Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Favorite Quotes, August 2017


“Politics always change. Stories never do.”

“Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.”

“We lie best when we lie to ourselves.”

“You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.”

“Adults are the real monsters.”
-Stephen King, It

“As soon as you finish a film, people want you to talk about it...and it’s, um...the film IS the talking.”
-David Lynch

“On your way to oblivion...always take the scenic route.”
-Carlton Mellick III, Satan Burger

“It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay. This longing had historically been the domain of religion, and was now the increasingly fertile terrain of technology.”

“This is one of the problems with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction.”

“The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.”

“These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don’t imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.”

“Humans, after all, weren’t actively hostile toward most of the species we’d made extinct over the millennia of our ascendance; they simply weren’t part of our design. The same could turn out to be true of superintelligent machines, which would stand in a similar kind of relationship to us as we ourselves did to the animals we bred for food, or the ones who fared little better for all that they had no direct dealings with us at all.”

“This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things.”
-Mark O’Connell, To Be a Machine

“Legend has it that when a puzzled student told him he had read ‘Absalom! Absalom!’ three times and still didn’t understand it, Faulkner told him, ‘Read it a fourth time.’”

“In the first ten years of the Alderman regime [circa 1915], only 1,145 of the 2,241 first-year men returned for the second year.”
-Virginius Dabney, Mr. Jefferson’s University

“I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.”

“The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.”

“He bit his lip in a manner which immediately awakened my maternal sympathy, and I helped him bite it.”

“Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin ..it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring”

“Do you know anything at all that nobody else knows or, for that matter, gives a damn about? If you do, then sit tight, because one of these days you're going to Hollywood as a technical supervisor on a million dollar movie.”

“Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.”

“I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse.”

“The main obligation is to amuse yourself.”
-S.J. Perelman

“If a man can be corrupted by a few books, I doubt if there was anything there to begin with.”
-Ray Russell, The Case Against Satan

“Rome wasn’t built in A.D.”

“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”

“Another day gone and no jokes.”

“Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.”

“Put a thief among honest men and they will eventually relieve him of his watch.”

“When I want to read anything, however, I usually write it meself.”

“Having considered the matter in, of course, all its aspects, I have decided that there is no excuse for poetry.”

“It cannot too often be pointed out that women are people.”
-Flann O’Brien

“I’m happy. Hope you’re happy, too.”
-David Bowie, “Ashes to Ashes”


-Compiled by Phony McFakename

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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Cinemasterworks: Movies I Liked in the Past Few Months

Good news: got an MRI the other day after seeing several specialists about my chronic shoulder pain. So I'm well on my way to regaining full function up there and hopefully having less pain when I write. Been doing better, but I still have pain days. Today is one of those days. So here's my laziest blog yet. Movies I liked over the past few months.

I'm staying positive with this list. Declining to mention movies I hated or walked out on after 5-10 minutes.

Unearthed and Untold: Making of Pet Sematary
Wonder Woman
Nerve
The Blob (1988)
Baby Driver
MST3K: Robot Holocaust
MST3K: Corpse Vanishes
The Other Side of the Door
Rifftrax: Galaxy Invader
Keeping Up with the Joneses
Surf II
Prescription Thugs
Lone Star
Rifftrax: Megaforce
Rifftrax: Death Promise
Rifftrax: Attack from Space
Rifftrax: To Catch a Yeti
Rifftrax: Buffalo Rider
Rifftrax: Alien Outlaw
Rifftrax: Night of the Shorts
Rifftrax: Reefer Madness
Florence Foster Jenkins
Paterson
Hacksaw Ridge
Video Game High School
David Lynch: The Art Life
Captain Fantastic
Memento
XX
Critters
Heavy Metal Parking Lot
Rakka
Netherbeast, Inc.
Son of Rambow
Oh Hello! On Broadway
Con Air
In the Mouth of Madness
Finding Dory
Storks
Big Fan
Rifftrax: Supersonic Man
Rifftrax: ROTOR
Rifftrax: Fever Lake
Rifftrax: Yambao
Rifftrax: I Believe in Santa Claus
Comedians of Comedy
Dig Two Graves
Matewan
Repo Man
Eight Men Out
Rock n Roll High School
Future Shock! The Story of 2000 A.D.
Rifftrax: Ghosthouse
Trolls
Don't Think Twice
Rifftrax: Guy from Harlem
Alien: Covenant
The Girl with All the Gifts
Clown
The Wizard of Lies
Dave Chapelle Netflix 2017 comedy specials
Rifftrax: Plan 9 from Outer Space (Live)
Rofftrax: Abraxas
Rifftrax: Nightmare at Noon
Rifftrax: Swamp of the Ravens
Rifftrax: The Magic Sword
Rifftrax: Wonder Women
Rifftrax: Devil's Hands
Rifftrax: Kingdom of the Spiders
As I Lay Dying
All That Jazz
Parenthood
Michael Ian Black: Noted Expert
Guardians of the Galaxy 2
Rifftrax: Cool as Ice
Shock Waves
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
Manchester by the Sea
Gimme Danger
Spaghetti Man
Rifftrax: Cat Women of the Moon
Norm MacDonald: 2017 Netflix Special
Batman & Bill
Doomed!
Mr. Arkadin
War Games
Rifftrax: No Retreat, No Surrender
Working with Orson Welles
99 Homes
The Fate of the Furious
Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in the Fifth Dimension
Kong: Skull Island
Rock of Ages
The Final Girls (Jumping up and down with enthusiasm for this one, just brilliant)
Strange Frequency
Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
Louis CK: 2017
Blood Father
Timecrimes
Snowden
Son of Kong
Train to Busan
Rifftrax:Jack the Giant Killer
Samurai Cop 2
Phantasm II
Rifftrax: Zindy the Swamp Boy
Rifftrax: Prisoners of the Lost Universe
Rifftrax: Manos, the Hands of Fate
Rifftrax: Boy in the Plastic Bubble
Rifftrax: Beast of the Yellow Night
Rifftrax: Breaker Breaker
The Ant Bully
Rifftrax: Night of the Living Dead (Live)
Rifftrax: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Rifftrax: Hideous Sun Demon
Rifftrax: Future Force


-Phony McFakename

* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Cinemasterworks: "A Ghost Story" and THE PIE

I don't normally go out for movies in the theater anymore. Name a reason.

-People talking
-People texting
-Can't get a babysitter
-Too expensive
-Poor/unoriginal movie quality

But A Ghost Story grabbed my attention. I love me a quality horror movie and this one got positive buzz all across the Internet (Check out its Tomato score!). It seemed like one of those clever, low-budget sleepers that you hear about later and wish you'd seen on the big screen.

So when I saw it pop up at the local indie cinema, I cheered! I want to support original, independent cinema! Here was my chance!

I knew nothing about it, I just wanted to experience something special. Been too long since I went into a movie cold.

So when the wife took the kids to visit family, I treated myself to a ticket to this flick at the local arthouse theater, where people typically respect the odd and artsy film.

And sure enough, the crowd was cool.

Lights went down and everyone shut up. Not a phone in sight.

The movie starts really slow. Every shot lingers for an uncomfortably long amount of time.

But I got that. It was building atmosphere. And the 70s Kodak-filter look of the thing, combined with its unique, boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio, was interesting.

And hey look, Oscar-winner Casey Affleck! I didn't know he was in this! Neat.

The relationship dynamic between the two leads is a bit cold and mumble-core-y, but I guess they'll demonstrate more warmth and develop it more later.

I got a little pensive when a shot of the couple laying silently in bed together lasted for what felt like a minute. (Especially after they'd already used the same shot of the same thing for about 30 seconds straight a few minutes earlier in the film.) But I trusted that it was building toward something.

And sure enough, the next scene is a gut-puncher. (SPOILER: Casey Affleck dies. He's the "ghost" of the movie's title.) I accepted its payoff.

So there you go. A main character is dead and wandering around covered in a white sheet with two eye-holes cut out, truly an old-school ghost of the highest order.

That's cool. Haven't seen that trope played seriously before. Some neat shots of him wandering through hallways and through fields.

Okay, the film has made very little narrative progress in the first 20 minutes, but the atmosphere is thick, so I'm cutting it some slack.

Then...THE PIE happens.

A woman walks into a house and leaves THE PIE for the mourning widow. She leaves a note by THE PIE. She walks out of the house. This scene takes a very long time, but I didn't clock it.

Then the silent sheet-covered ghost in the house hangs out and looks at THE PIE. This also takes a long time.

Then the widow walks into the house, derps around, and then notices THE PIE. She takes THE PIE into the kitchen. This takes--SURPRISE!--a long time.

And then THE PIE scene happens.

The widow SLOWLY gets a fork. Then places that fork in the pie. Then brings that forkful of pie to her mouth. She chews it. Swallows it. Pauses.

Then the widow places her fork in the pie AGAIN. Brings that NEW forkful of pie to her mouth. Chews it ONCE MORE. Swallows it YET AGAIN. Takes ANOTHER pause.

You will never guess what happens next.

Here it comes...

SHE TAKES ANOTHER BITE OF PIE!

This continues, silently, for five minutes.

Now you're thinking: C'mon, it was probably one minute at most. You're exaggerating. The movie didn't really waste FIVE MINUTES of its running time showing a widow stress-eating a pie!

Yes. Yes, it did. Five minutes of its 90-minute running time were spent with that widow eating her pie.

Now about 4:30 into that scene, she finally sheds a tear while eating a piece of the pie. That's SOMETHING! But no way is it enough to justify the 1960s Andy Warhol-level of cinematic monotony that was just inflicted upon us.

Even then, like an abuse victim, I tried to cognitive dissonance-myself into believing it was gonna get better and that there was a reason for THE PIE. I actually stayed for the next scene in hopes that it was gonna have a payoff.

Nope. Just another molasses-slow scene with silent people slowly moving from room to room.

Irredeemable.

This is why people don't like art movies. Because they abuse your attention span and troll you with pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-emotional nonsense.

I walked out on the film.

This marks A Ghost Story as the first film I ever paid for and then walked out on. The theater manager, to her credit, gave me a free pass. I told her that her theater was great, but the movie was unwatchable and unforgivable. She mentioned that she planned to see A Ghost Story the next day.

"Hope you like pie," I responded.

I looked it up when I got home and it turns out I wasn't the only one who took note of this scene.

Please add my voice to the anti-THE PIE demographic. There are a thousand cinematic methods for demonstrating grief. Showing a widow stress-eating pie for five silent minutes was the worst one you could possibly choose.

To this movie's credit, I will never forget it. And I'll think about it every time I see pie. The other night, I was reading my kids a book where a toddler magically makes nine pies appear.

I blinked and muttered, "Nine pies...That's 45 minutes of screen time in A Ghost Story."


-Phony McFakename

* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Literateur: A Couple Re-Reads

For the longest time, I never re-read books. I felt like: been there, done that. Next!

Since I'm cranking out prose now, I get curious about how my favorite authors pulled off their tricks. Because I want to rip them off.

So!

Just finished re-reading Stephen King's The Tommyknockers. I liked it well enough at age 14. As an adult, its faults are glaring. 

Woman discovers alien ship buried in her backyard, unearths it, finds it gives her strange mental powers, then the dormant alien force gives everyone in her town mental powers...except for one guy who has a metal plate in his head. Mayhem ensues as people are trapped in the town. It's like a rough draft for Under the Dome, with elements from It thrown in for seasoning. 

King gives us two likeable main characters up front, then makes the mistake of turning it into an ensemble epic about the entire town and the two people we like get pushed to the background. The townspeople just aren't that interesting, making it all feel like a drag. 

King admits Tommyknockers is his least favorite of his books, written heavily under the influence of drugs, with lotsa drug allegories throughout. (The same could be said for Misery, but that one integrates the drug allegories better and was more concise.) Its biggest problem is terminal bloat. This thing is 750 pages when it should be half that, at most. 

Then the ending just farts in your face. Way too much death and doom, not emotionally earned or resonant. It misses the mark in almost every way that It perfectly hits the mark. Both books have similar endings and similar plots. And they were written around the same time. Interesting to see an author hit and miss with such similar stories at a similar time.
The so-so 1994 TV miniseries adaptation starred Jimmy Smits as the guy with the metal plate in his head. That's how they labeled him in the credits: "Guy With the Metal Plate in His Head."
Another reread: William Peter Blatty's Legion. The author of The Exorcist wrote this semi-sequel to his notorious classic in 1983. It was filmed a few years later (by the author, writing and directing!) as Exorcist III. And it wisely ignores the events of the atrocious Exorcist II: The Heretic. 

It's a gem. Although structurally a murder mystery, the mystery and supernatural aspects take a backseat. It's mostly the old Jewish detective character philosophically rambling about the problem of evil and why bad things happen to good people. Which sounds horrible (I normally hate it when authors whine about this issue because they're usually just sloppily soapboxing), but it totally works. 

And Blatty reaches a surprisingly original conclusion at the end: an answer to why the world is the broken way it is, all of which went way over my head when I read it as a kid. 

Ready for it? Here you go: the giant flash of light that we know of as The Big Bang was Lucifer ("Lord of Light") falling from heaven. And evolution has been the slow process of Lucifer trying to form himself back into an angel of light. Thus: we are all Lucifer.

Your mind blown yet? It should be! 

It's so rare for me to find an original idea anywhere anymore, so even when a new idea is bonkers, I like it because I haven't heard it before.


-Phony McFakename
 
* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Earworm Analysis: My First Song

This is a very special episode of my blog where I actually share a personal story rather than just a list of whatever I've seen/read lately. Gird your loins!

Circa 1985, my parents got this eight-track player and a bunch of eight-tracks (an ancient technology, even in that ancient year) at this rickety place we were spending the summer. And one of my earliest memories was seeing Dionne Warwick's Promises, Promises eight-track and putting it in the player and the title song came on. 
Looked about like this.
I had no frame of reference for what music was, but I liked the noise it made. And I jumped around with the playing mechanism (eight-tracks are weird, I still don't understand them) until I found the title track again and I would listen to it over and over. Never cared about the rest of the album. This was the song.

But here's the part where it got weird: I always assumed that song was a huge hit. It had to be, right? I was telling my wife about it and Googled Dionne Warwick and a list of her songs came up and I scrolled down looking for "Promises, Promises." After a ton of scrolling, I still hadn't found it. Wha?

I'd never heard of her other songs. But admittedly, I wasn't a Warwick fan. So I just Googled the song title and found it and played it for my wife. I hadn't heard it in over three decades. Turns out Burt Bacharach wrote it, so it's got a strong big-band vibe to it. Decent lyrics. It's okay. 

But then I looked up the album on Wikipedia and it turns out Promises, Promises was Warwick's 11th album. It's a nonexistent blip on her career radar. There was like one radio hit on there and it wasn't the title track. So it was surreal because I always thought Promises, Promises was Warwick's biggest hit album and the title track one of her biggest songs because it was the only one I knew by her...but it was NOTHING! 

I'm having a hard time articulating how weird it was to find this out. I might have to write a book about the mental reversal it did on me.

My parents happened to visit last weekend and I asked them about that whole setup and my dad was like, "Oh yeah, we randomly bought that eight-track player and a handful of eight-tracks from some garage sale, just for the heck of having a music player over the summer." So the album meant NOTHING to them, either!

To their credit, one of those eight-tracks was Elton John's greatest hits, which had the SECOND song I was ever over-and-over addicted to: "Bennie and the Jets." I still totally back that song. And just about every song on that album. ("Rocket Man" is a bit played out, though.)

My subsequent first cassette that I ever owned was not cool and I have no bragging rights, but to keep it real: it was the Young Einstein soundtrack. Almost none of it holds up, except for this song, which was my over-and-over fave on there and to this day makes me drop whatever I'm multitasking with, pay attention, and feel something vaguely melancholy and beyond my grasp deep in my soul every time it pops up on a mix CD or shuffle mode.


-Phony McFakename

 

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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Favorite Quotes: July 2017

"Sure, naked galactic vampire movies are a dime a dozen, but Hooper’s big-budget career-wrecker tears through all competition and stands tall as the ultimate example of the form...Do what you like, but skip this movie and you’ll be missing a telepathically-possessed Patrick Stewart deem himself 'the perfect woman' before kissing a dude right smack dab on the lips.”
-Review of Lifeforce, from Destroy All Movies! 

“Where’d you get your clothes, the poor store?”

“Where’d you get your manners, the rude store?”
-Video Game High School 

“Mummy, come back, ‘cause the water’s all gone”
-David Bowie, “Glass Spider”

“Hey, let’s not have a blame-storm here!”
-Netherbeast, Inc. 

“I’ll turn my home
(Check in, check out)
Into Bates Motel”
The Hitmen, “Bates Motel” 

“We're pretty good at finding demons to be afraid of.

The other.
The one in the shadows.
Change.
The family member we can't possibly please.
Competition.
Critics.
The invisible network of foes conspiring against us and what we stand for.
It turns out, though, that the one who usually lets us down is us. 
Our unwillingness to leap, to commit, to trust our own abilities.
It's the internal narrative that seeks disaster just as much as it craves reassurance. 
That's the one we ought to be vilifying, fortifying ourselves against and frightened of.
It gets less powerful once we are brave enough to look it in the eye.”
-Seth Godin


-Phony McFakename


* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

"Eric Roberts 2: Acoustic Boogaloo" by Phony McFakename

Oh, yes. It has finally arrived.

The long-awaited sequel to the legendary Eric Roberts: The True* Story!

That's right, folks. It's time for Eric Roberts 2: Acoustic Boogaloo!

Read the further exploits of the legendary actor Eric Roberts!

Explore the many churches that have been built in Roberts' name!

And learn the TRUE history of the 2007 financial crisis, when Roberts fought the Wall Street fat cats with his ancient Slamurai ninja skills!

And may Eric Roberts bless and keep you. 


-Phony McFakename

* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.