Monday, June 25, 2007

Good Shoes

I went over the week end and got the most comfortable dress-casual shoes I could find, so if I have to walk picket lines next week I can do it without killing my feet. It looks like a strike might happen; there has been little change in the negotiations by the administration. (There is of course plenty of time for them to make some reasonable offer, but I'm losing faith at this point.) Who knows what craziness will ensue from the weekend onward. Stay tuned.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Worst. Movie. Ever.

I've been participating in the League of Dubious Film run by friends this summer. The first I saw with them was BeastMaster, which I have no objections to because, hey, Marc Singer in a loin cloth. (Interestingly, we discovered that there are parts of this movie no one had ever seen before because we'd all watched it on TV, and TV usually cuts out shots which include boobies, for example.)

But the second movie was something called Zardoz, starring (believe it or not) Sean Connery in an orange diaper with bandoliers. He's a member of the "Brutals", one of two divisions of the future human race. He's one of the Brutals who is employed by a floating stone head called Zardoz to exterminate as many of the rest of the Brutals as possible, until he decides to stow away in the head and meets the "Eternals" who live forever in the Vortex. The Eternals are apparently very advanced and psychic (or perhaps just prone to weird convulsions; it's hard to tell) but apparently have lost the technology from our time which allows women to keep their tops on. (There does seem to be a common boobie theme in many bad movies. I keep thinking of Joe Bob Briggs.) The immortal line from the beginning of the movie is the stone head roaring "The Gun is Good! The P*nis is Evil!" This lead someone to hypothesize early on that it was a lesbian movie, but we decided after watching for a while it most definitely was not. I finally decided it must have been made by fundamentalist Christians, because while they say it's evil, they obviously can't stop thinking about it for ten minutes.

But I have to give a warning here: The movie is much worse than it sounds. It could easily have been edited down by at least an hour and have lost nothing (except perhaps all the trippy drug related sequences with flashing lights and disjointed sounds and clips). The floating stone head takes up far too little screen time. There are no other lines which compare with the "Gun is Good!" line. The only point to the movie (although poorly made) is that humans shouldn't live forever. (Or perhaps it just wants to communicate that women have boobies, which was a better made point.) It's a truly hideous experience which no one should have to sit through. And yet amazingly, any film, no matter how bad, has its adherents. There are actually crazy people who think this is the greatest science fiction movie ever made.

That said, there are apparently movies that people have found more unpleasant to sit through. I've gotten some amusement out of reading through some of the reviews on BadMovies.org, which gives Zardoz three "droplets". (I think they're slime drops, but I'm not sure.) That ranks it as a middling bad movie. Some movies get only one (described as "A bad movie, even for me"), or a "skull" (described as "This is going to hurt, lots"). Personally I'm intrigued by the five droplet movies, such as Drunken Wu Tang, which is a Kung Fu flick featuring a watermelon monster. Check out the site; it has pictures.

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Updates

A few quick updates:
  • Regarding my post Pennsylvania Registration, Take II: Apparently, Pennsylvania does send out registration renewals; they just don't send them to me.
  • Promoted from comments on my post "50 Years of Sitcoms": Obie Ben Ken Obie says
    A fair number of sitcom plots go back to the Roman comedians Plautus and Terence, which had their own stock characters (clever slave, clueless master, oaf) and situations.
    Well there you have it. Those clever buggers. (Although it still leaves unanswered who they may have stolen from. The lack of written language if you go back far enough is a real pain.)
  • I spent part of yesterday wrestling with air conditioners. I've added a second unit to the back bedroom and I'm going to see if these two somewhat overpowered units upstairs will take care of the whole apartment or not. Unfortunately the larger one I put into my bedroom is a bit noisier than the old one.
  • I've been spending time getting ready for my summer classes, although not nearly as much as I wish I had. Classes start Monday. I'm really not sure how I'm getting through all the material in one of the classes in the time allotted. I also have to say I think having a four hour class in a summer session by meeting three hours a day, four days a week for five weeks is a terrible idea. I can't imagine how any student could end up learning anything.