WAS1 Productions

Originally Written 04/13/03

Watched  Comic Book Villians, which sounded interesting. It was a black comedy about rival comic-book shop owners trying to talk an elderly woman from selling her deceased son’s comic book collection. He’d died in his 50’s and had been an avid collector, so when they got to take a glimpse at his collection, it was like finding the holy grail, with all of the vintage comics stashed away there.

Of course the woman doesn’t want to sell her son’s things, and the two store owners start turning up the pressure. The movie started out good and was entertaining seeing all of the machinations the two guys were going through. However, the third act of the film became unnecessarily dark and gritty and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

On the plus side, it was neat seeing the geeky kid from Road Trip, whose been in typecast roles for several bad movies (including a kind of pointless role in The Core), it was neat seeing him get a chance to have a bit more of a character. Yeah he still played a geek, but at least his character evolves through the movie.

Originally Written 2007.

Fans of the new Doctor Who BBC series will have likely seen these episodes already, but for anyone who hasn’t seen them, if you like good drama and entertaining science fiction, you should check them out. The episodes are from seasons two and three, and star David Tennant as The Doctor.

The Girl in the Fireplace is probably my favorite episode of the new series. It has a few plot holes (it is Dr. Who afterall). Reinette falls in love with The Doctor too quickly, but I also really loved the romance and melodrama of it. The things I mentioned liking about the pathos of time travel were touched upon even better here.

The story was a lot of fun. The Doctor and companions find a deserted 51st-century space ship, which they discover has various time portals back to 18th-century France. The Doctor ends up jumping in and out of Madame de Pompadour’s life, discovering a monster under her bed when she’s just a child, and then saving her from nefarious droids when she’s a grown woman. The connection between the two of them was really sweet, and the actress playing the Madame really added a lot to the story. A Review of the episode mentioned “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” which is a book that’s on my ever-growing reading list.

The set designs between the two time periods was quite nice. I loved the styling of the ship, and the Victorian-era disguises of the nefarious droids after the Madame was delightfully creepy. The fact that they’re shown to be clockwork, instead of electornic is a nice touch too, and the creature design was superb. I’ve always liked artificial life forms, and the mechanized thinking of these machines made them interesting characters.

All in all, the plot was delightfully absurd, and worked at handling the goofy premise wonderfully. The whole story had a nice dreamy quality to it too, especially the coda at the ending.

Blink is another episode I really liked, it was right up there with “The Girl in the Fireplace.”  It didn’t have the same emotional impact of that episode, but it did have a couple of nice bits of character drama, and the use of different time streams was very well done. It was something very different and creative, plus having scary moving statues is always interesting. I also liked how The Doctor was mostly in the background for this episode, and they had some clever ways of having him interact with the other characters, which was a lot of fun.

Other episodes in the series which have both wonderful horror atmosphere and good character drama are The Silence in the Library and the two-parter set in a WW2 war-torn England The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances.

Here’s a couple of music videos which make use of anthropomorphic animals and also show the genre as artform is still alive.

Ramona Falls – “I Say Fever” is trippy with some nice stylish animation and makes an interesting metaphor for exposing people’s baser animal behaviors. Plus, a gun that shoots birds is just cool.

Menomena – “Evil Bee” is an older video which is attributed to the same director and is another wonderful piece It’s a dystopian world and a view on life, relationships and the birds and the bees that’s darkly beautiful.

Originally Written 09/08/09

Johhny Cash covers “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails.

I remember this song from the last album he did in 2002, and I loved the video on the DVD included with it. I ran across a link for it and it’s nice to see it’s on YouTube. It’s a wonderful cover, faithful to the source material without a hint of irony, but also making the song his own. There’s a lot of emotion in this one; it’s both a moving song and a beautiful video.

I have a lot of respect for Johnny Cash. He’s one of the few country musicians who I like and I like how he was a man of the people, acknowledging his own mistakes and troubled past. I like that he wore his faith on his sleeve, but it a very humble and human way. He was concerned with the plight of the disenfranchised, not preaching from an ivory tower. His song “Man in Black” is a good example of that.

Originally Written 10/29/08, Revised 04/19/10

The Boing Boing blog had this odd music video which people might like.

It’s Tuvan Throat-Singing Rap by Ondar, with the voice of Richard Feynman. It’s got a fun stream-of-consciousness vibe to it. Tuvan throat singing is hella cool and it’s just a fun video. The mix of Western and Eastern cultures is fun and anything which refernces the physicist Richard Feynman is worth mentioning.