I watched this with the intention of seeing the third film in the theater soon thereafter. As far as reboots go, this is probably as good as they come. The sadistic zookeeper was a bit much. I mean, why is there even a home for stray apes in San Francisco?
Very well done proto-slasher film with a star-studded cast. Despite the title, Christmas doesn’t play much of a role in the plot here other than setting up the conceit that most of the girls in the sorority house are home for the holidays. The dark, ambiguous ending is unsettling and effective.
I’ve owned a Yamaha DX100 synthesizer for decades and never really had a strong grasp as to how the heck you build sounds with it. The last few months I have been immersing myself in FM synthesis and I think I finally have a handle on the concept now. Here is set of twenty-four patches that I created:
They all sound better and less brittle with a little reverb and chorus, but you get the idea. I especially like “Astro Pong” and “LoocySynth”. If you like what you hear, you can download a .WAV file of the cassette dump and load these patches on to your DX100/27 via the cassette port hooked to your PC. Just make sure your PC’s volume is turned way up or the DX won’t hear the data stream.
UPDATE: I have finally saved these patches as sysex files (see below). Here is information on loading sysex on to a DX100 (also contains separate sysex files for each of the individual patches).
I was tasked to create a quick flyer for a Nonagon tour show in Louisville and here’s what I came up with. The night itself was a complete train wreck with bars kicking us out and then walls falling on John. The flyer was nice.
This is a memoir of life aboard a merchant vessel in the early 1800’s. It is also noteworthy as a glimpse California before the gold rush. The book is loaded with detail of life at sea but it becomes a bit of a slog about a third of the way through the book with its endless descriptions of tanning hides. Moby Dick it ain’t.
Norton is usually a very entertaining guest on whatever chat show on which he appears. However, I’ve watched his stand-up and it never really clicked for me. His routine, much like most of this book, is him talking very matter-of-factly about his personal perversions. I don’t know. I guess observational humor about a fringe-y lifestyle is hard to relate to. I wanted to like this book but alas, it’s just not my cup of pee. Puns… Now that’s top-notch humor.
Grand Slam is a reasonably amusing heist film with the usual tropes of assembling of the team, a complicated heist, and the inevitable team squabbling that leads to everything falling apart. Edward G. Robinson is green screened into half the scenes in which he appears and doesn’t really need to be in the movie. The soundtrack is by Morricone, but is not one that I particularly like. Way too much Brazilian festival music.
One of the better super hero films I’ve seen. The limited scope of the plot helped center the focus on the characters rather than massive action sequences. I probably could do without the last twenty minutes which devolved into the usual fake CGI battle with a seemingly invincible enemy. Yet it is a battle in which there is no sense of danger or tension.
A euro-crime thriller/drama about a prison warden who is blackmailed into letting a prisoner escape. Boasts a wonderful score by Ennio Morricone and features the world’s least intense prison escape, mountain hiking with commies, drunk acting from Oliver Reed, corrupt hippy pop-stars and a cynical ending that those life-loving Italians just go bonkers for.
A 70s euro-crime film from Italy featuring a barely-there performance from James Mason. Mason is out of the film at about the halfway point at which time it becomes a revenge story with little to no tension. The only reason to watch it is this fantastic clip of J&B delights:
