Tag Archives: halloween

Ghost: Could it really be as bad as I remember?

In a word? Yes.

The 1990 mega-hit Ghost starred Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze’s chest, Tony Goldwyn and Whoopi Goldberg. It was so awesome that it’s been reworked and is currently in previews before heading to London’s otherwise theatrically respectable West End as a musical. Of course it is.

I would like points for having the self-restraint not to suggest that “Patrick Swayze’s Nipples” would make a fantastic band name.

You’re welcome.

Ghost is ham-fisted, but it’s not incompetent. Director Jerry Zucker, part of the genius team that created the Airplane movies, knows what he’s doing. That said, I suspect that no one quite knew what to do with this movie. To be fair, it’s not the worst movie ever, it’s just a muddle of too many genres, each given a shallow treatment. It starts out with a spooky title sequence then transitions abruptly to that staple of the late 80s: New York City Real Estate Porn. Goldwyn and Swayze use sledghammers to knock out a huge wall to make the gigantic amazing loft that characters Sam and Molly just moved into super-gigantic. Barechested, natch. Then it’s a lovestory. Then it’s a mystery. Then it’s a wacky slapstick comedy. Then it’s a ghost story. Then it’s Sam running around barechested again. Can someone please give that man a shirt?

Whoopi Goldberg as medium Oda Mae Brown and Vincent Schiavelli as the ghost-mentor who saves Sam’s bacon turn in great performances. It also has Stephen Root in a small role as a cop. Root has been in pretty much everything you’ve ever seen but is probably most famous for playing Milton in Office Space. Root and I were born in the same hospital. I’m running out of things to say about this movie.

Patrick Swayze & his chest (Sam) and Demi Moore (Molly) apparently have no family or friends other than Carl Bruner (Goldwyn). Despite the fact that they work in a huge bank, Sam and Carl seem to only work together. Sam gets killed and the mystery to be solved is: which one of his one colleague is ripping him off? I can overlook the primitive CGI, Demi Moore rocking a serious Moe, and the uneven Acting. But I can’t overlook that the mystery at the core of the movie isn’t mysterious. At all. And that’s just annoying.

I’ve already identified my mistake. This isn’t a morning-coffee sort of movie unless you routinely put kahlua in your coffee. I wanted to start the day with Beetlejuice but netflix streaming wasn’t cooperating so I thought this would be an okay film to jump ahead to.

If memory serves, I saw this movie at The Avalon with EvilAgent not long after we started working together in 1990. The theatre was packed and we couldn’t stop giggling every time one of the bad guys died and the “dark spirits” came for them. Those weren’t supposed to be the funny parts, or so I’ve been told.

And now, just for you: Puppies Parody The Famous Ghost Pottery Scene:

Spook

Today I’m enjoying the nice weather and finishing a very entertaining book, Mary Roach’s Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. If Roach’s name is familiar, it might be because she’s back on bestseller lists with her latest, Packing for Mars: the Curious Science of Life in the Void.

The chapter (in Spook) on EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) was one of my favorites, for audio-technology-geekery reasons, and also because I was recently reading up on new archeological research regarding the Donner party. I don’t think you can do a graduate degree in audio technology without being asked 10 million times about EVP. I know I couldn’t.

There’s a nice excerpt from this chapter on Roach’s website, so I’m very happy to be able to share it with you:

From the chapter “Can you Hear Me Now?: Telecommunicating with the Dead”

“The National Forest Service has a fine and terribly dark sense of humor, or possibly they have none at all. For somebody, perhaps an entire committee, saw fit to erect a large wooden sign near the site where fourteen emigrants bound for California were eaten by other emigrants bound for California when they became trapped by the savage snows of 1846 and starved. The sign reads: DONNER CAMP PICNIC GROUND. I got here on a tour bus chartered by Dave Oester and Sharon Gill, founders of the International Ghost Hunters Society. IGHS, one of the world’s largest (14,000 members in 78 countries) amateur paranormal investigation groups, sponsors ghost-hunting trips to famously and not-so-famously haunted sites. By and large, we look like any other tour group: The shorts, the flappy-sleeved tees, the marshmallow sneakers. We have cameras, we have camcorders. Unlike most visitors here today, we also have tape recorders. I am facing a pine tree, several feet from a raised wooden walkway that guides visitors through the site. I hold my tape recorder out in front of me, as though perhaps the tree were about to say something quotable. The other members of my group are scattered pell-mell in the fields and thickets, all holding out tape recorders. It’s like a tornado touched down in the middle of a press conference.

A couple and their dogs approach on the walkway. “Are you taping bird calls?” I answer yes, for two reasons. First, because, well, literally, we are. And because I feel silly saying, “We are wanting to tape the spirit voices of the Donner Party.”

Thousands of Americans and Europeans believe that tape recorders can capture the voices of people whose vocal cords long ago decomposed. They refer to these utterances as EVP: electronic voice phenomena. You can’t hear the voices while you’re recording; they show up mysteriously when the tape is replayed. If you do a web search on the initials EVP, you’ll find dozens of sites with hundreds of audio files of these recordings. Though some sound like clearly articulated words or whispers, many are garbled and echoey and mechanical-sounding. It is hard to imagine them coming from dead souls without significantly altering one’s image of the hereafter. Heaven is supposed to have clouds and bolts of white cloth and other excellent sound-absorbing materials. The heaven of these voices sounds like an airship hanger. They’re very odd.”

Good stuff.

I couldn’t find video of her talking about this book, so here’s her delightful recent appearance on the Daily Show, where she and Jon Stewart gab about pooping in space and other weighty (weightless?) issues.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Mary Roach
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity


Happy haunting!

Paranormal Activity

Because we’re super-cool, we’re often way ahead the culture curve and see hip new things long before mere mortals do. Other times, not so much.

Thus it was that Husband and I didn’t watch Paranormal Activity until over a year after it was released. It grossed almost $200 million at the box office, so I’m sure some of you got to it before we did.

It’s not that we hadn’t heard of it, it just kept slipping down the priority list. This being ghost movie/book/tv show/comic book/breakfast cereal month, I decided it was high time I bumped it to the top of the Netflix.

The summary: Katie and Micah live in a house. Katie and Micah keep hearing things go bump in the night. Katie knows not to screw around with whatever it is. Micah is a dick and does it anyway, putting video cameras in strategic locations in their home to try to capture evidence of the ghost or demon. What part of “put the ouija board down,” did you not understand, Micah?

I wasn’t sure how to describe the movie without spoilers, but this so-so trailer shows some of the things I was going to point out, so maybe they aren’t exactly spoilers anyway:

It’s a fairly creepy little movie that gives you a few good jumps. Something creepy happens, we see it, the story moves on. The lack of lingering is really what’s so effective to me – the scenes just pile up as these people are being inexorably marched to their doom. Or at least Micah is, we hope, because Micah, as I may have mentioned, is a dick.

The most effective scares: the bedroom door slamming, the footprints in the flour, and that swinging chandelier. I don’t think knowing they’re in the movie makes them less creepy or ruins the fun, either. Two of the creepiest scenes, to me, involve Katie merely getting out of bed in the middle of the night and standing by the bed for prolonged periods of time. She’s not doing anything, she’s just staring at Micah while he sleeps. It’s unnerving. This movie might not be the best use of 86 minutes, but it’s not the worst either.

Here’s the trailer for the sequel. They provided the embed code, so I shall embed. Plus, while I was capturing the code I accidentally let the trailer play a second time and I found that stopping it or moving it forward or back at a few points reveals creepy images you don’t see at regular speed. It was unnerving to find it accidentally. The end of the trailer is actually an amusingly clever use of Flash.

I haven’t read anything about the second one, but babies are inherently creepy, so there you go.

Happy haunting!

I didn't set out to become the champion of great sex in the city…

…but that’s what has happened. Yes, even when I’m wiped out with a nasty case of bronchial-wahatsits, loopy on high doses of steroids and antibiotics, and just generally drooling on myself I can find a way to get myself neckdeep in…something. Or, at the very least, spur others to action. There’s a blogpost brewing about all of this, but it’s too important to be dashed off in a hurry so it probably won’t appear until Monday.

Plus, today is a major holiday, and I think I deserve the day off from thinking Deep Strategic Political Thoughts, don’t you?

Plus, tomorrow is the start of National Novel Writing Month and I don’t have a clue what I’m going to write. I don’t even have any extra character names floating around the top of my head. This may be the year I write about homicidal artists…

Plus, I have to pace myself. I might actually have two outings today. I bought bloodred/black dahlias at the farmer’s market this morning and I’m going to meander over to fiberspace to work on my malabrigo scarf for a little while (and then it’s naptime). I lead a life of great excitement and danger.

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Plus, tonight we have to give out candy to the small, cute trick-or-treaters. Once they finish (or we run out of candy) we’ll shut off the lights and hide. It’s a strategy that works well for us.

On an unrelated, yet adorable, note, our fence has made us rockstars with the little kids in the neighborhood. They’re in awe, it’s only 4 feet high but that’s gigantic to them. Little girls blow me kisses now as they toddle by with their parents. I’m so used to my very presence making them cry that I just don’t know what to do!

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Back to Halloween. Halloween is serious business in my neighborhood. A few streets away the neighbors got a permit to close the street to accommodate their Halloween festivities. I don’t know how they’re going to top last year’s mock executions, but they’ve promised to give it a try.

On an unrelated note, last night Dr. Birdcage and The Amazing Phil stayed over after the opening of Phil’s new show at Irvine Contemporary. Phil’s new work is very cool and I’m hoping to own one of these captivating images.

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The awesomest part about hosting Dr. Birdcage is that she always leaves the guestroom neater than she found it. Next time she’s here I’m going to see if I can’t get her to stay in the laundry room. That place is a wreck.

Halloween is just around the corner

So, Halloween is right around the corner and I need to get to work deciding what, if any, the theme of this year’s Halloween movie marathon will be. Last year it was Frankenstein’s Monster (mostly). Of course other movies worked their way into the mix, thanks to our Tivo, Overlord.

I’m leaning towards werewolves. Or possibly haunted houses. No zombie or vampires – been there, done that.

Maybe I’ll do a movie-a-day for the entire month of October and allow for multiple themes. I’ll be at a conference for a few days, but it’s about the state of the music industry, radio, and telecom & internet policy so it will be rather like watching horror movies every day. Also have a daytrip to DisneyWorld for mom’s birthday. Some would argue that in itself is pretty horrific, but I’m looking forward to it. Plus, I do so love the Haunted Mansion. We went to Disney a lot when I was growing up (got to do something with the parade of visiting relatives) so I pretty much have a photographic mental map of the ride, and yet I still love it. I suppose this would be a good occasion to finally watch The Haunted Mansion, I’ve never gotten around to it.

Well, what do you think? Werewolves? Ghosts? I was going to post an actual poll but everyone one I installed had a glitch of one kind or another and time was slipping away. You can vote in the comments.