Sunday, August 24, 2008

A Fifty-Year-Old Guilt Trip

  • What I'm Watching/Listening To/Reading:
    • Caught The Mist on DVD. It's based on the novella of the same name from Stephen King's Skeleton Crew collection and being a connoisseur and collector of King's work, I am very picky when it comes to such adaptations. This one is directed by Frank Darabont, who helmed the not-so-arguably two greatest King adaptations, The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption (Kubrick's The Shining is good as a movie, but he took too many liberties for me to love it as an adaptation). Sure enough, Darabont is very true to the source, with the exception of the ending, which is truly horrifying. The Mist wasn't as good as the other two books that Darabont had to work with, so the movie isn't as good, but it's still pretty solid.
    • I also caught the original The Blob starring freaking badass Steve McQueen in his first lead role, "freaking badass" being his honorific, like "Doctor" (his "We deal in lead, friend." in The Magnificent Seven is the most badass quote in movie history). Anyway, enough about freaking badass McQueen, the movie's okay. Not bad for a scifi flick from 1958. More on it later.
  • Random Thoughts/Links:
    • Congrats to my friend at Shtetl Fabulous on her 100th post today and much love for the shout-out.
    • This is a video that someone submitted to a contest at The Daily Dish. It really cracked me up.
    • Say it with me: noun, verb, P.O.W. No doubt, John McCain is a tougher son-of-a-gun than I'll ever be, but one might start to believe that even he thinks his only qualification for being President (and the job is President, not Commander-In-Chief; that's only a part of it) is having been a P.O.W. Mac, please don't make it okay for all of us to make fun of you for it.
  • Daily Rant:
    • So, back to The Blob. I suppose it was supposed to be scary because people feared weird, radioactive stuff during the Cold War, or maybe because it's about how adults have an innate distrust for teenagers. What usually happens with these types of movies is that over time, they lose the fright factor because our culture and its Jungian collective fears change. It's true of this flick, also. Until the end. What was supposed to be a dumb throwaway shock line at the end has turned into a guilt- and depression-inducing prophecy. To set it up, McQueen and company have just escaped the Blob's attack, having discovered that it hates the cold. The police and the town's high schoolers bring in fire extinguishers with which they shoot the Blob to weaken it. The army is called in to bring a transport plane so the monster can be dropped near the North Pole and therefore kept in check. The last two lines of the movie are as such: Lieutenant Dave: "At least we've got it stopped." Steve Andrews (McQueen): "Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold." D'oh! Thanks guys for making us environment-killing twenty-first-century folks feel like crap!

1 comment:

N said...

Huh. I had no idea about the guilt trip at the end of the blob. (which is hilarious, given that I've never seen it, because it was filmed in the town where I went to high school. heh.)