Tag Archives: Heavy Metal
Van Halen
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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Magazine Rack, Nostalgic Obsessions, Thousand Listen Club, Worst Of All
Cheap Trick
Whatever happened to all this season’s
Losers of the year
Every time I got to thinking
Where’d they disappear
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Filed under Animation Analysis, Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Idiot's Delight, Movies You Missed, Nostalgic Obsessions, Saturday Movie Matinee, Thousand Listen Club, Unfairly Maligned, Worst Of All
The Joke Shop
Somehow, in 1987, I convinced my father to drive me to a joke shop in Paterson, New Jersey.
In the back, there’s a kiddie pool. JOKES, PEOPLE! JOKES!
The name of the place escapes me; it was unremarkable, something like “[X] Joke & Novelty”. Three years later, hunting for liquor and without proper ID, my friends and I were chased away from this very same area by a man swinging a chain over his head. Alongside Newark and Camden, Paterson is one of Jersey’s finest hellholes.
So getting my dad to drive me out there for gag items was quite the coup. I wanted a realistic fake faucet that could be attached to the forehead. I got much, much more. Continue reading
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Ah Leia Akbar
Carrie Fisher, the beloved actress who played the role of Princess Leia Organa in Star Wars, is no longer alive. You’re welcome for the update, recently-awakened coma victim.
There is literally nothing I can say about this. Literally; even praise will be feted as heresy. Legendary comedian Steve Martin, who knew Fisher, dared to tweet that she was beautiful when he met her, and of course the virtue-signalers can’t have that.
This is a gift from the man who made The Jerk and wrote Picasso at the Lapin Agile, you philistines.
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Metallica
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1941: The Illustrated Story
1941 is a not-very-good comedy from 1979, directed by a young Steven Spielberg. It has an all-star cast; John Belushi, Robert Stack, Slim Pickens, Ned Beatty, and Christopher Lee, just to name a few. The score, from the dependable John Williams, is rousing and bombastic, with a great send-up of Glenn Miller that plays before a “zoot-suit riot”. The movie is a farce about a small California town that descends into chaos when a Japanese sub appears off the coast, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The destruction effects, and Slim Pickens faking a forceful shit by chucking a boot in a toilet, greatly endeared 1941 to me as a boy, to the point where I drove my dad nuts with it. He knew it was a stupid, leaden bomb. I saw Dan Aykroyd with nylon hose on his head and oranges in his eyes screaming “I’m a bug”, and I lost my mind. Then I tried it myself one day, and I almost lost my eyesight. Continue reading
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Animation Analysis: Heavy Metal
When analyzing or criticizing animated feature films, it’s important to keep three factors in mind:
- The talent
- The resources
- The date of production and release
Production designer: the late great Michael Gross, who gave you National Lampoon Comics and the Ghostbusters logo (for a movie Ivan Reitman directed that you might have heard of).
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The Glory Of GWAR
Gwar, often styled as GWAR, is an American heavy metal band formed in Richmond, Virginia, United States, in 1984, composed of and operated by a frequently rotating line-up of musicians, artists and filmmakers collectively known as Slave Pit Inc. [Wikipedia]
- After seeing GWAR in 1991, my freshman buddy Chris ran into the cafeteria to meet us the following morning. He bugged out his eyes with a grin, making a hard side-glance to push his contact lenses slightly off his irises. They were stained bright red, from GWAR blood.
- I met GWAR’s manager, Sleazy P. Martini, at a DragonCon in the late 90s. I timidly asked him, “Gee Sleazy, do you really know GWAR?” He laughed and replied “Yeah, I know GWAR. I’m their FUCKIN’ MANAGER.”
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Movies You Missed: Dredd
Suspension of disbelief is when you silence the internal critics of your mind, and make concessions in order to increase your enjoyment of something, typically movies. For instance;
- Transformers movies have groan-inducing songs stuck into them, to deflate tension.
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Return of the Jedi have dodgy special effects for some reason, that’ll pull you out of the movie if you let them.
- In The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo and Princess Leia are more or less in the vacuum of space, inside a giant slug, equipped with little more than snorkels.
- In even the grittiest, most violent color films of the 60s and 70s, blood looks like red tempera paint. Even Death Wish.
- Sylvester Stallone had to reveal his whole face in Judge Dredd (1995), even though the “real” Judge Dredd never has. The movie wouldn’t have seen the light of day otherwise. (It shouldn’t have.)
For the 2012 version of Dredd, I didn’t have to suspend my disbelief. At all.
It was the home run of that year, and for some weird reason, everyone missed it.
Look how mad he is!!
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Axl of Nazareth
I never liked Guns ‘N Roses, and this might surprise you, but my reasons are weird. On the surface, I found Axl Rose grating and embarrassingly trashy, although the other band members were really good, and their album Appetite For Destruction was my earliest exposure to the art of Rob’t Williams. But I never could abide a poseur, and in my opinion, Axl Rose has built a career impersonating the lead singer of Scottish hard-rock band Nazareth.
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