Whooooo! I have returned! I have returned! My last final is over with (for those concerned, I think it went well), and now I'm going to destress for a while, update my journal with random occurrences over the last week, and then go out and get blind, stinking drunk!
Well, okay, maybe not the blind, stinking drunk part (you can stop worrying, Mom & Dad), but I will at least have a beer or two. Anyway, I have to do
something for a couple more hours; it'll be that long 'til the next bug bombs that I set off are finished with their work. (I had another package, and all my cookware is still sitting in my car anyway, so I figured might as well complete the double-whammy.)
So, commence the updatification!
Jericho
I promised a bit more detail on this movie, and it's time to deliver.
Jericho is a movie by native Springfieldian Merlin Miller, who made another movie (
A Place to Grow) a few years back which was set in Springfield. This one is set in New Mexico, Texas, and California. It stars Mark Valley (an actor with minor roles in several recent movies, and a three-year stint on the soap opera
Days of Our Lives) and talented newcomer Leon Coffee, with minor roles for R. Lee Ermey (best known as the drill instructor from
Full Metal Jacket and
Space: Above and Beyond), Western character actor Buck Taylor (Newly O'Brien from
Gunsmoke), and Springfield disc jockey Woody P. Snow.
The film is an independent movie--which means, it was made without the backing of a major studio. In the Q&A session after the movie, Miller was reluctant to disclose actual budgetary figures (since he was still trying to find a distributor, and one might be in the audience), but indicated it was made for "under four million dollars." He seemed a bit bitter about the studio system, indicating that he felt that the major film festivals were controlled by the major studios and that there were significant barriers to entry that kept quality independent films (such as his own) from being widely seen. He is still seeking a national distributor for
Jericho, and asked that people put out the word and try to raise some publicity about it.
What about the film itself? It was quite good, and definitely interesting. It's not so much a "Western" as it is a character study and psychological drama that uses some of the trappings of a Western. It owes more to slow, character-driven Westerns like
Lonesome Dove than to shoot-em-ups like
Magnificent Seven or the Man With No Name series.
The story begins with a sheriff picking up a payroll from a train in a town called Jericho, when he is beset upon--and killed--by three men. A young lady on the scene cracks one of them (Valley) over the head with a two-by-four; the other two drag him into a boxcar and pitch him out a few miles down the line. He is found and nursed back to health by a black cowhand called "Preacher" (Coffey). Unable to remember his real name (or much of anything else, either), he adopts the moniker "Jericho," for the town where the train had stopped last--and after hearing about the trouble in Jericho, and putting two and two together, Jericho and Preacher ride on to Texas and California, where they live for several years. But finally the time comes for Jericho to return and face his past . . .
The film was very well-made, with the authentic Western scenery for which there is simply no credible substitute. There are some plot twists toward the ending, which the more cynical will probably see coming a mile away but were well-enough done to hit me from out of the blue when they happened. Even so, the plot seemed to rely an awful lot on coincidence--perhaps too much for my tastes. All in all, I'd give it an 8 out of 10, and recommend seeing it if you can, before it's gone.
Consumerism and the Best Buy Nutcase
I may or may not have mentioned him before in these pages, but over the last few months I've happened to see a fellow picketing the local Best Buy off and on, usually on the weekends toward holiday season. He sits out on the grassy escarpment leading into the parking lot in a folding chair, with a great big sign decrying the warranties at Best Buy. He was there again Sunday night, when I was working at my nearby retail store and headed down to the Subway just a couple of doors down in the same shopping center for dinner.
I had about resolved to buttonhole the guy and ask him what his beef was with Best Buy, but as it turned out, I didn't have to. As I was waiting in line for my sandwich to be made, a couple of Best Buy associates about my age came in, and I took the opportunity to ask them about the guy's problem. I got two slightly different stories. Apparently the fellow made a purchase two years ago at a Best Buy in San Diego, and did something stupid. The first fellow thought it was that he'd bought a home stereo system and broken it while trying to modify it, then expected Best Buy to honor the warranty he had voided; the second fellow (with whom the first fellow agreed when he heard him) indicated that the fellow had bought a camcorder, which he had dropped in a lake and
then brought back to Best Buy and tried to buy the service plan for (which wouldn't have covered that in any event). "He certainly does have dedication, though," I said. Said one of the Best Buy associates, "Either that, or he just has no life." Either way, he certainly does carry a grudge.
(Now, if I were trying to be fair and balanced, I'd probably ask the guy himself his side of it, but I don't
have to be balanced; this is commentary, not news. Besides, that sort of person tends to disturb me. ("He scares me," one of the associates said.))
I was almost completely unsurprised that the issue turned out to be one of consumer stupidity. I think that people like this are in part a byproduct of our consumer-oriented retail culture. I would say that "The customer is always right" is the axiom that we live by in retail, but that doesn't go quite far enough. It would be very little exaggeration to say that I am an acolyte in a temple whose deity is always present, in multitudes, and whom we must do everything to please, lest his wrath fall upon us. We are instructed to do everything possible to please the customer. In questions of price differential, we're authorized to take the customer's word instantly and immediately for price differences of 30% to 40%. If a customer thinks he saw a sign that said a $9.99 item was $6.99, we're supposed to take their word for it then and there. It almost feels like we're supposed to do everything short of licking the customer's boots, and if they look sanitary, that too. I think I do pretty well about pleasing customers myself, but even so, my yearly performance review suggested I still do not go far enough. I'm just wondering what more I can possibly
do?
But anyway, I think consumers sort of know this, and are conditioned to expect that almost any demand they make will be met if they're just hard-nosed enough about it. And this is what makes it all the worse when they are not. There is this sense of entitlement, I think--the feeling that they
should be getting whatever they want, because damn it, they're the customer, and therefore, they're always right, and how dare you retail peons say otherwise. When the demand can't be met, thus, there is that much more ill will. (I know I've been on the receiving end of it more than once--God help those poor schmucks who work at the Service Desk.) And in the case of the Best Buy protester, that ill will can express itself in odd ways.
Batman Beyond
In the last couple of days, I've discovered an interesting little software application. It's called
Morpheus. Morpheus is one of those peer-to-peer file sharing/trading things that have been all the rage lately--sort of like Gnutella, only it actually works most of the time. It's amazing the things you can find there, especially since people have started converting episodes of popular TV series to digital form and uploading them for all to see. This way I can keep up with TV series on cable networks that I can't afford, or see episodes of shows like
Enterprise that I might have accidentally forgotten to watch. And I can see shows that I never saw while they were on.
Which brings me to
Batman Beyond.
I had never managed to see any of this show before now, though it had been part of the Warner Brothers cartoon lineup for a while. I'd gotten out of the habit of watching TV, especially since my cable TV connection had been cut off. (I only just reinstated it because it would let me save a net of about $2 a month on my cablemodem bills.) It's stunning what I missed.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about,
Batman Beyond was an update of the prior
Batman: The Animated Series cartoon, which took the media presentation of Batman away from the camp it had become since the sixties back to its dark, Gothic roots--partly inspired by the Tim Burton movies, which had done much the same thing. Batman was a true
dark knight again--he met the villains fist to jaw, and Kevin Conroy's raspy growl fit the character perfectly.
Batman Beyond continues the trend, while making some sweeping changes. It is suddenly forty or so years in the future, ten years after Bruce Wayne finally hung up the cape and mask. His company is in the hands of an upstart corporate raider, who is the antithesis of everything Bruce Wayne ever stood for. And it's time for a new generation to don the cape and mask once more.
Now, usually, when a TV series goes through this kind of sweeping update, it's not good news--it means that the original production crew has been given the boot for some reason, most likely studio heads meddling in what does not concern them. But that's not the case this time. This show seems to draw a lot of inspiration from anime such as
Akira,
Armitage III, and other cyberpunk/SF sources--and also from Hong Kong action movies, as every episode is full of a lot of kung-fu style martial arts action. Kicks, punches, throws--the whole works. Sometimes I wonder how they even managed to get it all allowed on TV.
And the story doesn't suffer either. Though there do seem to be some similar plots that run through the series (about half the episodes seem to revolve around some robot going berzerk (often at the hands of a geek to get revenge on jock bullies) or some sort of radioactive/mutagenic substance mutating/merging/doing the tango with someone's DNA (honestly, there are enough radioactive and toxic waste canisters lying around Gotham that the whole city should be declared an ecological disaster area)), most of the stories are well-realized and thought-out. There are a lot of shades-of-grey stories, where the villain isn't evil, but a normal, sympathetic person forced by circumstances to commit some heinous act. There are a lot of cool celebrity guest stars, too.
I've managed to find and download most of the 52 episodes + 1 movie in the series via Morpheus, and am watching them as sequentially as I can. (Plus, I bought the movie on DVD.) This is definitely some good stuff. It's too bad they aren't making any more of it.
And that's about all from here and now. I'll fill in stuff from elsewhere and later as things come to me. Right now, I think I'm going to wait another hour or so, then go home and air out the apartment (and vacuum up whatever bugs crawled out onto the carpeting to die), then spend the rest of the evening watching more
Batman Beyond and putting away the laundry and silverware and stuff.
Later!
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