cornelius.

Spy Vs. Spy - Never really was a reader of MAD magazine religiously but did take time to look at the pages when they spoofed a movie or property I was particularly fond of. One thing that was always a part I looked at was the Spy Vs Spy cartoon.  I knew about them before I even knew about MAD magazine because of the NES game.  (It actually was how I learned that Vs. meant Versus)  I loved the illustrations, the fine attention to detail that was incorporated into such over the top Wile.E.Coyote fashions or that Tex Avery "dynamite-down-the-pants" type gags.

Zartan - Now here is a spy who doesn't mess around.  gun for hire, master of disuse, runs a rough and tumble Aussie biker gang, has a chameleon brother and a expert infiltrator for a sister, this guy is bad ass.  I loved his action figure with the color changing skin and armor plating on the legs and chest, the extra "face" in his backpack and even the weird smell that came off his hood.  If you want to see Zartan at his full most ruthless potential, look into Resolute or the fan film Operation: Red Retrieval.

Spy Hunter - dunno if it's the car, the driver or that they are neither and they are simply killing spies throughout the game that simply loops the Peter Gunn theme throughout its course.  This is one NES game that doesn't mess around with spiked tires, smoke screens, snipers shooting from limos... oh yeah, there's nothing quite like slamming one of those bullet-proof bastards off the road.

Aeon Flux - Steampunk before it existed in Peter Chung's dominatrix inspired femme fatal leaping from planes, elevators, stealing alien eggs, pulling microfilm from false hinged teeth...and dying every single time.  This Monican agent (we found that out in the way less entertaining series where they talked...wayyyyy too much) was at constant odds with her Breen arch-nemesis and lover Trevor Goodchild.  Ah hell, whatever issue you may have with the series, the shorts (especially the one entitled, "War") were a pinnacle of MTV's heyday when Liquid Television was on the air.

 

Soundwave - I thought to myself, why wouldn't this guy be counted as a spy?  He's all about unseen surveillance, always gets in under the Autobots radar, has an endless army of small minions to do his bidding and listening, and always is gathering information.  He's one hard-core spy and by far has the coolest voice on this list.

Bothan Spies - Little is know of these ubiquitous spies in the Star Wars saga except that "many of them died to bring us this information"...for apparently no reason too since the emperor gave them that false information to lure the rebels into a trap of charging their entire fleet at a fully armed and operational second Death Star...thanks Mon Mothma.

The Spy (Team Fortress) - French, smokes, stabs you in the back...oui oui.

 

Monkey man from Raiders - I guess he's more an informant but he still does his job very well in Raiders and lives to tell the tale unlike his monkey who falls victim to the 'bad dates'.   Raiders really never seemed to have any central villain in my mind besides Belloq who just seemed like a waste.  We never get to know that Deitrich or Toht even have names until post production and you looked it up.  I found out in the Marvel comic version.  and with a movie where bad guys are "mean Mongolian", "monkey man", "German mechanic" and "Arab swordsman", you really can't get much more generic that "Bad guy 1" and "Bad guy 2".

Da Fino - I'm a Brother Seamus! - an Irish monk??? - I coulda did Eddie Valiant, Sam Spade or even Duck Twacey but you gotta have a dick on the list and this guy its just great. 

League Assignment: Spacemen

Are you starting to see a theme here? First we had Spies, then came the Cowboys, and this week we’ll be covering another far out pop culture genre. This week’s assignment from the League of Extraordinary Bloggers:
–
“Spacemen.”

Spacemen is one ever spanning topic approached by many from nearly limitless possibly directions. We've been fascinated with this subject ever since our ancestors were able to look to the heavens and ponder what existed beyond. Our contemporary culture came up with a little more "toy" and "cartoon" friendly imagery of both human, alien, robot and everything in between from the Day the Earth Stood Still to E.T.

Some of my most favorite spacemen are noneother than the Colorform Aliens and later Glyos Outerspacemen. I never had the cash to collect these great looking, super detailed little bendy sculpts which run into the hundreds per figure but I've always been a sucker for miniature figures from Pewter Ral Partha Battletech figures to Battle Beasts.

Speaking of minifigures, let's not forget some great 80's and 90's vintage spacemen from the Lego Space series...you had M Tron, Blacktron, Space Police and Ice Planet. Each team had its own special gimmick...my favorite being the magnetic effects of the red and black M Tron team. I only owned a few of these sets but I did get a lot of play out of them as my outer space soldiers explored in Pirate or Medieval times as I had way more of those guys to play with. Lego eventually did make an Aliens line but that wasn't untill relatively recently.



Then there are the great spacemen of the human variety and you can't get more rough and tumble than the Space Marine of all variety. Be it USCM colonial marines with nukes and knives, Wildcard Squadron of Space Above and Beyond, the Imperial Marines of Dawn of War or the Terran Solider of Starcraft...this is one genre of "space-man" who never gets tired. Big Armor, bigger guns, skulls, crossbones - do the math!

Other noteworthy spacemen from my recollection would be Ignigknog and Err, Toe Jam and Earl, Martians, Invader Zim and, of course, Darth Vader from Planet Vulcan.

Over at the Mos Espa collection they speak in much more detail about the great Lego Space Collection.

Goodwill 4 Geeks showcases possibly every space action figure you can think of, bravo!

MemoriesofToymorrow shines some light on the Psycho Circus.

My Top 10 Favorite Non-Christmas Christmas Movies

 

What's that mean?  Well, any movie where Christmas kinda takes a back seat to the overall crisis, mayhem or plot that supersedes the setting.  Some of these more serious movies work it in all too well making it even more unsettling by having disturbing or distressing events overshadowing the otherwise supposed happy time we all should be feeling rather than cold, eerie and creeped out.
Other movies just work in having a nice Christmas scene in it and just resonate a Christmas'y feeling so I gravitate toward them to boost my Holiday morale.


Take a look. 

"Haaa---vvveee a MmmmmM-eeeerrrrr-eeeee Chrissssszt-mazzzz"

10 - 12 Monkeys:  Believe it or not, this movie takes place during Christmas time.  This time and perspective bending film keeps you guessing on the truth of reality and takes you on a true Gilliam prescribed epic that constantly stops to look at the details all the way to the end.  Between the prospects of pulling out one's own teeth to stop radio transmissions and collecting samples in a pathogen soaked apocalyptic Philadelphia, you do get some nice Holiday decor in the John J Wanamaker building. :)

9 - The Ref: Hard to find on DVD anymore...this home for the holiday's hostage crisis gone to hell take on the Christmas movie is great... Denis Leary at his best and Kevin Spacey is absolutely wonderful in anything he's in.   Great one-liners, great interaction and a must for any Leary fan.

8 - The Good Life: Steve Berra's first (second if you count the low budget 7-teen sips) big cinematic endeavor as a director works well as a Christmas settinged piece around a skinny outcast (Mark Webber) with alopecia in a mid-western football town where that is the absolute only thing that matters. Chris Klein is such an incredible asshole in this movie who literally takes our protagonist's Christmas gift from his hands and smashes it on the pavement. Donal Logue (Grounded for Life...awesome show) is another great character that emulates your classic football town townie. Believe me, I know...central PA is full of them. Zooey Deschanel I pretty much think trademarked the god-awful "manic pixie dream girl" act in this film before she started ordering soup to be delivered in the rain, barefoot while she strums a ukulele and knits a scarf ironically. ugh. Christmas seems all the more colder though and the whole film is worth it for the gift scene (the lottery ticket part is great).

7- Batman Returns:  Christmas on a bad circus-induced halluconegenic trip.  Clowns with machine guns bursting out of presents (with a boing sound out of a cartoon), Fire-Breathing Harlequins burning teddy bears, candy cane missiles strapped to penguins...oh yeah and Batman's there too somewhere.

6 - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone:  I know it takes place over the events of a school year but the "Happy Christmas" scene always brings it home to me.  Maybe it was because I saw it on VHS when my roommate left it at my apt right around Christmas when I was sick in bed.  It just resonates Christmas to me especially when all of Harry's classmates are going home for the holiday's while he stays behind.  Sad but heartfelt.

5: Die Hard:  "Now I have a machine gun...ho-ho-ho"  Hell yeah...the anti-Rambo if you will...he certainly is a one-man-army but God this is the annex of the certainly destructible hero where we see every gunshot-glasscut-burn-scrape and wound by the end where Mr McClane can barley walk to the final fight and better yet, uses Christmas gift-wrap to conceal his final takedown pistol.  Bravo!
This is what happens when you get invited to a Christmas Party by mistake.  Plus this was my first exposure to Run-Dmc's take on a carol.  I could watch this movie any day of the week.

4 - Ghostbusters 2: Christmas never gets mentioned and I wonder how much time passes between the Ghostbusters rise to fame and New Years Eve at the end....I guess a month but that means the G-men really bust their asses getting the money to reopen the firehouse, get all their stuff back together and get a healthy customer base within a let's say 3 week period. This is loaded with Santa Hats, Christmas Trees and festive lights...oh yeah and Auld Lang Syne at the end so congrats Ghostubsters 2, you aren't nearly as good as the first (probably will be better than the 3rd) but you get to transcend into the ranks of Holiday Films. Nice one.

3. Mothman Prophecies:  Still gives me chills as my personal scariest movie of all time...not for jumps but for something that gets under your skin and stays ther long after the movie is over.   You will never look at tail-lights, christmas lights or christmas presents the same way again, number 37. 

2. Gremlins:  What was advertised as a sweet, family, Christmas film turns into a hellish nightmare that was one of the two reasons why PG-13 exists to this day!  Everyone is great in this movie, not a character, line of dialogue or special effect is wasted and it is expertly paced.  Has horror, suspense, sci-fi, family, holiday and comedy elements all wrapped into one.  I always as a kid wanted to get out of school quickly when Christmas break was starting...to get home yes but also to get out of that building if any Gremlins were hiding in the science room...where we always got a random boring filmstrip to watch before break just like those kids in the movie did.

 

1. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang:  I don't entirely dig the whole Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man thing...granted, he is perfect for the role but maybe it is just that he does Tony Stark a bit TOO well for my taste.  However this is RD Jr at his finest with Val Kilmer in one of the funniest roles around while Michelle Monaghan is possibly one of the most likable love-interests who nails emulating the whole package of what so many of guys longed for in high school with that one perfect girl who only could go so far as to tell them about her dates rather than go on one with them.  This movie is sharply written, has a great modern, noir, whodunnit feel and gives every guy that shot of being able to be the grown-up hero to the girl that got away wearing a Santa Hat as a cherry on top.