Our strange winter (or lack thereof) continues on. I’ve been looking at new PCs. My I7-3770K still runs full steam; at six years old, she’s getting ancient, but she’s still quite the goodie. And I’ve done something I never thought I’d do this month. I’m playing my first console game since my bout with a NES 8 bit system back in 1989. That ended abruptly when I was exposed to a Commodore 64. I procured a bank loan for my first PC (with a whalloping 12 mHz 286 processor) and never looked back.
1. House of Wax on Blu-Ray: I first saw this in its original 3-D grandeur in a stately old movie theater in downtown San Diego, California. I remember seeing it alone and wanting to cling to every cinematic moment. It made me never want to leave the theater. Now, to own this movie for my very own and being able to lose myself in its magic is a testament to why I love movies so much. When I was a kid at the mercy of a rabbit ear antennaed TV festooned with tin foil that pulled in six channels I never dreamed I would someday own movies. Boy, what a movie to own! Vincent Price is nothing less than spectacular in his role as Henry Jarrod, a wax sculptor who loses his museum in a tragic fire in which he is horribly burned. He rebuilds his museum completing his figures by murdering people and covering their corpses with wax. Despite his mad intentions, he’s very much a sympathetic character. The movie uses a 1950s style “Technicolor” type film that looks warm and rich on a big screen, and looks marvelous on a big screen TV as well. The Blu-Ray treatment is well defined. This is a movie well worth adding to your horror collection.
2. Back to the Future III on Blu-Ray: I finally watched the last of this great series. I’d heard it wasn’t as good as the others. (Are sequels and sequels of sequels ever?) But I didn’t think it was bad. If you want bad sequels, watch The Toxic Avenger. There was a lot of love put into this movie, right down to the town of Hill Valley itself. None of it was built up falsefronts. Every building was a standalone building. There’s a line in the film in which Doc Brown doesn’t believe that Ronald Reagan (who was a movie actor in his time) is the current President. Rumor has it during Reagan’s own personal screening of this movie in the White House during his tenure, he laughed so hard at that line he had the reel played back so he could watch it again. Cute. And Bob Gale, the movie’s writer knew they had a hit when the movie was satired on the cover of Mad magazine.
3. 3 Doors Down “The Greatest Hits” on CD: This is a band with members from a town right out of William Faulkner’s fictitious Yoknapatawpha County. Escatawpa is where this band hails from. They were childhood friends who played together. When they released the song “Kryptonite,” they became world renown. I always had a fondness for them, but there were too many songs I didn’t particularly care for to warrant buying a single album. This album is the perfect cure for that. It really does have all of their best songs on it. I admire their belief in God and family, in guns and black and white values. They performed at President Trump’s inauguration and caught a lot of flack for it. They rebounded by saying they were just honoring their values. These are guys who frequently perform for the soldiers in the Middle East.
4. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: Oh, where to start? I got engrossed in this book from the beginning, but somewhat lost my way. David Copperfield is a likeable character, someone I grew to have a real attachment to. But the book is little more than a long series of discourses. The action is simply Copperfield leaving a houseful of people engaged in conversation to ambulate to another houseful of people to talk some more. Where the book grabbed hold of me again and refused to let go was the character development. The zany cast of characters (who can forget Uriah Heep?) is what won me over through to the end. Much like Dickens's venerable Great Expectations, this novel has introduced me to characters I will remember for the rest of my life. Dickens's powers of description are brilliant at times. His descriptions of cold and rainy London and the summertime fields and glens as seen by Copperfield and the description of Copperfield's lonely but cozy sleeping rooms are so real as to invoke a new affiliation with the phrase "virtual reality." I was moved to happy tears in the final page. But then it may have been a moment of catharsis at having finally finished this 950 page novel. (Disclaimer: This was plagiarized from my own review of this novel on my GoodReads.com account.)
5. Red Dead Redemption on PS3: I have preached the sin and abomination of playing console games for years. Of course I started with an original NES 8 bit back in 1989, but after getting the chance to play on a Commodore 64, I ridded myself of my Nintendo and never looked back. Oddly, Rockstar Games released Red Dead Redemption II. What’s a gamer to do? I had never played the first one (which was only released on console.) We had a PlayStation 3 here, so I figured, why not? I bought the Game of the Year Edition for super cheap, and I can’t lie: I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it! I’m only four hours in, but I’m just a recovered outlaw, trying to be a good guy, redeeming myself in the eyes of the law. But in truth, I’m a wild west klutz, I make Don Knotts in The Shakiest Gun in the West look like a superhero.
6. Light
in August by William Faulkner: I’ve
always regarded William Faulkner as the southern country cousin of Ernest
Hemingway and John Steinbeck. He writes about the clay and dirt and the hot
Mississippi sun quite like no other, creating garish and stark word pictures
complete with characters so well described you’d swear they walked out of a
painting onto the pages of his books. He makes up words such as “mileconsuming
chatter,” “manlooking shoes,” and “squatting in a ditchbank,” and contextually,
the words fit right into where Faulkner places them. I’ve only started this
book, but it just feels like a slow easy ride atop a mule wagon on a sultry
summer day, much like the scenes depicted in the book.
8. Conflict: Denied Ops on PC: After only beating six games last year, I thought I’d try to make a jump-start of it this year and go a little faster. Despite being a co-op online game with now dead servers, this game seemed to check off all of the bulletpoints: short (about six hours long), told a semi decent store involving two military “bros,” one a black man from the “’hood” and the other a redneck white guy seemingly raised by alligators in the Louisiana swamps, lots of red barrels to shoot at and crates to open. The Steam reviews are horrible, but at two hours in, I can’t complain too badly. It’s an action game for guys who like action games.
9. The Wrestler on Blu-Ray: This low budget film was a sort of comeback for Hollywood brat packer, Mickey Rourke. The movie depicts a professional wrestler forced into retirement due to health reasons, and finding life outside the ring quite dispiriting. The term “washed up” comes to mind. And Rourke was the perfect guy for this role. You can’t help but feel sorry for him as he struggles in daily life, clinging to his glory days as a famous wrestler. He has an estranged daughter, whose relationship he keeps torpedoing despite his best intentions. His love interest works in a strip club with a “no dating customers policy.” Nothing seems to work out for him, but at the end of the day he remains true to himself. I always thought pro wrestling was fake. As it turns out, not completely. The matches are pre-determined. But the path to that win or loss is worked out by the wrestler’s themselves. And as one wrestler stated in the behind the scenes short, “You can’t fake smashing into a table from the second rope.”
