Laserdisc Rot

I thought I'd try to do a regular review as a challenge to keep me writing. I further challenged myself with reviewing any films I had watched in the past week. Since I didn't watch anything relatively recent I thought I'd review the most obscure film I watched this week. Which means I'm reviewing Jack Arnold's 1953 film It Came from Outer Space. Among Jack Arnold's long career as a director, he's known for a short but influential stint where he focused on horror and sci-fi which included Creature from the Black Lagoon , its sequel, Tarantula! , The Incredible Shrinking Man , and a few others, but he kicked off that run with this. Our lead is Richard Carlson, who would further collaborate as the male lead in Creature from the Black Lagoon , both times as a scientist. In It Came from Outer Space , amateur astronomer, John Putnam, played by Carlson, observes a meteor crash over the tiny desert town he lives in with his girlfriend, Ellen Fields, played by Barb

Hey! I'm back with a new blog post for the first time in *checks watch* nine months. Sorry, life got crazy. Anyways, I'm here with a listicle because that's what this here book on "How to Blog circa 2012" told me I should write. It's the end of the year and I apparently watched a lot of shows as well as movies, but for this article I wanted to focus on the shows with a list of my favorite ten shows that came out this year. I wanted to focus it on shows that came out this year, otherwise I'd be boring y'all with how I just discovered Columbo and how you really need to watch it! Anyway, special shout out both to Columbo as well as the 2022 Western show The English , probably my two favorite shows I've been exploring this year that didn't come out this year.   10. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Genre: Comedy, Animated, Action Service: Netflix That's right, Scott. Just keep smiling. An animated Scott Pilgrim series feels like it's coming out a

I got twin toddlers that recently have had a desire to watch the movies and show from the Cars  franchise on repeat. Watching those movies over and over and over and over gets you asking questions about this odd alternate history just to stay sane. There's a World War II jeep living in Radiation Springs... was there a World War II in this world? Mater has a throw away line of "I bet this is smoother than the roads on the moon"... did the world make it to the moon? Are there actual roads on the moon? The forklifts only ever appear while labor is being done... are they an underclass? Would a Russian Revolution in this world be organized by this underclass? Was Lenin a forklift? But one that really ate at me once I started thinking about it revolved around the character Sheriff. The character is a 1949 Mercury Eight police car and his entire personality is basically "I'm a rural lawman." So, the question is... was Sheriff destined to be a cop and have the perso

An unofficial tradition of the Laserdisc Party community is to list our top new-to-us films that we viewed during a particular month. I tend to ramble on those posts and figured if I'm gonna ramble, I might as well do it on that dang new fangled blog I just started, right? Anyway, that's enough of a preamble - let's check out some cool movies! 5. Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) Director: Carl Frankin Wow. Wow wow wow. This is some amazing noir right smack dab in 1948 Los Angeles. It leans hard  into the setting in a way that places the racism of the era into focus. In most noir, the protagonist is beget at all sides by dangers and it's even more palpable in this flick, following right in the footsteps of Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night  and doing it so dang well. I had a blast with this film and am more than a little upset there isn't a whole damn franchise built around Easy Rawlins and Mouse taking down rich white folk trying to get richer. Fortunately t

This post was originally posted on my old, now defunct blog, on May 17, 2019. I have done some editing to it but, for the most part, is the same post. A father lay dying and gave his son, a woodcutter, the family ancestral ax. The father made the woodcutter promise that he would always use the ax in his trade. During the next season, the ax blade, old as it was, snapped in half on a stubborn tree. Being a dutiful son, the woodcutter had it replaced by the best metalsmith. During the next season, the wooden handle began to fall apart from age. Being a dutiful son, the woodcutter had it replaced by the best woodworker. During the next season, admiring the new blade and new handle, the woodcutter wondered if in dutifully executing his promise to his father, he had inadvertently broken the same promise. Is it the same ax? Just like the Ship of Theseus , the question of fidelity of identity lingers. Is the intent enough to call it the same ax when the sum of the whole have all been repl

Alright alright, I know this isn't going to be as bold a stance as defending the 1993 Super Mario Bros.  movie , but I still feel it's a defense that needs to be made. I saw at least one person talk about the show as having little to no cultural impact and that made something in me snap. This article didn't take much new research for me as I had previously toyed with making a whole podcast based around the cultural footprint that television shows left on comic characters and vice versa. The most obvious example is the character Harley Quinn - originally created for the 1992 Batman: The Animated Series , Harley Quinn quickly jumped onto the comic sheets and has been a fan mainstay. Since then, she's become a major character in the comics and in movies. I mainly shelved the podcast because I asked myself "do we really need another white dude talking with false confidence about a niche topic?" I said no, saved your RSS feed the psychic damage, but still had mater