Tag Archives: NaBloPoMo

“Skyfall”: My New Favorite James Bond Film, Says Lifelong Bond Hater

November 22, 2012 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Historically speaking, the average moviegoer loves James Bond films a lot more than I do. I have nothing against the spy genre itself, but the Bond concept never appealed to me. Based on the trailers, the TV commercials, the very few Bond films I caught, and the same five scenes constantly referenced throughout pop culture, my impression of the scripts for most Bond films went like so:

PANICKY POLITICIAN: Ladies and gentlemen, a deformed billionaire Dick Tracy reject has a preposterous plan to take over and destroy the world, and we’re not sure in which order. We need our best man to stop him.
BRITISH CIA HEAD: How about James Bond? He’s a millionaire who knows a lot about sex, bartending, and tuxedos.
PANICKY POLITICIAN: Brilliant. Send him a million-dollar car and a box of our latest, deadliest, billion-dollar single-use Sharper Image toys.
BOND JAMES BOND: There’ll be sex, right? I was promised sex.
FUNNY-FACE VILLAIN: I’m killing your sex partner and stealing your scenes! And also incidentally detonating things and ruining world peace because of issues.
BOND JAMES BOND: Not my sex partner! You fiend.
[Bond chases or runs from henchmen, using up his toys one by one. There are explosions.]
BACKUP SEX PARTNER: Job well done. Join me in my lair.
BOND JAMES BOND: Way ahead of you. Do you like expensive booze?

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Turkey Leg Rock (because every holiday needs carols)

November 21, 2012 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Thanksgiving turkeyThis Thursday will mark my first time in almost two decades, and my wife’s first time in her life, that she and I will attempt to cook a turkey. We volunteered for turkey duty because one of our usual turkey chefs is under the weather this year and sorely needed a relief from her duties. We appreciate my wife’s grandmother’s years of service, but we think her turn to rest and watch while someone treats her for a change.

I thought to sing an ode to our forthcoming meal (pictured), but traditional Thanksgiving carols are few and far between. Once you get past “Over the River and Through the Woods”, the pickings are pretty sparse. No one’s written “Have Yourself a Merry Little Thanksgiving” or “White Thanksgiving” or “O Come, All Ye Hungry” or even “O Butterball”. I couldn’t even find a single hymn praising Squanto for giving the Pilgrims maize. Fie on those tuneless ingrates.

So I wrote my own ode. Feel free to serenade your own meal as well. And if you’re off the Internet between now and then, Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

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“Revolution” 11/19/2012 (spoilers): Charlie vs. Imagination Station

November 20, 2012 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Reed Diamond, NBC, "Revolution"As this week’s new Revolution episode “Kashmir” opens, Our Heroes have commuted a full 280 miles from last week’s endpoint in Ford City, PA (or wherever the Allegheny rapids dumped them south of that), all the way east to West Chester, twenty miles west of destination Philly, and home of a Rebel Alliance faction led by special guest star Reed Diamond. The costar of TV’s Dollhouse and Homicide: Life on the Street was a welcome change of pace from the long line of guests I haven’t been recognizing. I presume this means the show’s mighty ratings have finally earned it a higher casting allowance.

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Notes for a “Cinderella” Reboot Nobody Needs

November 19, 2012 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Walt Disney's CinderellaThis weekend I revisited Walt Disney’s twelfth animated classic Cinderella for the first time since the late 1990s. Of all the numerous Disney films our family has owned in multiple formats, this is one of several that rarely saw repeat viewings even when my son was a toddler who insisted on watching every animated movie over and over again until I hated it.

As with many older Disney films, parts of it have aged better than others. I’ll admit I had trouble staying conscious all the way through. Even if I’m alone in this struggle, the film is now over sixty years old and therefore in need of a gratuitous overhaul on shallow principle. In the spirit of today’s remake-happy medium that thrives on second-hand ideas, the following notes are my suggestions to downconvert this one-time children’s favorite for the modern, unsophisticated audience that Hollywood executives so dearly crave:

1. We need to believe that Cinderella’s dad would have good reasons to want to marry the wicked stepmother. As drawn and acted, she’s a horse-faced harpy. Was she, once upon a time, a gregarious looker? Were they married for so long that her looks and demeanor have simply deteriorated over time? Was the marriage that hard on her? What does that say about dearly departed Dad? Cinderella’s trauma at his loss means he wasn’t an unlovable tyrant, so the only other sensible option is that he was a spineless doormat forced into marriage by this conniving harridan. Clearly we need copious non-linear flashbacks to Dad and Stepmom’s deceptively happy wedding day before it all went wrong, when he turned into Walter Mitty and she became Miss Hannigan from Annie.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #31: Underground Salt Museum, Part 1 of 3: Into the Mines of Morton

November 17, 2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

We ended Day Seven with a hotel stay northwest of Wichita in Hutchinson, a city large enough to have its own dying shopping mall and not one, but two notable attractions. Thus did Day Eight commence in the heart of the Kansas heartland…at the Underground Salt Museum.

I realize the name carries an excitement level on par with a box factory or the state of Delaware, but the Salt Museum is no ordinary salt mine. Granted, yes, part of it is an ordinary salt mine, but we’d never seen one of those before, either. Could it possibly be fascinating to gander inside the workplace that provides us with one of the greatest-tasting minerals on Earth?

This rusty but imposing chainsaw-mobile says yes.

Chainsaw-Mobile, Underground Salt Museum, Hutchinson, Kansas

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A Photo Salute to Green, Before it Retreats into Hibernation for the Winter

November 17, 2012 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 14 Comments

This week’s edition of the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge is the first such challenge I’ve ever attempted. It’s not a fierce competition with a major award at stake, but I feel sheepish daring to share a theme with so many top-notch professionals who do this for a living and/or have had extensive formal training. In the spirit of fun, though, I’m giving the Challenge a whirl anyway.

Behold my octet of entrants from my own collection, submitted in the categorical competition of general greenery:

1. Sugar Creek runs through Turkey Run State Park near Rockville, Indiana.

Turkey Run State Park, Rockville, Indiana

2. The Jolly Green Giant, standing tall and proud in Blue Earth, Minnesota.

Jolly Green Giant, Blue Earth, Minnesota

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Once Upon a Time When Black Friday Was My Thing

November 16, 2012 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

winter crowd, downtown IndianapolisNo one would deny that Black Friday, on a base level, has always been about crass consumerism. Even in more mild-mannered times when the day after Thanksgiving was simply the starter pistol that signaled the first day for many people to initiate Christmas season protocols, phase one was almost always, “Commence gift-shopping.” Within that oft-derided framework, though, for the past several years I managed to develop myself a fun routine in which I found fun and purpose in my own little ways.

My ritual would begin each Thanksgiving evening, after all relatives were finished with my presence for the day. For just this one special day out of the year, I would spend several hours reading a newspaper. My wife and I would open up the day’s issue of the Indianapolis Star, toss the articles to one side for later skimming, and have several hundred pages of ads lying before us. I would assess our technological and living situation; brainstorm a list of things that could use replacing, upgrading, or first-time owning; then study all the ads laboriously like Rupert Giles researching an obscure monster. I created a notebook index of my most viable store options — potential deals for the items on our want list, both the most impressive sales and the next-best alternatives in case I was beaten to the punch by too many other, wilier shoppers. I would assemble a strict chronological itinerary visit in descending order of store opening times. In my own special way, I prepared for war.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #30: Boot Hill Museum, Part 2 of 2: Dedicated Hobbyists of the Old West

November 15, 2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Previously on MCC: The most notable event of Day Seven of our road trip was a quick tour through the Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City. The main attraction is a preserved portion of the original Boot Hill Cemetery, still populated by the original customers, still marked by low-budget tombstones of the Old West.

However, the Boot Hill Museum is more than those preserved historical plots. Beyond that and the spacious gift shop, visitors can also walk along a simulated Dodge City strip mall of the Old West. Some of these shops are inaccessible, but several invite visitors and contain display cases filled with souvenirs and paraphernalia of the Old West. The saloon even has occasional rounds of singing, and waitresses who invite you in for a glass of sarsaparilla, which I was afraid to sample. There’s also a working ice cream shoppe, but the tourism-level prices inspired us to bide our time and fetch snacks later at a Dairy Queen down the street instead.

Boot Hill Museum stores, Dodge City, Kansas

Not all the contents are vintage 19th-century items. One room is dedicated to TV shows of the Old West in general and Gunsmoke in particular. Their short-sighted gift shop missed a profit opportunity by not offering copies of these objets d’art for sale. What child wouldn’t want to pop Gunsmoke’s Festus…Sings and Talks About Dodge City and Stuff! into their parent’s CD player and listen to it twelve times a day?

Gunsmoke, Boot Hill Museum, Dodge City, Kansas

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The “Wreck-It Ralph” Easter Eggs You’ll Never See

November 14, 2012 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 12 Comments

Disney, Wreck-It Ralph, Fix-It Felix Jr.In this day and age where moviegoers can wait until the home-video release before watching a movie multiple times, how often are we willing to devote extra time and money to encore presentations of a theatrical release? The case agreeing to my second showing of Wreck-It Ralph tonight consisted of two winning bullet points:

1. My son and I really, really liked it the first time we saw it. This is the first year for new Pixar and Disney Animated releases in which we liked the Disney film better.

2. We had free passes.

I had hoped to catch more details and Easter eggs this time around. Regretfully, I am old and the film’s background characters are spry. We managed to see a few items we missed the first time around: the other three Pac-Man ghosts; a mounted ostrich from Joust; the resemblance of the TurboTime cabinet design to that of Rally-X; and graffiti on a wall reading “Aerith Lives”. That list is too short. I’d also hoped to catch additional Easter eggs and overlooked scenes more to my liking, including but not limited to:

* A sign in Tapper’s bar reading, “Now Hiring Waitresses”.

* An autographed photo of Fix-It Felix Sr. bearing a strong resemblance to Alec Baldwin.

* The monsters from Rampage standing on a street corner outside the Niceland apartments, just staring and drooling.

* A traffic jam outside the terminal whose gridlocked commuters include the Moon Patrol rover, the OutRun Ferrari, an Armor Attack polygonal tank, an ExciteBike, and Nathan Drake in a Jeep. All sport the same license plate: “RIP G4”.

* A Grand Theft Auto thug being arrested by Mappy.

* A terminal convenience shop run by a Moogle and selling movies on DVD with titles such as Citizen Liu Kang, Disney’s Knights of the Old Republic, Wolfenstein 3D in 3D, and Galaga vs. Gyruss.

* A sidekick barbershop quartet with Clank, Daxter, Sparx, and Luigi.

* Pac-Man throwing a fit at Felix’s party because all the snacks are fruits, and for decades he’s been dying to have just one lousy steak.

* An inter-game prison populated with Leisure-Suit Larry, PaRappa the Rapper, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

* A political-activist poster advocating a unilateral ban on all Minesweeper mines.

* Alternate end credits with the big-head Journey avatars singing the same thirty-second snippet of “Separate Ways” over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

…but I guess that’s what cutting room floors are for. Those, and the dreams of over-the-hill gamers who can imagine a film with three times the budget and none of the legal hassles.

“Revolution” 11/12/2012 (spoilers): Charlie vs. the Annoying Little Sister

November 13, 2012 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

David Meunier, Sgt. Strausser, NBC, "Revolution"In this week’s new Revolution episode, “Ties That Bind”, it’s finally Nora’s turn in the flashback spotlight. Intense situations evince memories of her post-blackout childhood in Texas. Her mother was murdered by home invaders in San Antonio; her father was last known to be in Galveston; and her younger sister Mia was close by her side. Throughout the ensuing years of chaos after the blackout, the two orphans would learn to rely on each other and no one else, not unlike last week’s gaggle of gun-toting independent orphans.

(Incidentally, said orphans are nowhere in sight this week. Presumably Our Heroes inspected the abandoned half-building where they were dwelling, deemed it safe enough for them to raise each other, and bade them a hearty farewell with no fear whatsoever that the Monroe Militia would come mow the rascals down.)

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