Even the best fall down sometimes...

It is a little after 1am on a Wednesday, and there is an episode of "The Twilight Zone" on the Sci-Fi Channel right now. Rod Serling's familiar narration has just given us an intro to tonight's tale of the strange. Yet instead of settling in for a half-hour of classic television, I'm witnessing what is easily the worst episode ever to bear the name of the otherwise great program. This is an episode called "The Bewitchin' Pool".

This episode is bad. Real bad. Inexplicably bad. Especially when you consider that at it's best, the Twilight Zone was groundbreaking television. A show that despite heavy doses of 1950's science fiction campiness still holds up in terms of innovation and storytelling. This particular story follows two children named Jeb (the son) and inexplicably, "Sport" (daughter) whose parents are having marital problems and are on the verge of divorce. Now, if you know the Twilight Zone, you'd expect a twisted, yet somehow insightful tale that skews the 1950's ideas of divorce and family into strange directions.

Instead, you get writing that seems like it was written in between lines of cocaine and constant strikes to the head with a sock full of lead pesos. But what makes this stand out from the infinite mass of bad television are a number of strange production and directorial choices. Here is the short list:

1. The parents are portrayed as shallow, uncaring WASPs, yet both their children speak with weird country bumpkin "Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn" accents that seem to come from nowhere.
2. The daughter's voice sounds like it was dubbed by an older actress who smoked throughout her teen years, up through her forties, and up to the recording date for most of her lines here. I'm 99% sure the voice was dubbed, but have zero idea why anyone would think this was a good idea.
3. The old woman who presides over the Neverland-like world on the other side of the "Bewitchin' Pool" is completely unintelligible. She is more difficult to understand than Lando's co-pilot in "Return of the Jedi", though she does bear a striking resemblance.
4. Instead of doing kid-stuff in what is supposed to be some kind of kid's Utopia, Grandma Mumbles has them do chores.

I guess the reason I even bothered to blog this is because of the whole "fall 8 times, get up 9" factor. If the show could survive a trainwreck like this, or the hour-long "Jess Belle" episode, maybe we can all avoid drowning in our own personal "Bewitchin' Pools".

Long live small apertures and text messaging.

Today I saw my Alma Mater, San Diego State, beat BYU in basketball. There were many politically incorrect Mormon jokes from the fans and a family dressed like bananas trying to distract the BYU players behind the basket. It's possible they were plantains, but I'm not a botanist and plantains are a far less funny. I tried to take some snazzy cell-phone-camera shots, but the gain was out of control.
The band played the SDSU fight song so many times that I've memorized the melody, but for the life of me I couldn't tell you what any of the words are. The lyrics were written on a free binder they gave me as a freshman, but that binder is long gone.

While walking around campus, I realized that all those annoying construction detours closed-down areas that blocked my way when I was on the way to class are now a whole bunch of nice things I didn't have when I was a student. I want to go back in time to tell myself in the past to go forward in time and check out where our tuition money is going.

Zork and Zorker

I felt very Rambo-ish the other night as I fired a rocket-propelled grenade across a narrow ravine toward a hulking Eastern European man. He was armed with a whirling menace of a chain gun that had already sliced two of my comrades into something resembling red confetti. My RPG smashed into the side of the cliff about a foot from his bald head and the resulting detonation dispatched him before the smoke trail had even cleared. I didn't have long to celebrate. An enemy combatant in a red jumpsuit burst from the rickety wooden shack nearby and ignited me with his (or her) flamethrower. It wasn't long before nothing remained but a smoldering lump.

I checked the clock on my book shelf. 12:15am already. Way past this guy's bed time. Despite an urge to re-spawn and get some revenge on the Red Team's pyro, I had big kid stuff (read: work) in a couple hours. Team Fortress 2 and anonymous vengeance would have to wait for another night. I tapped out the usual "good game all" and logged off. ("But Ben, I thought you had screenplays you needed to work on... Why were you playing games for an hour and half?" "Because fuck you, that's why.")

Fast forward about eight hours and I'm in a rectangular division of an office building cubicle struggling with an ancient computer system that I am quite sure was only recently converted from Sumarian BASIC. I'm guessing that this software was programmed in the age of Zork. For those of you who don't remember or were born after Ronald Reagan was president, Zork was a text-based video game. No graphics, just descriptions of where you were. You interacted by typing commands and reading the results of your choices. Kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. That's probably a bad example, since those books were from the same era as Zork.
Oh, the irony. This is not the first time I've run into software that was obsolete ten years ago. This is the era that "real work" and productivity are stuck in. Yet, when I'm bored and need to kill/waste time, I can control a fully articulated character in a 3-dimensional audio/visual world with dynamic lighting that can be affected by tracer fire or muzzle flash from the weapons of any of the other 31 people connected remotely to a server from all corners of the country and even the world, all presented to me at a modest 38 frames-per second at 600 x 800 resolution. And I'm at the trailing edge of this technology. Game stats are updated in real time so I can review my individual performance on the server's website. I wonder if somewhere deep in the coding for this technology, Zork is lurking.

I accidentally hit "enter" on my console at work. I ask around how to go back a step and correct my error. Impossible, I'm told. The only way to correct the error is to tag my last action as invalid, then create a new identical action to replace it and notate which was the correct one to pay attention to. I have just cost myself about ten minutes. Even "Zork" allowed you to step back and see if you missed something... I suddenly feel obsolete.

Live for nothing, or die for the 80's.

Rambo 2008 is a horrible movie that is completely awesome. It is a throwback to the 1980's low-story, high body-count flicks such as Stallone's own "Cobra" and the masterwork of the genre, "Commando". (Note: AFI did not place Commando on their list of top 100 films of all time, proving they are a terrorist organization run by Communist Nazis who kill whales for fun by shooting baby seals from a cannon at them.)

It's tough to review this movie because on the level of "art" and storycraft, we'd be lucky to test at a 3rd grade special-ed level (though it is surprisingly well-shot.) On the visceral level of watching scores of baddies dispatched in the most violent (and manly) ways possible, the movie is in fact rocket science. The "rocket" in question being one fired from one person into another person, blasting them to a million beautiful pieces. Therefore, I give this movie a unprecedented 9.0 and 2.5 out of 10.

Basically, all you need to know is that Rambo is living in Thailand, there are some fascist thugs up river in Burma raping women, killing children, eating non-dolphin safe tuna, and voting Republican (probably). Some do-gooder Christian Missionaries catch a ride on Rambo's boat, but end up getting captured by aforementioned thugs. It's unclear exactly why Rambo decides to go after them after playing reluctant hero for the first section of the movie. It was either due to an exchange with the cute blonde woman earlier in the movie where she laments people not helping other people, or the fact that there were some assholes up river that needed killing and Rambo was bored.

We are then treated to about an hour of feel-good carnage. The morals of the movie are so black and white, and the bad guys so one-dimensionally evil, I didn't feel bad cheering on their dismemberment with the rest of the theater. Ah, mob rule... The kills come via .50 machine gun, .50 sniper rifle (wielded by a mercenary bearing an eerie resemblance to Bear Grylls) knives, a large bomb, and of course bow-and-arrow. What is it about these action flicks that calls for bow-and-arrow deaths? (Think Hard Target, Predator, or... Deliverance, I guess.)

If you're in the mood for some nostalgic old-school action, I highly recommend Rambo 2008. Bring your kids so they can see a real American in action. Bring in a bag of nachos and dip them in the dialogue because it is dripping with cheese. Bring your girlfriend because you've been waiting to get revenge on her for making you watch "27 Dresses". This movie was entertaining and had a moral. The moral being: DON'T FUCK WITH RAMBO.

No More Beautiful Girl

For something in the vicinity of $3.00 American, the lovely heap of self destruction pictured here can be yours. Oh how tragic and wonderful this time of ours...

It was sunny in Mission/Pacific beach earlier this week before the rain came in. It looked very Summer-like, but felt somewhat January-ish. The main difference being a large drop-off in temperature and an equally large and possibly more noticeable drop-off of in the population of half-naked girls at the beach.

It's mostly local rule around the early months, with the latest generation of Skate-Slackers having more or less free run of the place alongside migrated vagrants and wandering Kerouac types who probably view visiting the city in the hot season incredibly pedestrian. A group of aforementioned Skate-Slackers sit outside the JBX (that's Jack-in-the-Box to you laypeople), where my friend Luis finishes eating and I try to figure out my new camera/phone/mp3 player. So far, I have figured out that I need to accessorize so as to fit in with the millions of people who obviously give a shit how up-to-date I am.

The skaters are probably at odds with the idea that with the throngs of hottie bikini girls will also come the hordes of tourist-barbarians to cast them from their kingdom. At least until it starts getting cold and we can do it all over again. Or maybe they don't think about it at all and won't until it's ten years later and they realize they spend too much time in analysis and don't skateboard nearly enough anymore. I think to myself that winter seems to have better sunsets than Summer anyway.

Seven-Leaf Cloverfield

I have braved the crowds of early audiences and returned with this review of the much anticipated Giant Monster flick "Cloverfield". The people in front of and behind us in line actually came to the theater to see the latest Uwe Boll movie(?) "In the Name of the King", but had exchanged their tickets after surviving its awfulness for a mere 20-minutes, average. Nobody warned them to avoid anything with Uwe Boll's name on it. The whole situation is quite tragic, really. Children could have walked into that auditorium. Thus, I propose implementation of the Uwe Boll scale of movie sucktitude. UB-1 being a shitty movie and UB-5 being either unedited footage of a rhino taking a dump or films actually directed by Uwe Boll.

Oh yeah, I was supposed to review "Cloverfield". On a scale of 1-10, I'll give it a 7. It had some good to absolutely brilliant moments, but I found the ending to be unsatisfactory and there were some elements that kept it from being great. The most glaring of which is that the entire movie is supposed to be edited footage from a camcorder retrieved from "the site formerly known as Central Park". This means headache or stomach turning camerawork, especially on the big screen.

They actually do a good job with the "Blair Witch" cinematography (Better than Blair Witch itself) and it provides for some very cool moments once the FX come in. Unfortunately this style of storytelling seems to sacrifice a lot the longer a movie goes on. Thankfully, the monster is big, but the movie is short (under 1 1/2 hours I think), so they seem to have understood they were pushing the limits of how much hand-held footage an audience is willing or able to sit through.

I think they could have cheated the footage more. It didn't have to be as jerky as it turned out. They could have used a little stabilization and given up some of the "realness". I mean, it's a 350-foot semi-humanoid monster attacking New York and we're already suspending disbelief with the idea that the person holding the camera wouldn't have just chucked it the second it slowed him down. Of course, he could have also used it as a weapon because the camera is apparently made out of fucking Adamantium and the re-forged Sword of the Norse God Odin. I'm serious. The camera was so tough they could have placed it on an RPG, fired it at the monster, and it would have probably killed the damn thing instantly.

Overall: Entertaining movie, possibly better as a rental for people who get motion sickness. Very good acting, with some unconvincing motivations. Cinematography is atrocious at times, with flashes of genius at others. There is a kick-ass song during the closing credits. There are no power rangers or "Zords" in this movie. Most people probably aren't expecting that, but I just wanted to cover all my bases.

"Wake up and smell the ashes..."

I feel like I've been in stasis for about four years, give or take. Like I drifted away from myself and ended up half-awake in a void where I could watch my own life in minute detail without exerting any actual control over it. And the honest truth is that I haven't really been able to tell if I was on the verge of slipping away or the edge of something more.

This isn't to say I'm out of touch with what I want to do, or even that I'm unaware of what I should do. Just that the doing of either has been difficult to impossible as of late. It could be laziness. I know at least some of it is. I should be creating. Movies, songs, stories, comic-books, and any other way humanly (or possibly inhumanly) to bring life to the characters and ideas that have been crowding around in my noisy, noisy, head since sometime in 1980.

But the void is warm, comfortable, and safe. It is devoid of ambition and therefore free of failure. You simply go about your business, waiting for the end of time and another Big Bang to send you on your random way. But this is the life of an asteroid, not a person. I have to leave it behind. I have to wake up. Wake up see if there's anything left. Or if there was anything there to begin with...