"I'd rather be up to my elbows in shit all day than talk to people like you..."

...perhaps I should become a plumber.

1) the world is insane
It's great and all she has a husband and kid and what not, but, ummm... you have to worry about the motives of someone who'd fuck that.

2) I was going to post an "epilogue" of sorts to my GE Washing Machine Rant. I have a voicemail saved that I was going to record and upload and link to and everything, but I'm lazy. It was left at 7:58am the day of the appointment and essentially goes like this:

"*crunch* *crunch* *crunch* Hello, this is GE. The tech is, uhhh, out of the field today, so you'll have to reschedule. The next available day is, uhhhh, Friday the 22nd (exactly one week later), Bye!"

I have a hunch their stupid online thingy just got sent to some contractor who had a better job that day and that was his wife eating potato chips for breakfast or some shit. Really freaking professional. Luckily my mother had already been talking to some of the people she works with about the whole situation and someone recommended a repair man who was able to meet her THAT DAY after 1pm. Everything is fine now, my clothes are clean, but don't buy GE, 'cuz they eat dicks.

3) Meraud asks for absolution for being too nerdy because he read the Silmarillion and loved it.

I am now asking for absolution for not being nerdy enough.

I read The Watchman and didn't like it.

The first half was righteous enough, but the second half went into La-La Land. For some reason the "we can do anything we can draw!" thing that turns people on to comic books and anime just doesn't work for me.

Gemma was in town and made me go into the comic book store near Roots because she wanted to pick up a HorrorClix booster pack.

My girlfriend fiancee is a 12 year old boy

I have this thing about small, independent stores. I don't like going in them and not buying something. It's weird. I assume the guy at the register is the owner. I feel like I owe him at least a little something for existing in his space and time continuum. They didn't have HorrorClix anymore, Gemma wanted to look around and it seemed like we wouldn't be buying anything.

I am neurotic.

Years ago, I read V for Vendetta and didn't like it. (Spoilers the next paragraph, skip it if you plan on reading/watching the movie.)

I thought the point of it was that V was the lesbian Valerie from the concentration camp. Then I saw the movie that came out a few years ago and loved it. Except for the part where V tortures Evey. That just never worked for me.

So anyway, The Watchmen is supposed to be, like, the pinnacle of the whole "graphic novel" genre. And they're coming out with a movie of it in 2009, so I'm somewhat interested because I liked the V for Vendetta move so much. It was there, it was $20, so I bought it. It turns out Gemma bought a smutty comic called "Purgatory," but I had already been carrying around The Watchmen, and I'm neurotic and didn't want to put it down because I didn't want the guy at the register thinking I snuck it under my coat. I need therapy.

The first half is great, the second half is masturbatory. The ending is poo. Meh.

I read about the Watchmen movie on wikipedia. It turns out Terry Gilliam was once attached to direct, but has since left the project saying it's, "un-film-able." I'm inclined to agree. There are five main characters and the entire narrative is so flashback heavy, I just don't see it working as a movie. Now the guy who is directing it is the guy who did, "300." I haven't seen that yet but I am interested in seeing it someday... for free. Maybe the Watchmen movie will be good, but I don't have high hopes for it and don't really care either way.

4) Audiosurf recently released an update, everything is smoother, it bugs out less, and it seems like they updated some of the graphics. Audiosurf is my new religion.


5) Oh hey, a Blofeld review.

Audiosurf

There's a bit of buzz about a new game called Audiosurf that was just released on Steam. Apparently it's been in beta for a few months, so a lot of people already knew about it, but I first heard about it today. Basically, Audiosurf reads an mp3 file and then generates a "level" from the song - similar to visualization plug-ins for Windows Media Player and Winamp and shit, only instead of generating it "on the fly," it takes a few seconds to pre-render it before you play it, so it comes off as a bit less random. Once the level is rendered, you then control a little spaceship and try to maximize your points by collecting colored blocks. It probably fits into the same genre as Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero and Rock Band, in terms of being a "rhythm game" where you try to hit things in time with the music.

It essentially has three "modes," of play; Mono, "not-mono" and co-op. Mono is where there are colored blocks and gray blocks, and you want to collect the colored blocks and avoid the gray blocks. The colored blocks are always the same color, so the player doesn't need to worry about color matching. "Not-mono" is simply my term for what seems to be the "regular" style of play, where the blocks are different colors and you have to match them, kind of like Bejeweled or some shit. There are a handful of different "not-mono" spaceships to choose from, each with its own special ability, such as the ability to shuffle the colored blocks you've collected or the ability to pick up a colored block and put it down later, when it will have a better impact on your score. Finally, co-op is what it sounds like; you need a partner and one person has the left two lanes, the other person the right two lanes.

Here are some YouTubes:

Mono - NIN "The Wretched" (remix)
Mono - Rick Astley "Never Gonna Give You Up"
Mono - A-ha "Take On Me"
Colors - Daft Punk "Around the World"
Colors - Dethklok "Murder Train"


It's loads of fun, and only $10 on Steam. I've found that Haujobb songs make the best race tracks. In fact, "Faith in Chaos" from Vertical Theory was so cool, I wanted to make my own video capture and put it on YouTube, but it appears that recording my own video with sound without spending any money is just not going to happen. (I did try a freeware program called CamStudio and it says my soundcard lacks the ability to capture the sound playing out of my speakers. *shrug*)

So if you have $10, thinks this looks fun, and want an excuse to sit in front of the computer listening to music all day, check out Audiosurf.

Politics and Machinery

Politics:

My post from Jan. 30th was apparently right on the money. I predicted that if Hillary Clinton had less elected delegates than Barack Obama, but still by a close margin, she'd try to get the Michigan and Florida delegates to count - y'know, the Michigan and Florida delegates that she and every other Democratic nominee agreed to screw over in or to pander to Iowa and New Hampshire primary voters. Aces!

What I did not know back then was how the whole Super Delegate thing worked. Apparently the Democratic party decided being totally retarded was totally awesome back in 1968 and set up a primary system wherein elected Democratic politicians and non-elected party activists and insiders get a vote roughly equal to x-thousand primary voters to decide, in their own "judgment," who the Democratic nominee for president would be. Not very democratic, is it?

So Hillary's people are going on TV saying that it would be totally cool and absolutely how the system is supposed to work if she were to, say, end up with less elected delegates than Obama, but convince enough Super Delegates to vote for her anyway that she "won" the nomination. This morning I woke up and turned on MSNBC and was met with Terry McAuliffe telling me that was exactly how "the system" was "supposed to work." At which point I screamed at the TV,

"NOBODY FUCKING WANTS YOU."

Terry McAuliffe is a former Bill Clinton fundraiser who ended up heading the Democratic National Committee from 2000 through 2004 - y'know, the years when Democrats did nothing but lose. So here we are, four years later, after riding what seemed like a never-ending wave of victories since 2006, definitely in part to the Republicans being themselves, but also in part thanks to the leadership of the Democratic National Committee's new chairman, 2004's insurgent presidential nomination candidate, Howard Dean. Dean implemented a 50 state strategy for the Democratic Party which allowed the Democratic Party to make big gains in Congress in the 2006 elections by competing in states and districts that the previous Democratic party establishment would have simply surrendered to the Republicans. Hence, when the Republicans screwed the pooch and voters weren't happy with them, the Democratic Party already had candidates and organizations and shit in place. Had McAuliffe been in charge, a lot of the Democratic challengers would not have had the infrastructure and support to actually compete; even when it turned out that the Republicans were harboring a pederast.

So after just two years of relative AWESOME, the old Clinton folks who failed in 2000 and 2004 are back to get on the gravy train. Here's the problem with that: They're fucked.

Hillary Clinton hasn't lost this race yet, and she may still yet win - legitimately. However, the genie is out of the bottle. She can't take back what she and her lackeys have been saying all week. Die hard Republican voters already think she's an authoritarian, now they're accusations have some merit.

What her campaign has been saying this week is this:

Even if the *voters* choose Barack Obama over me, it is still perfectly legitimate for that to be overridden by my friends and colleagues in the establishment.

That's pretty fucking authoritarian.

So-called moderates and independents will see it that way. And I suspect that young voters and minority voters will see it that way too. The former don't see John McCain as being "that bad," the latter will likely choose to not vote at all or vote for some third party candidate (Nader's already got an exploratory committee going).

Hell, even I recognize just how bad John McCain *really* is, compared to his media hype, but right now even if Hillary wins via the most elected delegates, I sure as fuck don't want to vote for her.

I would think that, especially after the 2000 Presidential election, there's a point where a rational person would say, "Well, maybe I should just hold off here a second. Essentially staging a coup of my own political party might not just be bad for me and my reputation, it might actually be bad for a political party that is the only real opposition in this country to the Republican party." But apparently Hillary and her people are not rational, and apparently they lack ethics, decency and principles. Or they're just Republicans incognito. I've suspected that at points in the past eight years, too.

My prediction - if Hillary is the nominee, whether legit or not, we will lose to John McCain. And that. Fucking. Sucks.

Machinery:

I have a GE washing machine, it's only 4 years old. Last Sunday, it broke. The "basket," where the clothes go in, is apparently no longer held into place by some doo-dad, so when it comes to spin cycle time, it's pretty much just getting thrown around inside the chasis and tossing water everywhere. I'm good with the inside of computers, I'm good with the inside of pig carcasses, but when it comes to the inside of machinery, including cars, I fucking suck and apparently that means I'm a fan of the butt sex - with men.

Instead of a phone number, it gives a website for if you need service. I have my mother go to the website, 'cuz I'm a busy man with all my pig guts and blood and shit, and she schedules an appointment. Apparently they're supposed to call and confirm the appointment. That's good, because the online appointment is for 8am to 5pm. I go to the pork plant at 10am but my mother can be here after 1pm.

Tonight I get the call. It's a fucking recording. "Press 1 to confirm the appointment, press 2 to cancel." Well, fuck, I don't want to cancel, so I press 1. "If you have pets, such as dogs and cats, please put them away (wtf?) for the service call, as they may interfere with or delay the service call." Now I'm pushing zero because I'd like to speak to someone live to narrow down the time frame to something like after 1pm. It continues about the pets, "If this is a problem please call 1-800-blah-blah-blah to cancel. Good bye. *click*"

I'm sitting there with a pen trying to jot down the number it just spit at me. No luck, I had the last four digits in my head, but not the middle three. Fuck. Caller ID gives me nothing, and I'm too stupid to think of *69.

So now I'm thinking, if he pops in at quarter to 10 tomorrow, I'm going to tell him, "Either come back after 1pm, give me a number so I can call and talk to *someone* to get an appointment in a narrower time frame, or go fuck yourself, because I'm just going to have to eat it and buy a new a washing machine and SEE TO IT THAT I NEVER BUY ANYTHING GE EVER AGAIN!!!"

The problem is this: they're making appliances shoddier nowadays to get you to buy more often. And they're making service calls harder schedule in order to get you to buy a new one instead of repair the one you have. What they don't seem to have figured out at this point is that I'M NOT GOING TO BUY A NEW APPLIANCE FROM THEM IF THIS IS HOW THEY TREAT ME.

Fuck off and die, GE. Just fuck off.

Waldorf Blofeld (part infinity)

Well, it appears that if you type "Waldorf Blofeld" into Google, one of my previous posts shows up on the first page of results. That's kind of bad - I'm just a pork plant worker in the middle of Indiana who has nothing to do with the Blofeld, but me blogging my anticipation for one is apparently one of the easier-to-find articles out there. I'm surprised there still aren't any user reviews at either Sonic State or Harmony Central, however I've found that some people have apparently gotten theirs and they're all posting to the Waldorf User Forum, which is an old-school style mailing list. You can read the posts in their archive without subscribing to the list, that at least proves it exists out there somewhere and that people seem to be relatively happy with it.

Some of my older Blofeld posts also got some comments:

RikMaxSpeed said...

I recently ordered a Waldorf Blofeld via www.Thomann.de - they expected delivery on Jan 31st, and they have now been told to wait till March 31st. So unfortunately it looks like this little beast is rapidly becoming obsolete :o(

That sucks, but I don't think "obsolete" is the word you're looking for... It definitely did feel like it was never going to come out, but apparently they're out there. I'm sure you'll be getting yours shortly after March 31st, it's obvious at this point that Waldorf had to resort to a production strategy where there was a small initial run (almost a beta test from what some of the bugs sound like), and the orders from that first run are paying for the manufacture of the second run. The money made from selling Blofelds is probably going to be used to finance the manufacture of the Stromberg. Like I said before in this post, I'm not an insider or anything, just a guy who disembowels slaughtered animals for a living, so everything I say is speculation, but it seems pretty plausible at this point, no?

panda said...

hey! i think the snow is going to beat the blofeld out of the gate, but.. its rocking a street tag of about twice the price.. (blofeld 700, snow 1300!)
that almost ends the game if you ask me. if waldorf can actually ship the unit. it will end up on more desk/table tops.

At the Unofficial Virus TI Forum, Access employee Ben Crosland (he demos all the new Virus hardware (TI, Virus Control V.2, Snow) in the NAMM videos you find at Sonic State (except the upcoming Atomizer effect, which was demo'd by Richard Devine)) pretty much stated that Access doesn't see the Snow and the Blofeld as competitive products, essentially because the TI is a hybrid soft synth/hardware synth with audio interface capabilities and the Blofeld is a hardware synth only.

Poster: "So can we expect it to be competitively priced with the Blofeld at $699 USD?"

Ben Crosland: "Why should it be?

Just because they are both small, doesn't mean they should compete directly with each other in price - the Snow has double the polyphony, Total Integration, audio ins, full FX per Part, MIDI out, soundcard functionality etc.

Really, the Snow is an alternative option for those who want a Virus TI, and hence needs to be priced relative to the other models in the range, not to a completely different synth by another manufacturer." - Source.

The way I see it, Waldorf as a company depends on selling X-many Blofelds. When they initially announced the Blofeld at Winter NAMM 2007, they announced twice the polyphony, the ability to edit it via your computer, and a price tag of $500 (see this video). Keep in mind, Waldorf was recently bankrupt and is now technically another company that bought the old one and is trying to restart it. Here it is a year later, they've had to cut some of the features of the Blofeld (no computer editing) and increase the price (although the price increase from $500 to $699 may have something to do with the U.S. dollar sucking butt).

Access is doing fine as a company and has been since 1997. It is simply introducing a low frills version of its current generation synthesizer to gain market penetration at a price point they haven't had since the Access Virus Classic. I don't think Access cares if more Blofelds end up on desktops than Snows because there are already more TI Desktops, Polars and Keyboards in studios than Blofelds and that's unlikely to change. The theory behind the Snow is to offer a $1350 (MSRP, $1250 in actuality) Virus TI for amateurs/hobbyists who can't afford the $2000 Desktop version. (The wrench into this of course is the fact that you can get a Reboxed Desktop for ~$1600 from NovaMusik, but I guess that is neither here nor there to the people involved.)

As for me, personally, I bought a Reboxed TI Polar from NovaMusik right before Virus Control 2.0 increased the price of the TI line, so I'm quite simply not interested in the TI Snow. I am interested in the Waldorf Blofeld because I don't have a Waldorf Q or Microwave, and while I like the sound of both, I never was really interested in paying $500 to $900 for one or the other, but I am willing to pay $700 for a Blofeld which is essentially both with a few more features added on (drive curves *drool*).

However, I am not interested in paying $700 now and not knowing when I will actually have one in my hands, so rather than pre-order one, I'm content to wait until they are readily available here in the States, which may be a long, long time.

Gossipy prediction: The Access TI Snow will be easier to get in the U.S., sooner than the Waldorf Blofeld.

My qualification for making such a prediction: ZERO.

Super Bowel

To the New York Football Giants - For beating the Packers in the NFC Championship game: I FORGIVE YOU!!!

To the Green Bay Packers - For losing to the Giants in the NFC Championship game: YOU ARE ABSOLVED!!!

I honestly thought the Giants were a shitty football team this season. I honestly thought Eli Manning was only a starting quarterback because of his last name. I am proven wrong and glad for it.

Fuck. The. Patriots.

Appendix

1) LBJ killed JFK

2) L *B J,* BJ being slang for "blow job."

3) Bill Clinton got a blow job in the oval office.

4) ...

5) Hillary Clinton killed JFK

Thanks to Gemma for inspiring me to blog this.

Addendum

1) Apparently the Blofeld exists, somewhere, because Waldorf has already released a patch for it. Supposedly it was also at NAMM but strangely enough no one bothered writing about it, but that may be because it's big unveil was at last year's NAMM, not sure if that was the Summer NAMM or the Winter NAMM* I read a rumor somewhere that one prominent U.S. retailer was shipped a whopping four Blofelds - this may not be true at all, however. INTERNETS.

*It was last years Winter NAMM one year ago.

2) This is the scenario by which the Democratic Party will manage to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" in the next presidential election:

A) The following scenario only applies if John McCain is the Republican nominee. He has this undeserved "independent" status in the public consciousness that will make him an appealing alternative to the "independent" and undecided voters that Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee lack. If the nominee is Romney, he's toast even if every other Dem candidate dies in a plane crash leaving only Kucinich to run in the general.

B) IF Barack Obama wins the nomination by less delegates than what Hillary Clinton would have won in Michigan and Florida, Hillary Clinton will likely then contest the nomination.

b1) IF - Hillary Clinton gets her Michigan and Florida delegates to count and takes the nomination, a significant number of democratic voters will not vote for her and will say she "stole" the nomination. She will be compared to George W. Bush in the 2000 election and McCain will not inspire the same amount of "hey, we gotta make sure *he* isn't going to be President" as the other possible Repub candidates would. The media will echo this sentiment, and many so-called "independent" voters, as well as the mouth-breather "undecided" voters will go for McCain.

b2) IF - Hillary Clinton *does not* get her delegates to count, the right wing media will claim that Obama is an illegitimate candidate who only won on a technicality. This sentiment will be amplified in the mainstream media in the form of "Rush Limbaugh said..." or "Fox News reports..." Once again, independents and mouth-breathers break for McCain, but Obama loses this more narrowly than scenario b1.

You heard it here first.

However, if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination even without the Michigan and Florida delegates counting, she will beat McCain in the general. Same goes for Obama if he beats Hillary by more delegates than what Michigan and Florida would have given her.

Personally, I think scenario b2 is most likely at this point. I have a feeling it is going to be close between Clinton and Obama, and the best chance for a Democratic President in 2008 depends on Hillary not fucking it up for the rest of us. FAT CHANCE!

Post Script: As stupid as it is that the Michigan and Florida delegates did not count in the Democratic primaries, all the presidential candidates agreed to it so as not to piss off Iowa and New Hampshire voters. You can't pander to Iowa and New Hampshire and then turn around and pander to Michigan and Florida... or fuck, maybe you can. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!!!

Personally, I wish the entire Democratic party gave a big FUCK YOU to Iowa and New Hampshire in favor of Michigan and Florida, but I'm a dick like that.

Misc.

1) Packers lost horribly to the Giants. That's unbelievably disappointing, I didn't consider the Giants a "good" football team this entire season, and I wasn't the only one, but you can't deny it when they beat both the Cowboys and the Packers in their home stadiums. Since the Giants are on a streak of upsets, maybe they could be so kind as to upset the Patriots. I have nothing but respect for the Patriots players, but what kind of retard organization names Bill Belichick "coach of the year," the same year he got a record half a million dollar fine for cheating? It's hard to be impressed by a team going undefeated when we already know that the coaching staff is perfectly willing to break the established rules, and if those videos of opposing teams' hand signals didn't provide an unfair advantage, it wouldn't be against the rules. Fuck you, NFL.

2) Looks to me like the Waldorf Blofeld is toeing the vaporware line. Supposedly they started shipping a month ago, but there are, like, no user reviews *anywhere* of the damn thing. No Waldorf news came out of NAMM last week, so it's hard to know what's going on there. I joked in a Matrixsynth comment that the Access TI Snow would ship before the Blofeld, someone chided me that the Blofeld has already shipped, but I can only say, "has it really?" at this point. Yeah, some people out there seem to have them, but they all seem to be "prototypes" and bound by NDA's or else someone would have fucking posted at least a "first glance" type of review somewhere by now.

3) Haujobb is fucking awesome. Last August I splurged on a car stereo that could play MP3s burnt to a CDR. It was well worth it, because I can burn over six hours of music to a CDR and listen to it on the six hour car ride to Wisconsin. I put together a CD of Haujobb's Vertical Theory, RMX Matrix, Polarity, Solutions for a Small Planet and Homes and Gardens and it just hit the fucking spot. Every one of those albums feels like the best fucking album ever while it is playing. And Meraud sucks balls for thinking Vertical Theory sucks balls.

4) Rotwang lent me The Call of Cthulu, a movie from 2005 made in the style of old silent movies from the 20's and 30's. It was okay, but the picture quality is too crisp and digital, even though its black & white and has fake scratches and what not. I just wish if they were going for the old look, they went all the way instead of just half way - blur up the picture a little, stuff like that. It looks like it was filmed with an HD camera or something. It's pretty much impossible to adapt Lovecraft to a visual medium successfully, the only exception being Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, and I have no idea how many liberties were taken there... The Call of Cthulu is short enough at 47 minutes that you can't really go wrong with it. And I have no idea why imdb decided to feature a 1 star review of a movie that averages 7 stars from the user ratings. It's not the greatest, but it really isn't that bad.

5) This is me whenever Virus Control 2.7 comes out in the Spring.

Oh snap! Midget Synth Fight!!!

Access Virus TI Snow

Vs.

Waldorf Blofeld

Access Virus TI Snow just showed up on MatrixSynth today. Snow is just like the other Virus TI's, just a new and reduced enclosure/interface. I'm glad I have the Polar - the way I see it, Access already gave the Virus too few knobs... their whole "shift" thing just isn't good. You have to hold down the "shift" button while you edit certain parameters. At the very least, the "shift" should have been a toggle on/off instead of a press and hold button. On the other hand, it's kind of offset by the 3 assignable soft knobs, so... whatever.

It's an interesting trend in hardware synths... Take pre-existing "guts" and put them into a smaller package. The Virus TI line already had the desktop version, so this is like a reduced desktop. The Waldorf Blofeld, on the other hand, is a combination of the Waldorf Q and Microwave synths, so it's not literally the same guts like the Snow is.

Nothing against Waldorf, but I think it would be hi-fucking-larious if the Snow shipped before the Blofeld did. I am curious to see what the price point of the Snow is, just out of morbid curiosity.

New topic: Today's NFC Division Game, Seattle Seahawks vs Green Bay Packers, was the best fucking NFL game I've ever seen.

New Movies - I Am Legend & Sweeny Todd

Holy crap! I actually left the house and saw a couple of new movies in theaters!

***I Am Legend***

Last Christmas, Gemma gave me The Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, which is a mostly chronological survey of the most important zombie movies in the history of cinema. It's a decent book, except going through the history of zombie movies in a strictly chronological order makes for a couple of rather dull chapters between the White Zombie / I Walked With a Zombie era and the Night of the Living Dead-to-present-day era of zombie movies. It's also annoying in that it summarizes a lot of movies scene-by-scene, up to and including the ending - so the result is that if you've seen the movie, you're already familiar with it and skip a few paragraphs, or if you haven't, you skip a few paragraphs because you don't want the ending spoiled. However, the book has an excellent critical analysis of three of Lucio Fulci's "zombie trilogy" movies; Zombie, The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery. If you've already seen those movies, that chapter alone makes it worth the paper its printed on.

The reason I bring it up is because it discussed an earlier movie adaptation of Rich Matheson's I Am Legend called The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price. The way the Book of the Dead described it, The Last Man on Earth sounded like a very interesting movie, with Vincent Price as a scientist alone in a city surrounded by slow moving, zombie-esque vampires who were warded off by the traditional vampire banes like mirrors and garlic. The first half of this movie was great and basically showed Price's day-to-day routine as a hunter who goes out during the day to methodically search the town for sleeping vampires, kill them while they are weak and defenseless, and throw their bodies in a giant fire at a leftover town dump site. The second half of The Last Man on Earth got kind of wonky, and the ending was outright retarded and in many ways contradicted everything that was presented about the vampires in the first half. Overall I did not like this movie, but was curious as to whether or not the bad ending (in my opinion anyways) was straight from the book or not; so I put I Am Legend (the book) on my Christmas list and have it sitting next to my bed waiting to be opened. (I'm so glad I have the previous book cover and not the new one with Will Smith on it - not that I particularly dislike Will Smith, but I think that kind of shit just makes a book look like a cheap tie-in, like a Burger King toy or some shit.)


Anways - I Am Legend, the new movie starring Will Smith. First off, I like this one overall better than The Last Man on Earth. (There's also another movie based off the same novel, The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston, I haven't seen that one yet.) Will Smith's protagonist is a military scientist, so he's a lot more physically fit and a bit more handy with a gun. In this movie, Smith doesn't seem to hunt the "vampires" necessarily, but rather bumps into them from time to time while foraging for non-perishable food or trying to hunt deer in the streets of Manhattan. The vampires this time around are more akin to the zombies of 28 Days Later and the craptastic Dawn of the Dead remake. They're super fast, super strong, super jumpy, but can be taken down with a bullet or strangled to death. The only thing really "vampire" about them is that sunlight kills them.

Whereas the vampires in The Last Man on Earth could talk, and would often come around to the protagonists home at night to taunt him verbally, the vampires in I Am Legend do not speak and appear to have only an animal level of intelligence. The story arc of I Am Legend revolves around one of these vampires apparently having a spark of intelligence and beginning to "get back at" Will Smith for stealing a vampire from his pack for medical experiments. There is some controversy about the look of the vampires in I Am Legend, a lot of people think the vampires look "too CGI," but I really wasn't bothered by their appearance. Perhaps those of us who sat through that CGI-shitfest known as the Star Wars Prequels have had our sense of taste in such matters deadened a bit - I don't know.

Overall I Am Legend is a solid movie, and even though it is easy to draw comparisons between it and movies like 28 Days Later and Land of the Dead, it stands well on its own. The only thing I really hated about this movie is that at the end they introduce this "God has a plan for everything," bullshit out of nowhere. I've lived through almost 8 years of the "God has a plan for everything" presidency, I don't need that kind of bullshit seeping into my horror movies. C'mon Hollywood, I know you love your hookers and blow - Midwesterners would have seen this movie anyway without you pandering to their religious fantasies!

***Sweeny Todd***

Tim Burton can either be brilliant (Beetlejuice, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands) or downright retarded (Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Rotwang wrote on his blog that he got so annoyed at this movie that he walked out after twenty minutes, but it seems he did not like Edward Scissorhands and therefore suffers from erectile dysfunction.

This movie, visually, is beautiful (Rotwang hates Burton's dreary goth set designs and cinematography, but he wears pink ties, so there's always the chance that his brain interprets color differently than the rest of us), the plot is awesome, the acting is great - but there's a big fat elephant sitting in the room here - it's a fucking musical. And not even a fun Danny Elfman Nightmare Before Christmas/Corpse Bride musical, not the kind of musical where the characters mostly talk, then burst into song every once in a while. This is a full on adaptation of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim "serious musical theatre" version of Sweeny Todd.

Sondheim is in the tradition of Guilbert and Sullivan and Rodgers and Hammerstein-type musical theatre, the kind that sees itself as the heir to opera. I went to school for music for six years, and got exposed to this kind of stuff, including Sondheim songs and I got to say...

It's

All

So

Gay!

Sorry to use "gay" as a negative descriptor, but, seriously, the only people who like this shit are gay men who love musical theatre and the overweight, mustached hags that love gay men. The music is blander than oatmeal, the lyrics are cliche and the vocal lines are jagged with wide leaps in this perverse attempt to be "new," but they just annoy most normal people. And I like atonalism, but you just can't put atonal song melodies, usually butchered even by the best singers, on top of stock, cliche orchestral arrangements and call it "jazz-influenced."

Musical theatre overall also has this tendency to be too long for no fucking reason. Oh wait, there is a reason, and that's because operas were written to be long, and musical theatre is the runty nephew of opera that's constantly coming by and saying, "Me too! Me too!" In the heyday of opera, people who went to operas wanted to be there all night long to hoot and holler and drink and gamble and solicit prostitutes, etc. etc. etc... they had nothing better to do at home, so they wanted to make a night of it. Their audiences wanted long, drawn out musical numbers that went nowhere and had little if anything to do with the plot. Now we have busy lives and while we all love a good diversion, we don't like it when things drag. Just because something is long doesn't mean it has to drag, and just because something drags doesn't necessarily mean it's long. This is not some horrible crippling of our attention spans due to T.V. or anything, it's Just. Modern. Life. It's different now than it was in the 18th century, and I wouldn't give up any of it because I like wiping my ass and showering and cleanliness overall, thank you very much.

There are operas that have survived hundreds of years and will survive hundreds more. The essential problem of really all contemporary "art music," but especially of musical theatre, is that it is so sure of its place in history - but it will be forgotten in a generation or two. No one likes this shit - and it's not for any lack of intelligence or taste on anyone's part - it's Just. Plain. Bad. - from conception to execution. Only *certain* people, with *certain* predilections for what *should be* "good art" buy into this kind of crap. And they're all either stupid, or just being ironic.

Anyways, Sweeny Todd, if you can ignore the music, is actually a great film, with great atmosphere, great acting and wonderful, wonderful violence. Alan Rickman is brilliant as the villain, Johnny Depp manges to be a few notches above brilliant as the murderous protagonist and I actually like Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, and I only mention that because it seems people think she's the new Lisa Marie, Burton's former girlfriend who really did come off as a talentless hanger on - but I liked HBC is this and I liked her Fight Club, so I have no idea where all the hate is coming from, but I didn't bother sitting through Planet of the Apes.

As I mentioned in my rant above musical theatre likes to drag on, and according to the reviewer at Fangoria, this movie version actually cut out a fair amount of the original version's song numbers and shit, and it's still over two hours long! But really, most of the pacing is pretty decent, except for one extraneous scene where Mrs. Lovett sings about and imagines living in a house by the sea with Sweeny Todd - yeah I understand they're probably trying to portray her motivation for hanging around the guy, but it's just so drawn out and out of place and unnecessary. I can only imagine that the full musical theatre version of it is full of that kind of shit for hours and hours on end.

Overall, if I were crass enough to give movies letter grades, I'd have to do something like this:

Sweeny Todd Music: F
Sweeny Todd everything else: A

which would mathematically work out to a C, but I would give this movie a solid B if I had no other choice, but since I do I would say, see it if you can ignore shitty music sung well for over two hours, but if that kind of thing is deal breaker for you, then don't.

Oh and Rotwang mentioned that he thought HBC couldn't sing, but really, all of Sondheim's vocal lines for women sound like that in my experience, so whatever.