NFL vs. College Football

Now that the regular season has begun, it’s time to for a sports-oriented blog entry.  I love the NFL...and can’t stand college football.  Here are some of the reasons why:

 1.         Super Bowl v. College Bowls.  The NFL has ONE Super Bowl, preceded by NFC and AFC Championships and a sensible playoff schedule.  On the other hand, there are 32 college bowls and NO playoffs.  That’s as many bowls are there are NFL teams!  Come on.  At least college basketball has the March Madness bracket.  College football is a confusing mess.  Unfortunately the powers that be are too strong and have too much to gain by maintaining the current system and refusing to switch to a playoff system.

 2.         Mascots.  NFL has the Vikings, Cowboys, Giants, etc.  What do we have for college teams?  Terrapins (my school)?  Boilermakers?  Sooners (what’s a sooner?)?  Orangemen?  Gamecocks?  Cornholers – err.. Cornhuskers?  Ok, there are the Wake Forest Demon Deacons and the Duke Blue Devils.  But most of the college teams have pretty lame mascots.

 3.         Uniforms.  Why is it that the top college teams have the dullest uniforms?  Notre Dame – black with a simple gold helmet (at least they’re no longer riding horses – see above).  Penn State – dark blue, white helmet with a stripe (not even player names on the backs of the jerseys).  Ohio State – silver with red stripe on the helmet.  Michigan – lame Wolverine type design.  For every Florida State with a spear there are dozens of others like Nebraska with just an N stencilled on.  The uniforms look like those generic football uniforms you see in ads for TVs or beer.  Only the Cleveland Browns combine a lame name and a lame uniform.  They’re better off renaming themselves the Dawgs and at least putting a paw print on the side of the helmet. 

 4.         Quality.  Only the top college players get picked in the NFL Draft, so the quality throughout the NFL is far higher, played at a far higher level, than college football.  Everything about the NFL is high-tech, professional, and top tier.  College football, by its nature, is a distant second.  And any NFL player will tell you exactly the same thing.

 Finally: GO VIKINGS!

Still Not on DVD

Two movies are STILL not out on DVD.

AC/DC “Let There Be Rock”. I mentioned this film earlier in my blog. This was a film that came out in Paris in 1979, showing one of the band’s last performances with original singer Bon Scott, at the Zenith. This place is up far northeast Paris, and we’ve seen several concerts there, unfortunately not this particular one.
AC/DC were touring their album Highway to Hell, possibly the best of their original Bon Scott albums. By now Brian Johnson has been with the band for 27 years, far longer than Bon Scott, but somehow Bon is the classic singer. The movie not only shows the band in concert – in top form – but also has several interviews with various band members. Bon gets to show his abundant charm, wit, and Scottish accent, even speculating that if there was a war, AC/DC could put on concerts for the troops. Malcolm Young, the rhythm guitarist, kicks a soccer ball around a field. Phil Rudd, the drummer, drives a Porsche 928 around a lake, chased by a biplane. Angus Young, the lead guitarist, even has a few words to say and scribbles a cartoon of himself.
This is one of the better rock movies out there, of a great band, playing a great concert, at the peak of their career, with some stunning extra footage in the middle. WHY is this not on DVD??

Beatles, “The Compleat Beatles”. A fantastic documentary, narrated by Malcolm McDowell, best known for his performance as Alex in the film “A Clockwork Orange.” The band’s history is told from Liverpool, the early days at the Cavern and in Hamburg, the rise of Beatlemania, the transition period of Revolver, the masterpiece Sgt Pepper, and even their breakdown and breakup are well-told. George Martin, the producer, is articulate and eloquent; various other musicians – including Billy Preston and the Beach Boys – give their two cents worth, and the way the whole thing is put together is fantastic, even without any actual interviews with any of the band members themselves. It’s stunning how they make it work even without John, Paul, George or Ringo involved.
We can now see the low-budget monstrosity “Magical Mystery Tour” on DVD (as Monty Python might put it, all the imperfections of the original film are now in crystal digital clarity!!). We can see the extended idiotic music video with great music but a stupid plot, known as “HELP!” on DVD. But when it comes to the best possible documentary on one of the best possible bands....it’s still VHS.
Why, when much lesser product by each band is out on DVD, are these two films still stuck on VHS? It’s oversights like this that force us to keep our VCRs instead of switching over completely to the DVD format. Argggh!!!!!!!!

THX1138 vs. American Graffiti

George Lucas’ first two movies, “THX1138” and “American Graffiti”, before “Star Wars” blew our minds in 1977. I decided to check out the former and revisit the latter.

1. THX 1138 (1971). Taking place eons in the future, in a very clean totalitarian regime – somewhat like 1984 (George Orwell), We (Yevgeni Zamyatin), Anthem (Ayn Rand) and Brave New World (Aldous Huxley). The main character, THX (Robert Duvall) works in a radiation plant, and comes home to his cubicle he shares with a cute number LUH 3417. Their lives, of course, are rigidly controlled: they’re not supposed to have sex, but they are supposed to constantly consume certain prescribed drugs. Eventually some other guy, SEN 5241, manages to get the girl transferred away and himself installed as THX’s roommate.
THX himself isn’t too happy. Although he has some cool holograms and a bizarre counselor, he’s alienated somehow, and ultimately tries to escape. They’re under some sort of mandatory medication, apparently something like the “soma” consumed in Brave New World to keep everyone docile and cooperative; in his case it doesn’t seem to work very well. He’s chased by cops, who look pretty much like the “bad” Terminator in T2 as the motorcycle cop. The plot isn’t very strong and not much happens, though it does have the obligatory “cars driving fast chase” scene every single Lucas film has to include.
The film is less notable in and of itself, as for its obvious inspiration for a much newer one, “The Island”, with Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johannsen. “The Island” picks up where “THX1138” left off.

2. American Graffiti (1973). One night in August or September somewhere in 1962 Modesto, California, various teens have their respective adventures and find themselves. Steve (Ron Howard) (aka Richie Cunningham from “Happy Days” and nowadays a big-time director with much less hair) and Laurie (Cindy Williams) (aka Shirley from “Laverne & Shirley”) break up with the stress of Steve going off to college and Laurie remaining in town. Curt (Richard Dreyfus – very young) – chases after a hot older woman, a blonde in a T-Bird (Suzanne Somers), not an alien spacecraft or a huge shark, briefly hanging out with the Pharoahs, the local gang. Tiger (Charles Martin Smith) (some nerd) borrows Steve’s hot rod to go cruising, picks up a chick, Debby (Candy Clark), and has his own bizarre misadventures. Milner (Paul Le Mat – looking like Chekov from “Star Trek”), the top gearhead with a yellow Ford deuce coupe (see above, with license plate THX 138), picks up underage Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) (later in the show “One Day At A Time” with Valerie Bertinelli...schwing!) while being shadowed by Bob Falfa (Harrison Ford) in a souped up, jet black ’55 Chevy Belair – his early version of the Milennium Falcon, though with Cindy Williams instead of Chewbacca (she’s considerably prettier and more articulate, though I doubt she’d rip anyone’s arms off). Incidentally, that ’55 Belair later showed up, in grey primer with a dual-quad 454, in “Two-Lane Blacktop” driven by James Taylor and Dennis Wilson. Even Wolfman Jack has a role.

In a sense, this film is the movie prequel to the series “Happy Days”. It’s very much like “Dazed and Confused” and others of these films involving aimless high school students drifting around over the couse of a single evening. Between the two of these, I much prefer “Dazed and Confused”, although myself I was far too young to have experienced high school in the 70s, but I remember being a kid at that time. This film is more a reminder of the 50’s nostalgia that was the rage in the US during the 70s, particularly Sha Na Na and “Grease”.

A good start – but Star Wars blew them both away.

Dr Strange

I’m not much into comic books – not DC Comics, not Marvel Comics, Japanese comics, underground comics, or graphic novels, though occasionally one or two of them grab my attention. Spiderman, the Freak Brothers, Alan Moore, etc. are fine but most of the rest leave me flat, including Superman (too powerful) and Batman (now too “dark”, “serious” and pretentious).

My favorite is Dr. Strange. Recently I caught the “movie”, if you can slap that loosely defined label on the animated idiocy they released as Marvel’s entry for this superhero. Even The Punisher got a real movie. It looks like it was done by the same people who gave us those more recent Batman animated cartoons, where Gotham City looks like it’s the 30s, everyone is so serious, etc. It seems to have gone straight to DVD, where it belongs – it sucked.

The early Dr Stranges, back in the 60s, illustrated by Steve Ditko, were by far the best. They were incredibly psychedelic, going off into dozens of crazy, bizarre, screwed-up dimensions. Dormammu looked like some weird, crazy villain, not just a ripoff of the devil in Fantasia’s “Night on Bald Mountain”, as this movie made him out to be. Dr Strange vs. the Devil? Come on.

I can't say he was as cool as Spiderman - Strange took himself too seriously and didn't seem to have a sense of humor. But he did end up on the cover of Pink Floyd's album A Saucerful of Secrets...

Dr. Strange wasn’t just a wizard, casting spells, doing magic stuff around like an overgrown Harry Potter. Any kind of magician can do that. This guy went places. Weird places. And met people. Weird people. Eternity? Dormammu? Countless bizarre alien wizards who all thought they could beat The Sorceror Supreme – including some hot sorceresses? That’s my scene. He rescued entire dimensions, saved the Universe, and protected the Ancient One. He’s the man.