http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index en-us Sun, 04 May 2008 18:24:13 GMT http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index?p=77

This is the best movie I've seen in months. Hausu is an extremely strange and surreal Japanese horror film from 1977, about a bunch of teenaged girls visiting a foreboding old house and encountering all sorts of weird supernatural stuff there. The film is full of amazing cinematography and bizarre, innovative special effects, and has a very, very peculiar tone: the horrific moments that come later on in the film are made all the more disturbing by the fact that the movie never completely loses the sugary-sweet feel that characterizes the giddy first act.

There's also an oddly modern, self-aware quality to it all: in one scene, a girl getting eaten by a grand piano (yes, you read that right) notices her bare, severed legs flailing about and stops to comment about how indecent the sight is -- a little hint from director Nobuhiko Obayashi that he understood exactly how ridiculously over-the-top the scene was (and that's just one scene -- the whole movie is full of crazy stuff like that).

I've honestly never seen anything like it. (Click on over to Teleport City for more on this one).]]> Sun, 04 May 2008 18:24:13 GMT http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index?p=76

A low-budget Robocop/Terminator rip-off released in 1989, R.O.T.O.R. is one of the most fascinating films I've ever seen. 1) The dialogue is completely ridiculous. The film's protagonist, Barrett Coldyron (pronounced "cold-iron") is fond of mixing obviously phony scientific-sounding gibberish with mind-blowingly dumb cornpone sayings, and he does it all with very, very little regard to grammar. The idea that a rational adult could've written this stuff is beyond incredible. 2) The actor who plays Coldyron -- a tall, blond, squinty-eyed fellow -- has his lines inexplicably dubbed over by another actor, to great comedic effect. 3) The story is nonsensical, and frequently meanders off on bizarre tangents. Early on, the film spends like ten minutes on Coldyron's irrelevant morning routine; later, more time is wasted as the film follows, methodically, his trip to the airport to pick up an associate and check her into a hotel (all the while the evil android R.O.T.O.R. is pursuing, Terminator-style, a random woman). 4) R.O.T.O.R himself is a pudgy, pot-bellied guy with a mustache who gets visibly angry whenever he's thwarted and whose "sensor recall" allows him to see back in time. 5) The soundtrack is all synthesized 80's dreck.

Anyway, I've seen it three times now, and it just keeps getting better. Highly recommended. (For more about this amazing film, check out Ken's hilarious review over at the old Jabootu site).]]> Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:47:02 GMT http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index?p=75 this commercial every ten seconds back in the 80's (at least during the shows that I watched). The bastards managed to burn the jingle into my brain so bad that I still remembered the lyrics to the stupid song perfectly after not hearing or thinking about it in almost twenty years. Nice work, Hasbro.]]> Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:52:18 GMT http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index?p=74

This is a pretty wonderful little game. I've never really been a big puzzle fan (particularly when it comes to word problems that involve math -- I'm a math dunce), but the majority of the puzzles in this game are all very clever and fun to work out on the DS's touch screen -- and even better, they're all wrapped up in a cute little graphic adventure about a professor and his assistant exploring a mysterious town (a sort of Saturday-morning-cartoon version of a small, rural European village) full of oddball characters. Very nice, very classy. DS games don't get much better than this.]]> Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:15:35 GMT http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index?p=73

Anyone ever try this stuff? You might not think so, but it's actually quite good: the pieces aren't as sharp and unforgiving as regular Cap'n Crunch, and they turn into a sort of tasty chocolatey paste as you chew them up. The only problems with it are 1) a lack of marshmallows, which would have gone great with it, and 2) the fact that, unlike most other chocolatey cereals (I'm thinking mainly Cocoa Puffs here) it doesn't really turn the milk very chocolatey. Still and all, though, an excellent effort by the Cap'n.]]> Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:11:59 GMT http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index?p=72

I'd vote for him.]]> Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:07:04 GMT http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index?p=70 The Wise Man's Fear, when it comes out in April), but there were some things about it that got on my nerves a little.

The book chronicles the early life of Kvothe, a charismatic, highly intelligent man whose exploits have become legendary throughout the fantasy world he lives in. Now living as an innkeeper in some backwater somewhere, Kvothe consents to tell the story of his life to a scribe who stumbles onto the truth of who he is; it is this story, told by Kvothe in the first-person, that comprises the bulk of the book. Kvothe tells of his early childhood among a group of traveling performers, and of how, following their murder, he found himself living alone for several years on the streets of a huge city called Tarbean. The final, and largest, section of the book details his adventures at the University, a school of magic (among other things) that he eventually manages to enroll in.

The novel's prose is very, very good: smooth, rich, evocative. And Rothfuss, writing as Kvothe, is full of clever little insights. However...

1) The overwrought repartee between Kvothe and his primary love interest, Denna, gets old fast. Rothfuss's great, realistic writing absolutely falls apart whenever they converse.

2) Kvothe is just a little too perfect: good-looking, brilliant (craftsman, musician, linguist, magic-worker), irresistable to women (virtually every female in the book makes moon-eyes at him), and a fantastic performer with enormous stage presence. Uh, sure.

3) The fantasy world the book takes place in is never really developed very much. Some kingdoms and cities are named, and some different languages and ethnic backgrounds occasionally featured, but on the whole, the world struck me as generic and oddly lifeless. Ethshar, Westeros, Barokan, Crotheny, even Xanth...they all blow this place (which, so far as I know, is never really named) out of the water.

4) Though the book is, as I said, well-written, the story itself drags at times; it really only started to grab me around the time Kvothe goes to the University, a couple hundred pages in. Moreover, though he handles them all reasonably deftly, some elements of the novel struck me as more than a little cliched: the murdered family, the street urchin stuff in Tarbean, the magic school...the genre is rife with these sorts of things.]]> Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:57:24 GMT http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index?p=69 Adventures of Philip Marlowe radio shows from the 40's and early 50's are still tons of fun. (They've also got The Shadow and Sam Spade and a bunch of other stuff over there, all for free.)]]> Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:41:24 GMT http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index?p=68 Forensic Files on truTV (formerly Court TV), which, if you haven't seen it, is all about cops solving real-life murders and other crimes with forensic science (and which is narrated by the great Peter Thomas, who can make the most boring, innocuous crap sound really profound and sinister). It's a handy way to kill a half-hour: most of the episodes go by pretty speedily, and truTV airs it like twelve times a day, so you never have to wait very long for one to come on. Perhaps predictably, though, the show has a tendency to overstate the importance of the forensic evidence in some of these cases: they'll spend twenty minutes talking about how some dude in a labcoat ran a high-intensity supermagnographicspectrometer test on a shoeprint or whatever and then mention offhandedly at the end that the suspect was also seen committing the crime by dozens of witnesses, winked at a security camera as he was doing the deed, and gave the police a signed confession. Still a pretty cool show, though.]]> Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:44:38 GMT http://www.trenchman.com/blog/index?p=66 article about the Grossinator, a little handheld device that says things like "I'm gonna make a horrible, putrid fart!" and "Let's all make a revolting, oozing scab!" In the years following my writing about it I've gotten all sorts of e-mails from people (usually women, which is kinda weird) wanting to know where they can buy one for themselves, because they're not really available anymore (Ant bought his at Target back in the early 90's, I think). The best I could do for these poor souls was to tell them to try their luck on eBay, but now, courtesy of Ant and his brother Nick, who spent hours putting it together, I can offer them all something much, much better: a Flash version of the Grossinator that functions more or less exactly like the original. Enjoy!]]> Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:35:24 GMT