..as in, I wish April 20 was Right. Meow.

From the Seattle PI:
In certain smoke-filled dorm rooms across the land, this may be the spring’s most buzzed-about movie. It’s a sequel to the cult 2001 comedy about Vermont Highway Patrol troopers who refuse to let crime get in the way of a good time. Here they venture into French-speaking Canada and pretty quickly test that country’s reputation for politeness. As they say in Quebec: Stupide mais drôle. April 20

In what’s become something of an annual tradition, a buddy and I went to the SIFF SFF Encore film festival today. While all the films were well made, many this year weren’t really as ‘sci fi’ as in years past.

Here’s the films I was able to find online – pretty much my faves from the show – enjoy!

FTL:

M.A.M.O.N (Monitor Against Mexicans Over Nationwide):

Time Chicken:

GEAR:

Dead Hearts:

Strange Beasts:

Jiminy:

The Privates:

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yet, cool.

Willy Wonka dialogue as a sax and drum jazz duet

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Saw (finally) The Last Jedi last night. Spoiler-laden review coming next, but in the meantime… 🙂

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Saw this documentary yesterday – pretty interesting, actually. It’s a look back at the life of Evel Knievel, hosted in part by Johnny Knoxville, several of Evel’s contemporaries, and sports broadcasters like Frank Gifford (RIP), Jim McKay and other ABC Wide World of Sports luminaries. Weirdly, Geraldo is in there too.

As a kid in the 70’s, we all knew about Evel – hard to not know about him. And i’m halfway sure I had one of those Ideal Stunt Cycle toys they show (or had friends who had one – I definitely remember the commercials). I also remembered that EK had spent a bit of time in jail, but didn’t know the details until seeing this movie (pretty scary, actually).

I was also very vague on the whole Snake River rocket jump attempt in ’74, but they sure go into a lot of detail here – sounds like a scary event for a lot of reasons, most of them not positive (for attendees as well as EK). As the story progresses from around that point and beyond, his decline and excesses get hard to watch, and in a couple of key areas, hard to forgive.

While I’m not ready to lionize him quite the way that Johnny Knoxville, Tony Hawk and others seen here do – you can’t argue with his influence on their (and similar) careers, and the industries they spawned (extreme sports, X-Games, etc.).

And I definitely *will* say, that he’s a true American Icon, for better or worse (to the filmmakers’ credit, they cover both) – and yet another example of being true to your dreams.

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finally got around to watching Logan tonight – definitely one of the better X-Men movies, but a few comments (which could be taken by some as spoilers, be forewarned):

1) pretty over the top violent, even with the lead guy having blades fly out of his hands as per usual. We’ve actually been watching Daredevil a bit lately too, and while that show lacks (for the most part) super powers (Daredevil is not a mutant), it’s violent like this one was….

2) there are a lot of influences going on here, from Terminator 2 to The White Mountains, to Escape to Witch Mountain being the most obvious in my mind. Unlike T2, there’s very little to no ‘end of the world monologuing’ a la Linda Hamilton here, however. And unlike the other two, there’s definitely a much darker tone, especially compared to E2WM. Nor was there a ‘rescue’ by other hideout mutants at the end the way I was expecting (following from the White Mountains or E2WM plots).

3) I was a bit unclear on how Charles Xavier is alive in this movie, when he was killed by Jean Grey in the 3rd movie – the 4th movie doesn’t count because that was time travel, and I haven’t seen the Apocalypse one yet.

4) I’m also a little skeptical that they could kill off nearly the entire world’s mutants in the space of only about 25 years(?) – in the early movies, we were led to believe that there were only going to be more and more mutants, and, what about all those that already existed – only Logan, Charles, Caliban and these ‘manufactured’ kid mutants exist over the whole world? Hmm.

Otherwise, it’s pretty good, although also pretty long (clocks in at almost 2.5 hrs).

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happy holidays!

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Besides Maria Bamford, I think Norm is my favorite comic.

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So I’m on a bit of a mountain climbing movie kick now, for whatever weird reason, following on from the Everest Unmasked movie of mid-Oct. This time, it was the recent K2 documentary from 2009. I’ve also decided that I don’t want to watch either ‘movies’ of mountain climbing unless there’s some other aspect of the plot too (e.g James Bond flick or something) – I’d rather just work through the scary-enough truth of these crazy climbs via actual documentaries. Besides these two movies, I’ve seen Touching The Void several years ago not long after it came out.

So once again in watching this film, there were parts of the movie where I wanted to just shut it off – they are up SO high. Plus on K2, unlike others, they do a up-down style so they can survive acclimatizing to the extreme lack of oxygen and climb itself, so they go up to Camp 2, then back down, then up to Camp 3, then back to 2, and so on.

The personalities here are a bit more interesting than the two guys in Everest Unmasked, but R. Messner from that climb went on to become one of the greatest climbers of all time in the decades since (they briefly mention his summit of K2 years ago on what seems to be the most difficult possible way).

Even the drive to get them into the mountains and then long hike to base camp seem far more extreme than Everest by contrast, even though Everest is of course the highest peak on earth (K2 is #2). But they show stats early on about how much tougher and far fewer summits have been done on K2 vs. Everest.

Finally, a great counterpoint in this documentary is the story of the first summit attempt, way back in 1912, by an Italian duke. They intersperse that story with the modern one throughout the movie, makes it even more impressive for both expeditions in the end, in my opinion.

Check it out!

Other perspectives:
Rotten Tomatoes

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Anyone who knows me knows – I don’t like heights, and never have. Watching this from the comfort of terra firma is STILL wild to consider. This is the story of the first two guys to have climbed Everest without oxygen, way back in 1978. I recently read the Outside article on it, and found the short movie made at the time (Everest Unmasked), linked below.

It’s about 51 minutes, spends about 12 min giving some of the history and the middle portion details the danger, including two major Sherpa accidents that happened. The last half of the movie is the best part, especially in detailing the two climbers’ final success.

here are two more NOVA links on the topic too, including one from a person involved in the first Everest summit by Sir Edmund Hillary back in the 60’s.

Everest Unmasked – Everest without oxygen (1978) by optimari

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