With probably a few more stragglers to come, here's this week's collection of links to reviews and citations to (mostly) overlooked audio/visual experiences, or at least items overlooked by the writers up till now...thanks, as always, to all the contributors and to all you who read (and comment if you like) these...and please let me know in comments here if I've overlooked your or someone else's review.
Bill Crider: Morgan the Pirate (trailer)
Brent McKee: The Life of Riley (1949 television series)
Brian Arnold: Mumford; Adventure Time
Cullen Gallagher: NoirCon 2012
Dan Stumpf: The Bat Whispers
Ed Gorman: James Wolcott on Lee Marvin; My Favorite Films (after Max Allan Collins)
Evan Lewis: Westworld
George Kelley: The Adventures of Tintin; Match Point
Iba Dawson: Street Scene
Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Flame in the Streets
James Reasoner: Jungle Jim; Hawai'i Calls (television version) featuring Martin Denny
Jeff Swindoll: The Dead (2010)
Jerry House: Beulah
John Charles: Killing Machine (aka Shorinji Kenpo)
Kate Laity: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore; An Appointment with the Wicker Man
Michael Shonk: Awake (2012)
Mildred Perkins: The Dead (2010)
Patti Abbott: Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Randy Johnson: In Old Arizona
Rod Lott: Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs
Ron Scheer: The Man from Colorado
Scott Cupp: The Animation of Tex Avery
Sergio Angelini: Twilight (1998)
Stephen Gallagher: The Reprisalizer and "A Gun For George"
Steve Lewis: There Ain't No Justice
Todd Mason: Ten Teen-Focused Horror and Suspense Films That Are Better Than We Have Any Reason to Expect; Girl K(iller) (aka Killer Girl K); "They're Made Out of Meat" (2006); Sound Opinions
Girl K{iller) (as the onscreen-title has it) or Killer Girl K (as Hulu and cable channel MNet have it), and there are more title variations for this Korean miniseries, is yet another child of The Professional and to a lesser extent Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with a remarkably adept adolescent assassin manipulated by a corporate private security/assassination force. The choreography of the fights is deft, the Korean soap-style approach to the young Cha Yeon Jin (Han Groo)'s existential crisis isn't too obtrusive and only slightly sticky, and her quest to avenge the murder of her mother makes for kinetic if not terribly groundbreaking viewing...but it's fascinating, to at least some extent, to see how these materials are handled in this context, particularly with such typically Korean elements as the most conventionally beautiful woman in the cast being perhaps the most ruthless single character (not unknown elsewhere, to be sure, but particularly common in the Korean materials I've seen). And it does move, and only has five episodes in the current series...with MNet cablecasting them a week or two ahead of clearance on Hulu.
"They're Made Out of Meat": Terry Bisson's very short story has been adapted by a number of folks, I see...perhaps as Stephen King (iirc--or was that Joe Lansdale?) does with some of his short stories, Bisson has been renting his story to any earnest filmmakers for a dollar; before seeing this version on an apparently fading On-Demand service called Illusion, the only a/v version I'd encountered was the Seeing Ear Theater audio version (which was over-frantic as this version is laid-back). Sadly, the online postings of this short film seem to varying degrees to be slightly out of focus, but this posting the least distractingly so of those I've checked; this film is worth seeing, even with that flaw (if you don't have access to what's left of Illusion)...
Sound Opinions fatuously misidentifies itself as "the world's only rock and roll talk show," and that's not where the fatuity ends...I haven't forgiven the hosts, Chicago-based rock reviewers, for not bothering to learn how to pronounce Miriam Makeba's name nor the title of her biggest US hit ("Pata Pata") in their otherwise also clumsy attempt to eulogize her at the time of her death. But in the episode which played locally Monday night, their guest Dessa made an excellent showing for herself, and didn't allow the hosts to go into their usual dim verbal noodling (they often come across as the kind of people who want you know, hey, get this...man, Grass is green!), or at least over came that hurdle. Deborah Harry was able to do likewise, to some extent, a few weeks earlier. So, these guys can be ameliorated by their guests. Seems a very weak recommendation, and it is, but I hadn't heard Dessa's work before, and I'll give them that.
Walter Albert: The Actress
Yvette Banek: Angels and Insects
6 comments:
Okay, mine is up now, Todd. Looks like another good week.
My usual Tuesday Western is now up.
Thanks as always, folks!
Great version of Bisson's story; I'll be sending this one around. It's been a few years since "Meat" became an email phenomenon. Because of the story's lack of detail, the opportunities for film seem boundless.
As noted, there have definitely been worse decent versions, indeed...though the aliens in human form begs the question...
On that note, it would be great to produce an existential version: "We're Made Out of Meat."
Post a Comment