I finally watched Martin Scorsese's Dylan doc "No Direction Home". I really enjoyed. It took me back. It was interesting to see the Dylan interview bits. My only issue with the doco is that the music was always much louder than the dialog so I had to keep the remote in my hand the entire time. I do not know why this is common practice but it drives me absolutely nuts in an annoying way.

I do not know how I missed this when it first came out.

I had seen the other Scorsese doco on Dylan - Rolling Thunder Review which bored me to tears. Partly because I never cared for the music but also it just seemed dull to me other than some moments.

The 60's really were an interesting time here in the US and around the world - especially with all the music that was falling out of the wood work. So much of it was wonderful.

Music was listened to and appreciated differently than it is today - at least from my perspective. It seems that in today's world, music is more of a background thing compared to what it was back then. I suppose the kids of today might disagree. Maybe I'm just out of touch but the majority of music these days is simply monotonous and uninteresting to me. Lots of week melodies, lame lyrics and of course so much of it is electronic which is not my thing either.

Watching this video really reminded me how special the music was back then and it made me appreciate the fact I grew up while it was all happening.

There's a sequel. It's being viral-marketed brilliantly at the moment by not even telling anyone yet that it's actually a movie.

A crew of rookie astronauts, known as 'The Blue Orpingtons', is about to embark on an historic space journey...

Dude! If you liked Heavy Metal, then you're going to f*cking hate Heavy Metal 2000! In this movie, some lunatic space pirate decides to make himself immortal by killing a milking a whole planet of people, and pursuing a planet that has a cosmic gateway to a world of pure immortal milk while he's being chased by Julie Strain as she pretends to be acting but really isn't because she suffered a head injury and eventually died of it. Yay! It's only got an 8%, so I was expecting the worst, but it really isn't quite the worst thing ever made. It's not terrible, but it's also not good. The animation was worse than Saturday morning cartoons, the voice-acting was cardboard, the action scenes move incredibly slow, and don't get me started on the music. Like, there's a lot of really good songs on the soundtrack, but they're all played at the most awkward times and are kind of jarring. Even as a fan of heavy metal music, I found it a relief whenever they switched to a traditional score for parts. But yeah, basically somebody watched the first Heavy Metal and missed the point entirely for this awkward sequel. It was put together by one of the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics and yeah, Kevin Eastman really just needs to stick to comic books.

I saw a Kickstarter that was putting together an anthology of the different Heavy Metal covers. Not gonna lie; that was pretty tempting. When I was a kid, my mom would go to the grocery store, and I would lurk in the magazine section reading guitar mags. When the store visits started taking longer, I would browse for something new to read, and I discovered Heavy Metal. Thinking it was a magazine about the genre of music, I remember being mesmerized by those covers, and at first I didn't like that the interior was all black and white comics until I got bored enough to actually start reading them. They were very imaginative and nuts. Too bad about all the nudity in them or I probably would have asked my mom to buy them for me.

I just Googled it, and it looks like somebody bought the rights and is in the process of rebooting the magazine, so that's pretty rad. Also, apparently the Netflix show Love, Death and Robots was originally supposed to be a Heavy Metal reboot, but they decided to remove the name since the stories ended up being pretty brainy.

What a total waste of money. And people are bitching about egg prices.

In Night Shift, Henry Winkler plays the role of a mild-mannered morgue worker that gets railroaded into switching to the night shift. His newest partner, played by Michael Keaton in his first starring role, fancies himself an enterprising free spirit, and turns both of their lives upside down when they turn the County Morgue into the operations center for a prostitution ring where they take only a tiny amount of the hookers' money (compared to what pimps ask anyway) and reinvest it into the organization. Typing out that description, it sounds like a super silly movie, and it really is. It's very fun and very hilarious.


@ Synth Guru needs to check this out. The guy that wrote and directed Terrified made another crazy Argentinian horror movie called When Evil Lurks! In this one, a pair of brothers living and working on a rural farm encounter someone that is 'rotten', a form of demonic possession that causes people to rot. When they contact the owner of the farm about what they've discovered, the farmer takes matters into his own hands, and breaks one of the cardinal rules of dealing with the rotten by killing him with a firearm. This causes a huge series of dominos to start falling where the brothers flee to the city to pick up their family and get as far away from the evil as they can. I found this one on a list of movies that the reviewer said he was too afraid to watch with the lights out, and this lives up to expectation. This movie is gory in parts with a juicy slice of body horror, but as the rules of dealing with the rotten unfold, the movie becomes more and more tense as the brothers try to stay ahead of the evil. On Rotten Tomatoes, 97% of all reviewers agree that this movie is not just scary as hell, it's very compelling and thrilling.



After watching When Evil Lurks, wifey wanted to watch something a little lighter, and we're both just weird enough to where I knew she'd enjoy Frankenhooker and get a good laugh after such an intense movie. In Frankenhooker, a college dropout with an unfinished medical degree works for the city's electric company while making all kind of weird gadgets by night. When his fiance is torn to shreds by an autonomous lawnmower that he built, he sets out to piece his life and his future wife back together, but there just aren't enough of her parts around to make a whole human, so he sets about assembling the perfect body from pieces of prostitutes. It's a Troma movie, so you know right out of the gate that there's going to be gore, nudity, and tons of laughs, and this one pays off tremendously. The ending alone is worth the whole movie for its surprising feminist subtext. If you don't mind laughing at the expense of some dead hookers, then you're going to have a great time with this one.

I just got a copy of Midnight Express. I read the book and saw the film when it was released. It's a very good movie and based on a true story of a guy who tries to smuggle 2 kilos of hash out of Turkey back in 1970.

It's been a long time since I read the book but I do recall that the movie took some poetic license and increased the violence and torture.

Still, the movie keeps you on the edge of your seat even when you know the entire story.

The acting was good. My only issue is the sound sometimes got so low it was hard to make out some of the dialog.