Maybe You've Seen These Too . . .

So every now and then when I'm driving down the road I see one of those orange, diamond-shaped signs that say, "MOTORCYCLES USE EXTREME CAUTION," and I think, "oh, that's good. I've heard they can be kind of dangerous." Also, I think it would be awesome if someone were to picket using those "END ROAD WORK" signs.

Actually, it looks like it's already been done.

Fortuitous

The front passenger seat in my car freaks out whenever it thinks there's a kid riding in it. Since I don't actually have a kid it's usually just a book bag or some groceries or something. A little flashing light comes on in the dash and the car beeps at me. I'm not sure what the light indicates or what actions I'm supposed to take in response to the beeps. They stop after a while, but it's usually pretty annoying and I have to put up with it because it's either that or relocate a week's worth of groceries to the back seat with one hand, while driving and without breaking the eggs. It happened again today, but this time it was actually not too bad because the beeps synchronized pretty well with the music I was listening to.

This gave me a great idea for a fire alarm that, before activating, would listen to see if there was any music playing and then blare in time with the main bass line. It would be a lot less jarring and make fleeing your burning home clutching a photo album and PC tower (really, most of the people I know have 80% of their life there) a much more pleasant experience.

An advanced model would listen to the music you played on a daily basis and then when a fire started it would play something thematically appropriate from your favorite genre. “We Didn't Start the Fire” by Billy Joel, “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash, and “Smoke on the Water” by Jimi Hendrix are three examples that spring immediately to mind.

This could be called the iFlee.

Chandni Chowk to China

If a Bollywood film has an engaging story, I can forgive it running three hours and if a kung-fu film serves up interesting fight scenes I can forgive it pretty much anything at all. Chandni Chowk to China is a Bollywood kung-fu flick that unfortunately doesn't serve up enough story to fill its two and a half hours and some fairly uninspired fighting. The fight scenes are mostly by-the-numbers choreography with a lot of CG sillyness thrown in (think Shaolin Soccer only without being actually funny). The songs, this is Bollywood after all, were mostly played for laughs as well, either turning out to be commercials or being interupted by people slipping on banana peels (honestly).

The film did feature Gordon Liu looking very dapper as a villian weilding a Bowler Hat o' Decapitation. I've been a huge fan of Liu ever since I first saw him in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Heroes of the East. I was happy to see him in the film much like I was happy to see Cary Elwes (Westley in The Princess Bride) in Saw, you develop a certain affection for the people involved in creating films and characters that you love and it's nice to see that they're still in a job and haven't been reduced to wrestling hobos for hooch. Also adding a bit of gravis to his scenes was Roger Yuen. I thought I recognized him, but I had to go hit IMDB to find out that he's the guy who played the main villian Lo Fong in Shanghai Noon. He's made a few other movies and done a lot of stunt work and has a very Hong-Kong-Cinema face. While he was on camera I could pretend I was watching a kung-fu movie, for a while at least.

CC2C uses the story of a Indian street cook and general loser who is mistaken as the reincarnation of a Chinese folk hero as a vehicle for a plot about believing in yourself and working hard to obtain your goals. Along the way coincidences pile up like dead teenagers in a slasher film and most of the main characters all turn out to be related to each other. I really wouldn't watch the movie again, and I can't recommend seeing it unless you are really curious to see how Bollywood and Kung-fu play together, or if you're just interested in checking up on Gordon Liu.

This film reminded me of Lagaan, but only because I kept wishing that I was watching that movie instead. It also reminded me of this song. Just cause. It's . . . Indian.

The Burrowers

So, I just had the pleasure of seeing a film called The Burrowers, which is basically what would happen if Tremors wasn't funny and was set in the Dakota Territories in 1879. The story follows a group of hard-bitten cowboys who are trying to save some women and children who they believe were kidnapped by indians but who were actually taken by the eponymous Burrowers. Without giving away more of the film than was revealed in the trailer I can say that the Burrowers paralyze their victims and then bury them until the bodies have decomposed enough to make easy eating--a sort of combination of the habits of alligators and spider wasps.

I wasn't sure what to expect from an Old West horror film but as it turns out, this setting provides a couple nice bonuses. First, it saves the viewer from the usual Creature Feature pseudo-scientific bullshit exposition on the creature's origin. "That's right, Doctor. These creatures are actually prehistoric Aphids that have bred with modern Black Widow spiders and grown to enormous size after being exposed to the Alpha Wave weapon the Army was testing in the mountains." Second, I think it's really great that everyone starts with guns. If I had a nickle for everytime I've had to watch a hysterical college girl fumble around for an hour and a half before finding some sort of makeshift weapon I'd have, like, probably two bucks. Or at least enough for a soda. To me, seeing a bunch of well-armed, tough-as-nails hombres being slowly worn down and broken by fear, exhaustion and the overwhelming strangeness of the situation they've found themselves in is a much more visceral experience than seeing a bunch of unprepared and unarmed amateurs get ganked.

Another thing I loved about this movie was that they used puppetry and guys-in-suits for, I think, 90-100% of their creature effects. The upshot of which is that the creatures look about a billion times better than they would have had the director gone with CG.

Anyway, this film reminded me of the H.P. Lovecraft story The Lurking Fear and the much-less-scary but equally fun movie Tremors.