The Real Utility of the Internet

Posted by Tony @ 9:45:00 am |

Thursday, January 27, 2005

As the opening guitar licks of Smells Like Teen Spirit came blasting through the headset as I started on mile 4 this morning, two thoughts struck me pretty much simultaneously:

The first was that if someone were to ask me what the most important song of the 90's was, I would without hesitation reply with Smells Like Teen Spirit. Maybe not my favorite song or the best song but without thinking too much about the definition of "important song", I'd name it without a second thought. I can't think of another decade that I would have that easy a time. Oh, I'd probably go for Love Me Do or Ticket to Ride for the 60's, the first because it sort of served notice or the second as it pretty much cemented the Beatles as the most important band in the world, but if you went with Like A Rolling Stone I wouldn't argue. If you're going to pick an arbitrary time period like a decade, the most important song almost has to come out early on and my obvious choices for the 90s and the 60s fit that criterion. I don't as strongly about the 70s or 80s, either. I dunno, Stairway to Heaven ('71) and London Calling ('80) maybe? I could probably make as good a case for Thriller or Like a Virgin as the most important song of the 80s if I really tried. But nothing springs to mind to knock Nirvana off their perch in the 90s.

Oh, the second thing that I thought was that Smells Like Nirvana must be the closest to the original song that Weird Al has ever gotten. I've got both on my current running mix and I have to really think to figure out which song it is that's coming on. Basically Weird Al's parody is just slightly faster.

Now I'm mumblin' and I'm screamin'

And I don't know what I'm singin'

Crank the volume, ears are bleedin'

I still don't know what I'm singin'

We're so loud and incoherent

Boy, this oughta bug your parents

Yeah!

*belch*

poing!

Monday, January 24, 2005

Spent the weekend pretty much as a couch potato, which is how I spent most weekends the first 30 or so years of my life. Couch potato-ing, though, is a sport that I've not practiced much lately and it left me a little stiff in the joints and somewhat unsatisfied. Might have been due to the fact that I really didn't have a favorite in either of the NFL conference finals, nor were any of them teams I hate. OK, so I have no love for the Iggles, but how can you not like Donovan McNabb? So I was just hoping for close games and didn't really get that either, although the Falcons did give it a go there for awhile. Even the Carolina win over Miami was somehow uninspiring - despite the lopsided score, it was almost as sloppy as the Clemson win and got Coach Williams so worked up he wouldn't even look at the team during one timeout. I think he was afraid he was going to strangle them all. After the loss to Wake and ugly wins over the Tigers and Miami, it's a good thing we've got a week off before the next game, but man are the players going to do some running this week! I do ask one favor of the TV announcers - we've all heard by now about how maladjusted Rashad McCants supposedly was last year and how much better his attitude is now, so give it a rest. Talk about what incredible defense he's been playing the last few games instead - that's much more important.

One oddly bright spot this weekend was the premier of "Numb3rs" on CBS last night. I know it's already getting ripped apart on a number of websites, but look - I was a math major. Even a feeble attempt to have a math geek as the star of a show is something I can get behind. So what if this was really all about statistical modeling rather than real math and so what if the whole story was incredibly obvious - I'm assuming that was all just to introduce the characters to us. There's nothing else on TV that isn't a sporting event that I'm watching regularly now, so I'll give it a try until they can it after 8 or 10 episodes as they inevitably will. I agree with one defender of the show who pointed out that the statement about the appearance of clusters in a truly random series is a bit of mathematical knowledge that most people wouldn't have thought of but that they can understand - if the show has no more than one of those per episode, it'll still be a very cool thing. Math rocks! Or to quote Heinlein, "Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house." And I kinda question the latter. Oh, and it stars the guy that played Bernard in "The Santa Clause" and has Natalie from "SportsNight" as a regular, so of course it's cool! But ten episodes tops before it becomes history.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

A few years ago, late on Friday afternoons when I was waiting for the week to end and hoping the phone wouldn't ring, I'd take a few minutes to catch up with Corona Productions Coming Attractions website - at the time the best single movie site to find on-set scoops, rumors, early screener reviews, etc. It hasn't been nearly as good since Cinescape took it over, so I've had to search a little further to get the scoop. Sites like Comics2Film and Harry Knowles' Ain't It Cool? are pretty good, but I miss the old Corona site.

This past Friday I chose to poke around the Apple trailers site and made the following observations (I'm not hyperlinking them as all of these are on the Apple site):

Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to do a new Pink Panther movie? With Steve Martin no less. Martin was a comic genius until sometime right after The Jerk, at which point he stopped being funny altogether. He was quite good in Leap of Faith, but as an actor, not a comedian. This is a terrible, terrible idea and the trailer bears that out. Wretched.

On the other hand, there's been talk of a Bewitched movie for years and the one that's coming out appears to have the twist that it's about making a movie of Bewitched in which they've unknowingly cast a real witch as Sam. Has possibilities. Nicole Kidman as the actress playing Samantha works for me and I'd be hardpressed to imagine a better Endora than Shirley MacLaine. Amy Sedaris as Gladys Kravitz? Brilliant. And I'll be extremely disappointed if halfway through the movie they don't substitute Kevin Nealon in for Will Ferrell as Darrin without anyone remarking on it.

Not all comic book movies are being produced from Marvel or DC comics and my winner for best comic adaptation trailer was not Fantastic Four or Batman Begins but Frank Miller's Sin City and what a damn cast! Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Mickey Rourke's 14th comeback, Rosario Dawson and directed by Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Once Upon a Time in Mexico) - sweet! If the movie looks half as good as the trailer it will rock hard. There are comics that I know I should read and for some reason don't start picking them up until too far into the story - Sin City is one of them and Hellblazer (the origin of Constantine) is another. The trailer for Constantine looks pretty good - I'm neither a huge fan of Keanu Reeves or one of those people that hates him and I like Rachel Weisz quite a bit so the casting is fine with me. Looks like it could be a winner at least on a par with other non-huge budget comic movies like Hellboy or Bulletproof Monk. And speaking of the Fantastic Four, now that I've seen the trailer I still want to know what the fuck possessed them to cast Jessica Alba as Sue Storm - just doesn't work for me at all.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory looks like you'd expect from Tim Burton - I'm not one of those that has a lot of emotion invested in the Gene Wilder version and the combo of Burton and Depp is unbeatable, so I'm sure I'll dig it. I know absolutely nothing about the Spielberg/Cruise War of the Worlds other than it's happening - if it's Spielberg at least it probably won't suck. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trailer is really just teaser at this point (I see Sam Rockwell more as Ford Prefect than Zaphod, but I'm sure he'll make it work. On the other hand, Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast is casting genius.). And for Dad and his Sandra Bullock thing, Miss Congeniality 2 looks like it could be funnier than the first one.

So, gotta save up the pennies for the cinema this year...