Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 11th, 2008
“You wanna be where everybody knows your name”
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 11th, 2008
“Hey Hey Hey, It’s Fat Albert!”
That’s right, it’s Fat Albert. Bill Cosby invented the portly young Albert for his stand-up and album releases in the 1960’s. The character, like many of Cosby’s stories, is based on elements of his own youth. My parents were huge Cosby fans, so I had heard all about these Cosby Kids long before they hit television in 1972. Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids was an almost instant hit on the Saturday Morning cartoon menu. Unlike most of those early morning toons, this one mixed in some live action elements with Cosby himself. He acts as a host for the stories. The show was also known for its attempt to teach some kind of moral lesson with each episode. Standard lessons like it’s not cool to call someone names, or drugs are bad business, were often the week’s taglines. Cosby would accentuate the lesson himself, and usually the show ended with a song played by the Kids with their junkyard instruments that again played on the moral of the week. Cosby used a staff of educational psychologists for the show and made no apologies for the often heavy-handed lessons. Off and on the series ran for about 12 years, finally ending original programming in 1984.
Posted in: Brain Blasters, Regular Columns by David Annandale on September 6th, 2008
We have all encountered films that are less intelligent than they think they are. My favourite example of this syndrome would probably be Contact, the deeply serious Jodie Foster vehicle, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and adapted from the Carl Sagan novel. The film keeps the novel’s primary weakness (the ending, which, smacks of a writer who hasn’t worked out a full outline before starting) and introduces some unintentionally funny visual elements (the alien-inspired technology looks suspiciously like it was designed by Wile E. Coyote, and the first time out works like was designed by him, too). But the film’s biggest sin was not that it has some very silly aspects, but that it is completely unaware of same, and really seems to believe that it is Important Art. Similarly, M. Night Shyamalan has become the undisputed King of Movies Less Intelligent Than They Think They Are.
But what of the converse? Are there films that are more intelligent than they think they are? Or at least, less stupid? Let me put forward the modest proposal that there are. Exhibit A is Massimo Pupillo’s The Bloody Pit of Horror (1965, out on DVD from a variety of sources). This mid-period Italian Gothic tells the charming story of a busload of cover models who descend on a castle that happens to be the home of the obsessed Mickey Hargitay (best known as the husband of Jayne Mansfield, and these days, as the father of Mariska Hargitay). As the models pose to be photographed in and around various torture devices, their host flips out, becomes convinced he is the reincarnation of one Crimson Executioner, and starts using the devices for real on the unfortunate women.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on September 5th, 2008
Denys Arcand’s conclusion to the loose trilogy whose first two parts were The Decline of the American Empire and The Barbarian Invasions takes place in a near-future Quebec of soulless bureaucracy and nonexistent human relations. Our hero (Marck Labrèche) is a civil servant with a wife whose job leaves no time for him, two iPod-dependent teenage daughters, and a giant suburban house that is not a home. He retreats from his dead-end life into a series of fantasies which see him as hero, shiek, rock star, celebrated novelist, and so on, always with women rushing to have sex with him.
There is sour diversion here, but this is not deep satire. The jokes are hardly fresh (smokers hiding from guards and dogs). Then there’s the attitude towards women. While one might argue that the fantasy figures are precisely that, and meant to reflect the character’s problems, not the director’s, the fact that the women in the real world of the film are a clutch of castrating harpies makes one suspect that the filmmaker is rather too sympathetic to his protagonist’s worldview. Of course, there is an absolutely terrific film dealing with a weak civil servant escaping into fantasy while labouring in a future society of absurd, Kafkaesque totalitarian bureaucracy. But it’s called Brazil.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
There has to be something wrong with anyone who doesn’t have at least a small soft spot in their hearts for Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas. The film will assuredly earn its rightful place as a classic as more years roll by. The film just works on so many levels. Danny Elfman deserves as much credit as
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
NCIS is a spin-off, of sorts, from the popular military lawyer show JAG. You could say that NCIS is the Order to JAG’s Law. The NCIS is a real government agency that deals with criminal activity inside or involving the US Navy or Marine Corps. The series has an incredibly global feel and honestly looks damn good for television. Production values are high, and the location stuff is out of this world, or at least all over it.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
Chris Rock has been one of those comedians that either hits a home run or strikes completely out. I’ve seen quite a bit of his stand-up and found I loved it or hated it. He’s not afraid to play the race card. Hell, Chris plays the whole dang deck at times, and Everybody Hates Chris is no different. The comedy is based, loosely I’m sure, on the young adolescent life of Chris Rock. It’s a black comedy that will bring back memories of those 1970’s shows we all watched as kids. Like Good Times and even Sanford And Son, the show is loaded with stereotypes. All of the white characters are bumbling fools who are often played as racists themselves. Chris’s school teacher, Mrs. Morello (Mazarella), is the most obvious example. She’s constantly trying to talk “hood” with the boys and making politically incorrect observations loaded with outrageous clichés. Of course, it’s all in fun and if you’re willing to overlook the often sensitive language and plots, you’re in for some laughs along the way. I like that the show never really takes itself seriously and challenges the viewer to simply lighten up. Basically, this ain’t no Cosby Show.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
<>“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
To Date 42 men have taken that oath to become President Of The United States. While our current president is #43, Grover Cleveland’s terms did not run consecutively and so he often is counted twice. From George Washington to George W. Bush our country has seen feast and famine, good times and bad, and extraordinary leaders and some, let’s just say, leave much to be desired. This American Experience PBS collection covers 10 of the most important from the 20th Century: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson,
Posted in: Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on September 3rd, 2008
Learn by Death, More Fable items on the Web, and Europe becomes the real place for gaming? - Welcome to the column that thinks the more you punish a player, the less likely they are willing to take up bondage as a vocational hobby known as Dare to Play the Game.
Welcome to another edition of Dare to Play the Game. The Labor Day weekend was full of watching various web pages to determine whether or not Gustav was going to come anywhere near by backyard of Texas. Thankfully, it did not and Louisiana despite damage avoided a tremendous disaster. The fact is that New Orleans could have possibly had another Katrina like disaster. They did not because 1)Gustav was much weaker than Katrina and 2)It did not suffer a direct hit on the levees. The barriers held and New Orleans can live and prosper once again. One has to be worried though that since New Orleans is under sea level (like a soup bowl), can it keep avoiding disaster? Well perhaps, but the team of army engineers need to come up with a real solution and quick. The levees in place would have not held anything above a 3 and history can only be rebuilt so many times before it is just that: history. The rest of the time? It was spent doing usual weekend chores and spending time together. We planned our trip to Ohio (airlines really really suck) and we will be required to stop in Atlanta for a connecting flight to Akron, OH. Atlanta? Seriously? I apologize to the people who actually live in Atlanta but what the heck do I do to deserve this? Maybe if they put a big sign over the archway that says “Welcome to some place that isn’t named Atlanta”, I can just pretend it isn’t one of the worst cities in the US. Well then again, it isn’t Detroit.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on August 30th, 2008
A few weeks ago, I nattered on about how Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace differs markedly from the very slasher genre it helped create. The same is true of Bay of Blood, though the comparison is rather more complicated.
The connection between Bay of Blood (AKA Twitch of the Death Nerve) and the slashers is one of the purest examples of superficiality one could think of. Many of the murders in Bava’s film were lifted holus bolus by the first couple of Friday the 13th films (machete to the face, love-making couple speared in bed, and so forth). However, the fact that the films have near-identical murders turns out to be as irrelevant as the fact that they both take place in similarly sylvan environments. For the uninitiated, Bay of Blood does not offer one killer, but many. Everyone is killing off everyone else in a battle to possess a valuable lake-front property. There is no motivation so pure as revenge here. Greed is what is driving the characters.
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