Post-Weekend Open Thread…

Updated on May 7, 2012 By Ken Begg 30 Comments

Saw The Avengers*, everything past that is a blur.

[*Want to speak about The Avengers without having to worry about saying “spoiler” all the time? There’s a thread in the message forum for exactly that purpose. Otherwise, please, be vague about details.]

OK, I did read Tricked by Kevin Hearne, the fourth paperback book in a series about a modern day Druid. In this one, he’s harried by skinwalkers. Good, fun reads.

Saw the finales of both The Amazing Race (sorry the Kentucky boys had been knocked out the previous week) and Chopped All Stars. As an extra bonus on top of those, Geoffrey Zekarian was the featured Iron Chef on that show this week. Good stuff.

Saturday morning on TCM I caught (yay!) Rodan and another Boston Blackie movie. It would nice of them to schedule an old monster movie every Saturday morning, wouldn’t it? Then on Sunday morning I caught a few minutes of 1947’s Down to Earth, a Rita Hayworth color vehicle that proved to be a sequel (!!) to the classic fantasy film Here Comes Mr. Jordan on TCM. Mr. Jordan was now played by veteran Brit actor Roland Culver. Man, if there was a more thankless show biz task than trying to fill the shoes of Claude Rains in one of his signature roles, I can’t think of it off the top of my head. Culver never stood a chance.

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  • Toby Clark

    I spent a lot of the weekend reading My Little Pony fanfiction, including some very strange cross-overs (Alien, Red Vs Blue, Jeeves and Wooster), most of which work pretty well. At this point my favourites are Article 2 and The Vinyl Scratch Tapes.

    I also watched The Ruby in the Smoke – good cast, though I can’t say it’s made me a Philip Pullman fan – and a few episodes of Red Dwarf series VI – really loving the Space Corp directives.

  • My brother actually bought those ‘best of’ collections of The Hitchhiker! I mostly skimmed through the episodes instead of actually watching any of them, but I made a point of listening to our thumb-busting hero’s intro and outro speeches. Man, those are even more hysterical heard aloud than when read. I enjoyed quite a few good yuks from those goofy soliloquies! (And you’re right, Ken, Page Fletcher was about the worst possible choice for an actor to play such a part.)

    Officially resting up from my nearly 500 page graphic novel after it’s completion, I was finally able to watch a few movies over the weekend. among them CAPTAIN AMERICA (which I’ve grown to really enjoy, although I still don’t understand why the Nazis weren’t evil enough that the producers had to dream up some fictional bad guys) and THOR. Enjoyed some highlights from BLACK DYNAMITE because I didn’t have time to watch the full feature. Watched some episodes of The Addams Family, and AC’s latest Nyoka movie. Those are the highlights.

  • Gamera977

    Just got back from vacation in Kentucky/Tennessee here. Checked out Mammoth Caverns (cool), the national Corvette Museum (awesome!) and several others stops along the way. Sad I missed Dinosaur week, but I did check out a tourist trap named Dinosaur World in Cave City, Kentucky which featured about a hundred or so life-sized dinosaurs in a walking path though the woods. Pretty nice place actually the dinosaur were fiberglass (I think) and are pretty dang close to currently accepted scientific thought unlike those lovable but unrealistic as hell concrete dinosaurs you still see left over from the ’50s and ’60s. 

  • I didn’t watch Avengers, in part due to lack of funds.  And because God hates me.  Hates me lots.

    However, I did finally manage to lay hands of Ramsey Campbell’s The Doll Who Ate His Mother thanks to the wonderful Half Price Book Store.  Been wanting to read that story for a good couple of decades.  I liked it a great deal.

  • Pip

    I saw the Miley Cyrus movie “LOL!”

    I kid.

    From Yahoo!:

    “We knew the chances for this one were slim, but now that the results are in, it’s sort of epic.
    Miley Cyrus’ film “LOL,” made a total of only $46,500 this weekend, Movie City News estimates. That is just a few hundred dollars more than what “Marvel’s The Avengers” — which drew a record-breaking weekend total of more than $200 million — took in per theater: $46,100, according to MCN. Sure, it had a much narrower release, appearing in only 105 theaters nationwide, but “LOL” made less per-theater ($440) than any other film in conventional U.S. theaters this weekend, running behind “Wrath of the Titans,” which made $640 per theater (and has been out for more than a month).”

    Oof.

  • Beckoning Chasm

     I think that if the Nazis appeared in Captain America, it would have hurt the German box office.  And the international box office is king these days.

  • Ericb

    I don’t know if there were any toy tie ins to the movie but I’d bet that if there were they would have wanted an alternative to Nazi action figures, hence the need to create an alternate villian with no historical baggage.

  • Ken_Begg

    Yeah, I think it’s more that Hollywood is shying away from using Nazis as ‘fun’ villains now–Spielberg has famously said he’d never do that again–and that also it’s part of the world building. There’s a minor plot thread in The Avengers regarding Hydra weapons research, and maybe, as Eric notes, they didn’t want to baggage of it being Nazi weapons research.

    The lack of Nazis was kind of irksome in Captain America, but as the film universe continues to become obviously science fictional, it grows less so. This is clearly a world with a completely different history. I’m a little bummed, however, that apparently CA II will stay in modern day.

  • The Rev.

    I didn’t even know this movie existed.  I know I’m not the target audience (and Chelsea’s grown out of that sort of crap, thank Jabootu), but I’ve not seen a trailer or heard anything about it.  Wow.
     
    I’m hoping to get caught up on the Marvel movies next weekend (Thor and CA, maybe that second Hulk one just for completeness) in anticipation of seeing The Avengers in the near future.
     
    Another weekend where I had little time to watch anything.  I did catch Rodan Sat. morning because, you know, it’s fantastic.  We also tuned in to the Amazing Race finale; while we kind of hoped the border patrol agents would pull it off, the team that won deserved it, frankly, with their overall performance.  We were also sad the Kentucky team couldn’t make it to the finals, and are hoping they’ll do an All-Stars edition and give them another chance.  We were utterly thrilled that Team Big Brother did not win.  That woman-child had me regularly cursing her existence, and we all despised her.

  • Ken_Begg

    Re: Amazing Race — I pretty much concur with all of that, although the border patrol guys didn’t wear on my well. The army guy and wife, for all their bickering, really did dominate the race, and I’m glad they didn’t lose because of a bad cab ride or something, which happens way too often. I completely agree about the Big Brother team; ugh. And yes, I also am hoping the Kentucky Guys return on a later show, like the Cowboys did.

    I understand how women are generally invested in their hair differently, but man, I can’t believe the several of them that have balked to shave their heads when it could help them win a million bucks. And the woman who did shave her head (and went on to win the Race) looked entirely gorgeous after doing so anyway. BB Chick–didn’t she already win money on that?–kept mentioning her $500 hair extensions. Hint: One million is more than five hundred.

  • MrTongoRad

    About Mark and Bopper- I wish I had been paying attention to the time difference on the leg in which they were eliminated. It must have been extreme for them to have completed the Fast Forward and still not have had a chance. I’d like to see them again too.

    I guess the last objectionable team won; I really admired their skills on the tasks, but the bickering was very difficult to watch. It just seems like under stress they will bring out the worst in each other. They definitely have plenty of vacation time now to work it all out, what with all of the trips they won- hopefully they take advantage of it.

    That was about all of what I saw this weekend, too- Derby Day took up a sizable chunk of the rest of it. Good race, I thought, exciting finish.

  • Ericb

    Jabootu colleague website Teleport City recently posted a bunch of photos from the Dino park. I’d link if I could but there is a link on this site under B-master’s Cabal if you want to check it out.

  • Ericb

    I saw on the Teleport City that the park had a model of Lystrosaurus, a critter that never gets any press partly because it is, well, only pig sized and totally unthreatening.  It only managed to thrive because a mass extinction had wiped out most of the world’s predators. I wonder why they bothered with the innocuous little creature (it wasn’t even, despite it’s name, really a dinosaur).

  • Ken_Begg

    They started three full hours after the other teams, because of the problems with the Bollywood task.

    I am not a very emotional person, so I can’t imagine caring enough about someone to fight like that with them and still consider the relationship worth it. However, I’ll admit that might just be a flaw in my character.

  • That’s just stupid. Germans today don’t identify with the  Nazis any more than modern Japanese identify with the Imperial Japs, or we in America identify with slave-owners. This oversensitivity is emasculating us all.

  • I suppose you have a point (regarding the science fiction angle), but I cringe a bit at dropping the Nazis or the Reds as villains in entertainment pieces. I thought history and reality added a little grounding and gravity to entertainment. I really don’t think RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK would have worked as well if the Nazis hadn’t been involved (I know for a fact it only makes the film more enjo0yable for WW2 buffs like Pop). Even KING SOLOMON’S MINES, as free and fun as it is, is only helped by using a historical army rather than a fictional one.

    Just looking at it personally, what if Dinosaur Girl were fighting Martians instead of Nazis? I think the strip remains somewhat grounded (given the subject matter) because the historical importance of the war and the very real enemy being fought keeps it from being just out and out farce. Then again, a reader of the strip might see things differently than I do. But I don’t think the strip would have what legitimacy it can claim if I suddenly replaced the Nazis with some super-army from the future.

  • Ken_Begg

    From general observation, “just stupid” doesn’t seem like much of a barrier to this sort of stuff.

  • Ken_Begg

    I agree, but since maybe 1% of the potential audience cares about that sort of thing, I think we’re being outvoted. Just on the basis of toys, you’re not going to sell many Red Skull figures these days if he’s wearing a swastika.

  • KeithB

    I bet you can find a bunch of Americans who identify with slave owners. CF “Confederates in the Attic”

  • Ken_Begg

    Depends on how you mean that. .001 of the population of the US would be 311,000 people. That’s a mess of people on one hand, but it’s also a vanishingly small percentage of the populace. I’d expect there are about as many practicing necrophiliacs as there are people who fantasize about owning slaves.

  • Beckoning Chasm

     I may be wrong, but isn’t it illegal to have Nazi symbols in Germany?  I thought I heard something like that some years back. 

  • I recall an addendum to Ken’s review of BLUEBEARD that mentioned a long-standing policy in films made in some European countries that the Nazi swastika  couldn’t be shown in motion pictures. I’d say context has a lot to do with it, though.

    I think you can collect historical relics. I’m pretty sure there are museums in Germany, and it’s not like they could just pretend the 30’s never happened.

  • I suppose you’re right. Still, if I had a a toy with a swastika on it as a little kid, I would have known it meant that particular vehicle or figure or whatever was on the bad side. It wouldn’t have scarred me to have a toy like a plastic Panzer. But then, I’m just old enough to remember normalcy in everyday life. I remember my cap gun, I still have my Red Ryder BB gun, etc. I can’t imagine seeing the world through younger eyes than my own. (Why, I’m just old enough to remember a time when the phrase “Directed by Steven Speilberg” actually meant something!)

  • At any rate, the demographic seems way way WAY too small to be a factor in marketing a movie. Which, I suppose, is your point in the first place.

  • Ken_Begg

     It still does. It just used to mean something good.

  • Toby Clark

    In fairness, he did direct one of my three favourite movies of last year while producing another of them (neither of which got nominated, funnily enough).

  • The Rev.

    I have that same flaw, as the one relationship I had with fights like that didn’t last too long.

    The shaving thing got to me as well.  The girls expressed similar sentiments to the contestants, and they don’t have extensions or anything like that.  Maybe if I spent years cultivating a lush head of hair I’d understand better.

    The cowboys are exactly who I thought of with the hope of Team Kentucky returning, although I seem to recall the cowboys fell out pretty quickly the second time around.  Hopefully Mark and Bopper would fare better on the second go-round.

  • GalaxyJane

    Having lived in Germany in the late ’90s, I can assure that they damned well try. Swastikas are illegal, as is comparing someone to Hitler or referencing Naziism (makes you wonder if that mean’s Godwin’s Law is less in effect there).  I never saw references to Naziism outside of the concentration camp memorial at Dachau, otherwise historical sites that mention WWII do so only in terms of what sort of damage occured and how it was restored. I was deep in Bavaria and many of the buildings, especially on the US Army kasernes as they were confiscated Waffen SS installations, dated to the Nazi period and had originally been decorated with stonework swastikas and other Nazi emblems and you could see where they had all been chipped away from the facades.  It was in fact a little creepy how hard they try to pretend history didn’t happen.

  • Ken_Begg

    On the latest Amazing Race the one irksome bit was when they took the teams to Hiroshima and the Peace Monument or whatever and all the contestants were told to come on camera and ‘reflect’ on the tragedy of the bombing, etc. (At least the Army guy kept his perspective, I’m sure to the annoyance of the producers, and mentioned the attack on Pearl Harbor while he was at it.)

    Meanwhile, I was wondering if they were going to visit Japan’s famous Rape of Nanking monument. You know the one.

  • Gamera977

     Thanks Eric, I went back and looked though my photos and found my photos of Lystosaurus. I was a little surprised by the number of smaller animals, many around the size of a large dog or smaller that they had. Possibly to be cynical to match their advertising of over 100 animals building small ones was cheaper but still it was cooler that they had stuff other than the spectacular dinos everyone thinks of. They even had the prehistoric amphibian Diplocaulus the giant salamander with the boomerang shaped head. Went by and checked out Teleport Cities photos- great collection, I think they came out better than mine. Though from what I’ve been told most of the Patton Armor Museum has been removed and shipped down to Fort Benning, Ga to be set up sometime in the future.