Blackmoor Vituperative

Cult Movie Night at Castle Blackmoor returns to the third Friday of the month. In September, we will celebrate D-list superheroes with Mystery Men and The Specials. In Mystery Men (1999), a group of inept amateur superheroes must try to save the day when a supervillian threatens to destroy the city. Features fun performances by Hank Azaria, William H. Macy, Janeane Garofalo, and Geoffrey Rush.

People who want to stay late will see The Specials (2000). The sixth or seventh best superhero team in the world pursue their rightful place in the harshly competitive world of toy tie-ins and fighting evil. Features Jordan Ladd, Rob Lowe, Thomas Haden Church, and Jamie Kennedy.

I think Mystery Men is a hoot, but the real gem here is The Specials. The character interplay is such great fun, and there are little touches that any fan of superhero comics will notice and appreciate.

The J. Paul Getty Trust just announced an Open Content Program making some 4,600 pieces of art from the museum’s collection free to use. Users can visit the Getty Search Gateway to browse through the entire collection of high-resolution images, and they can all be used for commercial and non-commercial purposes so long as they’re properly attributed to the museum.

This evening’s Cult Movie Night was Phantom of the Paradise and Suck.

Phantom of the Paradise is unusual among our Cult Movie Night offerings in that I had never seen it before this evening. It was… interesting. I’m glad we saw it, but it’s not the sort of movie I will go out of my way to see again. Or maybe I will. Who knows.

Suck, on the other hand, is simply brilliant. From the numerous cameos and supporting parts played by rock icons like Henry Rollins, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, and Alex Lifeson, to the surprisingly good music, to the various homages to classic rock album covers, to the hilarious subversion of — and yet total respect for — the vampire movie genre, there is so much about this movie that we love. It’s just 96 minutes of pure awesome. If you haven’t seen this yet, you need to see it. You need to buy it. And you need to see it again.

This is an official National Security Agency (NSA) coffee mug. Nowadays, this isn’t anything special. Everyone knows who the NSA is and what they do.

Back in the 1980s, it was a different story. NSA agents were my favorite government “spooks” to use in modern-day role-playing games, because not many people knew they existed, and many people who did know weren’t quite sure what they did. So if I needed a couple of “top men” to show up under the flag of government authority without revealing exactly who they were or what they were authorized to do, the NSA was my go-to organization.

Those were the good old days.

One of the great things about my company is that they send me to conferences every so often. This mug came from php|tek 2012, which was a great convention held at a terrible hotel located an hour away from Chicago. It was a horrible location for a conference, honestly. However, the conference itself was really good.

This mug came from Mashery, which was one of the sponsors of the conferences. They provide API management for third parties. But what I think is neat is that the mug changes when you put something hot in it.

I was taking out the trash when I noticed that one of the rocks next to our front steps had a spot of yellow on it. I picked up a few rocks, looking at each, and I found three rocks that had letters painted on them: “HYD”, “HYDRANGEA”, and “BLEED”. After stepping back to take a photo, I realized that I’d also found something else. As the saying goes, if it’d been a snake it would have bit me.

It didn’t bite me.

This mug was made for me by a colleague. The logo on the front is DriveThru, which is the parent brand of most of sites operated by the company I work for. The most well-known of these, and the one I like best, is DriveThruRPG. I loved DriveThruRPG before I worked here, and I’ll love it after I’ve moved on.

The back of the mug has my name in a “hobbit” style font.

The details are kind of hard to see in photographs, but it looks great in person. This is one of my favorite mugs.

We watched Double Indemnity this evening, which stars Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. I am a huge fan of the genre, yet somehow I had never seen this classic. It was so much more hokey than I expected. From the self-consciously hard-boiled narration, to the snappy nonsensical patter, to the “twists” in the plot that are more spoof than suspense, I kept thinking that Larry Blamire would have made this movie if Billy Wilder hadn’t made it first.

I enjoyed it, but I chuckled a lot.

Tonight’s entertainment at Castle Blackmoor was a Jodie Foster double feature: Foxes and The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, my parents went to drive-in movies. During one of the movies we went to (Eaten Alive? Smile? Alien?) I remember seeing a trailer for Foxes, but I had never seen the movie itself until tonight. It had a very “after school special” vibe to me. The moral of the story? As far as I can tell, the moral is to not accept rides from extras in the David Lynch movie next door. (Also, Cherie Currie is probably a high maintenance girlfriend.)

The second movie was The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane. I first (and last) saw this when I was about 13 or 14, on TV, or perhaps HBO (which was not a given, back in those days). At the time, I thought that I should very much like to meet Rynn Jacobs (played by Jodie Foster), because she was like me: clever, lonely, and somewhat homicidal. Lucky for me, I did marry someone who fit that description. But back to the movie… this is probably one of my top ten favorite films. If this is not the best Jodie Foster movie of all time, it’s in the top three, definitely.