Sci-Fi In July: Paprika (2006)

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I rarely remember my dreams. Sometimes I remember them for just a few seconds as I’m walking downstairs in the middle of the night to use the toilet (for I am of the age where I walk downstairs in the middle of every night to use the toilet) but by the time I get there the dream has been forgotten. Like mist, it fades away no matter how hard I try to capture it.

I’m not one to put much stock into dreams and their significance. Once in a while, I’ll remember a dream and it will seem to have some deeper meaning. During my brief tenure in graduate school, I had a dream about my grandmother, some hot air balloons, and a bunch of turkeys which guided me through a major decision, but mostly I think dreams are just your brain playing Etch-A-Sketch while you’re sleeping.

Paprika is a Japanese animated film from the mind of Satoshi Kon (who also made Perfect Blue). It is a strange, beautiful film that is all about dreams, reality, and our relationship to movies and pop culture.

Taking place in the near future scientists have invented a machine that allows others to view (and even record) people’s dreams. It was built as a psychiatric tool, but it has been stolen by a terrorist. The devices, called DC-Minis, are prototypes and lack restrictions, thus anyone (including terrorists) can enter anyone else using the machine’s dreams.

Our hero is Doctor Atsuko Chiba, the head of the psychiatric department developing the DC-Minis. She’s secretly been using the machine to help people outside the purview of the research facility. When she does this she uses the alias “Paprika.”

One of the people she’s been helping is Detective Toshimi Konakawa who has been having recurring dreams about a murder case he has been unable to solve.

Together (along with Doctor Toratarō Shima the chief of staff for the institute and Doctor Kōsaku Tokita, the childlike inventor of the DC-Mini) they try to solve the mystery of who stole the device.

I think. Honestly, the plot of this film was beyond my grasp. Like a lot of films that deal with dreams, Paprika embodies dream logic to tell its story. Things are constantly changing, morphing before our eyes. Characters jump into painting and movies on a whim.

There are a lot of movie references within the film. Not to specific movies (at least none that I caught) but to genres like mysteries and romances. In doing so the film seems to be toying with the idea of reality versus fiction and how movies and books and stories sometimes seem more real than reality.

Or something. Seriously, I’m not sure what I just watched, but I sure as heck enjoyed watching. The animation is simply gorgeous. And weird. And wild. And trippy.

Go see it.

Arlo Guthrie – Arroyo Grande, CA (04/08/15)

Arlo Guthrie
Forbes Hall
The Clark Center for the Performing Arts
Arroyo Grande, CA
April 8, 2015

16 BIT

Neumann AK-40s (ORTF In Hat) > LC3 > KM-100s > Beyer MV-100 > Tascam DR-100mkII @ 24 bit/48 kHz

Mastering: .WAV’s > iZotope RX3 Advanced v3.00.695 (declick) > Sound Forge Pro 10.0a (minor edits, normalize, & fades) >
WAV >Audacity (Track Splits, Down Sample / Dither To 16 bit / 44.1k) >FLAC (Level 8) via xACT 2.35) >FLAC Tags Via xACT 2.35

Location: 7th row, Center Section, three seats in from left-side aisle
Recorded, Audacity track splits / down sample, FLAC, tags, & front-cover artwork by OldNeumanntapr

Mastered by: Dennis Orr

Set I:

  1. Motorcycle Song
  2. talk / band intros
  3. Chilling Of The Evening
  4. talk
  5. Darkest Hour
  6. talk
  7. Me And My Goose
  8. talk
  9. Ocean Crossing
  10. Last Train
  11. Pig Meat Papa*
  12. talk / Wavy Gravy story, Woodstock story, Checker cab story
  13. Coming Into Los Angeles

Set II:

  1. Alice’s Restaurant
  2. talk
  3. St. James Infirmary**
  4. talk
  5. Hear You Sing Again***
  6. City Of New Orleans****
  7. talk
  8. Highway In The Wind
  9. This Land Is Your Land***
  10. talk
  11. My Peace^*
  • Leadbelly, circa 1935
    ** Cisco Houston
    *** Woody Guthrie
    **** Steve Goodman
    ^* Words By Woody Guthrie, Music By Arlo Guthrie

Arlo Guthrie – lead vocals, guitars, & keyboards
Abe Guthrie – keyboards
Bobby Sweet – lead guitar & violin
Terry A La Berry – drums

OldNeumanntapr Notes:
I hadn’t seen Arlo in almost 17 years, since he played the old Cuesta College Auditorium in San Luis Obispo. I noticed right away that Arlo appeared to have lost weight since the last time I’d seen him. His voice was a little craggy, which he attributed to being sick.

The night before the show I burned CD’s of the two previous Arlo shows that I had recorded (3/23/91 Ventura Theater and 10/23/98 Cuesta College), in hopes of giving them to Arlo. I wasn’t sure if he would meet folks after the show, like he did at Cuesta in ’98, so luckily I was able to stop by the back doors of the Clark Center at around 3 pm. I was able to give the discs to Arlo’s bus driver and he said that he would pass them along.

My friend Dave bought four tickets back in November or December, when they went on sale, so I knew I had a good reserved seat waiting. Even though Arlo is reputed to allow taping, I decided to go stealth because it would be easier. Plus, my seat was about 10 feet or so in front of the board, which is where I figured to set up if I went the open taping route.

I wasn’t sure the venue would allow me to bring in a mic stand, and even if they would have I thought the possibility was high, being it was a sold out show, that someone in the back would complain that my microphones were blocking their sight lines. When we walked out after the show I noticed that Arlo’s sound crew had brought in their own mixing board and lighting gear, and the house board was covered up in the spot where I had set up before, for Dark Star Orchestra in 2007. So, it was a good decision to run stealth. Fortunately the crowd around me was very quiet. One guy behind me coughed a couple of times but it wasn’t intrusive. There was a baby that cried once or twice during the second set but fortunately it was way in the back of the hall.

Being a multi-media presentation, Arlo opened the first set with a claymation video of the Motorcycle song, complete with Arlo as a pickle riding his Honda and falling off the cliff and smashing the police car. The band came out, in the dark, while the short film was playing, and synched their playing with the film soundtrack. There was also a cartoon later depicting a little boy and his pet goose, which Arlo used to highlight a children’s song about the goose being cooked and eaten for dinner. ‘Coming Into Los Angeles’ closed the first set, which is a favorite of mine.

The second set opened with ‘Alice’s Restaurant’, with four part harmony and full orchestration. 😉 Arlo had film clips from the 1969 film ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ playing behind the band during this part of the show. He remarked to the crowd that Officer Obie, as well as the judge, were real people playing themselves and were not actors. Arlo said that Obie told him when the film was being made that if anyone was going to make a fool out of him he should do it himself. He said that he and Obie actually developed a friendship that lasted until the officer’s death.

Arlo played ‘The City Of New Orleans’, which was written by Steve Goodman. He mentioned that Goodman wanted him to pass the song on to Johhny Cash but Cash wasn’t interested, having done a recent trains album. ‘That was fortunate for me,’ Arlo said. He also played ’St. James Infirmary’, which I don’t know if I have heard before.

Arlo played a plethora of acoustic guitars, including a 12 string that seemed to be electric/acoustic, which had a sound hole that was high up in the front corner of the body. He fiddled with one acoustic six string guitar which needed some adjustments and remarked to the crowd, ‘Funny, I tuned it last year.’ He also played keyboards. His son Abe played keyboards and he had a lead guitarist who also played violin. His drummer was surrounded by a clear Plexiglas sound containment wall.

All in all it was a good concert evening in a really small intimate theater. The theatre at the Clark Center holds a little over 600 people.

Enjoy! Share freely, don’t sell, play nice, don’t run with scissors, etc. 😉
DO NOT Convert To MP3!

Allman Brothers Band – Paso Robles, CA (08/05/96)

Allman Brothers Band
8/5/96
Grandstands
California Mid-State Fair
Paso Robles, CA

SEC. 5, Row B, Seat #4 (2nd Row, Left)
Nakamichi CM-300 CP-2 Omnis >Sony TCD-D7 (Stealth)
DAT Master Transferred: Tascam DA-30 >HHb CDR 800 PRO Via Analog i/o,
CD Masters >FLAC (Level 8) Via xACT 2.35 >FLAC Tags Via xACT 2.53

(Recorded, Transferred, FLAC’d, Tagged, & Front-Cover Artwork By OldNeumanntapr)

Disc I

  1. Statesboro Blues (fades in)
  2. Midnight Rider
  3. Blue Sky
  4. You Don’t Love Me (fades in)
  5. What’s Done Is Done
  6. Worried Down With The Blues
  7. True Gravity >

Disc II

  1. Drums >
  2. Bass Solo >True Gravity
  3. The Same Thing
  4. Dreams
  5. End Of The Line
  6. One Way Out

OldNeumanntapr Notes:
This was a stealth recording because the fairgrounds would NOT allow a recording to be made, even though the band allowed it. I purchased tickets that were directly under the left PA stack, as the crowds at the fair shows are usually drunk and unruly. This was the night that Dickey went to the hospital midway through the set so the band had to improvise with lots of long drawn out jams. You got the feeling the band was really flying by the seat of their pants after Dickey was taken away. It was like, ‘OK guys, NOW what do we do?’ The show must go on! I believe that my recording was the only one made that night. I’ve never seen another source for this show, and most of the tapers were still in Colorado for the ABB Red Rocks shows that had just taken place the previous weekend. As usual, the Mid State Fair crowds were drunk and obnoxious. (I wanted to be as close to the PA stacks as possible!) I used the omni capsules because I had the microphones hidden in a Levi jacket with just the capsules protruding from the front pockets, and they were pointing straight up. (There was really no way to ‘aim’ them’ so proximity to the PA was key.) This was my standard stealth set up at the time. The jacket had holes sewn into the bottom of the front pockets and I used hollowed out 35mm film can lids that went around the microphone bodies to keep the weight of the microphones from falling through the pockets. Custom shortened XLR >RCA cables were used to link with a standard RCA >Mini Y cable that ran into the mic input on my D7.

Do NOT Convert To MP3.
Enjoy! Share freely, don’t sell, play nice, don’t run with scissors, etc. 😉

Sci-Fi in July

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After a month without a theme, I wanted to come in strong. Science Fiction isn’t a genre that I love. Or maybe I should say it is a genre I don’t watch all that often. I love many science fiction films – from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Alien, Jurassic Park to Mad Max Fury Road. But again it isn’t a genre I necessarily turn to regularly.

So, I thought it would be fun to watch some this month (and I just love me some rhyming monthly movie themes).

Sci-fi is a genre that’s hard to define. In a pinch, I’d say it takes place sometime in the future and deals with technology and ideas that we’ve not yet thought of. But that just scratches the surface. The genre often blends with fantasy. What’s that old line about technology becoming so advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic? And stories set on alien planets with alien life are not so different from magical creates in fantasy stories.

Looking at the sci-fi genre on Letterboxd turns up all the Marvel movies and Star Wars and where do you draw that line?

I don’t know. Don’t really care. I’m gonna watch films I think fall into the science fiction category and we’ll leave it at that.

I think this is going to be fun.

The Movie Journal: June 2024

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I watched 43 movies in the month of June. 35 of them had never been seen by me before. 20 of them were made before I was born. Eight of them were made in the last two years, which is an unusually high number for me.

There was no theme this month which is nice sometimes. I just watched what I wanted to watch. Although it did mean I hardly did any reviewing this month as I really need that theme to push me into it.

As we are six months into the year I’ll talk a little bit about how my year is going. I’ve watched 238 movies this year. That’s an average of 34 per month or 9.1 per week. Unsurprisingly, I watch most of my movies on the weekend.

Drama is my most watched genre with 97 films watched in that category. This is followed by Thriller (97 films), Crime (71 films), Horror (60 films), and Mystery (57 films).

English is my most watched language with 202 films being in that language. This is followed by Italian (11), Japanese (10), French (5), and Silent Films (3).

187 of the films I’ve watched were new to me, leaving 51 of them as rewatches. I try to keep my new watch-to-rewatch ratio at 75% and I’m at 78.6%.

actors

As you can see the actors field has stayed more or less the same. The Doctor Who cast bumped up one (save for Carole Ann Ford who left the series at this point) and Barbara Stanwyck made the list with four films watched.

director

Terence Fisher joined the directorial ranks with two films (two Hammer Horrors) and Lucio Fulci jumped in as well with two.

Several months ago I posted one of these things to my Facebook account and a friend of mine noted how these fields are full of white dudes, with hardly a female or person of color to be found.

That hit hard as I know it to be true. There are excuses I could make like how Hollywood is run by white dudes. But I have been making an effort to watch films directed by women and people of color and to seek out actors in that same way. But I’m afraid my top draws continue to be white dudes.

Some favorite new watches from the last six months include The Great Train Robbery (1903), Battleship Potemkin (1925), Love Lies Bleeding (2024), Edge of the City (1957), and Sherlock, Jr (1924).

Anyway, here’s the June list.

Cemetery Man (1994) ****
Scotland, PA (2001) ****
Beware, My Lovely (1952) ***1/2
No Man of Her Own (1950) ***
Dark City (1950) ***1/2
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) ***1/2
Dream Demon (1988) ***1/2
Macbeth (1948) ****
Act of Violence (1948) ****
Top Gun: Maverick (2022) ****
Barbary Coast (1935) ***
Klute (1971) ****
Risky Business (1983) ***1/2
Top Gun (1986) ***
The Devil Rides Out (1968) ****
Demonia (1990) **
The First Omen (2024) ***
Doctor Who: The Rescue (1965) ***1/2
Doctor Who: The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) ***1/2
Godzilla Minus One (2023) ****
The Deep (1977) **1/2
Drive (2011) ****
A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) ***
The Fall Guy (2024) ****
No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) ***
Love Lies Bleeding (2024) ****1/2
Late Night with the Devil (2023) ***1/2
The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) ***
Candyman (1992) ***
Edge of the City (1957) ****1/2
Saigon (1947) **1/2
Corridors of Blood (1958) ***1/2
Comrade X (1940) ****
Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023) ***1/2
The Burglars (1971) ***1/2
Flatliners (1990) **1/2
Wicked Little Letters (2023) ***1/2
The Good Die Young (1954) ***1/2
Sylvia Scarlett (1935) ***
Night Terrors (1993) **
Immaculate (2024) ***1/2
The Wrath of Becky (2023) **
Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) ***

The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2014)

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In my review of The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears I noted that while I liked the film I was not likely to ever watch it again. And yet my review of the film makes me want to do just that.

It is a strange, almost incomprehensible film – one filled with beautiful, dark, blood-soaked images. I barely remember it. I need to rewatch it.

My full review is here.

Borgen: The Complete Series

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Being an amateur reviewer is fun, but sometimes exhausting. Because I have a regular full-time job, a family, and sometimes I pretend I have a social life finding the time to sit down and watch something and then review it can be complicated.

Ok, let’s be real here. Obviously, I have the time. I watch a lot of movies. I talk about them here so I can’t pretend that I don’t have the time. Let me start over. Being an amateur reviewer is fun, but sometimes I want to watch whatever I want to watch and not have to write about them afterward.

That’s better.

Being an amateur reviewer does take a lot of time. When I write an official review I try to do a good job. I spend quite a bit of time in research mode. I’ll read about the making of the film. I’ll read new reviews and reviews that were written at the time the film came out. I like to dig into the history of genres and filmmakers. Etc. That stuff doesn’t always come into the actual review, but I like to do my research.

But reviews also have a deadline. PR people want you to have the reviews up the week the film comes out (or in my case when the Blu-ray is released). When things go well that is no problem. But sometimes they don’t actually give me a copy of the film until after it has come out. Sometimes I’ll request quite a few things and then find myself having to watch and review half a dozen films within a few days.

Or sometimes, as is the case with this series, I’ll get a multi-season collection and have to get my review out quickly. Binge-watching a series is one thing. Bing-watching multiple seasons in a few days and managing to write something coherent is something else. With stuff like this, I tend to watch a couple of episodes then skip a few and work my way through the entire thing like that. There just isn’t enough time to watch every single episode.

So, Borgen is a Danish series that is often likened to The West Wing. I remember watching it, and liking it, but the whole thing is a blur. I know I skipped around quite a lot with it and now I really want to sit down with it, taking my time to enjoy it.

You can read my review here.

Wizard World Tulsa 2014

wizard world

Comic Cons and the like have become big business. I remember hearing about the huge one in San Diego for years. That’s where the big names come and preview all the big nerd-centric movies and television series that will be released that year. I suppose there were Star Trek conventions, etc. in various cities for years, but these days it seems like there is some kind of con going on just about everywhere on every weekend of the year.

In 2014 we got one in Tulsa and I got a press pass to go. It was a little daunting but fun. I came back the following year and the year after. Each time the con got a little smaller, the celebrity names a little more b-lister. I guess Tulsa just isn’t a big enough city or something.

I got kind of tired of it, too. I like looking at the costumes people wear, and some of the doo-dads people sell are cool. The whole celebrity thing is weird, though. I have no desire to pay a lot of money to get a celebrity autograph or to snap a picture with them. The talks can be fun, but more often than not the celebrities seem kind of bored and they tell the same stories.

I’m not knocking it. If you enjoy that sort of thing then by all means enjoy it. But after a few times going myself, I’ve had enough.

And now my daughter is getting into all that. She actually loves to cosplay and wants someplace to go where she can be with like-minded people. I’ve taken her to a couple of them and we’re going to another one here in a couple of weeks. So the circle of life comes again.

Anyway, I did a little write-up on that first con I went to, and you can read it here.

Puck: What Fools These Mortals Be!

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I pay very little attention to politics these days. I know I probably should, I know it is important. I do get enough information to make what I think is an informed enough vote, but there is so much vitriol out there that I can’t take too much of it in.

I used to pay close attention. I used to argue about it on social media thinking I was making a difference. Then one night I realized I was lying in bed at two o’clock in the morning trying to make the perfect argument to convince an old college friend on Facebook of something or other.

I didn’t convince him of anything. In fact, we got into a pretty good fight and stopped talking to each other for a long while.

My blood pressure can’t take that crap.

And that’s how I make an introduction to my review of a book that is full of political cartoons from a century ago! Puck was a hugely important political magazine that ran from 1877 to 1918. This book covers that history and presents a whole bunch of the cartoons that ran inside its covers. As you can read in my review, it is quite informative and rather dull to this non-history buff reader.

Intruders (2014)

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I read all of these old reviews of mine before I post them to the site. I mostly enjoy reading my thoughts on things I watched many years ago. Reading this review, of a sci-fi/horror series from Britain released in 2014 I suddenly realized Millie Bobby Brown was in it. She is now known as “11” on Stranger Things.

Back then she was just a kid, and now a well-known one. It is funny to think I saw her in this series and wrote her name in my review, but had no idea how big of a star she would become.

Not that it really matters, I just find it interesting. Like I didn’t know who she was then, and until just now I didn’t realize she was in that show (of which I have the vaguest of memories watching.)

Anyway, you can read my review of the series here.