In the past month, sales are up! I suspect that due to The Force Awakens, my Imperial Navy Admiral T-shirt/Polo design is getting some extra attention. But at the same time, the "There are Four Lights" T-shirt has also had more sales than usual too.
As one of my many artsy sidelines, I've been tinkering over the last few years with some T-shirt designs on Spreadshirt. It's actually a rather interesting challenge to create fair use/dealing designs that still manage to play with pop culture memes and make me some pocket money too.
In the past month, sales are up! I suspect that due to The Force Awakens, my Imperial Navy Admiral T-shirt/Polo design is getting some extra attention. But at the same time, the "There are Four Lights" T-shirt has also had more sales than usual too.
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Apollo Shat: Some Thoughts on Atlas Shrugged II, and Why Robert Heinlein Kicks Ayn Rand's Ass9/4/2012 When I got a screener copy of Atlas Shrugged, Part I (2011), some months back, I didn't get around to blogging about it because it was just plain bad: B-movie cheapness with no real improvement on the absurdities of the source novel. Unlike The Lord of the Rings, to which Atlas Shrugged is often compared in jesting reference to its defective, naive worldview, the filmmakers clearly lacked the wit to do a "faithful" adaptation that nevertheless fixed some of the sillier plot lines. So while its lean, 90-minute running time made for some surreal viewing, Atlas Shrugged didn't quite get to the campiness of, say, The Room, and thereby warrant mention on that front.
And yet, with the nomination of Paul Ryan, self-professed Ayn Rand buff, for Vice-President of the United States, Rand's Objectivism is back in the news. What no one seems to have noticed is that the VP pick is a big boost for the producers of Atlas Shrugged, Part II, scheduled for release this October. Anyone can read between the lines and see that the Atlas Shrugged series was in trouble: the sequel will have (with the exception of the producers who hold the rights) a completely new cast and crew. Good luck with that. But instead of beating up on Atlas Shrugged (aspects of which you can read about here, here, and here), I want to consider why the novel's worldview is so seductive to young, naive minds in the same way that LOTR often is. If you don't know the old joke already, it goes something like this: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, concerns hobbits." Academic commitments have kept me from posting of late, but the low-res DVD screeners of new movies keep piling up. So I just watched Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012) the other day, and it was one of the more interesting new movies I've come across lately; some of the interest comes from its unoriginality, but some from its innovations.
Chronicle is about three high school kids who come across some kind of mysterious artifact/meteorite and gain telekinetic powers. At first they use their abilities for kicks and pranks, like playing catch at 30,000 feet. But the least-popular kid, Andrew (Dane DeHann), becomes more alienated and convinced of his superiority. After Andrew kills Steve (Michael B. Jordan), one of the other two super-powered teens, the last one, Matt (Alex Russell) -- who argues that they need to set rules for how to use their new abilities -- must confront Andrew. All this is told via faux-video camera footage: Andrew is a budding videographer, as is Matt's girlfriend, Casey, and they "chronicle" the film's diegesis. Let's get the bad news out of the way first. The plot sounds a lot like the setup to a Stan Lee Marvel Comics series from the mid-1960s, a fact you could probably glean from the promotional material around the movie alone. And yes, Chronicle is pretty much X-Men meets Carrie. But perhaps its real progenitor is the second Star Trek pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (1965). A schlager-singer in a nightclub scene from Das Boot (1981). The schlager arose as a specifically German musical genre in the mid-19th century, out of arias from operas and operettas. Originally simply a "hit song", the term originated from "Viennese retail jargon," according to Brian Currid's A National Acoustics, presumably as a kind of best-selling sheet music. While there had already been a long tradition of opera in the various German-speaking countries, it must be remembered that until the 19th century, Italian had been the language of opera. Thus the schlager coincided not only with a rise in commercialism and a bourgeois music-buying (and at-home playing) public, but it also coincided with the rise of nationalism, especially expressed in the unification of Germany in 1871. The schlager would reach its peak in the first half of the 20th century. By the end of WWI, the schlager was seen as a specific (German) genre, although individual schlager were quite diverse musically. The variety, cabaret and revue shows popular at the time became the "home" of the schlager during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This coincided with the advent of film and radio, in which media the club shows were routinely featured. Indeed, schlager would be caught up in the rubric of "mass production." After the German defeat in WWII, schlager survived, in part because of the genre's mutability. As Sunka Simon points out in "Der Vord're Orient: Colonial Imagery in Popular Postwar German Schlager", schlager offered a nostalgic escape to Der Vordere Orient (the "near east"), which often didn't go much farther than vacation spots in Italy or Spain (sometimes Mexico); at the same time, schlager re-purposings of Native American imagery allowed younger Germans to, as Simon asserts, invest such portrayals "of the noble Indian with the hope for an ecologically based humanism of tolerance, [and] singlehandedly root for the underdog in a world order ruled by US economic and military power and reinvigorate one's sense of teutonic superiority via Old Shatterhand's [Karl May] exploits" (92). Be thankful the title of this post wasn't "Ape-ocalypse Now." But seriously, in this Blu-ray review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I want to focus on the Andy Serkis factor for a number of reasons: 1. When Fox sends me review copies of first-run movies, they show up at least a few days after the release – that means no timely scoops for yours truly. 2. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is totally mediocre plot-wise – no surprises, and a lot of clichés. Scientist recklessly experimenting with wonder drug for personal reasons? Check! Greedy big pharma guy who gets his comeuppance? Check! (He also, incidentally, wins the stupid line award: "This is a business, not a petting zoo!" Someone please tell the writers that a petting zoo is a business) Predictable ape revolt/killer virus outbreak? Check and check! Which brings us to ... Once again, thanks to the folks at 20th Century Fox, I've gotten an advance look at a direct-to-video movie sequel. It's the latest opus from notorious schlockmeister Uwe Boll, called In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds. While the original In the Name of the King had some quasi-A-list stars such as Jason Statham and Ray Liotta, all Two Worlds has going for it is Dolph Lundgren. He plays Granger, an ex-military type who, to atone for some mission or other in which all his buddies died, now teaches karate to underprivileged Vancouver kids. And then he's thrown back in time to the middle ages, of course! To fulfil some prophecy, no less! It should be clear from my snarky tone that this is a bad film. Granted, it wasn't as bad as I had feared -- Lundgren has a goofy charm, which he hasn't always had a chance to show in other movies, and it helps keep things moving. And ITNOTK 2 at least isn't over-long. But it's very low budget and has a bizarrely bad script; not the least of its sins is that its concept is a total, soulless rip-off of Army of Darkness. Ah, the tribulations of the part-time culturenaut. Twentieth Century Fox is too greedy to send me a review copy of Star Wars on Blu-Ray, but they'll send out a DVD of the direct-to-video slasher pic Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings. "I think we took a wrong turn!" (For those who don't know, that's a quote from the fourth episode of the superior franchise.) So how is the latest instalment of what is now the malatropic tetralogy? Well, let's just say that coming up with the term "malatropic tetralogy" was the most fun I had watching this movie. Maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but the ill-thought-out details kept bugging me: "I really doubt that motor has enough torque to pull that guy's limbs off," I thought to myself at one point, while eating my dinner no less. Or: "How can that guy still be screaming? He would've gone into shock a long time ago." And so on. The plot, such as it is, concerns the cliché group of co-eds taking a "wrong turn" on the way to their party cabin, and stumbling across an abandoned sanatorium in the middle of a snowstorm. Of course, it's not that abandoned, as it houses the charming, grunting trio of One-Eye, Three Finger, and Saw-Tooth, inbred cannibal brothers who are the villains of the series. Wrong Turn 4 is a prequel, as they were killed off in instalment number 3. But if you cared, you already knew that. X-Men 1960s nostalgia gives us vertigo X-Men: First Class is the second prequel to the X-Men trilogy, going back to the beginning of the friendship between Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr (aka Professor X and Magneto). It's a serviceable film, but might be confusing to the uninitiated, especially since it doesn't quite keep to continuity with the other films. Like the other X-films, there are plenty of second-string mutants to keep track of. But the complex relationship between Xavier and Magneto has always been the core of the franchise (much like Peter Parker's mundane problems in Spider-Man, or Bruce Wayne's angst in Batman), and First Class's strength is that it focuses on that. The main action occurs in the early 1960s, in events leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is perfectly logical, given Magneto's childhood as a concentration camp survivor, and it dovetails neatly with the (real-world) historical debut of the Xavier and company in 1963's X-Men #1. It would have been nice to be a little more accurate in the details, however -- for example, the Soviet Union is always referred to as Russia in the movie, even when referred to in dopey subtitles like "Russian Military Retreat." First Class is very much of the present time in its setting, however, since there is a spate of 1960s-themed shows and movies lately, viz. Mad Men, The Playboy Club, Pan Am, and so on. It channels the spy-fi aesthetic of the early Bond films well without veering too much into Austin Powers-style farce, though it's not quite as sophisticated-and-at-the-same-time-irrepressibly-1960s as The Prisoner. Then again, what is? What's funny about all this sixties throwback stuff is that in other ways, the Blu-Ray of X-Men: First Class is right on the technological cutting edge: the bonus features are typical of current extra "value" that costs nothing for the studio and only requires you to consent to tracking via the corporate equivalent of Cerebro. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the 2003 film directed by Peter Weir, synthesizes many adventures from Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels.
Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin, the series' protagonists, are amateur musicians. In keeping with the film's period detail, Master and Commander's soundtrack features many pieces whose composers are also mentioned prominently in the novels. |
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