Burn in Hell, Blockbuster

Blockbuster is the video store that killed video stores. Granted, they were on limited time anyway as Netflix and Redbox would eventually change home viewing. Instead of human beings at mom and pop stores, who have gotten to know us and our tastes, we have algorithms to make viewing suggestions to us. Its a brave new world a little less personal and easier to sink away from entirely.The video store was once a hub, a gathering place of movie geeks that could be just as sacred to us as comic book stores were and are. Blockbuster killed that. But now, Blockbuster is dead and may it burn in Hell for all eternity.

Video stores were often local or regional businesses. You couldn’t find a certain chain outside of a certain area. In my area in central North Carolina during the early 90’s, we had maybe four different chains each with multiple locations. Each location and chain would have different niche selections than others. What this meant was, that you could go from store to store looking for something like Suspiria until you found a copy. It was kind of a pain in the ass, but this was before online streaming, Netflix and Bit Torrent. You had to track down a physical copy of the VHS that you wanted. It was a pain in the ass, but it was also something of an adventure. When you found that rare title, there was a joy and sense of minor accomplishment. The movie was instantly more special because you had to go through so much effort to find it. This was the shit that movie geeks lived for.

Those video stores were also where films like The Beyond and Cannibal Holocaust became nearly mythical. Any copy of the video nasties was almost a sacred object. You would hear about these films from other movie geeks, who were often working behind the counter of the local rental store. These were people who loved movies, who worked in a low paying job because sitting around and talking about movies all day was their idea of heaven.

There was a guy who worked at the local Carbonated Video, about a fifteen minute walk from my house. I can’t remember his name because it seems like so long ago. But I remember that he had long hair and was a really cool guy. It was January of 1998, my father was dying of cancer and didn’t have long to live. His last favorite movie was Slingblade.

My mother went in to buy a copy, but it wasn’t on sale yet, only for rent. She told him that her husband didn’t have long and she hoped to get him a copy of the movie while he could still enjoy it. But it wasn’t on sale and wouldn’t be for several weeks. By then, it would already be too late. The guy walked over to the new releases section, grabbed a copy off the shelf and brought it over. “It is now,” he said.

This is the kind of thing that doesn’t exist anymore. The world is now filled with people who can do nothing, because some executives somewhere demand absolute compliance with policy. This is the disease that Blockbuster brought with it. The above story is what Blockbuster took away from the world.

Gone were personable film buffs behind the counter. Gone were the small moments of humanity that bind us together. Gone were the little niche titles and the sense of discovery. Gone were the mom and pop video stores that treated its customers like people. Blockbuster came in and took that away by putting everyone out of business. They catered to the lowest common denominator, treated their customers like garbage, refused to stock challenging and controversial films, turned their workers into mindless drones and took every opportunity to screw over their own customers for nickel and dime bullshit.

They opened multiple stores in towns regardless if they were needed or not, just to choke out all of the competition. They strangled, beat and pummeled all of the mom and pop and regional video store chains into closing. They got a monopoly on the video rental business for a few years and no doubt were popping the champagne and feeling good about themselves. They continued to treat their customers like shit, who began to miss the mom and pop stores that they forsake just so they could rent the new releases and didn’t have to risk picking out another, maybe more challenging film. The return policies were asinine, they constantly changed prices sometimes from week to week. They constantly changed policies sometimes week to week. People were getting fed up, but there was no alternative. Blockbuster was the only game in town.

Then Netflix arrived. Blockbuster had sown the seeds of its demise. By killing the local and regional video businesses, there was no net to catch the market. Blockbuster could have slipped into more of a boutique styled store, and while not enjoying the few years of sweet success it did, would have survived reasonably well. The local and regional businesses could have adapted to Netflix. They could have survived Netflix. Blockbuster could not. It stubbornly refused to. Now here was a service that customers actually enjoyed. That worked.

Now this was before streaming, when the majority of Netflix users were getting DVDs in the mail. One of the reasons why everyone jumped on Netflix was because they didn’t want to deal with Blockbuster. People hated Blockbuster. If the local and regional businesses were intact throughout the country, Netflix would certainly have had the early success that it did, but not to the extent that it did. After all, you still had to wait for the DVD in the mail, instead of just driving down to the local rental store and grabbing a copy that night.

Blockbuster would have survived because the other regional and local businesses would have helped sustain the market in the early days of the Netflix revolution. They would have had time to restructure themselves as more of a specialty shop connected with the local community. Streaming was coming and Netflix streaming would have overtaken the market regardless of the existence or non-existence of the mom and pop stores. But it wouldn’t have been the massacre and complete humiliation that Blockbuster suffered at the hands of Netflix. They wouldn’t have become a running gag or a forgotten relic so quickly. The fact is, Blockbuster never had a chance, its death was inevitable.

By killing a healthy and vibrant market to become a monopoly, the video store industry lost any resilience it might have had. It would have eventually faded away as all things do. Nothing lasts forever. But Blockbuster killed that possibility when the home video market was in its prime. Now all we have left is Netflix and buying DVDs and Blu-Rays off of Amazon. Netflix’s streaming service allows for home viewers to take a chance on viewing smaller and more challenging films, but that sense of discovery is muted. Like all of our technology, it makes everything more convenient and better, but also slowly mutes what made everything special in the first place.

So now Suncoast is dead. My local Best Buy has all but given up on selling DVDs and Blu-Rays, pushing them into a corner in favor a lot of floor space for cellphones. Yup, Best Buy has turned into Radioshack.

Carbonate Video was an amazing place. Its where I developed my taste in movies and expanded my genre interests. Blockbuster killed it. Along with Video Plaza and all the others across the country. So today, after the death of Blockbuster, I curse its name but also mourn the video rental store. For those too young to even know what the inside of one looked like, it was more amazing than you can possibly imagine.

It’s the thought that counts.

Christmas Eve with Terry Funk

 

 

 

Going Retro

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 1 a little bit everyday. It’s not the NES version, but the remake released on PS1 with Final Fantasy Origins. I never beat the original NES game, I have it. Perhaps I should focus on that instead. I don’t think it really matters. The Origins version is a much more pleasant experience. The menus and interface are just a lot easier to use and deal with it then the original NES version. I’ve only been playing an hour a day, about all I can handle before getting bored since Final Fantasy was essentially nothing but grinding levels. I will say this about Final Fantasy, it may be dated and repetitive, but I find more enjoyable than Hitman: Absolution right now, a game I actually had to force myself to finish.

It seems like the older generation of gamers is getting a little weary of the video game industry as it stands today. I am weary. For me, its not so much the games that are the problem. Far from it, good to great games are being released regularly. What I am weary of is the whole culture of gaming right now. The misogyny, the bitterness, the scamming and scheming of the major publishers. Games are starting to become overshadowed by all of the other bullshit. For most developers and publishers, its no longer about selling video games. It’s about using video games to sell us DLC and milk as much money as possible from their loyal consumers. All of the bullshit has truly eclipsed the games themselves.

I don’t even really want another generation of consoles at this point. The Xbox Live dashboard shoves its music and video apps down your eyehole while the games section is put in an isolated little corner. Then there is the gaming press who seem more interested in impressing all of the industry bigwigs than doing actual journalism and critique on the video game industry. Pissed at a bullshit ending of a beloved franchise? They call you whiny and entitled? Pissed that content that should be in the game is locked behind a wall of DLC that you have to pay to unlock? Well the publishers have to do this if they want to make money. They always have an excuse for the greed and stupidity that is the norm in video games today.

I remember once playing Super Mario World with a girl and at the time thinking that was the coolest thing in the world. Now gamers require that girls prove their geek cred first, or suffer the wrath of their little-dick misogyny. What the fuck happened to us? How did we get this way? Maybe I should go retro for a while, find my love for gaming again. There are of course bright spots that offer hope, but they seem to be ever more fleeting. There are good games out there, but that small question of doubt always lingers in the back of the mind. Is it worth it?

More and more, the answer seems to be no.

I expect the next generation of consoles to be more of the same. More DLC, more micro transactions, more DRM, more bullshit and if were are lucky and fortune smiles upon us that day, maybe a few more decent games. Right now, the good seems to be worth suffering through the bad. In ten years I will doubt that will hold true. I hate being cynical, but there it is.

They Came Down From the Highlands by the Hundreds…

A Highlander reboot starring Ryan Reynolds…

Are they fucking kidding? Ryan Reynolds as a Scottish immortal? Who are they going to get to play the Sean Connery role? Will Reynolds be rocking the kilt? Will they troll the geeks by revealing all of the immortals come from another planet at the end of the first movie? Will Summit actually put some money behind this or they will go cheap like they did with Twilight thus making the movie look like a two hour version of the TV show? Can Reynolds even do a Scottish accent without sounding ridiculous?

The Highlander fans have been through enough guys. Leave these poor bastards alone, I don’t think they can take any more soul crushing disappointments when it comes to this franchise. Christ, was the Quickening not enough? Was End Game not enough? Or the one with that part where it looked like the dude from the TV show and Christopher Lambert were about to kiss? Highlander fans have suffered enough. Let them die in peace. In the name of all that is good, show these withered souls an ounce of mercy Summit. There is no need to torment a fanboy when he/she is already a broken and empty shell. Show some fucking decency to your fellow humans. No one on this planet needs any more Highlanders, especially Highlander fans.

I bet Ryan Reynolds’ McCleod won’t even come from Scotland. They won’t even mention Scotland. I seriously would not put it pass a studio to have a movie called Highlander and not even have one scene in the Scottish Highlands in it. Kind of like how Disney decided to adapt Princess of Mars and desperately tried to ignore the fact that the movie took place on Mars. Then they renamed it to John Carter when no one knew who the fuck John Carter was, nor did they try to explain who the fuck John Carter was. So everyone saw the trailer and said: “Man they made a movie about John Carter! Who the fuck is John Carter?” Or when the Total Recall remake didn’t take place on Mars when the only thing anyone remembers about Total Recall was it was about Arnold on Mars and it had a woman with three breasts in it. Kind of like that.

But let me try and be helpful here. Here are the things that people remember about the original Highlander movie. That kick ass Queen song, Princes of the Universe. There will only be one. People getting their head chopped off with a sword. Sean Connery. And finally, that guy who played Raiden in the Mortal Combat movie was in it.

In order to make a successful Highlander remake, you will need people getting their heads chopped off, there will only be one and the Queen song wouldn’t hurt. Now if you excuse me, I’m going to sit here and wait for the inevitable remake of Adventures in Babysitting. THOR!!!!!!!!

Sweet 80’s, rescue me from this cruel world.

I have a Graph for the AP

I have a scientific graph that the AP must distribute immediately that proves that Iran is raising the Elder God known as Cthulhu.

One Palm Tree for Old Sumer

So I’ve been reading some ancient Sumerian texts. I don’t really have any good reason as to why. It’s there for free on the internet, so why the Hell not? These were originally written on clay tablets thousands of years before air conditioning and now they share the same digital space as the universe’s largest collection of cat videos. It truly is amazing just how far we have managed to come. Ancient Egypt would have went bonkers for the cat videos alone. Ancient Egyptians liked cats, or at least I assume they did.

While interesting, these ancient writings had less to do with summoning antediluvian demons that will possess your girlfriend and more to do with how much it costs for a sorcerer to get rid of the locusts plaguing the fields of your farm. As it turns out, the price is one tall palm tree. Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense to me either, but this was six to five thousand years ago. For all we know palm trees were the Tickle-Me Elmo of Sumer. That was of course, before the decidedly less popular Tickle-You Elmo.

I totally ripped the guy off, the job was only worth a nice fern at best. He didn’t go for the extended warranty though as he didn’t having any larches.

The translation I am reading is from 1917, so its probably no the most current and up to date but good enough for me. What’s interesting is there is commentary and explanation of what you are about to read. The interesting thing is the writer casually assumes that there would be more discoveries of even older civilization in Asia or Africa. He doesn’t go into a crazy Atlantis rant, he just assumes that the story of Oannes relates to an actual person on a boat from another civilization unknown to us. Once again, possibly from Asia or Africa. There are a lot of stories about a great teacher such as him from all over the world. These are not popular views these days, but its interesting how casually these thoughts were thrown around in the early twentieth century. By the way, Oannes was half-fish and half-man.

 

Greetings people. I have come to teach you the ways of civilization and culture. I will also instruct you in the unique opportunities of something my people call timeshares. You’re welcome.

Before you write this off as a stupid, pointless and entirely random post on a shitty blog, I ask you to remember one thing. You now know how much it costs for a sorcerer to rid a farm of locusts in ancient Sumer. How fucking cool is that?

Mocking Munsters

Edit: When I wrote Lily Munster, I actually meant the character of Marilyn. It’s been years since I even thought about the Munsters and got the names confused. Hell, I’m surprised I could remember most of them.

NBC sunk $10 million into Mockingbird Lane, it was a failure before it even hit air. A giant waste of money. NBC will try to get what they can from it by turning the pilot into a Halloween special. Of course the show was a failure. Anyone with half a brain could have predicted that. Rebooting the Munsters without the Munsters was beyond a stupid idea. Sure, they have the same names, but these aren’t Universal Horror caricatures of the old sitcom, they are regular, bland, nice looking people.

Mockingbird Lane represents everything wrong with our current culture. For starters, its a reboot/remake of an old property that even my generation barely remembers. Second of all, it completely misses the point of the original show. Lilly Munster was the pretty, normal looking one. The rest of her family were monsters, she was the outsider. The black sheep of the family. The one interesting dynamic in an otherwise typical 60’s sitcom is gone. God forbid anything Bryan Singer touches actually be interesting. This is the guy who decided that the X-Men should all wear the exact same black outfit, sucked away their personality and then made the most boring Superman movie in existence. Superman 4 may have been a crime against humanity, but it wasn’t a bland trek through tedium and boredom.

Why reboot the Munsters? What’s the point? What’s the gimmick here? The Adams Family I can understand. A smart writer can take the Adams Family concept and turn it into a dark, morbid comedy. It can offer us a way to laugh at our most hideous inner self. It can offer a twisted, perverse reflection of our society. The Munsters? Not so much.

So they decided to reboot a half-remembered sitcom and then stripped everything away that was memorable about it. If you are going to reboot the Munsters, then fucking do it full on. Call it The Munsters. Make it a dumb sitcom starring Universal rip off monsters in full make up. Grow a fucking pair of balls and go for it. We have a remake of 60’s sitcom that is trying to distance itself from the source. On CW, we have a Green Arrow show that wants to distance itself from everything that makes the Green Arrow an interesting comic book hero, including the word green. What exactly is the point of doing these properties if you are going to run away from the very things that make them unique and interesting in the first place?

Granted, The Munsters isn’t the most interesting of old sitcoms. It was a fairly standard show, a Father Knows Best with a monster mash flavoring. Eddie Munster was Beaver with sideburns. Also granted, the concept of a normal teenage girl living with a family of monsters could be very interesting in the right hands. Something like Fred Phelps having a gay grandson. Just imagine those Thanksgiving dinners. But once again, they took away the concept’s only interesting dynamic. All that is left is a bland, pointless reboot of an old sitcom. Mockingbird Lane is trying to capitalize on nostalgia but not giving us anything from the show that its potential audience would be nostalgic about. The whole thing is a pointless exercise and a giant waste of time and money. It was doomed to fail at conception.

Sinister Review; AKA Dude Turn on the Lights

True crime writer Ellison Oswalt has moved his family into a house where the previous family were hung in the backyard. This is how he plans to do research for his next book. When his wife finds out about the history of the house, she justifiably freaks out. The family didn’t die in the house he assures her, they died in the backyard.

I would be more concerned that none of the lights in the house seem to work properly. Perhaps it’s bad wiring. The Oswalts are living in the darkest house in human history. Even during the day the house is incredibly dark. So dark in fact that there children seem to be having trouble finding their way around. Their daughter can’t find the bathroom and their son can’t find his bed, so he elects to sleep in cardboard boxes and the bushes instead.

Sinister is a creepy movie with a lot of good jump scares. It has a lot of atmosphere and the 8mm found footage is used to great effect. The 8mm scenes are true show stoppers. The one with the lawnmower is worth the price of admission alone. It’s a shame that the story backing it couldn’t be a little more interesting.

Ethan Hawke stars as Ellison Oswalt, a true crime writer who hit it big with a book called Kentucky Blood. He has tried to repeat the success but has come up short with his follow up books. He hopes that moving into a house where a family was hung from a tree will give him the material he needs for one more big hit. Above all, Ellison is a complete shithead. Hawke plays him beautifully but you spend most of the movie wanting him to die horribly. He’s selfish, a terrible husband and a lousy father. These are not necessarily deal breakers when it comes to main characters in the horror genre, but the film offers no redeemable qualities for him. He’s just an incredible asshole who only thinks of himself, even at the clear expense of his family.

Once again, that’s not a problem itself but his family are barely characters. Watching the film, the audience could be forgiven for forgetting that he has a son until he and his wife find him in the bushes. The daughter is typically cute and precious, with a big sign hanging from her neck that reads ‘IN DANGER’. The wife is standard issue Model Nagging Spouse. The movie introduces characters and then forgets about them. Vincent D’Onofrio even cameos as Professor Exposition via Skype.

The problem with Ellison’s family is the writers are showing their work. Showing your work is great for math but bad for writing. The family exists merely to be in peril by the movie’s supernatural villain Mr. Boogie. There is no other reason for them to exist in the movie. Most of the screen time is devoted to Hawke wondering around the house in the dark while things go bump in the night. For the majority of the movie the family is either asleep or out running errands. Cut the family from the movie and little will be lost except for the ending, which is predictable but also the logical one. The inclusion of the family in peril is meant to give the movie more tension, but the tension is lost when you know exactly how it is going to play out. The real tension in the film is the mystery in the 8mm footage and the secrets it holds. The entire film should be driven by Ellison’s investigation but constantly gets interrupted by the family. The other problem with the film is Mr. Boogie.

Mr. Boogie is a Babylonian deity who lives in images and eats children. Mr. Boogie also seems to be a believer in the superiority of film over digital. The havoc he could wreak with an iPhone and the internet must be tempting, but he sticks with 8mm. He may be an evil Babylonian, child eating god but he has style. He exists as a marketing device, an image to build a franchise around. Like the family, his inclusion into the story is largely unnecessary. A story about a true crime writer who finds a haunted box of 8mm murder films has limitless possibilities. A story about an evil god who kills families and leaves one child alive for dinner limits the possible endings down to one or two. One: he kills the family and eats the child. Two: he doesn’t. Once the film shows its hand there is only one way it could possibly end and that is exactly what we get.

Despite all of its narrative problems, Sinister works as a spooky movie. There are a number of good jump scares in it and the film does a good job of being creepy. Jump scares are largely an technical exercise. The film’s technique is good, but its narrative failings hold it back from being a classic or even memorable horror film. The Possession was a much stronger film on all fronts as was Insidious. Those two films managed to generate their tension and scares in houses that had working lights.

With The Possession, Insidious and the Woman in Black, there seems to be a movement in horror that is moving the genre back to its roots of style and atmosphere. Sinister is a part of this movement, although it is not as successful as those three films. Still, Sinister is more than welcome. The era of torture porn is finally coming to a merciful end. While filled with narrative problems and an unlikable shithead for a main character, it does deliver on tension and jump scares. It won’t redefine the genre but its just good enough to check out.

I rate this film as Recommended.

Fictional Reality: Atheism +++++++++++

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnBGeoJsFOk&feature=g-all-u

http://atheismplus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=740

I get it, I understand it now. This is what they call a moment of clarity. That moment when you get the right piece and see the puzzle for what it truly is, even if it’s still incomplete. This is that piece. Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Christ, I have seen the light!

I know exactly what this is. This goes beyond atheism and the Atheism+ movement I was talking shit about. This goes to something that has damn near emotionally and intellectually crippled my generation and will continue to cripple generation after generation of young Americans. I don’t know how prevalent the problem is in other western countries, but here its pretty bad. I say this in all gravity and seriousness. These people are victims of one of the most damaging and insidious group-think cults plaguing society today. The Self-Esteem Cult.

“The people who have crippled you, you want to see them burned.”

- Black Sabbath

It’s okay, you can bring it in for a hug guys. We’re all survivors of the Self-Esteem Cult here. I guarantee that most of these people went through public school and had the same self-esteem, everyone is a winner bullshit shoved into their heads. This is going to be a major problem in twenty to thirty years, when all the kids with helicopter parents and a school system designed to make every child feel safe and special so they won’t have any negative experiences whatsoever.

All those kids are going to grow up, set off in the world. Then the world is going to give them their first good kick to the nuts and they will have no idea of how to deal with it. Then comes a dark, monstrous revelation worthy of Lovecraft. After spending their entire lives being told how special they are and how everyone is a winner, they find out that the world doesn’t give a shit about them or their ideas and beliefs. They realize that the world is perfectly fine moving on with or without them. They’re not special, they’re not delicate little snowflakes who must be nurtured and preserved, they are just people on a planet full of other people just trying to get through their lives.

The Self-Esteem Cult works like this. Some assholes do a study that shows that popular kids who do well in school have a high self-esteem. You remember something from eight grade science that said something along the lines of: “correlation is not causation.” Well this for the children! So fuck that correlation/causation shit.

The lesson that the Self-Esteem Cult took from these studies is that children with high self-esteem tend to do better in school. It did not occur to them that children who have friends and do well in school have a high self-esteem because they get good grades and have friends. So the obvious answer was to raise the self-esteem of all children. So the dogma of the cult became this: high self-esteem gets better grades. Better grades look better in statistical reports. Better statistics means more funding and money for the school.

So concepts like winners and losers are becoming taboo, as is anything that could negatively effect their self-esteem. Think of their self-esteem like a balloon. The Self-Esteem Cult fills that balloon with hot air. If life is a mountain, the idea is to climb that mountain and reach its peak. But climbing is dangerous and the children might fall and scrape their knee. We can’t have any of that shit.

Thus they inflate that balloon with hot air. The air expands the balloon and it begins to rise raising the child up artificially. It raises them up so high that they can see the mountain top and how beautiful it is. Then life comes along and pops that balloon and they plummet straight to the fucking earth where the rest of us bitterly live. And since they have never fallen before, they don’t know how to pick themselves up, mend their wounds and get right back to climbing that mountain. So they lay there screaming at the heavens for the cruelty that was inflicted upon them.

They were told they were being prepared for the real world. This was a lie. They were lambs being led to the slaughter by sadists masquerading as child development specialists. They were being prepared for a world that didn’t exist, this wasn’t supposed to be it. One can see how whiny movements like Atheism+ and the Men’s Rights Movement are formed in our current culture. These people were supposed to be special, they were told this. Their world was supposed to be one of nothing but winners, just like the guidance counselor told them in the second grade. The world is unfortunately made up of winners and losers. Sometimes you are the winner, but mostly you will be the loser. This is a truth of life. Bad things happen. They happen to good people. Every human being has the right to climb the mountain, but most will not get the privilege of standing on its peak.

Most of us try to change that by making the world a better place anyway we can. Sometimes all it takes is a smile and a friendly conversation with a stranger, or saying ‘thank you’ to the check out clerk at the grocery store. Sometimes it through fighting for civil rights and joining a march. There may not be room for all of us at the top of the mountain, but there is plenty of room on the mountain itself.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.