Thursday, April 26

When Film Geeks Make you Laugh

A comment on one of the Onion AV club's DVD reviews made me laugh out loud(-erskates). Regarding the film "Shakes the Clown" by Bob Goldthwait, SK73 says
The Boston Herald famously described 'Shakes' as "the 'Citizen Kane' of alcoholic clown movies."
I mean sure, the Boston Herald probably gets the credit there, but still. That killed me. Maybe I'm going soft.


Tuesday, April 24

Pop is Crap: co-conspirators

Oh, how I deeply love to rant about the inanity and stupidity of pop culture. (All in good fun, of course. You know how much I really love you, Pop Culture!)

Much to my enjoyment, there are many others who do so much better than I. First is Amelie Gillette, the blogger behind The Hater. Her every post is a pop-culture-eviscerating Garden of Earthly Delights.

And then, courtesy of MeFi, there's this article in the Village Voice, which gleefully mocks (by way of Venn Diagrams) the song by Mims called "This is Why I'm Hot." Although really, you don't have to go much farther than to quote the lyrics:
This is why I'm Hot [2x]
This is why [2x] Uh
This is why I'm Hot (Uh)
This is why I'm Hot [2x] Whoo
This is why [2x]
This is why I'm Hot

I'm hot cause I'm fly (fly)
You ain't cause you're not (Mims)
This is why [2x]
This is why I'm hot [2x]
A graphical dissertation on the number one song in America

Monday, April 23

Stross, Again

Charlie Stross' Hugo-nominated novella Missile Gap is avialable online for free. It's pretty dark fiction; a classic story of war determining not who's right, but who's left. I read it through in a couple hours, and it had a powerful effect. Perhaps a bit muddied with exposition, but overall a very solid piece of work.

Talking about it with the Pharaoh, it occurred to me that Peter Watts (whose full name I'm spelling out here for ease of ego-surfing) and Stross both are teaching me the lesson I've heard Ellison and Bradbury and Spider Robinson (in full-on fellate-Heinlein-mode) blather about: SF as mind-expanding, scary stuff that teaches us as much what we're scared of the future being as what the future will be.

The thrust of the argument never really made sense to me. Their stories all seem...tame. Bradbury's tales of mars-people and sun-rockets and Tall They Were, And Golden-Eyed are...nice. Like, "That's nice, Timmy" kind of nice. Even Ellison seems more like the neighborhood pest of a kid trying to wreck automobiles with a slingshot rather than any kind of genuine menace. And then there's Stross and Watts, holding your head under water together while bellowing philosophy of the mind at you. Demonstrating the finer points of interspecies competition by watermelon-off-a-balconying your dog with a sledgehammer.

And my (grand?)kids are going to read them and think "that's nice, Pete and Charlie."