General

New Abraham Lincoln photograph…?

Heard about this a couple of days ago.  Christopher Oakley, a scholar and former Disney animator, was looking at this panoramic photograph of the Gettysburg visit by Abraham Lincoln and various dignitaries:

lincoln

When he zoomed in on the crowds and looked around, he found spotted the “distinctive hawk-like profile of William H. Steward, Lincoln’s secretary of state”.  Knowing President Lincoln was known to be close by his secretary of state during this visit, he found this:

lincoln

Blurry?  Certainly.  Barely visible?  Yes.  But at the same time, clearly distinguishable.  Congratulations, Mr. Oakley!

For the full article (including a video!), you can click here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/25/new-abraham-lincoln-photo_n_3988659.html

Movies

The Philadelphia Experiment (2012) a (mildly) belated review

As you get older, you’re sometimes surprised to see remakes of films you enjoyed in your youth.  Especially films that might be, for the most part, forgotten by many.

Back in 1984, Michael Pare and Nancy Allen starred in The Philadelphia Experiment, a sci-fi romance involving a top secret experiment conducted on a battleship during World War II.  The experiment attempted to create an invisibility cloak around the battleship but instead sent it into the “present” of 1984, where Pare’s time-traveling sailor goes on the run avoiding shadowy government types while romancing Nancy Allen’s character.

It has been many, many years since I’ve seen this 1984 film but I recall having positive feelings about it.  Then, much to my surprise, I found The Philadelphia Experiment was remade and shown on the SyFy network last year!

So, is it worth your while?

If you’re a fan of the original film like I am, you’ll be curious enough to give it a try.  If you do, you may find some good here…though there is plenty of bad as well.

On the plus side, this film does more than simply re-shoot the original film’s script.  There are new ideas presented and while some don’t work very well there are interesting bits here and there.  I especially liked the idea of the WWII battleship appearing in different locations and causing some big problems.

There’s also some fun in seeing Michael Pare appear in this remake, though his character is far from the “hero” of the piece.

BUT…

This is a SyFy original movie and if you’re familiar at all with SyFy original movies, then you know they share one thing in common:  Their budgets are one very small step above being non-existent.  This should be pretty evident in the “special” effects found in the trailer above.  In a movie like this one, which features some pretty crazy things the audience has to accept as happening, you need effects that at the very least look plausible.  There isn’t any “big” effect in the film that doesn’t look like what it is: A cheap computer graphic.

Secondly, and concurrently, the movie’s script is very ambitious and attempts to create a sense of world-wide threat.  Yet in total we have only about eight or so major characters (including a small cameo by Malcolm McDowell…perhaps that’s where the bulk of the budget went!), which again makes one realize this is a film made on a micro-mini-budget.

In the end, I can’t recommend 2012’s The Philadelphia Experiment except to those, like me, who have some nostalgia toward the original and are curious to see this new iteration.  This is a no-budget film with some genuinely clumsy effects and at times amateurish direction (check out the way our heroes get past a military roadblock…its a real howler).

Too bad.  With a more decent budget, this could have been a far better film.

General

Jack the Ripper mystery solved…?

Wouldn’t hold my breath here, but we have another individual -in this case retired homicide detective Trevor Marriott- presenting his evidence for the identity of Jack the Ripper…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/24/jack-the-ripper-solved-investigation-german-sailor_n_3981837.html

It seems every year or three another person comes forward with what they believe is iron-clad, indisputable evidence to who Jack the Ripper was…and we’re often given intriguing bits and pieces of information which never quite add up to as solid a case as we would have hoped…

And I keep reading the theories anyway! 😉

The fact is that the Jack the Ripper case is intriguing as hell and it shouldn’t be a surprise so many people have given it a look (and offered their theory).  Mr. Marriott’s theory is just as good as any of the others, and far more plausible than those implicating assorted figures within England’s Royal sphere, yet the same problem plagues this theory as the others:  1) So much time has passed and all the witnesses and/or suspects to these events are long gone, 2) There is simply very little actual physical evidence to be found, and 3) What evidence there is was collected by a police force that was operating on a level that was primitive by today’s standards.

I’ve noted before that I believe Jack the Ripper was probably someone like Mr. Marriott’s suspect Carl Feigenbaum.  A person with a deep, disturbing level of psychosis who probably came into London from outside (either that or his “work” was done with more finesse before this), did his nasty business, and either left the London area immediately afterwards or was killed or died naturally sometime shortly after the last victim was found.

Other than that, we’ll probably never know….

…which doesn’t mean it isn’t intriguing to offer guesses!

General

Mysterious plane found in lake…

Discovered this report on CNN.com…a fascinating piece:

My guess as to the who/what about the plane relates to what was implied in the report itself:  That the aircraft might have been part of a drug running group and was lost and never reported as such, which explains how an aircraft can be found on the bottom of this lake without any report of missing planes in the vicinity.

Still, love the sonar images…so tantalizing!

Movies

Gone too soon…

A while back I posted an entry regarding the last (and often least) final works of some famous actors (you can read this here).  What follows below is a sobering list of actors who died while filming either a TV show or movie:

http://madamenoire.com/287846/gone-too-soon-actors-who-died-while-filming-a-movie-or-tv-show/

Coincidentally enough, a couple of days ago I reviewed the 1940 Tyrone Power film The Mark of Zorro (read this here).  His death could easily have made the above list as he died of a heart attack in the middle of filming Solomon and Sheba.  Mr. Power had the lead role and, it was reported afterwards, had filmed almost the entire feature before his untimely death.

I read that because the studio stood to gain insurance money from their star’s death and his inability to complete the film, his final work was essentially hidden away and/or destroyed.  Yul Brynner took over Mr. Power’s role and the film was “remade” with him in the lead.  However, Tyrone Power can supposedly still be seen in the movie’s crowd scenes…an eerie reminder of what might have been.

General

Are Jetpacks finally here…?

Is our Jetpack future finally here?  Check it out for yourself:

7000 feet up and a speed of 50 mph?!

Count me out.

I have enough problems standing on the balcony of a tall building looking down at the ground below, so the idea of trusting my life on something gas powered and strapped to my back…something that could malfunction and stop (then what?!)…

Well, as I said, not for me, thank you, though I have to admit it is a cool device!

Computers/Electronics

The History of #- and 6 Other Symbols that Rule Twitter (and the Web)

Fascinating list from Kieth Huston at (or should I say @?) Time magazine concerning the above, a short history of six of the symbols now very commonly used in Twitter and around the web…and how they came to be:

http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/23/the-history-of-and-6-other-symbols-that-rule-twitter-and-the-web/

Not to sound too terribly nerdy, but I especially enjoyed item number 4, the slash (or / ) and what its significance is.

No, I’m not kidding.

If you’re too lazy to click on the link above, here’s the bit I found so intriguing:

In 1996, when Tim Berners-Lee was laying down the ground rules for his new computer network, he declared that website addresses should begin after a double slash, thus: “http://”. He explained that the double slash represented a sort of “root” for all addresses; google.com and time.com are top-level children of that root address, with other levels below them separated by single slashes (“http://time.com/us”). Taking his concept one step further, Berners-Lee gave the example of an imagined interplanetary telephone network—if all Earthly telephone numbers began with a double slash, he said, interplanetary numbers would begin with a triple slash, with the dialing code for Earth or Mars placed between “///” and “//”.

Movies

The Mark of Zorro (1940) a (incredibly) belated review

1 Comment

Saw this film a very long time ago, when I was a child.  Didn’t remember all that much about it, other than perhaps the famous climactic sword fight between Tyrone Power’s Don Diego Vega (aka The Zorro) and Basil Rathbone’s Captain Pasquale, still considered by many the best sword fight ever put to film.

But considering the 1940 version of The Mark of Zorro (itself a “modernization” or remake/reworking of the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks film of the same name, which was a big inspiration for the creation of Batman) is among the earlier examples of “super hero” movies, I was interested in giving it another try…

So, how did this 70 plus year old film fare?

Pretty well indeed.

Most people, I suspect, are at least somewhat familiar with the story of Zorro, even if it may be through parallels with the character of Batman, which we’ll get to momentarily.  The setting is early, Spanish controlled California.  Young Don Diego Vega is in a Spanish school and returns to California to find that his father has been dumped from his Mayoral job and replaced with a man of considerably less virtue.  The Mayor and his right hand man, Captain Pasquale, are heavily taxing the poor citizens and generally running roughshod over the entire county.

Don Diego Vega quickly realizes he needs to do something to rid the territory of these evil characters.  To that end, he sets a plan in motion.  Because few remember him from before he left to Spain, he acts to all those around like a -let’s be blunt here- fey/homosexual pretty boy (though no one comes right out and says he’s “gay”, it is heavily implied!).  But by night, of course, Diego dons his Zorro disguise and mounts his trusty black Stallion and is off fighting the corrupt forces behind power, his ultimate goal to restore the town to its previous ways.

The above paragraph gives you the parallels between Zorro and Batman.  Bruce Wayne is presented not unlike Don Diego Vega, though the heavily implied homosexuality present in the movie isn’t quite as present in the comic book (though you can find it hinted at in some of the very early stories).  Nonetheless, both display the “spoiled party boy” elements.  Moving on, the mask and flowing capes are very similar and the black steed could easily be a proto-Batmobile.  Both characters share a desire to fight corruption as well, although the Zorro’s focus is government corruption versus Batman’s more “street” level crime fighting.

Getting back to the movie, it moves along at a breakneck pace, setting up each situation quickly while presenting the audience with new information.  Don Diego Vega’s decision to a) act fey and b) become the Zorro is never really dealt with in anything approaching a deeper psychological way…he does what he does because that’s what he does.  This is not a “heavy” film in any way, it is quick moving popcorn entertainment.  This extends, it would appear, to the Zorro’s costume as well.  There are a few sequences where Zorro wears his standard mask, one that covers the upper half of his head…while there are also a couple of sequences where he wears a mask that covers the lower half of his head!

 versus 

Why?  Who knows.  The mask inconsistency, like the decision to act fey, is never really addressed in the movie itself.

Regardless, the different masks do not in any way mean the film is a sloppy work.  You get plenty of well created action, adventure, and, the cherry on top of the pie, romance.  Don Diego’s attraction to the lovely Lolita Quintero (Linda Darnell) provides that extra spice to an already great film, as does his relationship with the character’s more wicked aunt (and wife of the corrupt Mayor), Inez Quintero (Gale Sondergaard).

If the film has one fault, it is that the excellent duel between Don Diego Vega and Pasquale, a duel audiences were waiting for from the moment the two characters first laid eyes on each other, happens a little too early into the film.  In fact, it occurs just before the movie’s actual climax, which is a curious and somewhat disappointing choice.  Perhaps Pasquale and Vega should have had two duels, the first before the climax (with Vega in disguise as Zorro) and the second when his identity is exposed.

Ah well, its a small complaint.  Despite its age, The Mark of Zorro is a fun action/adventure film that is well worthy of your time.  Recommended.

Movies

Oblivion (2013) a (mildly) belated review

The ever energetic (39 actor credits since 1981, many if not most of them starring roles…does the guy ever rest!?) Tom Cruise is Jack Harper in the sci-fi action adventure/mindbender Oblivion.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski of Tron: Legacy fame, a film that despite some beautiful visuals, I didn’t like.  Oblivion, in my opinion, features both better visuals and a far, far better story than Tron: Legacy.  But are both elements enough to recommend the film itself?

…yeah…with some reservations.

For much of the first half, Oblivion is a two person drama.  Jack and his companion Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are the last two humans on Earth.  Sixty years before, we are told by Jack in the opening narration, the Earth faced alien invaders that, in the ensuing war, destroyed the Moon before being defeated.  Because of this destruction and subsequent radical change in gravity, Earth’s environment was wrecked and the planet rendered uninhabitable.  The human survivors moved on to a Moon in Saturn and it is Jack and Victoria’s job to watch over massive machines left behind sucking all the water from the planet to make energy to take to those off-world survivors.

With me so far?

Ok, so Jack and Victoria live on this isolated and very elegant “home” and Jack goes out now and again in a cool aircraft to check up on the machines and fix whatever is broken while avoiding the “scabs” left over planet side, apparently alien machines still fighting the war that ended so many years before.

During this section of the film we are also informed that Jack and Victoria have received “memory wipes”, though it is never made clear why this was deemed necessary (one of the film’s many small writing glitches, IMHO).  Nonetheless, Jack starts having vague memories of being with a woman (Olga Kurylenko) in pre-apocalypse New York and on top of the Empire State Building.

How are these memories possible if Earth was destroyed over sixty years before?

As far as the story description, and for the sake of not getting into any spoilers, I’ll stop there.  Suffice it to say, the mystery of Jack’s memory as well as that of the scabs serve to propel the film’s plot along.  The trailer, presented below, does spoil more than a little of these mysteries so if you know nothing at all about the film and want to be surprised, you may want to avoid it.

Having said that, Oblivion starts off and moves along quite well for this first half and a little beyond…well into many of its subsequent revelations.  However, there does come a point where all this plot and information -and mild to large improbabilities- threaten to derail the film.

Without giving too much away these are some of the things that bothered me:  Why is it so difficult for Jack to talk -to actually have a conversation- with Victoria?  Why is she so different from him, memory-wise (Wouldn’t it have been intriguing if she, like him, had some odd memories popping up in her head)?  Why were Jack and Victoria -two people!- even necessary on the planet, given the ultimate revelations?  Toward the film’s climax and conclusion, why was it necessary, other than to create some suspense for the viewers, for Jack to place person X into a cryogenic chamber before flying off?

These are just off the top of my head.  And while there is some damage to the overall film, it isn’t bad enough to invalidate and destroy it.  I do wish the movie could have been simplified rather than made progressively more and more complicated.  At one point, it felt like I was watching a season’s worth of a sci-fi series rather than a movie.

Despite this, I recommend Oblivion.  Just be aware that sometimes less is more.

TV

Lessons of “The X-Files”

Author Alec Nevala-Lee for Salon magazine offers a fascinating article regarding TV shows with long, overarching “stories”…and the perils inherent in doing this:

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/17/lessons_of_the_x_files_the_one_show_every-tv_exec_should_be_watching/

What I found the most interesting about the article can be found in the first few lines:

A television series is a shapeshifter. At birth, it looks fully formed, but its bones and vital organs are dangerously undeveloped, and it’s forced to compete immediately with countless other shows ravening to take its place. To stay alive, it evolves from one week to the next, sometimes radically, but also blindly, so it won’t know for months whether its latest adaptation is a brilliant strategy or a fatal mistake.

Love the above lines and found a lot of truth in them.  Further, it got me thinking about some recent shows with longer story arcs and a term that has been used to disparage such shows when said story arc suffers:  “They’re making it up as they go along.”

Such a term, unfortunately, really did apply to the revamped Battlestar Galactica series and was driven home at the start of each episode, when the title sequence announced that the dreaded Cylons had a “plan”.  Unfortunately by the end of the second season it didn’t appear there was any plan at all.

However, with regard to the notion that “they’re making it up as they go along,” ALL stories are “made up” and fixed and poured over as the many authors involved in them go along.  In the case of TV shows, its silly to think that what is set out by the writers before a single scene is filmed will be an immovable or unchangeable Bible when the time comes to actually film the show.

Star Trek, the original series, began as a pilot that featured only one character who would return to the second pilot and subsequent series, Leonard Nimoy’s Spock…though the Spock of the first pilot episode was considerably more emotional.

Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov -every one of them!- were later additions, some not appearing until well into the series.  As for William Shatner’s Captain Kirk, his first appearance was in the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”.

One of my favorite TV shows, The Wild Wild West, similarly, featured more and more interplay between the main characters and more and more outlandish, pulp inspired action as it went along, versus the far more “straight” pilot episode.

The second season of Lost, perhaps my least favorite season (except for a few interesting episodes here and there), made the bad decision (in my mind) to focus waaaay too much on the survivors of the rear of the fallen aircraft.  By this point, I as a viewer wasn’t interested in following a whole new cast of characters…I wanted to see what was happening to the characters we had grown to love in the first season.  Clearly the writers were trying out different things but even they appeared to realize the whole “tail section survivors” subplot was going nowhere and, by the end of the second season, essentially did away with the entire subplot (not to mention many of the characters!).

In the case of these and almost all other shows, the talent behind and in front of the cameras over time experimented with story lines and realized what worked and, assuming they had success with the series, what didn’t.  Over this same period of time adjustments were made, often on the fly.  In two sections of the article, the author notes the problem and, ironically enough, the resultant success of searching for a way to create a winning formula in The X-Files:

When I first encountered (The X-Files), part of me was irked by its narrative amnesia, in which each case’s incredible events were forgotten by the following week, but it didn’t have much of a choice. Each episode had to stand on its own; the show, always seemingly on the verge of cancellation, had to keep moving or die.

What strikes me now about the first season of “The X-Files” is how relentlessly it kept reinventing itself, and how willing it seemed to try anything that worked.

Again, The X-Files is hardly the first show that has had to creatively tap dance while looking for the ingredients to make the whole thing work and, even more importantly, succeed in an unforgiving marketplace where cancellation lurks behind every corner.

As I said, a fascinating article.  Give it a read when you get a chance!

The Blog of E. R. Torre