TV
Snowfall
Snowfall is a series FX has been promoting with each and every commercial break for the better part of 2017 now with spots set to the Run-D.M.C. tune “It’s Tricky.” Last year the channel had great success with its mini-series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story so Snowfall, a fictionalized version of the creation/introduction of crack cocaine in Los Angeles circa 1983, seems like it would be a good replacement show this summer.
While the O.J. series grabbed me right away, Snowfall on the other hand, hadn’t yet grabbed me by the end of the first episode.
The LA of Snowfall is this weird amalgam of how everyone thinks the 1980s were, but not how it was really like. The characters either live a completely hedonistic, opulent lifestyles, doing drugs and attending orgies in their colossal mansions, or live in a bad part of town where people are getting into fistfights while selling weed. It’s all presented in a hyper-real look at the 1980s where everything exciting that ever happened is happening at once and every hit song of that era is playing out of every radio.
All of which is fine, it just makes for a show that’s a bit hard to watch as it’s always trying to grab your attention.
It doesn’t help matters that most of what Snowfall is doing has been done before in other things like the movies Blow and American Gangster. But what I kept coming back to compare Snowfall to, with its eye towards 1980s fashion and music and colors is the TV series Miami Vice. But instead of focusing on the cops Snowfall instead focuses on the guys selling the drugs.
I just wish Snowfall had been as interesting as Miami Vice was 30 some years ago.
Castlevania
For as much as I’m into all things horror and sci-fi I’ve never been all that much into video games, or really into them at all. I grew up with an Atari and later on a Nintendo with all the classic games of the time but to me video games were always a social activity, something to be played with cousins in grandma’s basement over Christmas and summer vacation or at friend’s houses after school. I rarely, if ever, played games on my own and never got all that good at them. So, while my friends were becoming experts at Metal Gear or Zelda I was getting left behind skill-wise, and as I got further and further behind I became less and less interested in gaming.
When Netflix announced a series based on the classic game Castlevania I was suspect since I can’t readily think of any video game inspired movie or series that was any good, and surly this new series couldn’t be any good either. That was until I read who was involved in the series; writer Warren Ellis.
Ellis is one of the best comics writer in the industry and who’s stories have gone onto be the basis of several movies like RED and Iron Man 3. He also wrote one of the best G.I. Joe stories ever, and certainly the best G.I. Joe story outside of the Larry Hama comics; the animated series pilot for a new Joe cartoon called G.I. Joe: Resolute. What that pilot, Ellis took something that before in its TV version was silly and stupid where the bad guys always managed to get away to something that was dark and dangerous, with characters being in situations that felt real and scary with some longtime faces of the comics being killed off in a story that felt very much of our time.
Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy Castlevania nearly as much as I did G.I. Joe Resolute. I only played the Castlevania game a few times so I’m dimly aware that it’s about a hero out to stop a vampire in his castle Castlevania but not much else. And after having watched the first episode of the series I’m not sure I’m any more clear as to what Castlevania is about than I was before I’d seen it.
The first of four episodes is nearly all prolog, beginning in 1455, then jumps forward 20 years then yet again another year. To which I wasn’t sure of the point of all this time hopping? I’m assuming it’s meant to setup that the character of Dracula (Graham McTavish) who has time to meet and fall in love with a human woman before she’s burned alive at the stake for being a suspected witch. But this all happens so fast on screen that while Dracula might have been upset over the death, I don’t think the audience will have time to be within the confines of the episode.
It seems to me that what gets compressed into the first episode, Dracula meeting this woman, falling in love only to have her lost to a population steeped in superstition where he then vows vengeance might have made an interesting first season rather than just a single episode. As it is it made for one confusing half hour of TV.
Comics
Planetary Book One
The classic Warren Ellis series is being released again in a trade paperback form with this edition that collects roughly the first half of the series as well as some Planetary one-shots. If you’re unfamiliar, Planetary takes place in a world where things like Marvel and DC comics characters, James Bond and Doc Savage to name a few all exist together in pastiche form alongside one and other in this series. And it’s up to a team of very special individuals to investigate the them and other weird goings on around the planet, and stop the people who are secretly pulling the strings of society.
“It’s a strange world, let’s keep it that way.”
This new cut of the classic series includes extras from the Absolute Edition, including sketches and variant covers. Collecting the adventures of Elijah Snow, a powerful hundred-year-old-man, Jakita Wagner, an extremely powerful but bored woman, and the Drummer, a man with the ability to communicate with machines. Collects Planetary #1–14, the Planetary Sneak Peek and Planetary/The Authority: RULING THE WORLD #1.
Cool Sites
The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack Home of the world’s biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles.
The Watch List
This week in pop-culture history
- 1940: Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Charles Xavier of the X-men films is born
- 1981: Escape from New York opens
- 1982: TRON opens in theaters
- 1984: The Last Starfighter premiers in theaters
- 1985: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome premiers
- 1985: Explorers opens in theaters
- 2016: Stranger Things premiers
And while I’m a sucker for 1980s gory horror movies, I’m don’t think that Near Dark has stood the test of time the last 30 years. But I will say that two scenes in Near Dark* alone make it worth checking out that movie today.
The crux of the movie is even though Caleb’s been turned to a vampire, he’s not yet a member of Jesse’s family until he’s killed someone on his own. And because the vampires need to feed is like a junkie’s need to get a fix, it’s all Caleb can do to not act on his impulses and end someone’s life for a little blood and cross over to the dark side.
The other scene is of a gunfight in a motel after the bar scene. Here, one of the patrons escaped the bar and has brought the police to the vampire’s room. The family aren’t scared of the cops and their guns, but what they are scared of is that the police have arrived during the day and daylight hurts them. So there’s this big shoot-out and the cops are shooting into the room and the family out. Bullets hurt the vampires but can’t kill them. What really hurts the vampires are the shafts of sunlight that’s let into the room from all the bullet-holes in the walls. These shafts hit harder than any bullet and hurt worse than any rifle shot. And at one point Caleb has to run out of the room to get the group’s car and catches fire before he’s able to get back into the shade and put himself out. Since he’s a vampire the burns hurt, but they go away.
Let’s put it this way, we live in a world where most horror movies follow the same formula. There’s a bad guy, and this bad guy is killing off characters in the movie one by one. They start with the least important character and work their way to the main character. Where, in the end, the main character gets the better of the villain and good wins the day. Only this doesn’t happen in The Mist. There’s no one main villain, there’s a few actually. There are these weird creatures that come out of the titular mist and there’s the character of Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) who’s religious fervor over what’s going on means that she’s as dangerous as the monsters out in the mist.
What I find most ironic is that while the public didn’t turn out to see The Mist, they sure turned out a few years later for Darabont’s next project; The Walking Dead. There are so many similarities between The Mist and The Walking Dead that it’s ironic that The Mist failed so badly but The Walking Dead was, and continues to be, one of the most popular series on TV. There’s the whole apocalyptic angle with people cut off and having to fight for their lives from a weird force. There’s the brutality of the situation, with characters being killed off in some disturbing ways. There’s even some of the same cast shared between The Mist and The Walking Dead too.
As much as I like to rag on The Walking Dead I have to say that the first season of the show did a great job of introducing characters. Right now there may be dozens of people on the show, but at the start there was only a handful really which meant we got a lot of time meeting each person. And in the first episode we’re only with the character of Rick (Andrew Lincoln) for a good part of the hour as he explores a post-zombie apocalypse wasteland. I think by having the loads of characters in The Mist and having the episode play out in normal life like a cruddy drama lessons the impact of the show. I mean, the show’s called The Mist but in the first episode we get maybe 15 minutes of the mist. The rest of the time it’s this fake family stuff.
This third season of Better Call Saul which wrapped up last week was better than ever. I think part of the reason the show is so good/I like it so much is that it’s headed towards some kind of conclusion, even if that conclusion is of the character of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) becoming Saul Goodman who later appears on the series Breaking Bad. As much as I might like the idea of having an open-ended story that a medium like TV provides, I have to admit that in practice its almost never a good idea. Too often series start out promising but go on a bit too long and instead of coming to a natural story conclusion drag out the story and grow stale/boring in their declining years. Series like Man Men, Game of Thrones or The Americans started off interestingly enough but went/have gone on a season or two too long and went from interesting series to watch to a slog to suffer through.
GLOW, on the other hand, was a bit different. First, it was on during the day after cartoons Saturday afternoon where I lived and rather than being almost all guy wrestlers as the WWF used to be was all female. What GLOW lacked in production values, each episode looked like it was shot on an $10 budget, they more than made up for in wild characters, over-the-top stories and a bit of titillation. For a time it seemed as if GLOW was somewhat popular but only for a little while. And just as quickly as the series emerged from the jurassic ooze of 1980s TV it was swallowed back up to disappear forever.
Except I don’t think anything intentionally made “bad on purpose” can ever be anything but plain bad. What the creators of these “bad on purpose” movies fail to realize is that all the bad movies that they’re trying to emulate with their film had creators who were trying to make something good. Now it’s plainly obvious that these creators failed in making something good — movies like Manos: The Hands of Fate or Kingdom of the Spiders are terrible films. But the goal wasn’t to make something bad, it was the opposite and became bad which is probably why we still remember these films.
Moon, much like 
In many ways Moon feels like a longish episode of Black Mirror, only being released a few years before that series made it to air.
And, nearly 30 years later Predator is still one of my favorite films. Let’s put it this way — at various times I’ve owned Predator on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and I’m sure that whatever the next thing is that comes along to improve on what’s come before be it 3D or holograms I’ll buy that too.
Back in the early 1990s I bought a copy of the animated movie Akira on VHS for $30, which with inflation is about $60 today. I was getting $5 a week in allowance and saved up any money I got from Christmas to buy Akira on tape I so badly wanted to see. And this version of the movie was cropped from widescreen and in “pan and scan” with the original audio dubbed from Japanese to English without subtitles. Still, for many years until I picked up a copy of the movie on DVD this was the only film version of Akira I’d be able to see. So today when I was wandering around Walmart and saw they had a 25th anniversary edition DVD of the movie for just $5 I was a bit flabbergasted. For a movie that originally took me many months to get — my original VHS order was lost in the mail and I had to convince the company I bought it from that I wasn’t lying and I really didn’t get it — to see a good quality version of the movie for that low price, just $2.65 in early 1990s dollars, was quite a surprise.