ErkkilaDotOrg

• co-ed naked monopolacrosse
• closet lambada
• shik shik
• mcfreshman
• hungry hungry hippoes in the government
• frosted cross puffs
• gwar (whatever happened to eddie munster? I’m lookin’ at him!)
• hairball’s unsuaveness
• nid, the mailbox chinchilla
• is this in color or black and white? (duck for the ‘3d effect’)
• whooooosh

We went to see the new Indiana Jones movie last night. I think I would’ve been happier if they’d gone out with Last Crusade.

I should’ve known when I first listened to the soundtrack earlier in the day; lots of nostalgia there, but I didn’t feel as if there was much new or interesting. The best parts were recycled from Raiders.

The worst part was the relentless action. It was as if they were afraid if any of the characters slowed down for a second they’d realize their only plot function was to get the skull to the lost city, where everything was wrapped up in the most predictable and hackneyed way possible (and the heroes ceased to be useful well before the conclusion). Believe me, you’ll see it coming, and probably be wondering, like I was, how many more Rube Goldberg-machine-like action setpieces it would take before the evil communist villianess’s face was going to melt off (not literally; I mean it felt that much like a rehash of Raiders).

While I’m willing to suspend some disbelief about these characters being able to make it out of any scrape (think the inflatable raft-jump in Temple of Doom), it was unbelievably cartoonish here. You just wanted to laugh because it was so incredibly stupid–from Indy’s nuclear test site escape to the triple waterfall scene.

And aliens? C’mon. My least favorite theory about various ancient civilizations–that the only way they could’ve done it was by copying the answers off someone else’s test paper. I know this is an Indy movie and the supernatural is expected, but jeez. (Incidentally, there’s an article in Archaeology this month about the crystal skulls. Guess what, not elongated, and they’re also fakes. :)

A few of the jokes and reveals worked (Indy’s age, and who didn’t like seeing that little corner of the Ark during the Area 51 scene? And the Marcus Brody references were a nice touch.) but it was mostly just hokey. The Marion character ceased to be interesting just about instantaneously, when the ‘big secret’ (like nobody saw that coming) was revealed and during the subsequent love-fest (conducted on the run, of course, because they couldn’t possibly give up ONE action scene apparently). I felt like the best scenes (like the one where Indy’s packing to leave and discussing the current political environment with the dean of the college) were just rewrites of scenes from Raiders or Last Crusade (with Marcus). The backstabbing colleague seemed a bit too much like Benny from ‘The Mummy’–especially in the treasure scene. Between him and the giant ants (read ‘carnivorous scarab beetles’) you realize that this was Indy ripping off every movie that came after, and ripped off, the previous Indy films. The Mummy was better at it, unfortunately. Maybe the genre is just played out.

Silly, lacking in dramatic suspense, and a tacked-on ending that felt too little too late. Gee, when does it come to blu-ray?

We are going to miss your magic…

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
4. For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.

-pee

What do they make at the Beech-nut plant near utica. Did it ever involve beech nuts?

New tool, was not so good (x 13ish)

Traffic in Albany still sucks

I still remember most of the backroads by sight

I couldn’t find the damn cat on boylston street.

Walking on concrete for lots of blocks is not as fun as walking in the woods

Signs telecom still needs work

• 5 people with cellphones on one side, and fingers in ear on the other side huddled in the one spot with good reception
• The words “Go ahead” more then 1 time while talking on the phone

85 is slow while leaving Boston

Gregs pizza was damn good, and i’m glad he’s found a job that he likes ;)

“La la la Lola”

the network is down

Home is where i get to take a nap.

Any second now, everything green’s going to burst and it’ll be mowing season again. There’s this one lonely frog peeping away near the pond (sure hope he doesn’t freeze solid in the next few weeks), plaintively trying to rouse his fellows into consciousness (Paul’s comment: ‘K…somethin’s peepin’…’). Unfortunately, the first mosquitos have hatched as well.

Funny how you can’t wait for the next season to start. In winter, you can’t wait until you don’t have to put on a hat, gloves, coat, and boots just to walk the dog; in spring, it’s all the mud; in summer, it’s the bugs, and in fall, you want some nice clean snow to cover up all the dead brown grass. This was one thing that drove me nuts about California; never much of a change.

Also, we’ve been picking up a few DVDs, mostly at a discount. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire improves with viewings; Donnie Darko (director’s cut) disturbs the hell out of me late at night and makes me nostagic for 80’s music I wasn’t much into then (I’m always 20 years behind in listening taste); and The Village had the advantage of being $8 used from Netflix (I hate when writers don’t quite wrap up a movie. If you’re going to go that far, at least finish the story). Man that sounded bourgeois and American of me. Really, I like unconventional movies. At least Darko wrapped everything up satisfactorally (if you watch it a few times, which of course you will).

A lot of people probably have good memories of their childhood when they watch TV shows or movies from the era in which they grew up. I think this is even more true if you happened to grow up near places that were filmed a lot. For instance, at least one episode of Dukes of Hazzard involving a racetrack was filmed at the Saugus Speedway–which, of course, reminds me of the weekend swapmeets held there, which we used to attend occasionally. Lots of the back road driving on that show reminds me vaguely of the Santa Clarita valley in the mid 80’s, as well (and not at all of the year we lived in the southeast, oddly enough). Always makes me think of how neat it was in the SCV and the surrounding area then–still relatively empty, lots of hills, scrub, onion fields, and not so developed. Very different from how it seemed last time I visited in ‘99, and I’m sure even moreso from how it looks now.

ET, while not specifically shot anywhere I knew, took place in a neighborhood that looked very much like the ones I grew up in. Don’t know where that corn field and pine forest came from, though; certainly not behind my house nor within biking distance.
Then, there is the mother lode of things shot near Vasquez Rocks…old Star Treks, old Battlestar Galacticas, commercials…just reminds me of all the hours I used to spend with my mom in nearby dry streambeds cracking open rocks looking for agate. Also it reminds me of the time my dad worked a night shoot for the TV show Benson and took me along to watch them tape. Very long night, while they sat near a “downed” helicopter and had to stop shooting every time a plane flew over. I remember arriving home cold (got pretty chilly overnight) and falling into bed exhausted.

Since my dad worked in TV (video engineer), a lot of TV shows trigger memories of where we were living at those times…Too Close for Comfort, It’s a Living, Golden Girls…got to go to the set for that last once. The movie The Color Purple reminds me of the time my dad worked on a short video shoot involving Whoopi Goldberg, whom I got to meet (she signed my VHS copy of the movie). Blah blah blah namedropping blah. Reruns of Night Court, along with a signed script (from one of the Hurricane episodes with Brent Spiner as a hick), remind me of my parents’ friend Jeff who had a few different jobs on the show, from what I recall.

Pump up the Volume, while done a couple of years after I left, was shot at my high school.
I’m not sure where this post came from. I fairly often get nostalgic about stuff, but I really wouldn’t want to be living out there now. For one, I’m glad we’ll be paying off our house within my lifetime, and I prefer the near-solitude here to the postage stamp yards I remember from those years. For another, I never got through a winter there without wishing it had snowed (I’m just about feeling that way this year here!) But it’s pretty nice remembering how it was then.