Gigli v. Plan 9

Another X v. Y comparison, this time regarding two supposedly horrible films, each notorious for being total turkeys. Which is worse?

 Gigli. Jennifer Lopez plays a lesbian "hitwoman" and Ben Affleck is the oversexed "hitman", both assigned to watch over a mentally challenged younger brother of a Federal prosecutor, really as a hostage to force the US attorney to drop charges against a crook – who is played by...Al Pacino! Throw this one into the "Love at First Hate" category, which we could see a mile away. While Affleck’s character gives us is "you’re the cow, I’m the bull"-shit, Lopez’ gives her own variety of Zen Buddhist lesbian ideology – each being somewhat entertaining on their own terms even if you can’t really take them seriously. Ultimately they figure they can’t knock off the kid, who has grown on them (especially his endearing devotion to "the Baywatch").

 Redeeming factors? Pacino, who basically reprises his Satan character from "The Devil’s Advocate"; Christopher Walken, with a brief part as a local cop (similar to his "Pulp Fiction" role); and Lopez, who is so hot in this film it cancels out her complete nonsense. She reminded me of an Asian chick I used to date, but truth be told, Lopez is 10x hotter than her, particularly in this film. Perhaps the ladies aren’t going to consider that much of a offset, unless they feel the same way about Ben Affleck. He does get to show off some beefcake, if that’s your scene.

However, overall I don’t think the movie is "shit" or "bad", it’s nothing worse than merely mediocre. I’m puzzled why it has such a terrible reputation.

 Plan 9 From Outer Space. The classic Ed Wood sci-fi/horror low budget masterpiece from 1958. Hmm. Aliens from another planet come down in a flying saucer and bring the dead to life! We’ve combined sci-fi and horror in the same movie! Vampira lurks around with an improbably slim waist, huge hands awkwardly probing in front of her, neither scary nor attractive (not much competition to Elvira or Morticia); the vampire guy simply holds his cape in front of his face (hiding the fact that he's a vampire??), and walks at what looks like a snail’s pace (can’t anyone outrun him??); and the zombie police chief simply scowls - "ooh, scary, spooky!" as Count Floyd, the Canadian vampire from SCTV might say.

 It turns out the aliens – who look like humans in Flash Gordon gear - are disturbed that humans have developed the atom bomb, and it’s only a matter of time before these stupid, puny humans ("all humans are vermin in the eyes of Morbo!!!") learn to explode solar atoms, which will create a chain reaction to destroy the sun itself and then the whole universe. Uhh, yeah (in Bill Lumbergh voice). The heroes are a Pentagon officer, the local police detective, and a commercial airline pilot (Will Ferrell for a remake?). They manage to smash up some of the aliens’ machines (which look like vacuum tube computers – space travel with vacuum tube technology, something we expect from the Russians!) and set the flying saucer on fire. Boom! That’s it for the threat. So much for superior alien technology.

 Is this really such a bad film? I suppose I’m the wrong person to judge, as I generally don't like horror films. To me 99% are crap, with only a few such as "The Thing" (Carpenter version) and "The Sixth Sense" being awesome enough to trascend the genre and merit serious consideration as real movies. It certainly wasn’t unwatchable or damnably laughable. I thought it was entertaining, which is what movies are all about, right?

Neither is "worse" because neither was really "bad" after all. What’s the big deal?

 I’ve never felt a movie was so bad that I actually left the movie theater before it was over. The closest to this was "The Thin Red Line", the atrocious WWII movie with Jim Caviezel. It came out at the same time as "Saving Private Ryan" but wasn’t anywhere close to as good. The action sequences weren’t bad at all. What was frustrating was that the film was so damn long. Just when you thought it was over, they’d go back to some stupid sequence of naked kids swimming on some idyllic tropical beach, like this was some deep-ass philosophical bullshit countering the blood and mayhem with which it was alternating. No, it was just plain annoying. I was tempted to leave early, but decided to stick through it.

 A movie I actually returned without finishing was "The Valley", the movie for which Pink Floyd’s album Obscured By Clouds was the soundtrack. Plot? Incredibly stupid. A bunch of idiotic hippies have some stupid gay feather, and they’re looking for more of these feathers, on an island which has a portion which – like Skull Island in "King Kong" – is perpetually covered by clouds and thus only attainable on foot. I got fed up about halfway through, so maybe they did meet a huge ape or some dinosaurs (though I doubt it). No sign of Jessica Lange or anyone as hot as her. I’m as big a Pink Floyd fan as anyone else, and I do love Obscured By Clouds (particularly "Free Four") but this movie was too much to endure. "More" is a far better film – a better plot, even if it does end somewhat abruptly. LSD & heroin on Ibiza? Pot in Paris? And a good soundtrack? This film IS worth checking out.

French Revolution

Ten days after July 4^th comes July 14^th – Bastille Day, which for the French serves the same purpose for their revolution as July 4^th does for ours.  Having mentioned the French one briefly in the prior blog, I’ll go into a bit more detail this time.

 Bastille Day.  When we lived in Paris, Bastille Day meant two things:  fancy military parades along the Champs Elysees in the mornings – with Mirages flying by overhead – and more important, firecrackers!!  This was the one day of the year when we could shoot them off without worrying about being hassled by the gendarmes.  We’d go off to somewhere remote, like Bagatelle, and blow off machine guns, larger ones (not M-80s or dynamite, though), and generally make lots of noise and destruction.  Immense fun.

            During the summer of 1989, 7/14/89 marked the Bicentennial.  The insanity was turned up a few notches: the Champs Elysees was a noisy war zone, and they had later night parades which we watched from the US Embassy, which looks out onto Place de la Concorde.  The Marseillaise was repeated ad infinitum.

 The Marseillaise.  The French national anthem.  I like this more than the “Star Spangled Banner”, which is kind of dull.  “KILL ‘EM ALL!!” – somewhat nastier than “bombs bursting in air”.  There are actually several verses, but typically only the first gets played (except on 7/14/89, when we heard them all).  Here it is:

 French

Allons enfants de la patrie

Le jour de gloire est arrive

Contre nous de la tyrannie

L’etendard sanglant est leve

Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes

Mugir ces feroces soldats?

Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras

Egorger vos vils, vos compagnes!

             Aux armes, citoyens

            Formez vos bataillons

            Marchons, marchons

            Qu’un sang impur

            Abreuve nos sillons

 English

Come children of the country

The day of glory has arrived

Against us tyranny’s

Bloody standard is raised

Hear in our fields

The howling of these ferocious soldiers?

They come into your arms

To cut the throats of your sons and comrades

             To arms, citizens

            Form your battalions

            March, march

            Let impure blood

            Water our furrows

 The Guillotine. But wait, that’s not all.  Beyond even the bloody Marseillaise, the guillotine is the coolest legacy of the French Revolution.  What did we have, aside from Nathan Hale  hanged saying, “I regret I have but one life to give for my country”, or Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death”?  The French had this bad-ass death machine, the Revolutionary Cuisinart.   Placed right smack in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, slicing off heads into the basket, eyes blinking for a few seconds.  Too bad now they just have the boring obelisk Napoleon brought back from Egypt.  Bring it back!!

A Tribute to FNAC

What is FNAC?  One of the largest record stores in Paris.  Now it has locations in Spain and Brazil.  But the ones I’m most familiar with are the locations at Wagram and Les Halles, Paris.

 When I grew up in the US in the 70s, there was no Tower Records, no Virgin Records, no Target or Wal-Mart.  You could get music at K-Mart or Sears, but most likely you bought it at a small record store in a mall (Sam Goody or Kemp Mill Records).  The first two records we bought were Sha Na Na (me) and KISS Hotter Than Hell (my brother) at a small shop in Gaithersburg.  This was back when the stores stocked vinyl, cassettes, and 8-tracks.  But as a kid I wasn’t buying records, I couldn’t drive around, and my musical tastes were obviously immature:  Sha Na Na and the Beach Boys, that was it.

 Then we moved to Paris, France in January 1979.  I started growing up, becoming a teenager, and developing a taste for music and an insatiable desire for it – which continues to this day.  I quickly found out where the record stores were and how they were set up.

 Paris has a few small shops, but they had poor selections and high prices.  They obviously couldn’t compete with FNAC, the huge chain.  I was most familiar with the branch on Ave. Wagram, just a few blocks from the Etoile, but I’d also been to the Les Halles store a few times (where I bought The White Album on CD) and the Montparnasse store once.  That one was out of the way on the Left Bank, whereas the Wagram store was pretty much in my backyard.  In fact, it was on my way home from school where the late bus dropped us off.

I’d keep my lunch down to a Coke and fries at the school cafeteria (maybe a Raider – aka Twix – bar for dessert) and save the rest of the money to buy records.

 FNAC also sold concert tickets.  They posted the shows on a whiteboard in marker, and the tickets were all general admission.  They tore the tickets off a booklet, and rather than the plain generic blue/white ticket you get from Ticketmaster, these were in full color with the album cover.  

 FNAC did have some realistic competition.  A store called Nuggets, off George V, was fairly large.  The window display showed Iron Maiden and Killers, the first time I’d been exposed to that band.  But my shopping at this store was primary focused on getting as many AC/DC albums as I could: High Voltage, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Let There Be Rock, and Powerage (we got Highway to Hell and Back in Black for Christmas, and found If You Want Blood (You Got It) at the PX in Germany).  For Those About To Rock hadn’t come out yet.

 Another competitor was Bazar Hotel de Ville (BHV, pronounced “Bay Osh Vay”), a large department store next to... the Hotel de Ville (east side of Right Bank) with a huge record department.  I got my first Deep Purple album, Deepest Purple, on vinyl there.  I knew I wanted “Smoke on the Water” but also wanted as many other songs as possible, which is why I didn’t get Machine Head to start off with.

 Much later, about the time I was in college and coming back on semester break, Virgin Records opened a store on the Champs Elysees.  The store was about as large as FNAC and equally stocked and priced.  They were close enough together (within walking distance).  When I’d wake up from jet lag on returning to Paris, the first place I’d walk to was here.  I’d even browse through and come up with a “shopping” list to compare notes with my friend Ken about which import versions to get.

 A fourth, and unlikely, competitor, was Uncle Sam.  The Army-Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) runs the Post Exchanges (PXs) at various US military bases.  We went to the base at SHAPE, Belgium, as it was closest to Paris.  Normally you don’t expect a PX to have anything close to a decent selection, but somehow, every now and then, you’d find something really special.  I got Sad Wings of Destiny and Sin After Sin (Judas Priest) there – and got Master of Reality (Black Sabbath) on tape at the PX at Henderson Hall, a Marine base next to Arlington Cemetary.

 RIP Tower Records.  While I’m on the topic, I should give this issue a mention.  As a fan of a wide variety of obscure music – which you WON’T find at Sam Goody, FYE, or Best Buy – I was particularly addicted to Tower Records.  Bar none, the top place to find Hawkwind CDs, at least before Amazon.com rolled around.  Whoever did the buying at the Tyson’s store was a trooper.  I snagged the first Hawkwind CD (self-titled) and Space Ritual there, among many other fantastic finds.  In fact, it was so good I barely missed buying records overseas. 

 Online buying.  Amazon.com of course, but also Allthatsheavy.com (the Stoner Rock store), and the King Crimson website is a great source for their own music.  I still go to Best Buy and Borders occasionally, but for every CD I buy in the store, I probably buy 3-4 online.

 But for me it all started with FNAC in Paris.  It was living there that I got into AC/DC, heavy metal, and also started learning to play guitar.  FNAC was very much an important part of my life growing up in Paris.

P.S. 2019.  Fall of 2017 I went back to Paris for the first time since leaving there in August 1990.  You can bet I went to FNAC again - though the locations are slightly different.  Ample supply of CDs AND vinyl.  (Homer drooling)...

American Revolution

July 4^th again!  Last year I discussed the Grateful Dead.  This time I’ll discuss the American Revolution and other topics in a random fashion.

 When it comes to Cuba, for example, Che Guevara seems to get more credit than Fidel Castro.  At least with our own revolution, America gets it right.  George Washington, the man who led our forces to victory and by far the most important figure in our revolution, gets the top billing he deserves:  our capital city named after him, with an obelisk in his name; the state containing Seattle is named after him; two colleges; the $1 bill; the quarter; and lots more. 

 Viewed in perspective, the American Revolution is remarkable:

1.         A ragtag army managed to defeat, in conventional warfare, the redcoated armies of the world’s largest and most powerful country at the time Great Britain.  A colony defeating its mother country in battle?  Amazing. Granted, we had some help from France, but the French alone could not have done it, and would not have intervened had we not been a winning proposition.

2.         After finishing up the war, the Founding Fathers established a Constitution AND a stable democracy.  As history shows, it’s fairly easy to get rid of a dictator; imposing something close to order and stability afterwards is quite another story (we have some VERY recent history to show us that...).  Let’s compare two other major revolutions:

            A.         French Revolution (1789).  After some lip service to “liberty, equality, fraternity”, they set up a guillotine in what is now Place de la Concorde and began lopping off heads.  Not only the royal family (King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette) but each other’s!  The Terror ended up devouring its own – Danton and Robespierre themselves became victims.  Eventually the French ended up with an emperor, Napoleon, and after some proud victories, with a comeback tour by Napoleon, they wound up with defeat; then Louis Phillippe and  Louis Napoleon (aka Napoleon III).  In other words, they had to wait until 1872 or so to finally get a stable republic.

            B.         Russian Revolution (1917).  The first one, led by Kerensky, only served to depose the Tsar but keep the war going on.  In November the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, took over in St Petersburg; a civil war lasted until 1922; and from 1922 to 1989 the Russians had to endure under a totalitarian dictatorship, induding those particularly nasty years under Stalin.  Like the French, the Bolsheviks couldn’t resist brutally murdering not only the Romanovs but each other. 

 Celebrate July 4^th?  Some argue that the blacks in this country have little reason to celebrate July 4^th, because the American Revolution – and the establishment of democracy thereafter – did not immediately abolish slavery.  This sounds a little harsh.  Never mind that they had to construct an entire democratic government out of thin air, including a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and set the whole thing up so it would (A) have enough power to do anything and protect itself from anarchy and tyranny, of the minority AND the majority; (B) not be so powerful that we’d wind up with a dictator; and (C) have an amendment system so it could be peacefully changed without a violent, bloody revolution.  Never mind t hat they had to sell this whole package deal to all 13 colonies and satisfy slaveowners down south as well as bankers in Philadelphia, New York and Boston.  Never mind that at that point, America was still an agricultural country which had yet to experience its own Industrial Revolution.  Never mind that even England had to wait until 1833 to abolish slavery.  Never mind that it took us a Civil War from 1861-65 to achieve this goal years later.  Slamming the Founding Fathers for not abolishing slavery in 1787 sounds about as logical as slamming Wilbur and Orville Wright for not launching a jet aircraft and breaking the sound barrier at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.

 American Wars.  I did some number crunching and came to a remarkable conclusion.   If you add up the days of prolonged hostilities (notwithstanding when a peace treaty formally ended the war) of each of the wars the US has been in, and divide the number of total deaths by that, we end up with not only some idea of how bloody these conflicts were, but you can also divide them into three categories of intensity of conflict:

A.  Low level.  The Revolutionary War (1775-81), War of 1812 (1812-1815), Gulf War (1990-91), and current Iraqi War (2003-2007): 2 deaths per day.

B.  Mid-level.  Mexican War (1846-48), Spanish-American War (1898), Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1965-72): a range from 20-33 deaths per day.

C.  High-level.  the big three: WWI (1917-18): 200/day; WWII (1941-45): 300/day; and the biggest by far, the Civil War (1861-65): 427/day.  Civil War casualties (well over 600,000) practically equal all the rest combined, with the next two being WWII (407,316) and WWI (116,708).  

            This should put it in perspective when the “body count” comes back from Iraq.  We aren’t even CLOSE to Vietnam – in total deaths OR intensity.  IF the situation can be stabilized and a strong, non-Islamic sickwad regime emerges, YES it will have been worthwhile.