Monthly Archives: June 2008

The Pom Pom Girls, 1976

I am on record as despising the 1970s in general. There are any number of things from the 70s I like, but the period, the atmosphere of it, is not something I can imagine ever wanting to return to.
Well, there is now a small, partial exception.
The Pom Pom Girls is, in its own way, [...]

Laying claim to a gag

Last week I ran into a guy I worked with for a while last year (Hi Steve!), and he attributed a joke to me that I honestly don’t remember. However, it’s brilliant, and Google reveals that nobody else has used it, at least online, so let me get this into the public record:
“I’m going [...]

Nice packages

Package Management explained.
Ubuntu and its derivatives uses APT for their manager, and I always use the command line apt-get to update. It’s very slick and painless.

Geeky joy

I got seconded by Ken Begg.
I might be the only person that is actually impressed by that fact, but it’s giving me a big, big smile.

New Miyazaki!

It looks odd, but it’s Miyazaki, so I’m just about guaranteed to love it. And there’s a little Japanese girl singing cutely, which doesn’t hurt.
It’s called Ponyo on the Cliff, and that and what I just watched in the above trailer are all I know about it.

Maniac, 1934

Wow. This is one hell of a movie. It’s positively loony.
Plus it has 1934-era women getting disrobed to various degrees.
I am tempted to just link to Dr. Freex’s memorable review of this flick and leave it at that, but no, I can’t.
Maniac was written and directed by Dwain Esper. [...]

Sounds like a must-see

Dirty Harry points us to a film (not a documentary) about life in North Korea, which is looking for a North American distributor:
Call it a Schindler’s List for North Korea. The difference is that the Steven Spielberg film debuted nearly 50 years after the Holocaust had ended. Crossing, which premieres today south of the DMZ [...]

Which is tackier?

The fact that they call their product “Hooter Hiders“, or the styles they offer straight out of a timewarp from the 1970s?

Elbow room

I got my RAM upgrade yesterday, so now my ancient beast of a laptop is not running on 160 MB of RAM (Xubuntu claimed it had 154 MB), it now has the maximum it can handle, 288 MB (Xubuntu claims 281).
The bad news is that it’s not as huge a help as I had hoped. [...]

Blue Steel, 1934

This is another Lone Star Productions flick, one of John Wayne’s Poverty Row pictures, and it’s better than Sagebrush Trail was. There’s also a dirty joke in it that somehow got past the Hays Office.1
Yucca City is an isolated place (what makes it isolated is not in fact made clear) with, apparently, only one [...]

Top Five Burt Lancaster Films

I’m trying to beat Dirty Harry to the punch, as one of his commenters requested this list. I loves me my Burt Lancaster, so I’m shooting out my own list first:

The Sweet Smell of Success, 1957. Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker, an intentional analogue of Walter Winchell, is one of the most vile characters ever [...]

Life’s an itch

The New Yorker has a fascinating article on how complicated the process of perception in the human brain is turning out to be, starting from a peculiar case of itching.
The grabber:
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” [...]

Sagebrush Trail, 1933

Sagebrush Trail is something like a good movie, and damned interesting to watch. It isn’t actually good, but it knows what a good movie is, and makes more efforts in that direction than a modern cheapie.
It’s a Lone Star picture, which was a Poverty Row studio that made westerns and released them through Monogram [...]

McLintock!, 1963

(This review is a good deal shorter than the marathons that most of my Yesterday’s Movies have become, but I just don’t have a lot to say about it. Oh well.)
McLintock! is an odd movie. I liked it, I liked it a lot, but it’s just odd.
It feels plotless. Stuff happens, to [...]

Lifeforce, 1985

(Not that I need an excuse to watch this magnificent misfire, but last month I came across Stacie Ponder’s Final Girl blog, specifically this post announcing the next movie for her film club. Since I’m shameless and will do anything to get links and up traffic, I figured I’d join in.)
(And I’m a day [...]