The Strange World of Thomas P. Coombe

The Result of My Friend Frank Using the Phrase "National Lampoon's Jedi Academy"

Some background: On Facebook yesterday, my friend Frank sent a message to me and another friend, talking about a block party he'd been to. While the smaller kids played with toy light sabres, their parents played a game of beer pong.

"It was like National Lampoons Jedi-Academy," he said, which set off the following conversation. I've rearranged it a bit so it matches the chronology of the Animal House plot.

 

Frank: Who delivered a live rancor to the alumni dinner? Who dumped a truck-load of fizzies into the Sarlacc Pitt? Every fall the trees are covered in toilet paper, every spring, a Death Star explodes.

 

Frank: Adventure? Exitement? A Delta Tau Chi pledge craves not these things.

 

Frank: "I gave my love a wookie, that had no home, I gave my love a bantha on dune seas it roamed, My love for you is a story that"...<force lightning destroys guitar, Master Bluto stares> "Luminous beings are we, not made of these crude lyrics"

 

Jerry: "IS THAT A...NERF HERDER!?!"

 

Tom: They can't do that to our droids. Only WE can do that to our droids!!

 

Frank: Yoda: "Young Skywalker, appointed are you to become the special social representative to Chancellor Palpatine"
Anakin: "Great! What do I have to do?"
Obi-Won: "It means you have to make the Kessel Run to the FOOD KING!"

 

Frank: Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or used the jedi mind trick on our female party guests - we did. But you can't hold a whole jedi order responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted padawan learners. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole Jedi Order? And if the whole Jedi Order system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Senator Palpatine - isn't this an indictment of our entire Galactic Republic? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the Republic of Naboo. Gentlemen!

 

Frank: THE JAWAS STOLE OUR DATES!

 

Jerry: They're even taking the stuff we didn't steal, like the power converters from Toshi Station.

 

Tom: Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to defeat the dark side.

 

Tom: Face it, Luke, you threw up ON Jabba.

 

Jerry: "Was it over when the Empire blew up Tatooine? HELL NO!" "Tatooine?"
"Forget it, he's rolling.

 

Frank: Grand Moff Tarkin! Grand Moff Tarkin! For God's Sake, they're looting the FoodKing!

 

Jerry: (Scene during the rebel attack on the Second Death Star. Commotion.)

"ALL IS WELL! ALL IS WELL!!!!!"

 

Frank: Senator & Mrs. Han Solo '64, Coruscant.
Chewbacca "The Wookie" '64: Whereabouts Unknown
Jar-Jar Bink '68: Psychiatrist, Encounters Inc.
Anakin Skywalker '64: Dark Lord of Sith, Galactic Imperial Army, '66. Killed by his own son, battle of Endor 1969.
C-3P0 '64: Aid to Emporer Palpatine 1967. Indicted & Convicted '72. Smashed to a million pieces at the spice mines of kessel, '74.

 

Shine On, Black Diamond

I mean no disrespect to any readers who are living there, but Ashland -- the town where I grew up -- seems like a sadder place every time I go back.

Part of it is just the passage of time: other than my grandmother, the rest of my family lives elsewhere, giving me less and less of a connection to this place where I spent my first 18 years.

Someone else lives in the house where I grew up. 

Behind that house there’s the Willow Park.

In the 1980s, the borough had all but abandoned it (or so it appeared to me back then), making it a perfect place for 9-12 year old boys. Who needed actual playground equipment when we could build elaborate tree forts and carry out an invisible, one-sided war against teenagers who rode through the woods?

But now the Willow Park is an actual, well, park, with benches and swings and a softball field.

Equally depressing: there’s an entire block of downtown Ashland where nearly every building is for sale or rent. (Including the dearly departed, oddly named Gay Store, which deserves an entry of its own someday soon.)

The only thing left is a tobacco store. There wasn’t even enough business to support a fucking dollar store.

None of this, however, makes me as sad as the loss of Black Diamond Video.

Why Cars 2 Didn't Work For Me

My sister-in-law texted me a few weeks ago with grim news.

"They want to see Cars 2. And Mr. Popper's Penguins." That was followed with something about shooting herself.

The "they" she's referring to are her son Bela and daughter Claudia, ages 2 and 3. They had seen the Kung Fu Panda sequel, and apparently seeing previews for these other kid-friendly movies had gotten them interested.

I couldn't blame Amber for being unenthused by the notion of spending 90 minutes with Jim Carrey and dancing CGI penguins*, but I felt the need to defend Cars 2. Or more to the point, to defend Pixar.

"The Pixar movies aren't like other kids movies," I wrote back (and a lot of his is paraphrasing). "They're not loud and hyperactive. They won't be dated by pop culture references the way a lot of cartoons are now. Adults can appreciate them as much, if not more than, kids..."

Etc. etc. I wasn't all that original in my pro-Pixar arguments. But I was convincing...sort of.

"Fine," Amber wrote back. "YOU take them."

And so we did. It was semi-disastrous. The kids seemed bored -- although later they apparently couldn't stop talking about the Cars -- and we left close to the end following a complete meltdown.

And I learned two things:

1. 113 minutes is far too long for a kids movie, especially one that follows 15-20 minutes of trailers and the standard Pixar short that follows its movies.

2. This is the first Pixar movie I wouldn't see again.

Don't get me wrong: it's not a bad movie. I didn't groan through it, the way I do for even the trailers for things like the Smurfs, those Chipmunk movies.

Even if it feels more like a kids' movie than, say, Finding Nemo or Monsters Inc, it's clever, it moves quickly despite it's running time, and the characters are all pretty likable.**

If I hadn't been worrying about two toddlers the whole time, or fielding their questions, I wouldn't have been bored.

Yet the movie didn't really work for me, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that the cars' universe doesn't really work for me.

Whether they've centered around toys, fish or superheroes, the Pixar movies have all existed in a recognizable world. 

But what world are the Cars in? It's one that includes TV, restaurants, Tokyo, Paris and London...but no people.

So where did the cars come from? Is there some sort of Planet of the Apes situation at work? Or are we seeing -- as cartoonist Joel Watson suggested recently --the world after SkyNet?

Or maybe it has to do with the notion that I can't identify with a car. I've written before about how I didn't as weepy over the end of Toy Story 3 as the rest of the country apparently did, but I at least always thought my toys had some sort of personality.

But never my cars. I've never loved a car, given one a nickname, or even called it "she." It's just an expensive, important tool. 

And finally, there's part of me that's a bit disappointed that the last two Pixar movies (as well as the studio's 2013 film, Monsters University) have been sequels. Not bad ones, or derivatives ones. But they're still sequels. As much as I admire their willingness to expand the universes they've created, I'd rather see them create new ones.

 

* Seriously, what is it with dancing penguins? When we saw Cars 2, there were two different trailers that featured them.

** Even Mater, the tow truck voiced by Larry the Cable guy, who I normally find pretty distasteful. 

At the Movies: Why I'm a Heartless Crank Who Didn't Cry During Toy Story 3

 By the time I was maybe 13 or 14, I didn't have toys anymore. I'm not sure what my parents did with them, nor do I really care. 

 I liked setting elaborate battle scenarios with my G.I. Joe/Star Wars guys. (And they were always guys; I'm pretty sure Princess Leia never made it into my vast collection.) But at a certain point, I just sort of forgot about them.

 All of this is a roundabout way of saying I'm apparently the only adult male in Ameirca to have seen Toy Story 3 and not left the theater weeping, or even a little misty eyed.

 Don't get me wrong: it was great, like everything else I've seen from Pixar. And it's not like the studio's other films don't have the power to move me. The wordless opening sequence of Up is one of the most affecting things I've ever seen in any movie, cartoon or otherwise. And the day after seeing Toy Story 3, I went back and watched the first one, and found myself with a little catch in my throat during the moment at the end when Buzz spreads his wings and flies. 

 And I found myself very scared -- and then very, very relieved for the toys during TS3's landfill climax, in which the Things-Always-Turn-Out-OK-in-Pixar-Movies part of my brain seemed to go on vacation, replaced by the newly-found This-Is-Terrifying-Why-Is-This-G-Rated? lobe. Yet when the end came, and goodbyes were said, and the toys moved onto a new life, I wasn't exactly weepy or choked up.

 I think it comes down to the fact that while I liked having toys, and playing with them, none of what I had was exactly cherished. I don't remember a favorite (I had a teddy bear when I was much younger, but it's not like I had him embarking on any adventures of the Buzz/Woody variety). I mean, Boba Fett was cool and all, as was Yoda, and I dug Vader's cape, but that's about all.

 Now that I think about it, when I played with Star Wars toys, they did Star Wars stuff. When I got out my G.I. Joe figures, they did G.I. Joe stuff, and so on. I like to think I have a strong, versatile imagination, but most of my flights of fancy as a kid came from books, and not from my toys, which all seemed to be off-shoots of movies or TV shows (TV shows made to sell the toys I played with). They were characters starring in spin-offs of their own stories, and I was simply their director. They were never my friends. 

 Maybe I'd relate better to Book Story than Toy Story, but I doubt even Pixar could get that one greenlit. And to be fair, if I knew Yoda and Boba Fett had wound up with the same fate the Toy Story toys narrowly escaped from, I might feel a little bad, even after all this time.

 Tom Coombe

At the Movies: Splice

 Somewhere in Splice's DNA is the genetic make-up of a "don't mess with science" horror masterpiece on the level of David Cronenberg's The Fly. Unfortunately, it just never quite comes together.

For a sci-fi/horror movie released without a lot of fanfare in the middle of blockbuster season, it's gotten some solid reviews.

 Splice does have a lot going for it. It's got two fine actors (Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody, in an age when a lot of horror movies seem content to go with generic CW heart-throbs) in the lead roles of Clive and Elsa, romantic/scientific partners who create a bizarre new life form using human and animal DNA.

 It has well-developed characters and raises interesting questions about parenting, ethics and science. And although the creature at its center -- Dren, played by French actress Delphine Chaneac -- is one of the most fascinating movie monsters of all time, the movie slowly turns its two leads into even greater monsters. 

 For the first hour or so, Clive and Elsa push all sorts of scientific and ethical boundaries, and it's deeply fascinating to watch. As the third act begins, they -- separately -- cross a moral boundary with their experiment, and the movie doesn't seem to know how to deal with it. 

 In its homestretch, Splice turns into a "run from the monster" movie, and while what happens is horrific, it feels somewhat out of place with the rest of the film. It all leads to a conclusion that seems to scream "sequel," and if that's the case, let's hope director Vincezo Natali will, like all good movie scientists, learn from his mistakes.

 Tom Coombe

At the Movies: Nightmare on Elm Street

It's a bad sign when you're watching a movie and your strongest reaction goes something like:   

 "I recognize nearly all of these actors from TV shows, shows that I'd rather be watching instead of this movie."

 I've touched on this notion before, but it's never been more apparent for me than on Saturday, during A Nightmare on Elm Street. The remake features:

•  Katie Cassidy who's been on Supernatural.
• Thomas Dekker, the young John Connor on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
• Connie Britton, who plays Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights, and was Jack Bauer's only likable post-season one love interest 24.
• Clancy Brown, who was one of the best villains on TV ever on Carnivale, and played Desmond's hatchmate on Lost.
• Kyle Gallner, who's been on a lot of TV shows, including three of my favorites: Veronica Mars, Big Love and The Shield (where he had a small but crucial recurring role in the final season).

 Hell, let's even toss in Jackie Earle Haley, one of the three main cast members on Human Target. It's by no means a great show, but it's at least fun and kind of engaging, adjectives that do not apply to Elm Street 2010.

 Haley's actually a pretty good choice to play Freddy Krueger. Nearly everything else he's appeared in since his comeback a few years ago has given us an image of him as a scary guy. He's still not as remote and unknowable as Robert Englund was in the original Nightmare on Elm Street, but he also doesn't spend the movie tossing off horrible one-liners either.

The real problem is that the movie spends too much time making us jump than actually scaring us. Here's a story where a large portion of the action takes place inside people's dreams, in a world controlled by a villain who can twist that reality however he sees fit. Yet the movie is rarely that imaginative or deep. The original Elm Street could sort of be read as a parable about the effect of divorce on teenagers: Nancy is so desperate to get her father back home that's she'll summon a monster to do it. Twenty-six years later, we're stuck with a parade of "I was just dreaming!" moments. As nightmares go, this one is a little closer to the school-in-your-underwear variety.

 

 Tom Coombe

  

Clash of the Neesons

 Two interesting moments from the lengthy Clash of the Titans ad I saw at the movies this weekend.

1. Sam Worthington says "Most people remember Medusa from the original Clash of the Titans..."

I would suspect most people know her from actual Greek mythology. (Or if you're me, the God of War video games.)

2. Cast member Alexa Davalos notes that it's a "fact" that "no one can kill the Krakken." Was that a Jacques Cousteau special that never aired?

"We tried to kill zee Krakken, but it is impossible!"

For what it's worth, I do plan to see this movie, which will hopefully at least entertain me more than Chloe which had an interesting concept, but had cast the wrong actress in the pivotal title role. Amanda Seyfried wouldn't be my first pick to play a call girl. Or maybe I'm just biased by four season of Big Love; during one of her sex scenes, I half expected Bill Henrickson to burst in and chastise her for not living the "principle." 

 For what it's worth, Chloe also featured Liam Neeson, who will play Zeus in COTT.

Supernatural Movies and the Curse of "Supernatural"

 Given the choice, I'd pick a bad movie over a mediocre one any day. If you see a movie that warrants nothing more than a "meh" after the credits roll, you haven't been given a lot to digest. 

 But if a movie does a lot of things wrong, it gives you a lot to think about and discuss when it's over.

 Take the new horror/action movie Legion. Watching it yesterday, I thought about a lot of things:

•  How many of the actors in it -- Dennis Quaid, Lucas Black, Adrianne Palicki of Friday Night Lights, Charles S. Dutton and Paul Bettany -- deserved better.
• How it had two screenwriters, but didn't feel like something two people collaborated on. Rather, it felt more like one person wrote the (better, promising) first half of the movie, while someone else came along and hammered out the (ridiculous, boring) second.
• How it contained some fairly horrific imagery (like the ice cream man, pictured) which belonged in a better movie. 
• How wasted the ice cream man scene was. It starts off well-enough: We hear the chimes of an ice cream truck coming out of the darkness. The driver gets out, contorts his body into a weird spider shape...and gets gunned down almost immediately.
• How any of the scariness or tension the movie might have built up early on was washed away by the appearance of winged angels in armor.

 Mainly, I just thought how Sam and Dean Winchester would have handled things a lot better than anyone in this movie.

At the Movies: Up in the Air

 (Spoilers ahead)

 There's not a lot to write about, TV-wise, this week, so why not look to the movies? We'll be back in TV mode next week. 

 This is a very brief review, so if you want more detailed thoughts on the writing, acting, and directing (all of which were great, by the way) look here.

 I'll just say that this one deserves all the praise it has gotten. Up in the Air marks two great movies for George Clooney in one year (the other being Fantastic Mr. Fox), and would make a nice double feature with another Clooney movie, Michael Clayton.

 They're both stories of men who are very good at their jobs, to the point that it's cost them their souls.

 And although no one blows up Clooney's car in Up in the Air, and although it's filled with a lot of nice, zippy one-liners and is often quite sweet and funny, it is -- in its own way -- just as dark.

 Because even though Clooney's Ryan Bingham -- whose job it is to fire people for companies that don't want to do it themselves -- grows and changes and learns over the course of Up in the Air, the movie never really rewards him for this growth. A lesser film might allow him to get the girl and sail off into the sunset. Here, the only victories Bingham achieves are kind of hollow, and the final shot of this lovely little film is a sky filled with fluffy, impenetrable clouds.

 Tom Coombe

What I've Been Watching, Part V: Short Attention Span Edition

 There's a lot of little things I've been meaning to write about, but none of them at the type of length that I want to do a full blog post, none of them brief enough to write about via Twitter. This looks like a job for...bullet points!

• I've gotten familiar enough with Sons of Anarchy that I think I'm going to add it to the blog rotation, starting with tonight's new episode. I still kind of think it's a bit over-the-top, but it's hard to expect a show about a gang of violent bikers to have a lot of Mad Men moments. Plus, I'm really enjoying Adam Arkin as the season's Big Bad, a quiet, soft-spoken neo-Nazi who wants to run the Sons out of town.
• Speaking of Adam Arkin, I'm watching the second season of NBC's sadly-shortlived Life, in which he plays the sidekick to the main character, Damian Lewis' Charlie Crews. Watching it now, I'm wishing Crews had stuck around a little longer. Actually, maybe NBC could resurrect the character and put him on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. He's a lot more appealing than Goren.
• Also on my DVD list: the fourth season of Supernatural, which may be the most critically underrated show on TV right now. (Other than the Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan, I don't see a lot of TV writers giving it the press it deserves.) Four seasons in (I'll be starting on the latest, season five, some time next week), I'm thinking it's a worthy successor to Buffy or the X-Files: funny, scary, smart and heart-felt, a weekly monster movie that's also a story about the importance of family. Whenever I see the trailer for a horror movie these days, I find myself thinking "I bet Supernatural could do this better."
• If you have HBO On Demand, you really need to be watching Epitafios. It's a thriller from Argentina that ran its first 13-episode season a few years ago; HBO2 started showing the second season last month. Both seasons are great, and supremely frightening. They follow a detective in Buenos Aries chasing serial killers, but I don't want to say much more than that. Go in cold, like I did. It's miles away from anything Criminal Minds can accomplish.
• Word is that Joss Whedon's Dollhouse might get cancelled, which would be a shame, even if the last two episodes have been kind of bland. But if it that does happen, can Whedon maybe turn his attention to comics full time? His Buffy comic is a must-read for me every month, but I've also just discovered his Astonishing X-Men arc (in trade paperback), which has been, well, astonishing. He manages to make all the characters his own (Kitty Pryde sounds like Willow or Buffy), while still staying true to the series. Really good stuff.
• Two good movies I've seen lately: The Informant!, which takes subject matter that might have wound up on Frontline and turns it into something akin to Burn After Reading, and Zombieland, which is a zombie film along the lines of Shaun of the Dead, but with a bit more emotional heft (and actually, a lot more consistently funny.)
• That's it for now. Sons of Anarchy tonight, Office/Flashforward/Fringe later in the week.

 Tom Coombe