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Showing posts from August, 2007

GRUMPY'S HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT

I haven't been to a show in a while, so I was excited to hear that Grumpy's was having an outdoor show, and on Dr. S's birthday weekend to boot. I don't like paying $20 for a 6-band show normally, since there's usually only one band you know is good and they don't play for very long, but this one had Helmet , Burning Brides AND the Melvins --two good bands and one all-time favorite. All three bands play very hard, very tight, but somehow also very catchy without seeming "pop" at all. So even though The Melvins and the Burning Brides didn't play many songs from the albums I have, I didn't have any trouble getting into it. I recognized most of the Helmet songs, they even did "Just Another Victim". They seemed better than when I saw them last, possibly because they followed Jesus Lizard back in the day, a fate worse than death for most bands (I think that was the time David Yow exposed himself, but I'm not sure; he definitely ke

FRANKENSWINE

I finally came up with the plot for my pig monster movie (thanks for the title, Dr. S !): A secret government project in the Nevada desert is breeding genetically enhanced super-pigs to guard America's borders from Islamic extremist terrorists. The super-hogs are more intelligent and built to withstand even the most extreme desert conditions (pigs can't normally live in the desert because they need to wallow in mud). Unfortunately, now there is nothing to stop the uber-porcines from taking over the whole United States. They escape and mate with the existing wild pigs, sowing destruction by spreading e. coli and uprooting our infrastructure with their snouts. Come on, aren't there any aspiring filmmakers out there willing to make this idea a reality? ---------------- Now playing: Generation X - Ready, Steady, Go via FoxyTunes

REMAKES

There's a discussion on remakes in the Name That Film Flickr group . Here's my take on the topic. What do you think? It looks from people's answers that most remakes that are better than the original could more accurately be called an adaptation of a pre-existing book or play. A book can be interpreted different ways to make for different movies. Wasn't the 1931 version of Dracula pretty much just a film version of the play, and therefore very static and once removed from the book? That leaves room for the 1979 and 1992 adaptations to go back to the book and take different things from it. The 1946 and 1964 movies of The Killers use Hemingway's story for the first 15 minutes, and everything after that is different. That said, I really doubt that Tim Burton went back to Monkey Planet for Planet of the Apes or that Sergio Leone really based A Fistful of Dollars on Hammett's Red Harvest . I love Thieves Like Us and have never seen They Live By Night --does

UPDATE

Update to this entry : Freemap.com , my submission to Web Pages That Suck , has made the top 1 0 Worst Web Sites for the first half of 2007 . Only one more step to worst of 2007, I hope, I hope.