Blackmoor Vituperative

Just finished watching Gamera 3: The Revenge Of Iris. This is probably one of the best kaiju movies I have ever seen (and I have seen most of them). A major plot element of Revenge Of Iris concerns a girl who blames Gamera for the death of her parents. It’s true: Gamera smashed her parents’ apartment building into rubble while fighting the Gyaos. Of course, had Gamera not fought the Gyaos (or had Gamera not existed at all), the death toll from the unstoppable Gyaos would have been much higher, but as you might imagine, that’s small consolation to the girl.

I think some of the best villains are those with understandable motivations. In the case of Ayana (the aforementioned orphan girl), you feel sorry for her and sympathize with her, even though she is tragically misguided in blaming Gamera for her parents’ death: she ought to blame the Gyaos. But it’s an all-too-human failing to place blame using emotion rather than reason. That’s an element that’s hard to pull off without being either heavy-handed or simply ridiculous (particularly in a movie about giant monsters), but I think this movie does it successfully.

I am imposing a unilateral un-grimmening! No more grim tidings for at least one week. Time for Christmas cheer and good will.

As a start, here are my favorite Christmas specials and movies, in no particular order. Some are great. Some are just terrible. Some make me laugh. Some make me cry. I love them all.

How The Grinch Stole Christmas (the real one, not the Jim Carrey abomination)
Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas
Santa Claus Conquers The Martians
(Mexican) Santa Claus
Gremlins
Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town
Silent Night, Deadly Night
Elf
Bad Santa
Scrooged
Star Wars Holiday Special
Hogfather
Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer
Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny

Merry Christmas!

I just had a panic moment when I thought that a Google document I’d spent the better part of a week writing had vanished. This is what I plan to do from now on, once a week, until I forget about it and stop doing it.

1. In Google Docs, go down to the far left bottom menu item, and select “More V” and then “All Items”.
2. Click the select box at the top of the screen next to “TITLE” to select all items.
3. Click the “More V” button at the top middle of the screen, next to the eyeball (“Preview”) icon, and select “Download”.
4. Select “Change all formats to… OpenOffice”, and click the “Download” button.
5. Wait a couple of minutes and then download the file somewhere.

When Rango came out in theatres, I had no interest in seeing it. It just didn’t look interesting. Why would I want to see a movie about a chameleon in a western town? Dull.

I was wrong. Susan and I just finished watching this on Amazon Prime, and not only is it a good animated movie (better than the last three Shrek movies, easily), it’s a damned good western — and there aren’t that many of those made these days.

If you have Amazon Prime, see Rango. It’s free. If you don’t have Amazon Prime… hell, see it anyway.

This is a damned good movie.

Just came back from seeing Skyfall with Susan. I confess that I am puzzled by all of the glowing reviews. I can forgive technical absurdities like the biometric pistol (an idea which first got floated around over 20 years ago, and which was discarded because no sane field agent would ever depend on it) and the head of Q branch plugging a known enemy asset into their network (although after the last two movies got so many computer details right, that was kind of disappointing).

The glowing reviews puzzle me because the movie was so slow and dull. Even the theme song is dull. The movie didn’t even have a villain for the first, what, two hours? And when we do meet him, he’s just… creepy. Not scary. Not menacing. Just icky, in the way the grocery store bagger who looks a little too long at your personal hygiene items is icky.

It’s not the worst Bond movie I have ever seen (A View To A Kill and Octopussy are both much worse), but even A View To A Kill had a better villain. Christopher Walken, now, he knows how to play a deranged blonde genius.

Last night’s interstitial Cult Movie Night SPECIAL EDITION was Silent Night, Deadly Night (a Christmas tradition!) and Brick. It was going to be Silent Night, Deadly Night and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, but I was overruled.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is a much better movie than you might think, if you’ve never seen it. It spends a good portion of the movie introducing you to the main character, Billy, and gives you insight into why he later snaps and start killing people dressed as Santa Claus. It also includes a lot more nudity than you see in slasher movies nowadays (something I miss). But it’s not torture porn, like Saw and Hostel — there aren’t long, lingering scenes of people tortured and in pain. The violence is over the top and fun, not sadistic and disturbing. That being said, there are some genuinely creepy and scary parts, primarily in the early part of the film where we see Billy being traumatized by his early experiences.

Brick, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is completely different. Brick is a film noir mystery set in and around a high school. That might sound camp, but Brick works because everyone in the movie takes it deadly seriously. It works because in high school, every ridiculous little thing is deadly serious. There’s very little violence, some mild language, and no nudity. An episode of CSI has more violence in first fifteen minutes than Brick has in the whole movie. Yet the movie is rated R for “Violent and Drug Content”, showing you what a load of crap the MPAA ratings are.