By Roy Mathur, on 2021-09-27, at 23:01:48--23:51:33, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen
I am now... drum roll... a year older as of yesterday. How old? I've been down this road before, so never you mind.
The important thing is, the same as last year, I forgot my age, erred on the side of caution, but blow me down, after consulting an online age calculator, I'm a year younger than I thought I was. That is the best present.
Also, due to other miscalculations involving numbers, Halloween is a month away, which means the panic buying of pumpkin was unnecessary, but now we have the ingredients needed for an excellent savoury pumpkin pie on the big day.
In Halloween adjacent news, possibility coincidentally, Celtic Samhain (on which Halloween is based) and Hindu's Pitru Paksha Pit (Pitr paksa) both include ceremonies to honour the ancestors.
This year Mum chose Sunday to send Dad---the oldest male of the family---off into the garden to offer water and flowers to the ancestors. The parallels between Halloween and Pitru Paksha are interesting, but I'm sure many cultures in similar hemispheres have similar rituals at roughly the same time because so much religion is based on astronomy and the seasons.
However, I also honour my ancestors by pouring some booze (more on booze later) onto the ground on Halloween, because modern Halloween is a favourite festival that I enjoy, so why not make it not just about materialism? Any excuse for a party.
Gas prices have soared due to global demand. I can see this in my revised tariffs (tweeted recently).
And, because of the UK's xenophobic attitude to Europe and foreign workers, there aren't enough lorry drivers to deliver fuel, hence a fuel crisis too.
We've been told that the government are issuing visas under stringent conditions, when what we need to do is blow the bloody doors off the border.
I saw the film, I did not read other reviews, and I do not care a flying fig about the box office figures. I say this because I know a lot of people geek out about this stuff, and there are podcast out there that will talk about that stuff, but it bores me silly and I'm into story and realisation of story, and art (may the gods help me).
In this 2021 film, a failing artist discovers the curse of the Candyman and it's origin, and becomes embroiled in the myth, as he either starts to lose his mind, or it's all real and he's rushing to meet his destiny. There're the usual horror vignettes, a mini teen side plot, social realism, satire of the art world, etc., and it all ends much in the way you'd expect.
I loved the original film---really loved it---the powerful screen presence of the sublime Tony Todd, the charismatic Virginia Madsen, and the beautiful music by Philip glass; goose bumps.
I am also an aficionado of Clive Barker's Books of Blood. I remember at one point owning most of the series of paperback books, though I can't quite recall reading The Forbidden, upon which the film is based.
Here, the screenplay, apparently a sequel of the original 1992 film, is given the Jordan Peele treatment. Does it stand up?
I didn't like the protagonist: wasted talent, morally dubious, and this art gallery artist's marketing word salad made me want to throw up (that bit of satire worked, but did not endear me to the protagonist, which is a problem wen you have to empathise with him and see the world through his eyes). I hated him for being hipster, with that bloody watch cap, that stupid little Moleskine notebook, and that naff earring.
It was gory, rather than scary. Those two early kills were strawberry sauce silliness.
I didn't not like some of the extra side-plots, like those high school girls. That seemed shoe horned in, after all this is not a teen slasher. It reminded me of Jame's Herbert's many pulpy vignette kills, and seemed unsuited to this film.
There was no sense of the original's towering gothic romance---the chemistry between Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen is palpable---here that's totally lost to tell a very different and more mundane story.
It steals from Velvet Buzzsaw's vicious dissection of the art world. It's something that has been satirised so many times it's a cliche: The Rebel (1961) starring Tony Hancock and David Thewlis's scene in The Big Lebowski.
There's some interesting dialogue blaming artists for gentrification---unfair, but like all the best insults contains an element of truth; though skewed. We know the real problem is the greedy property developers and predatory rich, who just want, want, want, to live in oh so fashionable areas, while destroying what made the areas cool in the first place. To the film's credit, this counter-argument is made. Tangent: there are a few exceptions to gentification being a bad thing. Like the area in which I grew up, which, frankly, the rich can take with my blessing and good luck to them.
One of the kills, where we see a character in the distance though a window picked bodilly up and tossed around like a rag doll, was really great. It was disturbing, but not gory to the point of theatrical silliness. rear Window, but horror!
Of note: the ghost story telling brother; was that Jordan sticking a Clive Barker-like character into the movie as a sort of cameo by proxy?
Conclusion? The film is relevant to the zeitgeist---BLM, etc.---but jumbled with too much going on, and it does not in any way have the mythic grandeur of the original film.
Tangent: I loved that Tony Todd makes short appearance. I worried that I haven't seen him much over the years, but a quick look at his filmography (film, TV, video games etc.) reassures me that he's never been out of work. #CRRRaSh! salutes the incredible Tony Todd.
Extra, extra! (Pod 406). Those Seattle Underground scenes? Surely a tribute to The Night Strangler (1973) starring Carl Kolchak as Darren McGavin: reporter of the supernatural?
At last, this season is over and though the shows creator wants to go on with it forever, this is where I bow out.
June escapes---at bloody well long last---and has her vengeance. It's a small and vicious and personal revenge, though a little less apocalyptic than what I was hoping for. Let's nuke Gilead from orbit. Oh, wait I'm a pacifist. Er... is an exception permissible?
Foundation is an TV show adaptation of Isaac Asimov's golden age saga of the fall and salavation of a galaxy spanning empire of the far future. In it, mathematician Hair Seldon predicts the demise of the civilisation, and plans a way of shortening the dark ages by preserving human knowledge within an encyclopaedia galactica.
I read the novels many years ago, and yes, they are differences to the Apple series, but I don't get some of the negative reviews. It was always going to be a contentious adaptation, but I think they at least nailed the realisation of an immense galactic empire of the far future.
As for gender bending, twisting the timeline, and sexing up the story; the original novel, like a lot of Asimov's writing, could be a little dry, so I think the changes work. I'm saying this both as a fan of his work and as a fan of golden age sci-fi.
Yes, there's up-to-date contextual allegory: 911, criticism of an almost omnipotent and vengeful military-industrial complex (hmmm...), as well as, of course, Asimov's take on the fall of the Roman Empire... in spaaace. But it also maintains a sense of how alien the future can be. It makes me wait with baited breath for Denis Villeneuve's Dune.
That space elevator disaster is so very reminiscent of almost exactly the disaster in Ben Bova's Grand Tour novel, Mercury, from 2005.
Was that terrorist praying in Sanskrit? Bad guy.
Hey, monks praying in Sanskrit! Good guys.
I'm really enjoying The Lost Symbol, based on the titular beach read by Dan Brown (may help pay his divorce settlement), with its macguffin hunts, ludicrously contrived puzzles, action-adventure, mystery, your standard nutty supervillain, and Ashley Zukerman (from The Code, which I also favourably reviewed on CRRRaSh!) is great as unlikely adventuring boffin Robert Langdon.
I do so love a crazy conspiracy.
Is Eddie Izzard now type casted as a limb-losing character? This, Hannibal, am I missing anything else?
I just bought the Smallrig 2791 smartphone camera cage.
Smallrig is a Chinese company regarded as the Apple of filmmaking accessories, and this thing is (so far) great.
I bought it because I want to film using my smartphone, but don't have a smartphone mount for a tripod. They cost GBP 37.79 on Amazon, about four times the price of simpler mounts, but it is much sturdier and has threaded holes everywhere, and a couple of cold shoes too, so it's pretty damn future-proof.
The next thing I need is a video light. More on that some other time.
Be careful of using cold shoe mounted spirit levels because most surfaces are not flat meaning that you actually want the camera a little off the horizontal to look straight. Also, you may want to deliberately mess with the shooting angle. E.g. skewing the camera up for a Mekon supervillain-like perspective that makes your forehead look bigger; see The Big Bang Theory: The Vengeance Formulation (I think). Any person who has ever hung a picture will know this. I'm not saying don't buy one, but check with you're eyes too.
Let me know, please.
However, if you have a record player, use a spirit level to make the platter perfectly horizontal as that is what a turntable's delicate balance mechanism expects. You can even get one that goes over the spindle at the centre.
I'm giving this mic one more chance, by taping this episode with it, before sending it off to eBay. I've tested it yet again and does seem clearer and less clicky than my trusty old XM8500, but the last time I tried taping with it, there was extra hiss. I don't know if the reason for that was a failure on my part in production, but tonight we're finding out.
At this stage, I am sick to the back teeth of testing mics. I just want stuff to work so that I can make a better sounding podcast.
Trouble is afoot in the booze larders of Yor. I found out from my mum that a lot of booze is not vegetarian. Some mondo dumbo process called clarification requires animal blood.
As a Hindu---not a particularly devout one, but still---this does not sit well with me. In fact I was furious when it turned out I was de-veggifying my boozy veggie soup by pouring in wine (what other way is there to imbibe soup? I mean seriously.
I read that some booze is vegetarian from a very useful website called barnivore.com