Oh my. Most of my buddies on Facebook lean leftwards and I am anticipating an explosion of liberal rage come Tuesday evening. They can’t seem to shut up talking about Christine O’Donnell, or whoever the right-wing boogeyman of the moment happens to be, while completely ignoring the main gripe of over-reaching government that is going to swing this election. I will try to document the “gosh, Americans are stupid” and “Somehow this is still Bush’s fault” nonsense and publish it here. If the Democrats pull off a miracle and keep the house, I will be knee deep in standard liberal gloat. Either way, should be fun.
My Halloween movie fest continued last night with a re-watching of Mother of Tears, the third film in the Three Mothers trilogy. When I first watched the film I pondered if it would get better on rewatching. Nope. It was actually more painful on the second viewing. What a rambling mess of a film with awful acting and dialogue all around. No screengrabs for this film. It doesn’t deserve that level of respect.
My Halloween movie fun-run continues with Mario Bava’s Kill Baby, Kill. Not really his finest work, but it is memorable for the scenes of the ghostly child at the windows.
This is a very creepy still, but, in the context of the movie, it doesn’t come off as eerie as it could. I’m probably the 9000th person to post this screenshot on the Web, but any Kill Baby, Killpost must include it.
The film is filled with more great compositions such as this one in which a young girl is compelled to impale herself with a sconce.
Italians sure do love their spiral staircases. As a note to budding architects who work in cities with high counts of maniacs and vindictive ghosts: a simple straight flight of stairs is probably a bit better in emergency situations. Oh, and avoid the metaphysical endless room loops.
My plans to watch a bunch of horror movies in the run-up to Halloween have not been going to well. I did manage to re-watch Dario Argento’s Inferno the other day. I have always considered this to be one of Argento’s weaker films of this era, but the more I watch it, the more I like it. It has much of the wonderful colored lighting, expressionist sets and dynamic compositions that made Suspiria so great. Also, despite the flawed and incoherent plot, there are plenty of memorable scenes.
For some reason I especially like this scene where our hero, Mark, gets bewitched during his musicology class by The Mother of Tears…
This is only a brief cameo from the third mother, but it’s very effective. Too bad the actual movie about her, Mother of Tears, was so mediocre. They should have just looped this scene for 90 minutes and released it as a feature.
Inferno takes it its time in getting to the main villain, Mater Tenebrarum, but the scene in which she reveals her true identity is one of my favorites in Argento’s entire body of work…
Mark, don’t be lured into her fiery trap!
Without giving away the surprise, the shot above is so, so well done. Apparently, this is some of Mario Bava’s special effects handiwork. Good stuff. I encourage anyone who appreciates films simply for their beauty to check this film out.
This weekend the family dragged me to a scarecrow building contest. This is a contest intended to allow kids to be creative and show off their stuff as budding young artists. Of course, my wife decided it would be a great opportunity to kick some underaged-art-noob butt. Pictured here is her winning entry in the category “most likely to scare a crow.”
Nova is checking out the new wave neon streets in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Nova’s personal goal: don’t punch anyone and avoid the cops… and chase the roller skating guy in pink shorts.
After more than a dozen years of maintaining a personal Web site, I have finally decided to monetize this thing (well, okay, that doesn’t count the Google ads in the sidebar, but those barely earn any money anyways). I have gone through my gallery and enabled a PayPal shopping cart system to take orders for my art. Currently, there are about twelve prints for sale. So, start shopping now!
After a back-to-back Drupal projects at work, I think I now have a better idea how this system works. In the process, I have updated the design of my Nonagon site and reworked the theme of this site. You may not notice any major differences, but now things are much more organized under the hood. However, I am guessing that I broke a few things, so if you notice any pages not rendering decently, please let me know in the comments.
My family and I just spent a weekend in LaGrange, Georgia visiting with relatives. Among the highlights of the trip, aside from the obligatory breakfasts at Waffle House, was an evening spent roller skating at Red’s Roller Rink. When we walked in the place they were blasting “Ice Ice Baby” so I knew this was going to be a fun time. I hadn’t been roller skating since the late eighties and it took quite some time to get my roller disco legs back in action, but once I got going, it was hard to stop… literally. Anyhow, I also enjoyed the Jesus mural at the far end of the hall. Here’s a full view:
