I certainly missed this one (he passed away in January of this year) – RIP to one of the real pioneers of electronic music, period. My friend and I saw them back at the Schnitzer in Portland I think around college timeframe – lot of the maui-wowie being smoked in THAT show, to be sure… 🙂
Tangerine Dream Founder Edgar Froese Dead at 70
candybowl
she forgot ‘the’ Spice melange….but I bet the Spice Girls never went to Arrakis…..
candybowl
So, a couple years ago I got the Black Mirror 2-season series on DVD from Scarecrow and watched them. All of these shows are very, very dark and take a Twilight Zone anthology approach with a bit of Max Headroom (‘twenty minutes into the future’) and then really take a dark, dark turn. Tales from the Darkside – eat your heart out.
At that time, there was one more episode done – ‘White Christmas‘ that I hadn’t watched yet (it came out a few months after the series season 2) – finally saw it today. This has to be among the darkest of all the episodes, with a double-twist ending that hits you right between the eyes. Boom. Not for the easily depressed, or those that believe all these dadburn dystopian shows lately are actually LEADING us to those same dystopias! This is just really messed up stuff.
Anyway, for those who dare, i found it on YT (linked below, with Portuguese subtitles) or you might be able to actually watch it on demand from UK Channel 4.
good luck.
candybowl
One of the baddest of the all-time bad guys passed away over the weekend – Christopher Lee, at 93. RIP, Lord Summerisle…..
Christopher Lee dies at the age of 93
candybowl
Our company had a free screening of Jurassic World yesterday evening – interesting. It was harmless fun but for the money the studio likely spent, they could have worked far harder on the plot. The movie was well made but offers nothing new in light of three previous JP movies as well as the whole ‘dystopian theme park goes very wrong’ theme done first (and arguably best) by Westworld. Ironically, that movie was written and directed by a 31-year old Michael Crichton, the original author of Jurassic Park. Amusing.
Chris Pratt is the main ‘reluctant hero’ star, and while this movie is nothing to write home about, his career will not be hurt by it, either – he’s definitely the most interesting thing in the movie, despite the writers’ efforts to turn velicoraptors into CP’s trained posse. I’ve liked Vincent D’Onofrio since his Private Pyle days, but here he’s just a cheesy fat ham (in more ways than one). Most of the rest of the actors are unknowns or on their way up (Bryce Dallas Howard, Irrfan Khan and BD Wong) – probably how you keep costs down with so much expensive, extensive CGI in nearly every scene.
I kept also thinking of Futureworld, the even lamer (than this JP sequel) Westworld sequel from the mid-70’s. It’s kinda sad how Hollywood just keeps betting that sequels will do more than trick people into movie theaters expecting the same magic as the first time. That’s only happened a FEW times, guys and you are paying these lazy writers WAY too much in the meantime!
other voices:
Seattle Times
Metacritic
Rotten Tomatoes
candybowl
So finally saw the new Avengers movie Sat evening. I liked it, despite my causing us to get there late and having to sit way up front (never optimal) – there were a number of funny parts and as always, the effects were well done. Definitely an entertaining movie overall.
But there were a number of things that definitely make this a lesser movie than the first one, much the same way the two Iron Man sequels are definitely lesser movies than the first one – to wit (Spoiler alert):
1) This movie follows on the timeline from Captain America: Winter Soldier, so SHIELD is dead yet Hydra still somehow exists (if memory serves, they still had Loki’s sceptre at the end of that movie) – and this gets to the first problem – how many big, secret conspiracy orgs STILL exist in the world, for pete’s sake? Especially those claiming to have existed since WWII (started by the Nazis – who else)? So that’s a bit farfetched to begin with.
2) Ultron is a good bad guy, even if a bit too sardonic (James Spader, eat your heart out) but he ‘springs into being’ a bit too quickly for the plot – one minute he’s parts on a series of tables, the next he is a fully-formed, morphable android with hundreds of copies? Where are the Koch Brothers who bankroll all this? Too fast.
3) Why is Thor the only ‘god’ seemingly interested in getting Loki’s gem back? Wouldn’t Loki himself have an interest in it? Wouldn’t Odin have a way to ensure Loki helps Thor and takes the gem back to Asgard where it belongs?
4) As pointed out by Kerewin – Scarlet Witch fulfills the role of ‘Storm’ in this movie – seeming a wimp, then at one point seems to be among the most powerful of all? You can’t have it both ways, guys.
5) The whole fight between Iron Man and Hulk was silly and a distraction. Why didn’t Hulk just run away? And it’s getting WAY too convenient for Tony Stark to just whip yet more Iron Man suits, ever more custom and more powerful, just out of nowhere whenever the plot demands it? Lame.
6) I liked the attempts to give these characters more than one dimension, but really the only three that have their heads on are Cap, Hawkeye and Black Widow, and the latter two are just badasses, not even enhanced. And of course the appearance of SLJ helps right the ship (mentally and then later, literally).
I think the main thing about these comic movies is whether or not they make you want to watch them multiple times. The first Iron Man – definitely yes, have seen it several times. The first Avengers – same. This one, like the recent CA movie and the Iron Man sequels – not so much.
Still worth a watch though….
Other voices:
Metacritic
Rotten Tomatoes
candybowl
only about another month until the 2015 NW Pinball and Arcade show on the weekend of June 5-7! Apparently this bad boy will be making its debut there….very, very cool!
candybowl
Thanks to Ed Fries, I got to play a real Computer Space tonight! Ed bought a Time2000 backbox from me (backbox for a vintage Atari pinball that I had around, it had been intended for a wall decoration for a gameroom that is likely to never get built out in that way, so decided to sell the BB. Ed bought my Atari Space Riders pinball some time ago). So I took the BB out to his house tonight, and in the arcade he recently built near his house in a separate building – lo and behold, a 1971 Computer Space resides.
Here’s the story of his Computer Space. And here’s some history links on the game itself:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7381 – KLOV
http://www.pinrepair.com/arcade/cspace.htm – Pinrepair.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Space – Wikipedia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhdu2Jh9cuc – The Dot Eaters (video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esp24NI9ixs – Computer Space making a cameo in the early 70s dystopian Soylent Green
I got to play one of these a few years ago at California Extreme, along with another extremely early Atari game – Space Race – but i honestly don’t remember the gameplay. It was very cool to *attempt* to play this – the controls look at first glance similar to the much later Asteroids (button to thrust, button to fire, two buttons to rotate the ship left and right) but the layout is effectively a mirror image of Asteroids, so hard to figure it out without practice.
One of the things I really like about this game – besides its age and heritage from the dawn of videogames – is simply that it represents a dream. When you look at that wild fiberglass cabinet, you know someone was thinking of science fiction when they designed it. They were thinking of inspiration and imagination, dreams of spaceships and exploration that wasn’t far removed from the Apollo 11 landing only a few years before – dreams that we still have in other forms, but to me, not quite the same, perhaps even a bit more cynical these days.
But when Computer Space came out, it was still at the dawn of solid state hitting both US industry far more broadly as well as the nascent consumer market not long after. For two kids at the local Sunshine Pizza Exchange in Oregon (and the far bigger, always extremely fun arcade down at Seaside, OR) the question was always “Can I have a quarter?” and “can I have another?”….
Thanks, Ed.
candybowl
