Everytime I channel surf the past few weeks, there's Ralph Macchio sulking, being oblivious or - most often - getting his ass kicked by every living soul whose path he crosses in one of the three Karate Kid flicks. I was roughly the age of high school student and social pariah Daniel-san, the character Macchio was playing, when The Karate Kid opened in theaters in the summer of 1984. (Macchio was, at the time, already in his forties) The movie was, as I recall, an unexpected hit. I saw [...]
I got sucked into The A-Team on cable. Three hours later, I had watched about an hour and a half more of the exploits of Hannibal Smith and friends in movie form than I had ever watched of the television series. As I was a kid at the time The A-Team initially aired, I was well aware of it. It was enormously popular for awhile and I imagine I undoubtedly checked it out for ten or fifteen minutes on a Tuesday night. (with five, six channels and no cable, [...]
Having had a reaction due to the ingestion of a certain plant-based substance, I once rampaged my way through several boxes of crackers, leading my housemates to dub me “Cracker Vacuum.” (it was later translated into Chinese as the far more sonically palatable Bin Gone Kon). Munchies-inspired nicknames aside, crackers are delightful and the addition of cheese was a great moment in humankind. My enjoyment of this combination has been tempered of late by my concern that – based on knowledge gleaned from numerous viewings of Blade Runner – I might be a [...]
Oh how true that statement is and, thanks to a bout of insomnia and Piñata: Survival Island , I can now rebuff anyone that uses that line as a selling point. (the titular quote was from a long-lost review of this cinematic tour de force) If you’re a piñata enthusiast - and, really, who isn't? - or simply have an interest in really bad movies, Piñata: Survival Island might just be for you. I cannot recommend it as “so bad it’s good” as I only caught the last ten [...]
Paloma got up, less than ten minutes into The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training , to go read. She muttered something about thinking Jackie Earle Haley was cute in the first movie and walked out before Kelly Leak arriving on his motorcycle kickstarted its sequel. "It's one of the greatest movies of all time," I countered, but she was unswayed and headed off with Kindle in hand. I don't think I'd seen Breaking Training since 1977, but that review was the consensus of me and my friends leaving the [...]
As a child, I had an obsession with dinosaurs and the prehistoric world. It likely was triggered by seeing Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster in the theater and watching B-movies on late-night television in the '70s. It's why I still pause, as I did the other night, when I stumble upon Jurassic Park . I can't help but think that had that movie arrived a decade or so earlier, I might have ended up a paleontologist. I dug Sam Neill's style as Dr. Alan Grant. [...]
Or, as he says it on air, "Chemical Romance". Glenn Beck has certainly picked some odd fights in his day. While the Fox News anchor has made targets out of the likes of Van Jones & George Soros to much media commotion, sometimes he does the exact opposite, instead responding to criticism by only criticizing back, whether it be responding to Rep. Anthony Weiner's allegations of Beck supporting Goldline's shady business practices by establishing the juvenile WeinerFacts.com or calling Avatar a "Smurf-murdering" movie following...
It all began with Paloma wondering about a co-worker at the record store where we met. A bit of sleuthing and I had stumbled on a cybertrail that included Scandanavian Elvis impersonators, Presley's optomitrist, a dodgy German politician, and a military general from Southeast Asia. The bizarre cast of associates of our former associate has left me bumfoozled. As I examine the sketchy characters in my mind, it almost makes sense. I can imagine this former co-worker getting involved in some scenario resembling a movie by the Coen brothers. And each time [...]
I half-heartedly and groggily took in the yammerings of the assembly-line spokesperson. He was a freshly-scrubbed fellow and his casual, yet completely unrumpled attire made it obvious that he could be trusted. He was just one of the guys, hanging out on my television, yipping and yapping. It must have been Saturday morning and I was channel-surfing for something that would allow me to ease into consciousness with coffee. (morning is an extremely confusing time for me...seriously) Why I would have paused where I did is inexplicable. Perhaps I had [...]
I happened across some television program on aliens the other night that was focused on theorists proffering the idea that human evolution has been influenced by extraterrestrial beings. One fellow rattled off the Nazca Lines , the Pyramids of Giza and the Moai statues of Easter Island as evidence. There was speculation that aliens might have altered the DNA of humans, resulting in some six billion or so lab rats. The theory was also offered that some of their experientation with the various species on the planet explains the [...]
I stumbled across Deliverance the other night and stopped. After a grueling day under the flourescent lights of an office, a commute from hell, and the rawness of a dark winter's day in early January, does anything goose the spirits like a river trip to Aintry, hillbillies, and Ned Beatty getting sodomized? I checked out before the mountain man lovin', but I did watch the early part of the movie. I barely remember the hulabaloo surrounding the movie when it came out in the '70s. I do recall it airing [...]
Paloma and I watched about an hour of that wretched flick Mannequin in which Andrew McCarthy plays a window dresser who becomes amorous with a mannequin...it's dreadful. We happened across it, several months ago, while channel-surfing one morning, and we stopped. It was as though the universe had thrown down the gauntlet and we felt compelled to push ourselves to watch as much as possible. (twisted, yes, but hasn't everyone done this?) But, I've hit Pretty In Pink tonight and I realize that it's difficult for me not to think [...]
Of late, Canada has had an increased presence in my life. (not that there's anything wrong with that) There's long been music from north of the border in my world and some fantastic stuff at that. And, a month or so ago, I happened across a groovy website for the brilliant Canadian sketch comedy troupe The Kids In The Hall. (I keep the page open at work and - to balance out the moments when I want to set fires - I often will read a transcript of a [...]
Rolling past a junior high school on the morning commute, I noticed that the final day of class was plastic lettered onto the marquee out front. This week. 11:15. Class dismissed. I still had one more year of junior high when school broke for the summer in '81, but it was the first summer for which I was legally and officially a teenager. I got started quickly, sleeping in 'til ten. In previous summers, I'd be up several hours earlier, my schedule hardly altering from [...]
After posting a couple singles from this tape we finally get the complete project. We named this project ‘Channel Surfin’ as it generally represented people and their short attention-spanned nature. Each song serves as a ‘Channel’ each different from the last song and so forth. The goal was to collectively mash them together to create what [...]
I still don't like the chorus of this song one bit but I do like the rappers he got to represent on the remix. Theo has been making some songs that I have been feeling recently but talking about the "life of a don" on the chorus doesn't do it for me. Also, I do [...]
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