Imagine walking by a house and looking in the window to see a 40ish bald guy with a fat neck, dancing.

Dance Moves (BPM tv – cable box, kids) is fast becoming one of my favorite shows. In a kind of a “Extreme Elimination Challenge” kind of way. It’s embarassing yet funky, laughable yet groovy, scary yet…well…scary. It’s a car crash because you watch only to see the girls behind to mess up. It’s the worst reality tv show ever, especially if you get up and attempt any of her Justin Timberlake moves. It’s mezmerizing.

Thankfully the free preview channels will shut off soon and I will be weened off.

I went and saw Phantom of the Opera last night and I cant shake this feeling that I’ve just seen the Battlestar Galactica of movie musicals.

I got this sick feeling part way through it (inbetween naps) I have seen this all before. That George Lucas (with Speilberg) and Andrew Lloyd Weber both have elevated the medium they work in to such impossibly unobtainable levels of success that they effectively killed small budget undertakings and drove independent movies/theatre underground for twenty years. Yet they both created a library of work that millions have seen and loved in some way or another.

With that said, PotO was so reworked and reused that it reminded me of the wave of movies that tried to cash in on Star Wars, like Battlestar, Battle Beyond The Stars and the Star Trek franchise, but in this case, we got rehashing of Moulin Rouge, Chicago and Van Helsing.

Okay that last one wasnt a musical but you get my drift. PotO was a movie musical reworked from (going backwards) a stage performance, a slew of movies (Paradise, anyone?), and finally a novel. In this effort, the themes from the original story are worked and reworked to reflect our current cultural levels while giving us 20 year old pop music to hum along to. An example of is that the Phantom himself was no where near grotesque as suggested in the story. Why? Because we didnt have time to “warm up to” him like we did to John Merrick in The Elephant Man (stage or movie). True to formulaic Hollywood movies, we had to deposit our pity on him without being totally repulsed so close to the end, so his makeup had to be toned down from the original stories so that we could accept him fast before we killed him off.

With this movie cotowing to the Hollywood formula, it makes me think that alien archeologists will unearth this movie and get a completely skewed view of pre-photography medium history: “Gas light gives off enough energy to light an entire cavern? Everyone in 1800s Paris spoke with an Eglish accent? There were two-way mirrors and safety glass back then?” (Moulin Rouge is extremely guilty of this as well)

Joel Schumacher did create several beautiful shots of opulent Paris opera, while borrowing from several paintings of the period, but someone needs to tell him how to shoot and edit a good fight scene. Too jumpy, too fast and not enough satisfying long shots of the action, much like his work on Batman (barf!). Trap Raoul under water and Schumacher runs film backward to extend the tension! Watch the bubbles go down!

I saw this movie with 4 other die-hard PotO fans and they were shocked to hear my views. I guess I didnt succumb to the music of the night.

I read today that Microsoft just added its own blog service.

Jump. The. Shark.

It sort of reminds me of when Geocities was bought up by Yahoo.

However, with that said and recognizing that I often contradict myself without noticing, I still havent lost my blogbug. I discovered last night that two people who I digitally respect a great deal have added my humble blog to their sites. They’re two highly creative people I met off of GAB and have met without the avatar of Dead Robot.

Ladies first: Uncle Al was the man behind the icons when GAB started. Mostly he writes about meat, which is good. And music. Which goes with meat. Mostly. The rest of his site is a site to see. The man is a Wacom tablet god.

And then there’s Dawn’s Brain, a freelance designer documenting various foibles and adventures in the crazy koo-koo world of going out on your own. So far she’s written some pretty insightful stuff (I smell “Freelance Design for Dummies” in the works!) and throws in a human element of self doubt to make it racy and a good read.

You’ve all read the stories of people meeting online and being weirded out by the actual live-meet. No different here. I remember walking away from the handshake-say-hi with Uncle Al like I had just been spit on by a rock star, and didnt care…he acknowledged me! And the first time I met Dawn I was suprised at her gentle attitude (she would talk to people on the streetcars) and whipcrack smarts.

Good people brought together by the warming radiation of our monitors.

Oh you Americans.

Last night on Categorey 6, Day of Destruction one of the scene intros flashed across the bottom of the screen read: “1400 miles north of Chicago”. Go get out your atlases, writers of this drivel, because that puts you somewhere in Hudson’s Bay, not in Alberta. North West is what you meant?

Team America is a wise, wise film, kids. Go see it.

The CGI of the truck getting the wind prop while driving through the Wind Farm in Texas scene was probably done on a Commadore 64. Ive seen better graphics coming out of my Playstation. First generation Playstation.

C6: DoD was a Day After Tomorrow for people who cant afford the $13 to go to a movie. After seeing DAT, I suggested a drinking game where everytime someone ran into the scene and yelled the hero’s name (“Jack! Your son is on line 2!” or “Jack! More weather…stuff…is happening in NYC!”) you had to take a drink. For C6: DoD, if you took a drink every time Dennehey pushed his glasses up off his head you’d have alcohol poisoning before the show was over. Where the hell did they dig up Dennehey? I think you could see the exoskeleton suit holding him up and making him move, under that ill fitting costume.

Yes I am going to watch the rest on Wednesday.

Down the brightly lit isles of food and product I travel. Happy! Happy! Im not really paying attention because Im humming along with the muzak:

“Hum de hum da huming, almost hum de two
Humma you were leaving, like you do, you do

All my dreams came shoo badoo, all my shopes and gears
All my dreams came shoo badoo, in tears, in tears”

I stop dead in my tracks and look up to the ceiling. I realize that Im humming along to the muzak. The muzak is playing a mutated string quartet of ABC’s Be Near Me. PAHfffffssshhhh! I feel my 20s drop away from me like a booster rocket, twirling hotly into the ocean of memories miles below me. Ladies and Gentlemen, we are oldly floating in space.

To have one of your ultimate favorite songs mangled into Muzak was a defining moment. It made me realize that soon I would be hating youth culture like my parents do. Soon I would be laughing outright at young 20somethings wandering around with their fauxhawks and buttshowing lowslung jeans. Soon I would be saying things like “Didnt Le Chateau make that back in the 80s?” With Sharkboy saying “Yes. You showed me a picture of you wearing it.”

Morressey’s words become a prayer for me: “Sir leads the troops, jealous of youth, same old suit since 1962.”

As more and more commercials rape my past via the culture I was brought up on to sell their cars, cookies and crap, I become more angry. Then last night happened…

Last night was pretty much the same scene as before. Standing in line at a check out with my purchases, humming along to the muzak. This time I recognize the song within a few bars: The Scissor Sister’s Laura. Not a fruity limp version but the original song. I kid you not.

Okay I may have been living under a rock here but in my mind, the Scissor Sisters are still pretty much an “underground” group, right? To use the rocket analogy again, their music was like little thrusters on my ship, giving me the last little booster thrill ride. Then this…then the fizzle out. I havent even downloaded all their songs yet and here they are being played over the Muzak network.

I guess the rule applies that when someone over 35 stumbles across a good chunk of youth culture and somehow makes it known to others that s/he likes it, the youth drop it and it shatters into obscurity. Like any rock band who does a Bond movie theme: Off the charts within 6 months. Think of it… Garbage – World is Not Enough…*poof*. Duran Duran – View To a Kill…*paff*. Madonna – Die Another Day… well. She comes back like wicked acid reflux. Exceptions being Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones.

I digress.

I can imagine that in the future, when three or more people stumble upon something “cool” the nanobots in their blood, placed their by Saatchi and Saatchi, pooling just inside their pleasure centres, will contact each other by WiFi, assess the coolness of the thing and then contact the mother hive base and the commercialborg will spring into action, assimilating that culture groove, and spitting it back into our hapless faces.

I, Paranoid.