An absolutely fantastic collection of themes and incidental music from the sixties cult T.V. show, The Prisoner. I use this music all the time as background to my various home movies and have been dinged several times for copyright violations from YouTube. Laws be damned, this music is essential. It’s a mix of mod jazz, easy listening and marching band music. Trust me it rules. This CD is actually a professionally produced bootleg.
There are lots of echoes and percussive bursts that elevate this mostly run-of-the-mill film score. It’s the appropriate music for when you are caged like a beast or being netted by soldier apes. The CD also includes the far funkier and melodic suite from Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
Coming off of FarCry 3, I really wasn’t sure I wanted to commit myself to another massive open-world game, but San Andreas was there in my bin of unplayed games calling to me. The GTA formula, like war, never changes: huge open world, lots of driving, violent gangster themes and general mayhem. I really wish the stories were more compelling, but they tend to get lost in the huge scope of the game. Personally, I have no nostalgia or interest in Southern California gangsta culture and music. In light of the never-ending murder in Chicago, it’s a hard sub-culture to glamorize without feeling icky. I was able to set that aside and just enjoy exploring the map and all it’s diversity.
The game technology is a slight improvement over Vice City, but it still seems empty blocky by contemporary standards. The cars still drive all floaty and weird the same way they did in GTA IV. Planes played a much bigger role and were difficult to get the hang of initially. Mouse controls don’t really work for flying but the joypad sticks for everything else so I just kept it on my lap for when I was flying. I realize I don’t have much positive to say here, but, really, I liked the game. Now that I have finished I will probably go back in an explore and be a bit more crazy for a while before moving on.
This classic sets itself up as a last man on Earth drama, but within five minutes kills that premise. The baddies are a set of hippy-dippy night people who offer no real threat to the protagonist yet are trying to attack him for no real reason. Of course there are lots of other people who survived Armageddon. More hippies. We must increase our numbers so we can form an organic foods co-op! Heston is always great in these early seventies films, but, man, dumb movie.
I tried very hard to like the book Naked Lunch. All the cool kids thought it was just the bee’s knees. Well, when I read it, I just didn’t get it. Then I read it again and it didn’t get any better. A few cool vignettes that add up to a big nothing. Not surprisingly, I discovered later on that Burroughs randomly cut up his writing and arranged it into a novel. What did he expect other that complete confusion?
Well, the film offered no other clues and neither does this soundtrack, composed by Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman. The soundtrack is a mix of Shore’s heroic scoring and the spazzed out horn playing of Coleman. Sometimes it works, more often it’s a typical free-form jazz mess. I get it, you can play notes fast on your tooter (scooter), now how’s about a melody my hat on?
A year ago a watched the other half of this double feature film noir DVD. This second movie is much better but is based on a completely ridiculous premise. A man on the run from the mob assumes the identity of another man who looks like him. When I say “assumes” I mean it. Takes his job. Goes on the town with his wife. And nobody catches on?! Despite this, there are some clever twists and turns that keep it exciting even though everything happening is fully implausible.
Ok, my wife wanted the entire family to watch this and I fully expected to be bored by it, but, you know what, it’s a really good movie. It does have some creepy undertones in the relationship between Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews. Also, I am noticing how in the movies, whenever there is an ex-nun, she is always portrayed as simply being an average girl who is good-natured, pure and that’s about it. In reality, I would expect ex-nuns to be quoting scripture and being your average annoying evangelical-type most of the time.
It’s hard to believe that this soundtrack won the Oscar for original score in 1979. Other than the disco beat of “The Chase,” there’s not much to this. In fact, a couple of the tracks, “Istanbul Blues” and the vocal version of the “Love Theme,” are downright terrible. Maybe people were just impressed with the novelty of an electronic musical score? Or everyone was just on drugs back then.
My Adam Carolla film fest continues with this documentary about Paul Newman’s racing career. There are no amazing revelations here except that Newman was a better racer than most of us realized. It’s a pretty straightforward character study of a charming man living a charmed life.
Although I haven’t written about them here, I have played through much of the first series of Bit.Trip games on the Wii. Most of those games could be classified as rhythm games with an Atari 2600 aesthetic. Beat and Runner were the stand-outs of the original six games. The former is a frantic pong-a-like and the latter is a platformer distilled to its most basic mechanics.
Runner 2 is mostly the exact same mechanics as Runner but with a 2.5D graphical makeover. Getting through the entire game is not a huge challenge. The true test comes in trying to achieve perfection by collecting all the gold and amassing the most bonus points. As such, it has more in common with a Contra game than a Mario game. Memorization is key. This is not deep, narrative game design but, as a pure arcade challenge, it’s well worth the few bucks it costs on Steam.
