posted by shechner on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 8:11am
In response to Mr. Stoke’s excellent recent post, I decided to do a little image searching on my work computer. I can’t even begin to understand the result:
What terrifies me the most is just how frickin’ sexy I think it is.
posted by fenzel on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 7:06am
Have you seen the May 5 cover of Time Magazine? Christopher Lambert has seen it, and it’s difficult to tell whether he’s amused or not.
Hey, he’s Christopher Lambert — the man doesn’t have a ton of range. But he does know how to chop someone’s head off.
And now, apparently, so do the season’s Democratically ordained Princes of the Universe, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Oh, I know the temptation is to dismiss the citizenry of the overthinkingit phantasmagoria — guys like Connor MacLeod of the clan MacLeod (who has a lifetime membership) — but if current trends continue, you’re likely to hear a lot more of this guy in the darnedest places.
posted by stokes on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 7:16am
So I just watched Abel Ferrara’s trash classic Ms. 45. (Thank you, Netflix.) Sweet crap on a crutch, what a movie. Note that I don’t put an adjective between “a” and “movie”: not “what a disturbing” movie, not “what a fricking awesome movie,” not “what a confused movie” or “what a sexist movie”… although it is manifestly all of these things. Further spoilerriffic analysis after the jump, plus two soundtrack clips that are SO worth hearing, even if you have to close your eyes and click randomly around the spoiler-laden text until you come across the link.
posted by stokes on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 8:24am
Until recently, I only really thought of the archtypical 80s metal band Whitesnake as a punch line. If pressed, I guess I could have sung through the chorus of “Here I Go Again On My Own Again,” but I wouldn’t have actually known that it was a Whitesnake song. Which is shameful, really. But that all changed the other day, when I sat down and watched a whole bunch of Whitesnake videos on youtube. It was a bruising and confounding experience (The hairspray! The fog machines! The horror!), and it may have weakened my grip on reality. But as the grueling marathon came to a close, I arrived at the following conclusion.
Dear reader, mirabile dictu: Whitesnake is flippin’ sweet.
Video and seriously, seriously overthought analysis after the jump.
posted by stokes on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 3:29pm
In 1965, the Hearst newspapers in San Francisco refused to print movie advertisements containing the words “cuties, flesh-a-scope, girlie, homosexual, immorality, lesbian, lust, naked, nothing on, nudies, nudist camp, nymphs, pervert, professional girls, prostitute, rape, scanty panties, seduce, skin-a-scope, sex, [...] sex rituals, sexpot, sexsational, strippers, and third sex.” (This is quoted from an essay by the film historian Eric Schaefer, which you can find in this book right here. The list of terms was originally published in Variety.)
Okay: really, Hearst newspapers? I mean, really? You’re going to go with “flesh-a-scope” on this one? REALLY? Has that ever been used to advertise a movie? But actually, the main thing that this list of banned words tells us is that EVERY ONE OF THEM has been used to advertise a movie at some point. Still, putting “flesh-a-scope” into google image search yields zero results, and a regular google search just leads back to another quote from Variety. (FYI: A google image search for “scanty panties” yields 116 hits, and while some of these are pretty much what you’d expect, you also get…
I told you this was bad news. Didn’t I tell you? Yeah, I told you.
I’m not saying it’s time to start stockpiling spam and twinkies against the apocalypse… there’s time for that yet, plus, twinkies are expensive these days. Still, maybe its time for us all to dust off our long term disaster plans. After all, if civilization ever does collapse, stockpiled food will only take you so far. Eventually you would have to start farming, or master some kind of useful pre-industrial trade like woodcarving, or pottery. (Or prostitution.) But you won’t have time to learn these skills after the collapse, when you’re being chased by flesh-eating mutants, you’re starving, and there’s no electricity, roads, or oddly hypnotic pottery instruction youtube videos set to the melancholy strains of Sigur Ros. Really, by the time there’s any credible threat of apocalypse – and I don’t quite call this food situation a credible threat – it will be too late. So the time to start training for it is now. Worst comes to worst, and the world DOESN’T end? You’ll still have learned how to turn pots. (Or, you know. Tricks.) So it’s really a win-win.