Author: J. A.

It reads. It writes. It watches. It researches. It overdoes many of those things!

Found-Again Friday: Bullshot

J. A. Leave a comment

Campion.

The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries.

Partners in Crime.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

If any or all of these are on your “fondly watched” list, you might enjoy Bullshot. Ostensibly a parody of the Bulldog Drummond movies of the 1930s, this movie doesn’t require knowledge of Drummond to be enjoyed—I’m proof of that. Any old tale of bored World War One veterans embarking on a life of solving mysteries will do, and there are plenty to choose from.

Why Found-Again? Like Kent Montana, Hugh “Bullshot” Crummond is far too silly a character to revisit on a regular basis: a former WWI flying ace with a background in marksmanship, science, fisticuffs, winning regattas all by himself, and pretty much anything else (except tarantulas!), Crummond and his faithful valet—pronounce the T, please— are on the case.

On someone’s case, anyway.

The Premise: When absentminded professor Rupert Fenton is kidnapped by nefarious foreigner Otto von Bruno for his new discovery, it’s up to Fenton’s daughter Rosemary to get to “the one man in England who can help us.” Is there any doubt who that is? And is there any doubt that von Bruno is already his nemesis?

This movie is, and I mean this in the best possible way, gleefully stupid: a broad comedy that is always great but could never be considered “good.” The cast is also fantastic, as leads Alan Shearman, Diz White and Ron House are joined by Billy Connolly and Mel “The Albino from Princess Bride” Smith, among others. It’s got adventure, slapstick, parody, romance of a sort, a touch of steampunk, and lines like “Is this seemly, Mrs Platt-Higgins? Playing popular music and your husband only ten years dead?” Good stuff.

The Verdict: In addition to the above, I’ve never regretted watching anything with Billy Connolly in it, even the final seasons of Head of the Class.

Well okay, those, but only those.

Might go well with: Stilton; tea; jazz.

 

Next time: The one question we should all be asking at this point in Highlander.

 

 

 

There Can Be Only Monday! Talking About Highlander…A Lot, Part 32

J. A. Leave a comment

Last time: The Kurgan has fantastic diction and a God complex. Come on, fella, say “Blessed are the proofreaders.” You (kind of) will eventually.

32. Is it possible this has worked for him in the past??

As the Kurgan has a manic episode prepares for battle, Brenda has decided to confront Connor/Nash. She’s bothering poor Rachel again, at least until Connor shows up in his Columbo coat. (There’s a perfectly good reason why I can’t let that go: I hate it. This is a man who’s lived through kilts, doublets, brocades, top hats and Mod clothing: why the hell would he choose to dress like this?)

“I’m looking for a dead guy named Nash,” Brenda tells him. Connor glances at Rachel, whose look says “The jig’s up, Boss!” as clearly as if she were a supporting player in an old noir film. Connor at last yields and takes Brenda off to his treasure cave.

I mean, living room.

Mostly, I mean treasure cave.

This part is funny, as Brenda is clearly vacillating between wanting to know the truth and mentally cataloguing all of Connor’s displayed possessions, with special attention to weaponry.

“I’ve been alive for four-and-a-half centuries,” Connor tells her, to which she says, “Everybody’s got their problems.” (Subtext: and a few million dollars’ worth of antiques. No, wait, that’s just you.) He hands her a dagger and tells her who he really is—

…And then he stabs himself, falling to his knees.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world’s worst pick-up line.

Even though Connor can obviously heal, this part of the movie always reminds me of this:

Let’s hope for Brenda’s sake “I can only do it once” isn’t true of Connor, as she seems to find this stabby display very alluring: this is followed by a sex scene that is 100% more sex than I would be having with a man who punctured himself in front of me. (I mean, really. Someone should write a fanfiction about opening a charm school for immortals.)

You know what would make this more believable? If he woke up in the morning to find Brenda had stolen the samurai sword. That doesn’t happen, of course. Instead they go to the zoo, where the lions hate Connor’s outfit as much as I do.

They talk just enough for us to learn that she’s been filled in on the whole immortals-beheading-each-other deal, and for us to notice that the Kurgan is watching them in the background. Connor senses him, but not before both the Kurgan and Brenda have both left. Connor…is not sharp.

 

Next time: Something silly.

Next time on TCBOM!: It all goes to hell.

 

Found-Again Friday: Musical Interlude 4

J. A. Leave a comment

I know that on Monday I promised you no vampires, but I never said I wouldn’t come close. It’s Goth time!

Given that I’ve been drawn to dark themes since my first Halloween coloring book, it was only a matter of time till that included music, too.

Like a lot of people my age, I began with The Cure, and I’ll be forever grateful to the aunt who accidentally bought me an import album full of obscure tracks because it was the only thing by The Cure she could find at the store:

I was in eighth grade when this one came out, and I drove my family crazy listening to it.

Fifteen years later, I was still playing the same song all the time—just this one.

And then there’s this—I’m a sucker for a Poe reference or seventeen:

And as a parting gift:

Enjoy!

Next time: The Highlander takes a stab at romance. Yes, even things on Mars can see what I did there.

There Can Be Only Monday! Talking About Highlander…A Lot, Part 31

J. A. Leave a comment

Last time: We played a weird match-the-line game with my DVD collection, while Connor and the Kurgan confronted each other and affronted a bunch of churchgoers.

31. The irony when something pleases your English-major soul and all you can think is “Duuuuuuuuuuuude.”

Our two remaining contestants in “Who Wants To Rule Forever?” are still in confrontation about, er, the coming confrontation, at least until the Kurgan takes a second to terrorize some nuns.

“Ramirez’s blade didn’t cut deeply enough,” Connor sneers. “He was right about you.” There are a lot of good points (no pun intended) to be made here, but this seems like a bizarre time to whip out the argument from authority: he’s right there, being a jerk.

“Ramirez was an effete snob!” the Kurgan growls… and that was the point at which I discovered I really do assign movie characters bonus points for vocabulary. One of my less bizarre hobbies the past few years has been watching all of Frasier on Netflix, and I don’t think even the Crane brothers use that word.

And this from a guy who may have, moments before,  been plagiarizing from a talking crow.

Duuuuuuuuuude.

The Kurgan continues, “I took his head and raped his woman before his blood was even cold!” Now that is some quality villain monologuing, and for once it won’t impede his progress.

It doesn’t actually take Connor five minutes to realize that part of the above refers to Heather, but like his first death back in 1536, it nonetheless seems to go on forever. (I timed it; it’s actually nine seconds, and by the end of that time, the church is pretty well cleared out.) Once he does, it takes his enemy two seconds to figure out the same thing and press his advantage. It’s just that Connor isn’t evil-minded, right? It’s not that he’s slow, right?

Right?

Connor grabs the Kurgan, who points out that they’re on holy ground and extricates himself, saying “You will always be weaker than I.”

Oh, wow. Good grammar, too?

Artist's rendering of my reaction, plus a plug for online photo editor BeFunky.com, whose cartoonizer I needed...for my cartoon. Sigh.
Artist’s rendering of my reaction, plus a plug for online photo editor BeFunky.com, whose cartoonizer I needed…for my cartoon. Sigh.

I hate writing posts that are chiefly quotes, so I’ll sum up by saying that Connor leaves, the Kurgan mocks Jesus, and there’s a big, splendid, loud power trip right there in the aisle.The guy seems to be losing his grip on everything except the English language.

So, you know, it could be worse.

Next time: I have no idea, but I promise it will have no vampires.

Next time on TCBOM!: Seducing women the hard way.

Found-Again Friday: The Mark of the Moderately Vicious Vampire/The Kent Montana Books In General

J. A. Leave a comment

This may be the first time I’ve been able to use that quote about tragedy and farce about…well, anything.

Why Found-Again? As I worked my way through ‘Salem’s Lot two weeks ago, I kept finding myself repeating the same cycle of thoughts:

This is better than I remembered…

sort of…

but on the whole, give me the parody.

My misspent youth.
My misspent youth.

I was in high school when I picked up The Mark of the Moderately Vicious Vampire, the fourth of five books in “Lionel Fenn”/Charles L. Grant’s series about Scots baron/unemployed soap actor/adventurer Kent Montana. The books, which are largely standalone, put their hero through his paces in a number of standard horror plots: Montana variously faces aliens, swamp monsters, an invisible man, the Elder Gods, and, yes, a peeved vampire named Lamar de la von Zaguar.

The Premise: Kent Montana likes his vacation home in a tiny town in Maine, at least until a mysterious nobleman moves into the big mansion on the hill and the locals turn to Montana for a little noblesse oblige and a lot of vampire hunting. Along the way, he’s helped—sometimes “helped”—by a local lass, an old salt, a clergyman with a weakness, law enforcement, a feisty funeral director, and an occult-expert dandy with an ultracompetent assistant.

I feel the need to issue a sort of warning about these books: they are very silly (if you remember my post about Cast A Deadly Spell, put these books into the same category). They’re rife with slapstick, puns, dialogue lifted straight from songs (I still remember hearing “Diana” playing on the radio in a Denny’s and suddenly understanding an entire conversation in MotMVV years after the fact), and in at least one book, a villain whose name is an anagram of another writer of humorous fantasy fiction. If digging those details out isn’t your thing, the books might not be, either.

The Verdict: Anything that can take ages to fully tease apart like this is my kind of book (see also the Butterfly’s speech in The Last Unicorn: it’s like a scavenger hunt for English majors). Besides which, the books are just plain fun. They’ve been out of print practically since I got them, but used copies can be found at Amazon and elsewhere, and I highly recommend giving them a try.

Might go well with: Scotch, junk food, old horror movies.

Next time: Is there a patron saint for good grammar?

Apropos of Nothing: A Non-Exhaustive List of Things That Will Buy My Goodwill in Movies/TV/Books

J. A. Leave a comment
  • The dog doesn’t die. It barely matters what dog or why; I just assume that any canine on my screen or in the pages of the book I’m reading has a large target on its back, and I enjoy being wrong about this.
  • Mummies (animate, French-speaking mummies a plus, as I mentioned last Halloween).
  • The Loch Ness Monster. I have watched some incredible crap just to see a few seconds of CGI Nessie. The same could be said for dragons.
  • A small, informal list of actors I would follow to cinematic hell and back (in some cases literally: are we ever going to get a third Hellboy movie?). When I say informal, I mean even to me: until quite recently I thought Tim Curry was on it, yet my Wiseguy DVDs go unwatched.
  • Spy crap. Any spy crap, really.
  • Architecture. I didn’t like Numb3rs much at all, but stuck around far longer than I should have just to see the house.
  • “They’re romantically involved, and they solve crimes!”
  • Owls. There’s no good reason. I just like owls.
  • Homages to film noir. Oddly, I often enjoy these more than the bona fide noirs themselves.
  • Mythology/folklore: I was going to narrow this down to actual mythology/folklore, but the first season of Sleepy Hollow was so gut-bustingly funny in its zeal to make things up that I’m going to leave this a broad category.
  • Any included reference to 1) Sherlock Holmes, 2) The Pirates of Penzance, 3) poetry, preferably Victorian, or 4) art.

So there you have it, just as I realize this list could in most respects be retitled “My Love For Castle Explained, Plus Owls.”

There Can Be Only Monday! Talking About Highlander…A Lot, Part 30

J. A. Leave a comment

Thirty posts—thirty WEEKS—and the end just barely in sight. The mind boggles.

Last time: Research. Pretty eyes. Brenda finds out what the movie is about, more or less.

30. Connor goes to church, and I seize my last chance to get splendidly bogged down in this thing (need I even say “part 1”?).

Unlike most of this movie, this section has been excerpted on YouTube:

Personally, I disagree with the title they’ve given it—to me, that would be a tie between the final fight and Ramirez! Stops! Talking!—but opinions no doubt vary.

Connor goes to a church to light a candle on Heather’s birthday, as she asked him to do while I was yelling about how much I hate what the movie does to Heather—and despite my suspicion that birthdays weren’t really a “thing” for normal people in the 16th century. Consistent penmanship and posthumous birthday parties: that’s our hero.

He lights the candle, says a little prayer, and sits down in the church: ostensibly to pray, probably to mope. He’s followed in short order by the Kurgan—who snuffs out all the votives, because, I guess, that’s the kind of guy he is. Half the people in the cathedral look up and rapidly conclude this is not the kind of miracle they were hoping for.

I suspect this thing with the candles happens in part to communicate the Kurgan’s continuing slide into madness, which has been going on since Wackjob’s act of Quickenus interruptus. It’s as if the writers, suddenly concerned that their hero is outmatched (at least in theory: the Kurgan still hasn’t killed a single non-combatant in the whole movie—and every time I type that, I get a little chip in my flinty black heart), are trying to handicap the final duel. As someone who was only a moderate Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan but remains very, very, very bitter about Glory, I appreciate this in theory, but there has to be a better way to go about it.

“Kastagir is gone,” the Kurgan tells Connor. “Only you and I remain.” It isn’t until Connor turns around that we see the Kurgan’s new hairdo, which is that he hasn’t really got any. He’s also decorated the scar Ramirez gave his throat with a ring of safety pins. Very punk.

Honestly, I find the whole safety-pin thing odd, because 1) that would take what I find myself forced to describe as some primping time, but 2) it could be another sign that he’s quite smart, as he’s rightly figured this ornamentation will indicate absolutely jack-all to the police.

“Who cuts your hair?” Connor snarks, because his facility with insults is at the same level as  his ability to flirt with women. The Kurgan makes a grandiloquent gesture and says, “I am in disguise.”

It’s a line I’ve always loved—unfortunately, I think I loved it even before Highlander was made:

The Secret of NIMH may be one of the only movies I've seen more than the one I'm writing about.
The Secret of NIMH may be one of the only movies I’ve seen more than the one I’m writing about.

Well, that’s a bit of a buzzkill.

 

Next time: Would you believe the other other damn vampires?

Next time on TCBOM!: Has anybody seen my dignity?

Found-Again Friday: ‘Salem’s Lot (The Book)

J. A. Leave a comment

This week I’ll sink my teeth into a little Stephen King.

Why Found-Again? Every so often, I’ll get an idea for Found-Again Friday that I think is the essence of the project: picking up things I very deliberately put down a long time ago to see if I was too harsh. Some of it has worked out brilliantly (Mister Frost)…and then there’s Altered States. So what could be more appropriate than the book that caused me to stop reading Stephen King novels for a decade or more?

As I mentioned in my very first post here, I’ve had a weird relationship with Stephen King’s work, beginning when I had the crap scared out of me by “The Cat From Hell” in an anthology at age ten. A few years later, my parents accidentally acquired a copy of The Dark Half; I read it and did with it what I tended to do with horror novels in those days, which was put them away in another room where I wouldn’t be tempted to reread them at night, then sneak them back out again once a week anyway. Intrigued, I picked up Thinner from the library; the combination of fewer likable characters and my familiarity with strawberry pie made that a bit of a non-starter for me, as did finding an old Cornell Woolrich short story that was essentially Thinner but with voodoo.

So my King readership was on the bubble…but I did like vampires. I was in college when I first picked up ‘Salem’s Lot at the library, and other than the writing, I found nothing to like about it. I despised every character, I despised the exponential spread of the vampires, and I wasn’t too fond of the movie adaptation, if it came to that. And so I abandoned the author as a whole, give or take reading a short story or two and having cable during the years The Shawshank Redemption was viewable nearly on a loop.

(I don’t like The Shawshank Redemption very much either. I am probably a terrible person.)

In recent years, a few things have happened to persuade me that I ought to give Lot a re-viewing. One, of course, was The Shining, which I started reading with the lowest of expectations and which is now one of my favorite books. It’s possible, I thought, that I had finally matured into appreciating King. The other is Haven, the loosely Stephen King-based TV show about a small town with troubles both capital and lowercase. I love all the characters in the town of Haven: perhaps I’d been too hard on the residents of ‘Salem’s Lot way back when.

The Premise: A writer returns to the small town that was the locus of his boyhood terrors, just in time to find out his boyhood terrors were only the beginning: A vampire named Barlow is set on making ‘Salem’s Lot his own.

The Verdict: It’s just possible that I am improving as a human being, because I was much less judgmental about the town’s denizens—those who weren’t bullies or abusers, anyway, which seemed to be around 40% of them—this time. I no longer think of Barlow as a fitting plague sent to wipe out the Village of the Asshats. And I am more astute in my old(er) age at picking out the themes about the squalor of evil juxtaposed with the grandeur of vampire myth. I get all that.

But I still don’t understand the actual plot. Why would a vampire want to make an entire town full of competition? Or, if that’s the normal rate at which vampires (who presumably have to eat regularly) reproduce, how did the world ever make it to 1970-whatever with its human population intact when Barlow has been nibbling around since before Christ? The book does feature one scene of blood exchange, but otherwise, vampirism seems to spread sort of like Amway. I did like the book better this time, but I just can’t get over that, even though King literally leaves room to say the Devil made Barlow do it.

Might go well with: Red wine, raspberry sauce, Fright Night.

 

Next time: Going to church with Highlander!

 

There Can Be Only Monday! Talking About Highlander…A Lot, Part 29

J. A. Leave a comment

Last time: Moran ran around; a wounded Wackjob waved wonderingly.

29. It’s called detective work; too bad the police in this movie don’t do any of it.

While all these other things are going on, Brenda is researching Connor/Nash, first by looking up his birth certificate. She interviews the doctor listed on it, who reveals that little Russell Nash died at birth and that someone is using his name.

It is at this point that I’m usually reminded that I need to track down the documentary I saw in my art history class in 1995, in which a fraud investigator starts forging a new identity for himself by visiting a cemetery and pulling this exact trick—looking for the name of someone the right age and getting the birth certificate. At the time, I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and I haven’t been able to find out anything about the documentary ever since.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is, good for Connor? His method is sound.

Brenda then calls on her friend Erik (It sounds like she says “Rick” to me, but I’ll defer to IMDb once more), who appears to be 1) an archivist  and 2) played by an actor I remember as “the guy who didn’t do it in that Rumpole of the Bailey episode” (spoiler alert?). They putter around on a computer, comparing the signatures of all the guys who’ve owned Connor’s building for the last 200 years—all of which look the same, possibly because Connor traded away some of his immortal powers for really consistent penmanship. (It’s not really mightier than the sword in this case, but whatever.)

Erik then performs an early form of “Enhance!,” taking letters from all the signatures and matching them to the “Russell Nash” signature. By this time, I’ve seen this scene often enough to notice that one of the Ls doesn’t exactly match and then suddenly does, but to quote the Highlander himself, I guess it’s a kind of magic.

And then two incredible things happen: the first is that he whips off his glasses in time-honored movie-boffin style and reveals absolutely gorgeous eyes. Really. It’s like the male equivalent of the cliché where the buttoned-up librarian takes her hair down. Those of us inclined to do so get no time to enjoy them, however, as he says:

“So what you’ve got here is a guy who’s been running around since at least 1700, pretending to croak every once in a while, leaving all his goods to kids who’ve been corpses for years and assuming their identities.”

That’s a hard line to sell—and probably a hard one for an actor to deliver with a straight face, even in a movie like this one—but he does a great job. Remember my rant about exposition characters? This guy is worth ten of Ramirez. I especially love the implication that given the choice between “some immortal guy is hanging around New York and running a shop” and “my computer program screwed up,” he immediately believes the former. Highlander is very kind to nerds in some ways.

As Brenda stews in doubt, we cut to a newsstand vendor selling papers: Wackjob has apparently collaborated with a sketch artist to draw the Kurgan, and the result looks like someone saw the future emergence of Vin Diesel in a dream.

 

Next time: All the damn vampires. No, the other damn vampires.

Next time on TCBOM!: Connor and the Kurgan show us how to clear out a cathedral in about three minutes.

 

 

 

 

Found-Again Friday: The Big Chill

J. A. Leave a comment

This week I didn’t finish reading that book I take a look at 1983’s The Big Chill, a movie I’ve sarcastically described as “Costner’s finest,” because his character is dead when the movie starts. It’s a sentiment that downplays my love of Bull Durham, Tin Cup and Silverado, but nonetheless has a bit of truth to it: 20+ years after I saw Dances With Wolves*, it’s starting to look like I’ll never forgive.

Why Found-Again? I’ve seen this movie many times: I’d love to tell you that it’s because even as a youngster I was interested in relationship dynamics, but no, it’s because I thought Jeff Goldblum was hot a good 7 years before most of the American public did. I do think it’s interesting that when I see him in interviews now,  he seems to most strongly resemble his character in The Big Chill, though.

The Premise: Following the suicide of their troubled friend, a group of college pals spends a few days together wondering what the hell happened to him—and to them—in the years since graduation.

Then they all have sex, more or less.

There are still lots of reasons to like this movie other than  Goldblum as the avatar of—well, of later, more universally beloved Goldblum: the soundtrack is amazing, it’s a really strong cast, and the Sam character’s TV-show opening credits are an excellent parody of the ’80s detective shows that haunt this Friday feature of mine. And I wasn’t kidding about the relationship dynamics: I remember having to watch this four or five times to really grasp who’d been feuding with whom, who’d hooked up with whom, and how it all led them to where they were as fully fledged adults.

The Verdict: Mixed. It’s definitely not a rewatch-till-you-drop movie, but watching it now I feel more sympathy for the characters and more admiration for the way the movie flows in general.

Might go well with: Cleaning up after dinner, wine, an identity crisis.

Here’s the trailer for the DVD edition I have:

And here’s one of the older ones, in case you thought I was exaggerating about the later Goldblum emphasis:

 

*The pathetic thing is that I didn’t even pay to see it: my friend and I sneaked into the theater when Warlock proved too intense for me, the Squeam Queen. The nicest thing I can say about Dances With Wolves is that no one gets their eyes ripped out by Julian Sands, but make no mistake, that is a nice thing.

Next time: Thank god someone in Highlander knows how to investigate—no, of course it’s not Moran. Also, how to catch a movie character up on the plot in 15 seconds (approx.).