Shapes Of Things To Come

SO I HAD burgers. I had cheese. I had bacon. Even-tually, this was going to happen. I think it probably happened as a result of having Chinese take-out last night. For some reason, having a bacon double cheeseburger strikes me as the polar opposite of having fried dumplings and mixed lo mein, and the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is the spark in the firmament that connects them. Very Zen, very yen-yang.

Tomorrow will be the cheeseburger at the local, which doesn't necessarily follow as a consequent at all. It'll be Tuesday. Tuesday is the day I go to the local for the cheeseburger. This, too, is more or less inevitable.


I also thought this was inevitable, but I was wrong. We got through maybe ten minutes of it before the Wifey had had it. She had decided, after the fourth sequel came out, that maybe we needed to catch up with the series. Which meant watching this, 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Fast And The Furious: Toyko Drift, and Fast And Furious, the ingeniously titled fourth installment of this seemingly deathless series. I didn't make mention of the fact that I gave up watching the third installment after five minutes of hammy, cliche-ridden, shallow exigesis that went down worse than old crackers from a packet of C rations without water, an analogy almost as cryptic and stupid as the movie itself. Of course, it didn't help that I knew a little about the "sport" of drifting, which is a nasty, filthy, wasteful, awful activity, perpetrated by idiots who hate their cars.

But, after all, crisis averted. When Vin Diesel is the most convincing actor in the flick, time's come to give it the fuck up.


AND then we watched this. I forget precisely what fomented it, although it clearly had something to do with the derbying, but she decided awhile back that she wanted to give it a shot, in advance of seeing the 2002 remake. Whilst this was waiting in the queue, we watched about two minutes of the newer one, about 15 minutes in, before Rachelle decided that it was a stack of shit not worth measuring. Which was fine by me. Say what you will about the man, but when Jean Reno is your seasoned veteran brought in to give the youngsters some gravitas, well, you're fucked.

But the original played nicely. Rachelle's classic quote, after the elucidation that the world in 2018 will be run by corporations, was, "Well, they got a couple of things wrong." (Which is funny, see, 'cause we taxpayers supposedly own several large banks, General Motors, etc., although it has been argued by yours truly that the political parties in most countries in this day and age are basically corporations.) Her classic after-action report is even better: "Also, I would totally watch a game of Roller Ball live. Without the killing." Yeah, the homicide would kind of put a damper on the thing for me.

The larger part of the reason I like the film has to do with how awfully ironic it is. We're supposed to be enjoying it because of all the terrible things it says about humanity, because all us smart folk are misanthropes who abhor violence. But we're NASCAR fans at heart, most of us. We're going to see people get smacked in the head with spikey gloves and shiny metal balls.

And when I say we, I mean you. 'cause I'm that kind of schmuck.


After that, this. Just happened to be on the TCM channel, a tad over half the way through, which is a fine enough way to watch it. This is another example of how much it is possible to get wrong. The International Space Station is a glorified high school science lab, there is no base on the moon, you can't fly manned spacecraft any further than the moon, and even then it costs a fortune and wastes resources, and so far as we know, freezing kills. No such thing as suspended animation.

The rest, howeverm is all true. The bone that famous ape-man threw into space turned into a spaceship, and then that monolith caused that one guy wo spend etenity in a ninteenth century drawing room before hurtling across the high deserts of California wearing neon filter glasses. Don't you read the papers?

So: to the recommendations. Anything you add bacon to in your own home is your own business. Wow. Think about THAT for a minute. The possibilities! On the other hand, what went wrong with the Fast & Furious movies is essentially what went wrong with the remake of the Rollerball movie, which is, basically, they added bacon to it. I could be wrong about that. But I do think that it's part of why no one ever thought to remake Kubrik's movies. They already had bacon added to them. Little known fact: Kubrik added bacon to everything.