Saw this a week ago, still haven’t talked about it. It was very enjoyable. It’s a grand operatic noir, an unnerving psychological thriller that doesn’t make much sense (do any psychological thrillers make much sense?). Great intensely-imagined visuals, gripping and moody atmosphere, pitch-perfect performances (heavily stylised and just OTT enough). The film offers very few surprises but is a great ride nonetheless.
It’s a big screen film, but probably not worth the big screen ticket prices unless you’re a particular fan of Leo DiCaprio or Marty Scorsese or Michelle Williams or Mark Ruffalo*. So watch it on your home cinema with surround sound, or go to the fillums on cheap night.
To its enormous credit, the film absolutely nails its very final scene.
* Hah! No-one in the world is “a particular fan of Mark Ruffalo”!**
** I stand corrected
It’s Friday linky time, first one at the new hosting site. Groovy. I’m gonna go into the depths of the linky file, pull out some stuff that’s been sitting there for aaaages without ever being grabbed up into a linky. Nothing fresh! Everything old! Come and get it!
Play classic Games Workshop strategy board game Space Hulk, live online.
The Day Tripper photos were taken by a new arrival in Wellington, of random folk he met on buses. They got a little bit of media coverage, but not much, because the Flickr set only shows a few hundred views. Take a look – nice slice-of-life photography. And if you’re a Wellingtonian, you might see someone you know – I did.
In 1978, Lorne Green became the inaugural member of the Pantheon of Plastic.
One year later in 1979, he was joined by the second inductee into this prestigious panoply of plastinated personalities. Ladeez and gennelmen, I give you the 1979 Inductee… Boris Karloff!
Karloff is unusual for the Pantheon of Plastic for two reasons – he had passed away long before his induction, and his two iconic plastic-commemorated roles were nearly fifty years old when the action figures were released. But action figures they were, and so Karloff can add PoP membership to his voluminous CV!
Frankenstein’s Monster, Frankenstein
(Movie, Universal, 1931; figure released 1979 by Remco) Jack P Pierce was responsible for the distinctive look of the Monster, but Karloff was enthusiastic about the makeup, offering to remove his bridgework to give the monster freaky cheeks. It was a combination of Pierce’s wizardry and Karloff’s unnerving performance that made this such an iconic role, worthy of being turned into a plastic figure to stomp around the sandpit with a generation of little kids.
Karloff once played baseball wearing full Monster make-up. Buster Keaton was the catcher. Read about it, and see the photo, here.
Another Pierce/Karloff joint. Imhotep! But does anyone really care about Imhotep? Really? This would’ve been a way cooler movie if they’d gone by the original idea of making it about Cagliostro. That dude was crazy.
SUCCESS IN FILM AND TELEVISION can bring seats at the priciest restaurants and entry to the fussiest clubs, but there is one coterie so exclusive that even the most well-known and successful are unable to gain entry, try as they might. Yes, we here at AdditiveRich hold that the true measure of a star’s greatness is their membership in this particularly elite group – THE PANTHEON OF PLASTIC.
The criteria for membership is quite quite simple: the performer must have played at least two different roles for which his or her likeness has been immortalized, in molded plastic, as an action figure.
(An action figure. NOT a doll.)
Note that it has to be an action figure of the actor as the character. Those James Bond figures that used the same mold regardless of movie don’t win a prize for Roger Moore or Sean Connery. Or George Lazenby even. Animated characters also don’t count, even if the animation is based on the performer. These are our rules! They are carefully-considered and cannot be violated!
This is a 2001 draft of the Pantheon of Plastic intro. It shows its age – in fact the whole concept of the PoP shows its age. As plastic molding tech has improved and action figure markets have matured, the PoP has lost its exclusivity. There are now action figures of all sorts of folk. The barricades have been thrown down! The Pantheon has been debased!
Here’s a screenshot showing the first inductee into the PoP… from 1978, it’s… Lorne Green!
The illustrious David R, proprietor of additiverich.com for most of the last decade, is pulling down the blinds. I have migrated over here to isprettyawesome.com, which is run by Svend – who is, happily, another member of the additiverich.com posse.
So I gotta thank Svend for generously welcoming me to his isprettyawesome crew.
And I really gotta thank David for all those years of hosting. Providing a platform for us additiverichers isn’t trivial. There’s updates to install, system conflicts to resolve, the endless march of the spammers to halt, and many more troublesome duties. Not to mention the costs of hosting and hardware and so on. All of this was provided with much generosity and good humour.
When David was first talking about setting up additiverich, back before most people had ever heard of blogs, we discussed a special feature of the site on which we’d collaborate. It never came to pass, like a number of projects we’ve talked about, and it’s a shame. So I want to deliver at least a small part of that project as a thank you to David.
So tomorrow, you’ll be introduced to… the Pantheon of Plastic.
Relatedly, girls in bikinis perform The Big Lebowski. To sell bikinis, apparently. But I dunno man but watch it but.
Repton last week made two posts that I really appreciated: this one about anonymity on the web (technical stuff here, beware) and this one straight after about some highlights from the Lateral Science collection of wild science-related things.
Have you seen this video showing just how much TV is shot green-screen? Will blow your mind. When filming TV, it is now easier and cheaper to hang up a green curtain in a back lot and CGI the street in, than to actually go down to an ordinary street corner.
And you have probably seen this wonderful music video featuring a human-sized Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson contraption, too, but if not:
I may be about to become a proper Hoose Moose.
Our offer was accepted, conditional on [boring stuff].
Now to do [boring stuff]!
This has all happened very quickly.
(Aside: If moose is the Scots for mouse, what, I wonder, is the Scots for moose?)
Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. This weekend just gone, Cal and I decided to put a toe in the water of house-hunting. We’ve been saving up a deposit for a wee while, and although we love our apartment we’ve been talking in general terms about looking to buy.
We do some reviewing of the house listings (well, Cal’s been checking them regularly for a while and showing me the choice cuts) and find a few open homes to check out. We’re thinking suburbia, and our price range is telling us the same thing, so we decide on Sunday to check out a few spots in the Hutt Valley.
Spot one – open home is cancelled. (This was the one we were very keen on.) Spot three – smaller and less cool than expected. Spot two, however, was nicer than we were expecting. It ticked all our boxes. It needs work, but not crazy work, and it felt good. We spent about twenty minutes looking around it.
So we decided to make an offer.
And here we are, three days into househunting and we’re already heading into a meeting with the real estate agents for negotiations. We’re acting in good faith – we could live there, and three days of reflecting on it hasn’t changed that view. But we’re in no hurry. We’re not madly in love with the house, we won’t do anything to get it. We could let it go, spend another 6 months to a year in our apartment and be pretty comfortable with that. That’s something in our favour. (Also in our favour: my brother is a lawyer who does this sorta thing all the time. Cheers big bro for the advice so far.)
But despite this, I am a bit unnerved. It seems incredible and ridiculous to me that you can get this deep into real serious financial process based on twenty minutes of walking through an empty house. Man, I take longer than that to pick a library book. But this, apparently, is how it’s done.
So, internets – advise me. What do we need to know?
And what the heck are we getting ourselves into?
And does quoting Bill and Ted make me more or less qualified as a potential home-owner?
