E.R. Torre's Blog, page 166

Real life CSI

The case involved is one of incredible, horrifying brutality:  A D.C. family of four were brutally tortured, murdered, and then their house was set on fire to cover the evidence.

Worse yet, during the ordeal the attackers apparently ordered Dominos Pizza.

Turns out, doing so fingered at least one of them in the crime, as their DNA was found and matched from a discarded piece of pizza crust:

http://gawker.com/suspect-in-d-c-murders-identified-from-dna-left-on-dom-1705947571

The heinous nature of the crime is difficult to comprehend, but one can at least find some encouragement that at least one of the people behind this crime has been identified.  I suspect it won’t be long before he’s captured -alive, hopefully- so that he can identify the others in this vicious crime.

Final Top Ten List…

Come on, everyone wanted to see this…

Thoughts on Letterman’s finale

So tonight marks the end of David Letterman’s fascinating tenure as a late night talk show host.  I used to watch Mr. Letterman religiously in the late 80’s and into the early 90’s but somewhere along the line I stopped.

While I’ve caught snippets of his stuff here and there, I was shocked when I revisited a full episode only a few months ago and found the man who was so sharp witted and on top of his game look so very, very…bored.  (You can read the entire posting, which references his then just announced retirement, here).

Salon.com has been running a series of retrospectives on David Letterman highlights, and today’s offering is one that really stuck in my mind since watching it air live many years before.  From 1987, the second appearance of the late American Splendor comic book creator/writer Harvey Pekar on Letterman’s show.  It is one of the very few times I can recall Mr. Letterman really having enough with a guest:

You can read the entire amusing article below:

Let’s Revisit That Time David Letterman Told A Guest to “Shut the F@*K Up”.

Given my interest in anything comic book related, I was delighted back then to see a comic book writer appear on such a prestigious show (back then, comic book creators didn’t have the cache they have now).

I vaguely recalled seeing Mr. Pekar’s first appearance on Letterman’s show and, when it was announced he was coming back for a second time, I couldn’t help but wonder why.  To put it kindly, Mr. Pekar was quite the character and wasn’t afraid to blurt out whatever was on his mind.  He would later say this was in part an “act” but I don’t know.  I suppose it was his shocking honesty that intrigued Mr. Letterman enough to have him over that second time.

As you can see from the clip, that second time proved pretty uncomfortable.  Still, you have to give it to Mr. Pekar, he made that appearance a most memorable one.

In the mood for more “disastrous” David Letterman guests?  Check out the link below:

http://entertainment.time.com/2009/02/13/top-10-disastrous-letterman-interviews/slide/joaquin-after-dentist/

Unfortunately, many of the clips in the list have been removed from youtube but with some looking around, I’m sure you can find ’em.

It’s astonishing how many of them I saw the day they aired.  I really did spend an awful long time watching Letterman back in the day!

Autonomous Autos…again

If you’ve followed my ramblings you know that I’m incredibly fascinated with the concept of the self-driving car.  Any stray article that comes my way about this potentially revolutionary new field (once its implemented) and its impact on our society has my attention.

What’s most fascinating is the fact that there are so many factors to consider when/if such a technology becomes the norm, something I suspect will happen soon rather than later.

For example, how will such a technology affect the economy?  Will we need to buy vehicles for ourselves if we can simply “order” a driverless car to come pick us up with our smartphone and have it take us wherever we need?  Will driverless cars lead to significantly less traffic and accidents and deaths (I suspect yes).

But there is one thing I hadn’t considered until now: Will safer driverless vehicles be allowed to run at greater and greater speeds and will this, in turn, allow us to live farther and farther away from our worksites?  If that’s the case, how will that affect the environment?

Joseph Coughlin and Luke Yoquinto offer a fascinating article regarding just this issue for Slate magazine.  I highly recommend those interested in this emerging technology give it a read.  Just click on the link below:

The Long Road Home

Nobody’s fault but mine…

Ever have one of those days?  You know the type, where absolutely nothing seems to go right?

Well, I’ve had something like three of those type of days in a row.

Saturday was horrific, Sunday at least gave me the opportunity to see Mad Max Fury Road before whalloping me.  And yesterday, the piece de resistance: I lost something like four days worth of really good writing on my latest novel thanks to a faulty wi-fi connection which resulted in me incorrectly saving an older version of my current book over the newer one.

I desperately googled all information I could on finding and saving “old” files (which in this case is actually the latest version) but after several hours of working on it and hunting temp files, it appears I lost it for good.

AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGgggggg!

I suppose I should be thankful I didn’t lose the entire book, but the experience has yet again taught me a valuable lesson I should have learned many times over already: Make other backup copies of your files, you IDIOT!

As I said in the headline, Nobody’s Fault But Mine…

Typecasting…

I suspect one of the more difficult things for successful actors to overcome is being typecast in certain roles/genres of film or TV.

While watching Mad Max Fury Road, this commercial for the upcoming film The Gift was shown:

Now, let me say this: I really, really like actor .  Even when he’s in mediocre to bad films, I have yet to feel he’s to blame for said work’s failing.  He’s charismatic, sardonic (in a delightful way), and interesting to watch.

But boy oh boy do I have him typecast in my mind as a “comedic” actor and find it really difficult to switch gears and see him acting in a serious/suspense film.

When I saw the first, very short trailer to The Gift (it must have been on TV) I thought Mr. Bateman was all wrong for the role.  This trailer, which is a little longer and may well give away more than it should regarding the film’s plot, made me feel more comfortable about the idea of Mr. Bateman tackling this mysterious, more “serious” role.

We’ll see.

Mad Max Fury Road (2015) a (not at all!) belated review

I said I’d see the film while it was in the theaters and early this morning, at the 10 A.M. 3D showing, I caught Mad Max Fury Road.

aaaaaannnndddd….

While I’m overall pleased with the film, I also have certain mixed feelings regarding the overall work, which I’ll get into below.

There are parts of the film that absolutely enraptured me.  Hell, there were parts where I shed a tear or two (it was the dust in the theater…right?), yet despite so much to like, and there was an awful lot to like, I still feel the best Mad Max film remains The Road Warrior.

Having said that, I loved the fact that director/co-writer George Miller returned as strong as he did to the Mad Max universe.  Sadly, we’ve recently seen damn good directors return to past triumphs and unfortunately fall on their faces (Spielberg/Lucas with Indiana Jones, Ridley Scott with the Alien universe).  In this case, Mr. Miller delivers a film he has clearly thought about and tinkered with in pre-production for a long time.  Word is that it took him ten years to get this film done and that thought process shows with a deceptively simple plot that nonetheless gives you plenty of characterization in its quiet moments and a logical story progression that continues the previous films’ exploration of mythology (Like The Road Warrior, Mad Max Fury Road is essentially an apocalyptic western with steel instead of flesh horses).

For those like me who wondered how this particular movie would fit in with the other three and the answer is: It doesn’t.

Mad Max Fury Road is a “soft” reboot of the Mad Max story.  We get bits and pieces of Max’s ( taking over the role that made famous) past in the form of flashbacks but these flashbacks don’t necessarily correspond with the other movies in the series, especially, the original Mad Max.  Yes, Max is still a burned out ex-cop who lost his family and now roams the wasteland as a solitary soul, but the flashbacks point out something slightly different than what we saw in the previous films, including a much older daughter he lost (in the original Mad Max, he lost his wife and baby child) and an attack on him that was bigger in scale than the motorcycle gang that attacked him originally.  Finally, Max still drives the car (mild spoilers) that was absolutely destroyed in The Road Warrior.

As the movie opens, Max is chased, captured, then taken to an oasis run by a fearsome fascistic individual named Immortan Joe ( returning to the Mad Max universe as the villain of this movie…he was the badguy Toecutter in the original Mad Max!).  Immortan Joe, to my eyes, is a mild re-tread of Auntie Entity in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Shortly after Max’s arrival, Imperator Furiosa () heads off to transport a truck from the Oasis to a fueling station but, it turns out, she has other plans and leaves the designated route.  This in turn causes a series of events to occur which eventually bring Max and Furiosa together as they try desperately to escape the forces of Immortan Joe while in search of a green paradise Furiosa insists still exists out there somewhere.

I don’t want to get into too many more spoilers but I will say this: Mad Max Fury Road’s story winds up using elements from both The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.  In fact, one could say the film is something of a mash up of those two films.

If you’re as familiar with those earlier films as I am, you’ll see these similarities (like the one I pointed out above regarding Immortan Joe) and, while it does take away a little in terms of Mad Max Fury Road’s “originality”, given that it’s been some thirty years since Beyond Thunderdome’s release, you can sorta forgive this.

Now, to details: How is Tom Hardy as Max?  I feel he was good in the role.  Having said that, I can’t help but think Mel Gibson would have been better.  Sure, Mr. Gibson’s much older now, perhaps too old for some of the stuntwork, but when he played the character he managed to convey something Mr. Hardy, as good as he is, never quite captures.  It is my understanding Mr. Miller wanted Mel Gibson back but the actor declined, so I suppose its worthless to worry about that now.

Regardless, Max’s character in this film is interesting in another respect because despite the movie’s title, I would argue he isn’t the movie’s protagonist.

I won’t pretend to be the first person to point this out, but Mad Max Fury Road could just as easily been called Imperator Furiosa Fury Road.  In fact, and I know I’m about to say a MAJOR heresy here, but I think the film might have been better had it NOT been a Mad Max film and instead a “sideways” sequel to the Mad Max films…set in the same universe but without the presence of Max.

Not that Max’s presence is unwelcome, its just that the contortions of getting him into the story early on could have been eliminated and I don’t think it would have hurt the film.  In fact, it might well have helped it!

However, once he was part of the story things were fine, right?

Well…

In The Road Warrior, Mel Gibson’s Max was very much in the eye of the hurricane.  Everything happens around his character and without him you wouldn’t have the movie.  But in Mad Max Fury Road the eye of the hurricane, even when Max joins up with her, is Furiosa and it is she around which all occurs and it is she who is the core of the film while Max just kinda helps out after a fashion.

Mind you, this isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, but given the fact that I came into the film expecting a Mad Max feature and getting a Imperator Furiosa feature does take a little adjusting.

The second, somewhat smaller problem I had with the film was the admittedly incredible stuntwork.  I’ve noted before reading a quote from a director or stuntman who stated something along the lines that with respect to stuntwork in movies, what you present should be about 30% more than what can happen in real life.  The implication of this statement was that if you push things too far beyond that 30%, you run the risk of making a cartoon of your action scenes rather than something audiences might still take as “realistic” and therefore dangerous.

There are an awful lot of great stunts and effects in Mad Max Fury Road, but after a while (another heresy!) I felt they got so broad and exaggerated that it was hard to take them very seriously, especially toward the end when people are jumping from car to truck to car while engaged in a high speed chase.

This is, obviously, a personal issue to me.  Others might not mind and your mileage, as they say, may vary.

So I’ve spent over a thousand words here and its time to wrap it up: Is Mad Max Fury Road worth your time?

Absolutely.

Despite the negatives mentioned above, the film nonetheless shows director George Miller remains one of the premiere action directors out there.  While Mad Max Fury Road may not quite capture the lightning in a bottle magnificence of The Road Warrior, it nonetheless gives you a potent, grueling, and ultimately uplifting story that should have you on the edge of your seat.

Recommended.

A quick note: Since the movie’s release some far right conservative talking heads have criticized this film as a “feminist” work.  Loathe though I am to agree with anything those on the far right say, they’re right here.  Mad Max Fury Road does carry an undercurrent of feminist empowerment in it, up to and including the hot button issue of fertility and (yes) abortion.  In this movie, we see a society run by a man who controls fertile women and forces them to have children against their wills.  The movie’s central plot involves these same women, led by Imperator Furiosa, rebelling against this tyranny and taking control of their destiny and, yes, their bodies.

I absolutely applaud that element of the film!

Apocalypse…Pow!

To those who weren’t around back then, there was a time in the pre-internet stone age when movies “snuck up” on you and suddenly there they were, released to movie theaters in all their glory…movies you hadn’t heard a thing about until literally they were days if not a couple of weeks from being released.

One such film that surprised me was 1981’s  Escape From New York.  Never heard so much as a word about it before being floored by the movie’s poster I saw in a theater no more than a couple of weeks before its release.  While I’m sure there were articles about the movie in sci-fi magazines, back then you had to actually find the magazines in bookstores -remember them?- to read about those upcoming releases.

As I said, what really got me was the poster, presented below.

Pretty neat, no?

Another such film that really surprised me and had me instantly salivating to see it came out that same year, The Road Warrior.

I don’t know if I read the Time Magazine review first (It’s the second one quoted in the above poster) or saw a TV commercial or whathaveyou, but for me 1981 proved to be all about The Road Warrior.  The movie literally blew me away and kept me coming back trying to sneak into theaters to see it (It was R rated and I was still too young to go into the movie without adult accompanyment…though with one exception that didn’t stop me from seeing the film three or four times upon its original release!).

As it turned out, 1981 proved a pretty spectacular year for movie releases.  You have the two mentioned above along with Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Evil Dead, An American Werewolf in London, Stripes, For Your Eyes Only (perhaps my favorite Roger Moore James Bond film), Time Bandits, Outland, The Howling, Superman II, and Scanners, among others (you can find the full list here).

What I didn’t know back then, again, thanks to the stone age pre-internet days, was that Escape From New York and The Road Warrior had a common thread: They were both intricately tied to a low budget, practically unknown 1979 film by the name of Mad Max.

Of course, The Road Warrior was a sequel to Mad Max and was known as Mad Max 2 in foreign markets.  I suppose the name was changed to The Road Warrior in the U.S.A. so that American audiences didn’t stay away from the theaters thinking they’d need to see the original to “get” the sequel.  Escape From New York, on the other hand, was inspired at the very least visually for director/writer John Carpenter because he had seen Mad Max and loved the “look” of the film.  Word is that Kurt Russel, the star of that film, was also a big fan of Mad Max.

Getting back to The Road Warrior, I absolutely loved Mel Gibson’s stoic, almost silent presence (he utters some 17 or so lines in the entire film).  I loved the cast of characters around him, from the desperate surrounded town-folks to the larger than life villains.  I loved the Gyro Captain (he was never given a formal name) and I really loved -and was heartbroken- by Max’s pet dog.

And that ending…so much going on, tragedy, triumph, what looked to be complete disaster only to be revealed as…Ah, but that would be spoiling.

The years that followed gave us one more Mel Gibson starring Mad Max film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.  As excited as I was to see it, it proved to be a crushing disappointment.  While I can understand the desire by director/writer George Miller to go a different route and give us something “new” with regard to Mad Max and his apocalyptic world, other than the magnetic presence of Tina Turner as the villainness this film was just too removed from what made the original two films such fascinating thrill rides and, to this day, I haven’t gone back to see it from start to finish.

I may have to revisit it, to see if perhaps I’m being too harsh.

Regardless, that brings us to today, with the release of the new Mad Max film Mad Max Fury Road.  Sadly, Mel Gibson isn’t involved in this new feature and that is perhaps my biggest disappointment.  Granted, Mr. Gibson’s strange behaviors a few years back made him a poison pill to many potential audience goers and (I imagine) financial backers and I can’t help but wonder if that, and his age (he ain’t no spring chicken anymore), might have played a role in his not returning for this film.

Still, that’s speculation and it isn’t the first time a popular star was replaced in a popular role.

So Tom Hardy takes over the role of Mad Max (I can’t complain, I like him) and the reviews for this film have been nothing short of stellar.

While it is difficult for me to get to the theaters to see first run films (hence so many belated reviews) I fully intend to see Mad Max Fury Road on IMAX as soon as I can, preferably in the next couple of days.

Will I be transported back to the magical year of 1981, a year when The Road Warrior quite literally blew me away?

By the Gods I sure hope so.

Movie “happy” endings and other things…

From the always delightful Cracked.com…

First up, 16 Happy Endings That Hoped You Weren’t Paying Attention:

http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_1470_16-happy-endings-that-hoped-you-werent-paying-attention/

It boils down to this: Sometimes a movie’s “happy” ending, if you think about it, isn’t all that happy at all.  Perhaps one of the best examples of this is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a very popular (and profitable) Steven Spielberg film that featured an ending that even as a youngster made me scratch my head for the very reasons pointed out in the article above:

Even Steven Spielberg and star Richard Dreyfus have realized the protagonist’s journey and ultimate resolution, presented so positively and with such a sense of Spielbergian wonder within the film itself, wasn’t quite as pleasant in retrospect.  Mr. Spielberg, if memory serves, noted that when he made the film he was a young single man and, as he grew and married and had a family, realized the ending presented in this work makes Richard Dreyfus’ character a heel (and that’s putting it kindly).

Check out the others, they’re interesting as well!

Next up: 6 Terrible Scenes Wisely Left Out of Great Movies:

http://www.cracked.com/article_22350_6-terrible-scenes-wisely-left-out-great-movies.html

What we have here are six movies based on literary works wherein the movie wisely chose to eliminate or ignore certain elements of the book/original story it was based on.  My favorite has to be the very first one presented, Die Hard.  The original book it was based on, Roderick Thorp’s Nothing Lasts Forever sounds like a real downer of a novel compared to what was presented on screen.  That’s not to say the other five didn’t wisely eliminate/alter material as well!

The only one I might quibble a little with is Up In The Air.  Yeah, the twist ending might have been more of a downer than one would have liked, but for some reason the book’s idea of the main character (SPOILER!) being terminally ill makes a certain kind of sense in the context of what he does during the course of the story, though maybe less so as a surprise ending.  Perhaps if it were part of the plot from the beginning…

Atari: Game Over (2014) a (mildly) belated review

I consider myself a part of the first generation of home video gamer fans.  I had a Pong type video game system in the mid-70’s and by 1978 or so had an Atari system (later it would be renamed the Atari 2600 system to distinguish it from later systems).

If you lived and experienced this home video game revolution, you know how incredible it was to have an Atari 2600 system.  Back then, video games were a revolution in the entertainment medium and having an Atari in your home allowed you to continue having arcade type fun outside the arcade itself.  Looking at the system and, in particular, the Atari 2600’s crude graphics today may have modern audiences scratching their heads.  Today’s games are almost hyperreal.  How in the world could anyone like that crude stuff?

Trust me, we did.

As dominant as the Atari system was, it is bewildering that in the early to mid-1980’s the system was suddenly and abruptly gone and Atari, the company that was so much a part of my childhood, faded away into oblivion.

Which brings us to Atari: Game Over, the documentary that on its surface explores one of the great legends regarding the company’s most infamous video game release, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, yet also looks back with nostalgia and sobriety at the rise and fall of the Atari Company.

The legend the documentary explores goes like this: The E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial video game, released to coincide with the release of the famous Steven Spielberg film, proved to be such a disaster that its failure sunk Atari.  Because the company produced way too many copies of the game, it was ultimately forced to dump the massive unsold stock into a landfill.

Did this happen?  And if so, could the buried copies of the game be found and the legend confirmed?

Using this as a jumping off point, the documentary that follows explores the Atari company and the people behind it.  The man responsible for the E.T. game, Howard Warshaw, proves to be the most interesting person, at least to me, in this documentary.  He talks of coming to Atari in the early days and the success of his very first game, Yar’s Revenge.

One gets the feeling he was something of a “golden boy” at the company during its good times (Yar’s Revenge was the best-sellingest video game Atari would ever release) and became the scapegoat when the E.T. game proved a failure.

In between we follow the people behind the search for the spot where the video games may have been dumped in a landfill in Alamogordo and go through the process of digging said site up (after making it through several levels of bureaucracy).

If there is one complaint I have about this documentary is that it is rather short and could have delved a little more into the life of Mr. Warshaw and perhaps a few others at Atari.

In spite of this, Atari: Game Over is a delightful documentary that explores a video game legend and, in its own way, proves to be a treasure hunt…though the treasure hunted, let’s face it, is trash.

Recommended, particularly if you were there during Atari’s golden years.