Plus, with the quality of movies these days, it’s easier to stop and delete a DVR recording than burning a DVD.  More “green” too, but I can live with that…  So, what have I been dozing off to?

Snakes on a Plane

Why are these monkey-fightin’ snakes on this Monday-Friday plane?  (Thank you, network censors.  “Mile-high Club” scene?  Perfectly okay.  Money quote from the movie?  Not so much.)  Seriously, who uses snakes?  What’s worse is that every contrived plot twist after the titular snakes are released onto the titular airplane is so bad it’s not even funny– even for a B movie.

You have cold-blooded reptiles invading your aircraft?  Turn off the cabin heat and pressurization– the switches are right there in the cockpit with you.  Nope, no can do– oh, and that switch magically moves itself to the rear of the cargo deck and becomes a home electrical breaker box.  Also, in one scene, the 747 is seen to move at almost 5,000 knots.  That’s around Mach 7.3 (assuming that they’re at around 30,000 feet, which means that 4,960 kts / 678.1 = Mach 7.3) .  Then the plane is landed by a guy who flew a couple of PS2 flight sims.

Somewhere in between the hyper-sonic 747 and letting Little Gonzo Gamer have the controls, I’d have been looking for a parachute.  Sayanora, suckers!

Westworld

A show with everything… including Yul Brynner.  Robots?  Check?  Gunfights?  Check.  Sex?  Check.  Robot sex?  Check.  Robot gunfights?  Check.  Robot snakes?  Check.

The one thing that bothers me is the fact that the robots aren’t supposed to have a body temperature.  (It’s explained that the guns in Westworld cannot fire on a target that has body heat.)  So, what about the robot brothel girls?  Do they have a body temp, or is… okay, I don’t wanna know.

Hardwired

Decent lightweight sci-fi movie.  Only really notable part is the the gunfight where the main character is aided by the computer geeks in the form of a HUD broadcast directly into his brain.  I expected him to put on sunglasses and a trench coat and begin answering to “J. C.”

Rambo

John Rambo is an old, tired man.  Then the outsiders kick over the ant’s nest in his backyard.  John Rambo is now an angry, old, tired man.  Who happens to be more lethal than some strains of Ebola.  This gives me hope for The Expendables.

1984

Remember the despair you felt when you read the book?  Cube it.  I don’t know how the film crew found so many places to film– I didn’t know you could rent condemned buildings.

The War Wagon

Nobody puts John Wayne in jail… and lives to brag about it.  Best sales pitch I can make for the movie is the title scene.  Enough said.

Doomsday

Viral epidemic breaks out in Scotland.  British ki-nig-its seal off the country along Hadrian’s Wall.  Years later, they find out they sealed the only man who could cure the disease in Scotland.  Oops.  Time to send in a team… lead by a cross between Lara Croft and Big Boss.

Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid

Ah, classic movies.  For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble…  Great movie, from the beginning bank scene to the final gunfight.  Best moment– Butch trying to hold up a bank using a Spanish crib sheet.

Patton

Decent, but memorable for Patton, not the acting.  Most interesting scene is where Patton takes his staff to the site of the Battle of Zama and expounds on his belief that he was at the battle in a previous life.  Patton (who was a Christian) believed he had lived six previous lives– and was a soldier each time.  He even wrote a poem about his belief.

The Fifth Element

Take Die Hard With a Vengeance, add in equal parts Star Wars cantina scene and The Mummy, and you’ve got this movie.  Decent, but not great– good campy, sci-fi.

The Professional

Come for the gunfights, stay for the humor and sexual tension.  The director who made this movie wrote the script in 30 days and shot the movie in 90, so that he wouldn’t be out of work before he shot The Fifth Element.  So, all this guy needs to do is limit himself to 4 months a movie, and he’ll become an Academy Award factory…

Well, I seem to be falling down on that whole “regular posts” thing.  I’ve been… busy.

Feasting on the flesh of fallen giants

One thing I’ve been doing is raiding pillaging visiting all of the Movie Galleries that were going out of business.  I visited the one in my hometown the day after the liquidation sale started, and began hitting all of the others as I could get to them.  The prices were “okay” at first, but they got much, much better– gallery (older) movies at $1.49 each, or $7.50/10 and new movies for $1.99 each or $10/10.  As you can imagine, stuff began flying of the shelves then– at one store a guy bought two moving boxes full of movies, and he wasn’t the only one buying in bulk…  What was great was finding out from the employees where all the unsold movies were going to be shipped– that way I knew which store was next in line to close, and could hit it right as they put on the final sale.

I felt sad the entire time, though… Movie Gallery was founded in Dothan, which used to be an old haunt of mine– great places to eat, pretty good selection of stores… too bad they’ve turned into Chicago South.  (The local paper– the Dothan Eagle– is like a RFDTV version of the New York Times.)  And yes, I hit the Dothan store before it closed– not only was I able to see where it all started, all of the unsold movies from every other store were there.

As an example of why Movie Gallery became unprofitable, I can point to the fact that I bought a copy of The Package on DVD.  This was a new purchase– the disc was unscratched– of a twenty year old movie.  Last time I saw any numbers, it cost a movie rental house around 40 bucks to purchase a movie for rental use… and for a new release, you can double that.  At around a buck a night, that means it would take at least five weeks of constant renting to make the movie a profit item– which makes it obvious why Movie Gallery is kaput.   (Blockbuster has a different system (profit sharing) in place with the studios, but they aren’t going to hold out much longer.)

In short, I purchased 71 DVDs (no games, because console geeks are even faster than I am) for around $275, or about $4 a disc.  I did buy quite a few older movies (look, at $0.75 each, I’ll buy it, watch it, and then sell it if I don’t like it…), but I got quite a few newer ones– including both of the new(er) Stargate movies for $5 and The Core for less than $2 new, in the shinkwrap.  (Yes, the science is horrible.  Yes, the acting is bad.  But it’s a good B movie.)  I also picked up used copies of the Stargate movies… and Disc 2 of The Kill Point.  Not a single note that there’s two discs, and they ain’t in the same case…

Anyone want to trade Disc 1 of The Kill Point for used copies of The Ark of Truth and Continuum…

Findin’ the soul food

One thing I love about the South is the fact that we have good food right at hand.  One of the benefits of going to Dothan was that I went through Hartford, Slocomb and Melvern… and you can’t throw a rock in that area and not hit a produce stand.  The tomatoes don’t seem to be that good right now, and I wasn’t interested in any fruit… but they had I what I needed.  Which was a bushel of pinkeye purplehulls and a bushel of speckled butterbeans, both unshelled.

For those of you wondering what in the blazes I was looking for… pinkeye purplehulls are a variety of cowpea– like black-eyed peas– but with a purple hull.  Speckled butterbeans are a Southern name for a variety of lima bean… that’s speckled with darker colors.  Unshelled means I wanted them still in their shells (hulls), and a bushel is 8 gallons, 4 pecks, or two hampers– enough to produce 8 quarts of frozen produce.  Add in some okra to batter and fry, and you have a meal.  Okay, you also need some tea, cornbread, and some bacon to toss in the pot with the peas and butterbeans…

Is it hot in here to you?

Alabama summers are hot.  Which makes it a bad time for your car’s A/C to decide that it needs to lie down and rest.  Which is what my car’s A/C did while I was traipsing across lower Alabama.  Needless to say, I was doing my best impression of a steam locomotive– drinking water and blowing off steam every chance I could– the entire day.  Luckily, it was just a Freon problem, but I do appreciate what it took to travel by road before cars had all of these new gadgets… heck, the Buick doesn’t even get decent airflow into the cabin when you roll the windows down.  Maybe it’s time for the little moveable vent windows to make a comeback?

So, I’m not dead (yet), and you can expect your regularly scheduled snark to pick back up next week.

Cobra (1986)

There are even fan sites.

Flight of the Intruder (1991)

My personal favorite “so bad it’s good” movie. Just because it stars one of my favorite aircraft.

It also inspired a level in a video game I seem to have missed, Tom Clancy’s HAWX. I think I’ll correct this oversight soon…

Having flown “Iron Hand” and “Wild Weasel” simulations, I gotta say… that looks fun.  Just remember: “Fighter pilots make movies.  Bomber pilots make history.”

Charlie Wilson was a low-down dirty politician.  He was a drunkard, a womanizer, and he played with the nose candy.  But compared to the rest of the Congresscritters, he was a saint.  With Charlie Wilson, you knew what you were getting– no B.S., no smoke screen, no talking out both sides of the mouth.

Here’s a toast to Charlie Wilson, the only man to be inspired by Dan Rather.

Via Breda:

And finally, Edward vs. a TRUE vampire.

The zombies are awesome: they are fast killing machines and scary as hell. The acting was good, and each character is unique, and each has a different style of taking out zombies. There are comedic points, too. In short– you will laugh, you will cry, you will drool over the guns.

Yes, you drool over the guns. Remember I said each character had a unique way of eliminating zombies? That has to do with the guns: Tactical pump shotguns, coach guns, a Mare’s Leg, and a few moments of full-auto goodness.

There will be moments when you want to yell at the screen (take the tank, the hatch is wide open!) and feel honestly bad for the characters (can’t a man just get a Twinkie?), and cheer for them, too (aww, ye-ah!).

Both thumbs up. Hey, what can I say, even the opening music rocks.

Very good, but little known sci-fi movie. Decent plot, okay special effects, and two very good selling points. The first is the fact that Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard get to launch nukes. The second is the Landmaster. Worth a watch, if just for the horrible graphics work done on the sky scenes, and the cockroach scene.

20th Century Fox made two science fiction movies in 1977. They expected Damnation Alley to be a smash; the other movie, not so much. The “other movie” was a little indie flick called Star Wars.

A 2081 movie is coming out. For those of you who haven’t read it, here is the Wikipedia article about the Vonnegut story it is based on.

I read the story as a kid, in middle school. It struck me, and made me realize that dumbing myself down to help others was an idiotic idea. All men are created equal– we don’t stay that way.