Book vs. Movie: Let The Right One In.

Books that get adapted for the silver screen usually get a bum deal.

Books that are written based on a movie are even worse off.

Let’s look at how Let The Right One In faired.

I read John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel before I watched Tomas Alfredson’s movie. I do this with most the books that get adpated into movies because I usually prefer the book to the movie. The only movie I’ve enjoyed more than the book was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The book was fantastic, but the movie was just enthralling on a level that the book couldn’t match.

Basic plot of Let The Right One In: a 12-year-old boy who gets picked on befriends an apparently 12-year-old vampire girl. Hijinks ensue. But in the slow, dramatic sort of way. No one throws a pie.

The Book: A slow paced horror. The translation was really odd in places, but I was able to look beyond that. The writing wasn’t very captivating but the story was interesting. The plot took place over about a month and brought in many groups of people who were bound together by random events. It was well done and all of it served to progress the plot.

The Movie: A slow paced confusing horror. The movie sort of assumed you had already read the book. They dropped many of the supporting characters or truncated their involvement in the main plot. The timeline of the movie was sped up to about a week and a half. There weren’t a lot of clues to be used to help you identify characters. The ending was the same as the book, which I really liked, but they cut out one of the largest points of conflict between the two children (ignoring the whole vampire thing) and only aluded to it with a bizzare vag-shot that made no sense without the context provided by the book.

So, Let The Right One In: better book than movie. Both were very good but very odd. Worth watching and reading, but I suggest picking one or the other and sticking with it.

(I’m told there’s a lot more dark humor in the subtitles for the theatrical release than made it into the DVD subtitles, but what are you going to do?)

Blame the parents-pt. 1

Women like this make my blood boil.

It’s not even so much that the only good thing she said video games can do is improve hand/eye coordination.

It’s not even that she said that instead of playing video games, people should try to be better spouses/parents.

It isn’t even that she “GUARAN-DANG-TEEs” in all caps that no geek will ever get married if s/he doesn’t stop button mashing.

It’s the fact that she resorted to name calling  as old, tired and overused as her C U Next Tuesday when she called gamers fiscally irresponsible junior high aged kids with no social skills. Oh and here’s another brilliant quote:

” …your THUMB muscle isn’t really the first thing the woman is going to look at say, “Oooh….What a MAN!”

Oh and apparently, all women want a man that is “kind, gentle, sincere, and puts them first as a priority” so apparently, males that game are complete assholes and physically weak individuals that won’t be able to  protect us poor damsels in distress when we call out for help.

Views?

The Basement’s Take on the New Cobra Commander

Cobra Commander 4E

Cobra Commander 4E

What follows is a Bill Simmons-esque discussion many of us recently had about the new Cobra Commander toy relased by Hasbro. Well, except all the frat talk is replaced with Net jargon, but this is the Basement after all.

Sam: They’ve raped my childhood.

Jake: qfft

Me: So, Cobra Commander wasn’t a metrosexual version of Jason X in your childhood?

Sam: I will shoot you with ten guns.

Derek:  You know it’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt, right? From Brick, and 3rd Rock from the Sun?

Me: My bad. So, Cobra Commander wasn’t a short metrosexual version of Jason X in your childhood?

Sam: I want to murder the world.

Kurt: Holy shit.  I feel violated.  And to think I was actually sort of looking forward to the movie…

—

Yep, and we’re all married or in long-term relationships. There’s hope for all of you. All of you.

Domo arigato, Harmonix

Harmonix announces that next week’s downloadable content for Rock Band will include a 7-song pack of REO Speedwagon and Styx.

Jesus, if they’d only mix in some Van Halen, I could recreate the Texxas Jam in my living room.  I’m regressing back to my youth in the best possible way.

Update: The Texxas Living Room Jam playlist from the songs available for the game:

“More Than A Feeling” – Boston (Texxas Jam, 1979)
“(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” – Blue Öyster Cult  (Jam, 1979)
“The Trees” – Rush (Jam, 1979)
“Hello There” – Cheap Trick (Jam, 1980)
“Roll with the Changes” – REO Speedwagon (Jam, 1981)
“Any Way You Want It” – Journey (Jam, 1982)
“Bad Reputation” – Joan Jett (Jam, 1982)
“Renegade” – Styx (Jam, 1983)
“War Pigs” – Black Sabbath (technically not a Jam band, but Ozzy performed in 1984)
“Highway Star” – Deep Purple (Jam, 1985) 
“Living on a Prayer” – Bon Jovi (Jam, 1985)

Why yes, I did in fact only pick songs for the bands that would have been released concurrent with or prior to their Jam appearance.  Well, almost…Bon Jovi’s appearance predates Slippery When Wet by a year.

What?

Texas Geeks Know Sam Houston > Rick Perry

Anyone who knows me understands that I’m one of those annoying Texans who really digs being a Texan.

I blame my parents. You see, I actually grew up in rural Texas. So we had horses, cows, cattle guards, and dirt roads. Not that I lived on some big glorious ranch. More like ten acres of hard-packed red clay with patches of bull nettles and ragweed. Ragweed so prominent that I sweetened milk out of instinct for years afterwards because of what it did to our cows. Hell, my first girlfriend’s dad knew me because he recognized my last name from all the times he’d been called out to our house to turn off the electricity for delinquency.  A cavernous maw of washed out dirt and gravel quite capable of devouring the undercarriage of a county utility vehicle served as our driveway, so I’m sure he remembered the trips distinctly.

Now, I admit that for all that Texas cred, I lean to the left. I’m a mild liberal by most standards–or a dirty pinko socialist by my uncle’s standards (he always meant it with love). So the fact that I dislike Gov. Rick Perry might not be a big surprise. That said, his secessionist rant this week should offend anyone who embraces the name Texan.

I’d like to point back to a true leader of Texas who opposed secession, Sam Houston. Yep, the Raven opposed secession in 1861. I understand that Perry is full of himself and doesn’t have the cajones to do anything like secede. He just wants some face time before Kay Bailey Hutchison kicks him out of office next year. However it’s still worth acknowledging that Houston opposed secession when it was an inevitable tide here in Texas. It’s an important distinction. Perry’s sedition of ego versus Houston’s willingness to put aside personal power out of dedicated belief could not offer a more stark contrast in what it means to be Texan.

Me, I have enough pride in the term to want to talk about the the Raven over footnote Texan Goodhair. So, not just to annoy Sam, I started up a little Facebook page to further illustarte my contrast. It seemed the geeky thing to do. 

For some extra enjoyment, here’s Perry making a fool of himself and then being granted an unwanted education on Texas law by Rachel Maddow:

Technoschizophrenia

I know, it’s not entirely new.  But I’m still occasionally surprised to realize how odd it is that I can freely refer to my wife and daughter by multiple names.  Specifically, by their online handles.

Names certainly have a power – ancient peoples knew it, and then we forgot it, and now, it’s back with a vengeance.  Your name is a portal to who you are, ad the panoply of things that exist about you on them there interwebs.  Hell, when I registered myself on this blog, I set myself up reflexively with a nick.  Then I noticed everyone else had their names, and got to thinking about it, and became Derek.

My wife and I play Team Fortress 2.  A lot.  Say, every day.  And while we play, we can both easily refer to each other by our nicks without any real issues (okay, I lie a bit.  My wife referred to me as Derek last week in a Left4Dead game.  I had an instinctual reaction of fear and annoyance.  Then I realized we were playing with a sum total of four people, two of whom were us.  The other two were people we play games with just about every night.  And it was entirely unlikely that, two days later, they would even remember my name.  But I still had the reaction.

I know that this is pretty common for “the young people today.”  But for me, it’s still an odd little piece of life.  At one point, my daughter continued to refer to me as “Cat” for a day or two after every time we played together.

And back in the olden days, it was more pronounced.  My online self was like me, but not entirely. I made an effort to stand out, so I adopted verbal tics, personality quirks (I referred to people by odd nicknames.  Not things like ‘fuzzy nose’ but just things you wouldn’t normally pick.  Michael would be Chae, rather than Mike.  Elizabeth might be Zab.  William would be Illi.  Etc).  I would occasionally even go so far as to espouse opinions I wasn’t entirely sure I believed in, or understood, in order to stand out more.

Now?  Who the hell cares?  I”m good with who I am.  I’m a sarcastic geek who is rarely serious (which annoys my wife to no end), and I’ve sort of given up on worrying about what people think about me, because I’m pretty well happy with who I am, and pretty well busy getting on with my life, despite what random ‘net idiots might think.

I like it a lot better now.  I’m not as interesting, but it’s a lot less work.

Out of the closet basement theater and into the streets

The way I figure it, one has to be hardcore geek about something if they’ll agree to wear a fur coat for it.  In Texas.  In August.

Granted it was for a job, and only the second one I’d ever had, but I still think it says something.  I’d begun working at the discount/second run movie theater that was about 10 minutes from home the fall after I’d turned 16.  It happened to be a Cinemark theater that had been closed for the summer as it expanded from two screens to four.  For the grand opening weekend, they were making a big to-do with balloons, big advertisements…and the Cinemark corporate mascot Front Row Joe out front to greet the kids.

Sadly, ordering the costume from the corporate office didn’t mean corporate also provided a shmuck to wear the damn thing in 98-degree temperatures with 60% humidity.  Which is how I wound up in the suit that first Friday afternoon.  As miserable as the experience was (one friend told me afterwards by the end of the day I was the most lethargic costumed figure he’d ever seen), there were three things about the experience I am thankful for to this day:

1)    That as a weight loss program, it was quick and effective.  I’m pretty sure I lost at least 10-15 pounds sauna style, and being the first person to wear it that weekend, I didn’t have to endure what it must have smelled like by the end of that weekend;

2)    The job was the first I had to provide me free movies as perk.  This would be akin to a drug dealer giving one of his pushers a free ounce of cocaine for every ten he sold;

3)    Because the Internet didn’t exist, I would not have any knowledge of what furries are for another 15 years.  As such, I wasn’t irreparably traumatized at the consideration of what might have been done with/in/on that suit before it came to our theater, and only have to endure the odd shiver down my spine as I consider that time in my life.  Though I must admit typing the previous paragraph leaves suddenly in desperate need for a hot shower to wash away tainted nostalgia.

I digress.

Movies have been the go-to entertainment choice for my family for as long as I can remember.  My parents simply don’t typically do culture on any level outside of that, and within cinematic territory they are almost disturbingly mainstream.  As such, my childhood consisted of a steady diet of celluloid junk food, though some of the classics did manage to sneak their way in.  But for the most part, if it was in the top 10 box office figures for a given year between 1980 and 1990, chances are good I saw it, possibly with my folks.

(Related nostalgia point: nothing is as surreal as listening to your typically uptight Catholic Hispanic mother talking with awe and wonder at the sight of Mel Gibson’s ass after seeing the first Lethal Weapon.  And now I’ve got material for therapy…)

Coming to college and continuing to work in movie theaters helped broaden my tastes and interests.  More genres were readily available to me, piquing my curiosity to explore unheard of names that would become favorites.  I owe an old friend from high school more than he’ll ever know for introducing me to Akira Kurosawa at UT’s Hogg Auditorium.  But couple of funny things happened on my way to full-blown movie geekdom.

I became a repository for a ridiculous amount of useless movie trivia.  I’m particularly skilled it seems at freaking people out by remembering whole scenes from films verbatim, or pulling the title out of thin air from a description as vague as, “It had Kevin Bacon in it and they were doing this thing…”

And I developed (in my mind at least) a reputation as being that guy.  The cranky ijit in the back of the theater muttering under his breath about derivative plot twists and uninspired direction.  How I’ve read better lines in fortune cookies.  You know the drill.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember to stop and dislodge the film can up my ass and remember that is, in the end all just entertainment.  That funny means different things to different people, and that not all people take the same thing away from the same movie.  I have a long celebrated two-hour argument over Fight Club to remind me of that, if nothing else.

And yet, sometimes I feel like declaring yourself a “geek” becomes a cop-out excuse to turn your brain off and blindly accept whatever gets put in front of you without any dialogue or independent thought at work on any level.  Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News probably did as much or more to mainstream film geekery as anybody, and for that I will always be thankful.  

That said, reading his gushing praise of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made me think that if Spielberg presented Knowles a shit sandwich to eat, Harry would produce a column that gushed over the shade of brown the shit he consumed was and thanking George Lucas for trimming the crusts off just the way he likes it.

I think geekery can be more discerning than that.  Whether that’s true or not is something we’ll be able to discuss in these pages over time.

Enough with the previews.  Fire up the projector.

WordPress RSS feeds are the devil

An hour ago, Mike mentioned wanting to link to a post on a FaceBook profile he’s about to create. The context of his question was such that it had nothing to do with where I took it. Mike wanted to know if anyone would be annoyed because the Basement is looking a little shabby at the moment.

But I ran with the question and began wondering if he could establish an RSS feed of the Basement that would auto-post to his FaceBook thingie when he made a post here on the basement with a specific tag. (I have no idea if FaceBook can do this, so whatever.)

Continue reading →

My basement

For me, coming out of the basement means something else.

It’s suddenly realizing that I’ve got 3 kids, a wife, and I could reasonably be called a mid-level executive, when 10 years ago, I couldn’t imagine having kids, thought being a manager was the worst thing I could ever do, and knowing that I would eventually find fame and fortune as either a senior *nix admin, a freelance RPG author, or both.

It’s suddenly looking around and realizing that all that stuff I’ve always wished I could afford isn’t the stuff I want any more (although I’m still gonna get one of those museum replica lightsabers when my wife isn’t looking).

It’s finding that, given the choice between going to a game night and staying home to help with the babies, I’m staying home to help with the babies (at least most of the time).

It’s realizing that I’m at the point where I’d rather just pay someone for a computer, instead of building one myself for half the cost, because the time I’d spend figuring out what’s top of the line and putting it together is worth less to me than the money.

It’s seeing my 15 year old daughter play WoW the way I used to (obsessively repeating instances until she has all the loot, running them 15x in a night until the right item drops, picking people randomly and whipping them in to shape), and listening to her wax sarcastic to everyone, wear a Star Wars shirt, and get annoyed about things that I used to rant about.

But it’s also playing MMOs on the couch with my wife, because we can afford new laptops, and that’s how we relax in the evenings.

It’s finding that it’s okay that I don’t have subs to comics any more – I can wait for the TPBs, and read 10 issues in a night, then hand them to my wife.

It’s finding that things I learned being a geek suddenly come back to help me later on.

It’s training myself out of my old habits, and learning that, in fact, you *can* learn to be a leader, even if it seems like a complete waste of time.

It’s realizing that I’ve found a niche in my career where being endlessly fascinated by patterns, details, minutae, and semantics is actually exactly what I need.

It’s waiting for the elevator and thinking “You know, I bet you could gather data for a week on stops and travel, and find the optimal floor for the elevator to wait on by time of day and day of the week, to reduce either the total distance traveled, or the time spent waiting per spot.” Then realizing just how few people there are in the world that think that way, and how that makes you valuable to a very specific group of people.

It’s having days when you have to explain to people, repeatedly, why you can’t average averages, why correlation does not imply causation, why you can’t just change one thing without others being impacted, and why, really, reports that aren’t repeatable and validateable are not, in fact, reports at all, even if they’ve been submitting them for months that way.

It’s learning that, the only reason your company is failing a key metric is because no one has sat down and said “What, exactly, goes in to this? And who, exactly, is part of the process? And why, exactly, do none of those people talk to each other?” then just asking the questions, and fixing the issue.

It’s being in Wal-Mart and deciding that, yeah, you’re gonna pick up 5 sets of the Star Wars characters you don’t have, and not being embarassed at the counter, or feeling like you have to say they’re for a child.

It’s finding that being a little eccentric at work gives you a bit more freedom, as long as it’s backed up by being good at what you do, and a couple subtle reminders that you are far more geeky and scientifically oriented than they could ever imagine.

It’s realizing that, were I to meet the me of 10 years ago, neither of us would really recognize the other, but we could still talk books, movies, games, and comics.

So yeah, I’m out of the basement, and I’m finding that life outside isn’t exactly what I expected. But damn, is it a good life. For all the cliches about not understanding what it’s like to be a dad until you’ve been one, and finding your purpose is to provide for others, and how much your life changes when you’re a husband, a father, a provider, and a quasi-grown up, they’re all really true.