Expelled Grey Matter

While I am a fan of most his novels it was Stephen King's shorter work that caught my interest early on. I had often wondered why some of it wasn't adapted into an anthology and, over the years, I've learned to be careful what I wish for.  This especially became true once I realized how badly Mick Garris, despite King being friends with him, can ruin his work.  He and others, especially in short-run televisions series, have rendered some of my favorite King stories into corny, poorly directed and acted drivel.  This was especially true after I saw what a great job a low budget production like Tales from the Dark Side could do with his material.  Despite his penchant for churning out low budget features, Dino De Laurentiis somehow managed to be on the same wavelength as King and his fans for a number of his '80s films.  Though his decision to let the author direct Maximum Overdrive was somewhat questionable, letting King adapt his material wasn't.  This had ...

I love cats.  If one had asked me over 25 years ago if this was so I would have said I tolerated them, while before that I didn't care for them much because I was kind of brought up not to.  I have nothing against dogs or any other animal, but ever since my future wife moved in with me and brought her cat Jonnie they have been my animal of choice.  Part of that is because they often come across as mysterious creatures, able to teleport whenever they know there is food being prepared or a bed being made.  Although they can look at one with quite a bit of love in their eyes, even that seems to be somewhat combined with disapproval, encouraging a person to continue to do better - or at least make sure the little pincushions are fed on time. Because our relationship with cats seems to blur the line between who is in charge there has always been a question of whether felines just figured out how to use the loud, clumsy things with opposable thumbs to do stuff for them jus...

The success of movies like   Deadpool and John Wick has led to a number of similar films in recent years.  It's not surprising to find that they are pretty much coming from the same group of people.  David Leitch, who directed Deadpool 2 , co-directed John Wick with Chad Stahelski, who has gone on to have commercial and cult success with the Bob Odenkirk vehicle Nobody   as well as the John Wick  sequels.  All the movies in varying degree feature over-the-top violence and wisecracking assassins - other than John Wick, who is a man of few words.  It is no surprise that, after Deadpool 2 , Leitch got a healthy amount of money to make Bullet Train , based on a novel by Kôtarô Isaka.  A good portion of the money went to pay Brad Pitt's salary, but a large chunk also undoubtedly was spent on the various sets and the awful CGI to try to convince viewers this was taking place in Japan on a train running from Tokyo to Kyoto.  Where Stahelski has op...

I have seen many attempts to celebrate the influence different decades and genres have had modern movies.  There have been successful - or at least semi-successful - attempts at bringing back exploitation films, slashers and even '40s film noire .  The one thing current filmmakers have not been able to do is bring back anything like the action films of the 1980s and first half of the '90s.  There was a brave attempt with The Expendables , but even though it and its sequels brought back the stars of the time and were full of great action set-pieces, they still felt like modern movies with an older cast.  This is because action movies of that time are the complete antithesis of what the younger demographic, the main target of Hollywood, wants.  They had ridiculous plots, scenes in which the hero would have been dead in seconds, cheesy music and women in roles that ranged from damsel in distress to sexpot.  They were loud, silly, often sexist and absolutely re...

Despite being Bruce Lee's son Brandon Lee had to work his way up to being a star.  His first lead role in a feature film was his one and only Hong Kong film, Legacy of Rage , after which Lee found himself playing bit parts and television roles before again being featured in the 1989 low budget  Laser Mission .  It was a supporting role in Showdown in Little Tokyo and another starring turn in this movie that finally set him up for his inevitable breakthrough role in The Crow . Unfortunately, it is well known what happened at that point, but Brandon had a number of advantages that his father didn't when breaking into Hollywood.  While it had in no way disappeared, the anti-Asian bias of the late 1960s had faded, and studios preferred hiring Asians for roles (although they couldn't figure out that it's silly to hire a Chinese person to play a Japanese role) rather than putting a white guy in makeup.  It was also in the middle of the classic '80s action movie boom, ...

Through the last couple of years or so I have watched every episode of Star Trek , except for Prodigy , from the original series through the current season of Star Trek: Picard .  That includes the 1970s animated series as well as all the movies, including the J. J. Abrams ones.  I had always been a casual fan, but decided to go through everything again because many of the episodes I hadn't seen in 20 to 30 years.  Although I can't, and never will be able to, quote exact lines and identify specific episodes that certain things happened in, I'm about as versed in Star Trek lore as I will ever be.  When I first saw Galaxy Quest that was a different story.  At that time I had abandoned both Deep Space 9 and Voyager for various reasons, most of them being a lack of time.  The original series and The Next Generation may still have been relatively fresh in my mind, and I knew Galaxy Quest was supposed to be a Trek parody, but beyond that I'm sure I missed a lot....

There are not a lot of the old grocery stores from the 1960s and 1970s left.  For the longest time they had a specific design, usually an arched or triangular awning over a front made of plate glass and aluminum, with doors that opened with a "swish" like in Star Trek .  It was the first thing a little kid noticed when going into the place, and definitely hard to keep them out of the way of everyone else as they figured out how the doors worked.   Years later when I read The Mist in Stephen King's Skeleton Crew collection it was one of the immediate, most memorable stories by him.  These grocery stores were still quite common in the 1980s, and everything he wrote about in the story I could imagine happening in my local Lucky's.  King himself got the idea while visiting a store in Maine during an electrical storm, wondering what it would be like if insects and prehistoric creatures suddenly attacked.  It was one of the best novellas he had written, and ...