A Text-to-Movie for my Daughter
Here’s a brief movie I made for my Daughter using xtra normal’s text-to-movie web app. (xtranormal.com/watch/5839651) if you are having trouble seeing the video).
UPDATE: Xtranormal is no more. Links are dead.
Power of Lard EP by Lard - CD
Jello Biafra and Ministry. The first song is great but the rest of the record is an endurance test.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The series chugs along. Number three is still the best movie of the series, but this one performs as expected. The kids in secondary roles are all growing up to be weird looking young adults who have yet to master their craft.
Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies
I was disappointed when I came to the realization that this was more of a collection of short stories rather than a full novel. The tales aren’t bad, but I would have preferred a much more grandiose story arc to end of the Hornblower series.
Lord Hornblower
Starts out nicely with Hornblower sent off to deal with a mutinous crew and keeps up the pace for about half of the book. Things begin to slow down near the end when the war with the end of the Napoleonic wars. Although, the return of some old friends from previous books is a welcome turn. So far, the initial trilogy of Hornblower novels are looking like the high point in the series.
Commodore Hornblower
A disappointing follow-up to the last Hornblower novel. This one has Hornblower in Russia helping out during the siege of Riga. Maybe a little too much politics for my taste.
The Jesus Lizard Reunion Show
This weekend, I actually left the house to see live music that wasn’t Nonagon. Thanks to John H., I got offered to see The Jesus Lizard at Metro. The Jesus Lizard is one of those bands that, during the nineties, I saw at least half-a-dozen times. Their music basically became the blueprint for much of the stuff we wrote in Der Lugomen. The band has reunited with its original line-up (technically, its second line-up since they had a drum machine on the first EP) and been playing shows since this summer. It was a pretty good show despite the fact that Yow had injured himself the night before and had to sing from a bar stool for most of the evening. His normal position is horizontally, thrashing about and body surfing over the audience. The crowd was typically wild. I managed to avoid the fray by just pinning myself against the stage barrier for most of the show. The opening band, Triclops, was awful. Truly, truly awful. Derivative, overly long and indistinguishable music fronted by a douche-bag singer who relied on an effects rack in lieu of any real talent. The comparisons to Jars of Clay were very much in order.
There’s my head in the foreground. This picture was stolen from some stranger’s Flickr site. They must have been standing behind me the whole night.
The Operative: No One Lives Forever
This weekend I played through No One Lives Forever again to see if it still holds up. I have long considered this to be one of the best games I have ever played. The graphics haven’t aged very well—they are comparable to what you would see in a Nintendo DS game these days—however, the story, game play, music and humor all are as fresh today as they were back when the game was released, and, despite the their simplicity, the visuals still have their moments such as the Bond-style credit sequence complete with a dancing Cate Archer. Plus, I will never get tired of the incredibly catchy soundtrack music. I would love to see a NOLF 3 one of these days. I may even be up for buying one of those nerdy “who the hell buys these things” collectors’ editions.
Time for the Stars
A fairly good sci-fi novel about a pair of telepathic twins separated when one goes off to survey new worlds in a near-light speed starship. Although somewhat dated in it’s writing style, the book does a good job describing how near-light speed travel would affect the aging of the twin in space compared with the one on earth.
AMC’s The Prisoner Remake
I just finished watching all six episodes of AMC’s remake of The Prisoner and I guess I shouldn’t have expected much. How could you possibly redo one of the most unique and thought provoking television series without disappointing those of us who idolize the original? After seeing some early teaser featurettes on AMC’s Web site I started to get high hopes for this. I mean, Gandalf as No. 2! And look at this awesome still:
Jesus is about to get crushed by a gargantuan pilates ball! If this series had consisted entirely of No. 6 being chased by rovers I would have been satisfied. Instead we get a confusing mess of mumbled dialog, uninformative flashbacks, more mumbled dialog and 3 or 4 schmaltzy love story plot lines. The rovers have about 15 seconds of total screen time over the course of the entire mini-series.
The original series was full of humor, suspense and sci-fi imagination. No. 6 was always playing a cat-and-mouse battle of wits with his caretakers—never knowing who he could trust. I always thought the key theme of the original was its defense of individualism. No. 6 had a mind of his own and nothing was going to take that away.
The new series starts off completely off-base by opening with No. 6 suffering from amnesia, with no idea who he is or what he believes. So, for pretty much the whole series, six is dazed and confused, with no real sense of purpose as he aimlessly stumbles about The Village. The series lingers too much boring side plots like the inane drama between No. 2 and his annoying son. The other villagers are treated in a far too sympathetic light. Where’s the paranoia? You’d think the writers would have a lot to address in this post 9/11 world regarding individualism and privacy.
If anything, this remake has made me appreciate the original that much more. And really, if you need a more modernized version of The Prisoner, you would be better off just watching Lost.