8,000 Glowing Balloons Recreate the Berlin Wall

As Germany celebrates this, an amazing art installation is in Berlin. Wish I could get there to see it – i’ve been there twice, once in 1987 (before it fell) and once in 1992 (right after). Very strange on the second visit how it had immediately changed and the desolation at the center of the city between the two sectors – i’m sure much, much more has changed since …. Such a cool city – can’t wait to go back again….!

Enjoy and congrats, Germany.

LICHTGRENZE from Fall of the Wall 25 on Vimeo.

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One of my favorite pop-culture things to read are smarmy reviews of media (movies, music, etc.). In reading something this am, i came across Nic Cage’s latest attempt to pay his taxes and rise above the <50% success rate he's had the past several years as to movies. About the only one I can think of that was any good (or interested me at ALL) was Kick-Ass. Everything else looked really stupid, uninteresting or got really bad reviews. His last good movies before that were almost 7 years earlier with Matchstick Men and Adaptation, although Ghost Rider was a guilty pleasure. 🙂

Which brings us to the latest, Left Behind. It was bad enough they did a Kirk Cameron version of this in the first place, but Nic – what were you thinking? I’m pretty sure the only thing worth reading here are the reviews – this is the downside of being Roger Ebert – watching a lot of bad movies.

Read several of the snipes yourself here – too funny. One only wishes that Damien came back to whack Nic upside the head for good, but he’s had his own movie challenges along the way….

I’ll leave you with one of the classics of smarmy reviews – the ‘discussion’ from Spinal Tap about their records (video quality not optimal but it’s the audio that matters anyway)…

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Some time ago I found a page that went into exquisite, delicious detail in ripping on Challenge of the Superfriends episodes. I mean, this would put even Roger Ebert to shame in its level of detail. Having been a huge fan of StompTokyo.com for years now, it’s the same thing – take (largely kids) shows that are starving for lampoon, and send them up by simply using logic and plain observations of what actually happens in the plot. And THEN throw in the frequent slam, comparison or grammar analysis that further pummels the show into the dust. 🙂

So as per usual, a random memory came into my head of reading these (whenever it was in the past) and looked them up again – it turns out there are actually 3 sites devoted to this, and they are all hilarious! Of course it helps if you are 40+ and spent way too many saturdays watching the original cartoons on TV in the mid-late 70s. If you aren’t, or didn’t (or simply didn’t watch ENOUGH of them) – you can catch many on YouTube now (of course).

here are the sites:

Seanbaby.com – The Superfriends

Jabootu – Challenge of the Superfriends

Roger Wilcox – The Challenge of the Superfriends

and here’s my fave quote so far from the first one (talking about Grodd, the evil-super gorilla from the Legion of Doom):

“….He comes from a secret invisible village of talking gorillas, but that’s not that big a deal. I describe my hometown of Baker City, Oregon exactly the same way. At least the people in my town all had rifles. Grodd doesn’t even have pants. But to be honest, even a non-talking gorilla is tougher than most of the people on the Legion of Doom….”

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Buzz Aldrin’s FIST is smiling… 🙂

Another Great Way to Prove Moon Hoax Conspiracy Theorists Wrong

Proof We Landed on the Moon is in the Dust

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Actor Robin Williams dies at 63

Many YouTube clips here – definitely one of a kind….

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It doesn’t get much nerdier than this….but I think I spotted an actual mistake! On the front of the suit at the end when they are talking, it says ‘Dallas’ on the front plate. But he says at the start of the video he was building the suit that Kane wore (John Hurt) – Kane was the character that has the alien burst out of his chest after getting back from the alien wreck. But Dallas was Tom Skerritt, the captain of the ship? Zing!

Anyway, pretty incredible work by any measure….

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A friend’s comment regarding HR Giger (see previous post) made me remember good ol’ Brother Theodore from Letterman back in the 80’s (and his brief appearance in The ‘Burbs). As I tend to gravitate towards the weirder, increasingly sociopathic comedians (Emo Phillips and Norm McDonald being among the better known, but I miss Sam Kinison) I miss the true psychos (or at least the expert fake psychos) like BT, who could turn it on and off like a faucet when they wanted too, and if you hadn’t seen them before, you were convinced they were about to kill the interviewer. In revisiting his story in wikipedia, I had no idea he was a longtime entertainer well before the Letterman stuff and had even known Einstein – wild.

This video has terrible video quality but several very funny bits, including Letterman sassing him back in at least 3 places – classic stuff! Both Conan and Letterman were funniest on Late Night, no question about it. There are several more on YT too.

Rant on, Brother!

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HR Giger has passed away as of this past May, just found out about it tonight.

‘Alien’ artist H.R. Giger dead at 74

Love him or hate him, he was certainly one-of-a-kind and one wonders where the ‘goth industry’ would have been without him – much of its art can certainly be considered a Giger ripoff at some point or another.

Definitely not art for the timid or faint of heart, most well known for the xenomorph alien, movie artwork and set design in Alien (reused in the sequels), the ELP and Debbie Harry album covers, and a bit more obscure, one of the original attempts to make a movie out of Dune. I actually have copies of both Dark Seed videogames on my shelf, need to break those out sometime…..

In whatever eerie, disturbing bio-mechanoid resting place you now inhabit, rest in peace, Herr Giger.

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As I’ve continually maintained, being a child of the ’70s means that you automatically use that decade as a baseline cue for style, sensibility and your world perspective. Setting aside many abnormal (if not outright offensive – but then again, hawaii shirts and golf-anything are still with us, so you can’t *only* blame the 70s) fashion trends, what still most often resonates is 70s music.

In this case, however, you have a cut-rate sci-fi film – Starship Invasions – that has a typical plot (alien race needs to colonize and overrun Earth because their home planet is about to die, unseen guardian aliens already reside here and would stop them but they are all but wiped out by the invaders until a UFO expert and math whiz human pair are enlisted to help, then things work out) with B list actors (Robert Vaughn who plays it fairly boring, Christopher Lee as the more interesting archvillian, the rest of the actors are no-names.

While the plot varies between boring (the attempts at transition scenes to show character development fall fairly flat), predictable (the invaders being successful and then being thwarted), and unconventional (Ramses’ visit to the pleasure center at the guardian alien base, which is populated, of course, by scantily clad alien women – Capt. Kirk, eat your heart out) – what carries the movie is the soundtrack, really. It goes between ’70s action scene’ upbeat jazz to piano interludes and stuff that wouldn’t otherwise be out of place in The Six Million Dollar Man or similar – definitely not your typical overblown orchestral fake grandeur by any means.

The spaceship effects are fine given the obviously low budget, despite the androids on the base looking like paper mache halloween costumes painted silver and every guardian alien having a huge, white bald egg-shaped head. And the fact that they were able to repair (well, temporarily) the saucer when they were on the run by raiding a downtown Toronto computer company – impressive…

As I saw this movie back in the day, it was nice to revisit, but it’s not going to win any Oscars anytime soon. Still, the soundtrack was very cool, i’ll have to look for other movies by the composer to see if they measure up.

Other voices:
Rotten Tomatoes
IMDB

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Love it!

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