2-2-09 WE’RE GONNA HAVE A BIRTHDAY PARTY!

Wish I could continue throwing the wolf underneath the fairy tale train, Shanoah. But I don’t wanna. It’s my birthday, and my favoritest person in the whole entire universe, Anton Szandor “Creepy Bald Son of a Bitch” LaVey, says I can do WHATEVER I WANT ON MY BIRTHDAY… kind of like the birthday boy in your neat thing today.

This, of course, is from that 20-megaton brain bomb The American Astronaut, which I love dearly for reasons that I can’t quite explain. Let’s put the first scene in perspective. This is after American Astronaut Samuel Curtis (writer/director Cory McAbee) brings a cat to a bar on Ceres, which looks suspiciously like a VFW hall, and trades it for the fetus of a girl hooked up to a rockabilly 45, then is accosted in the can by a pair of high-steppin’ voyeur hillbillies in the employ of the Blueberry Pirate, who needs Curtis in order to win the big dance competition. It’s also after Curtis stops off on Jupiter and gives the rockabilly girl fetus to the owner of the mines there in exchange for The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast (Greg Russel Cook), who regales lucky sex-starved miners with tales of the gentler sex (“It was round and soft. Now get back to work.”).

But it’s before they encounter the space barn carrying the microgravity atrophied silver miners from the early 20th century and their retarded kid dressed up like the Gimp.

And you wonder why I’m the way I am.

Anyway, Dr. Hess – Rocco Sisto, who, as he’ll remind you multiple times during the movie, is having a birthday – shoots the Jupiter miners with a gun that turns them into piles of dirt, leading to this… interesting episode.

Yes, Hess is trodding through the cremated remains of the miners. You are seeing that right… unfortunately.

Anyway, Hess goes after Curtis and TBWASAWB, leading to this timeless piece of cinema. And let me tell you, you can have your David Mamets and Neil Simons and Barry Levinsons and Joel Schumachers. This, to me, is movie dialogue in its highest form.

American Astronaut footage courtesy, once again, of phlegmuffin.

Grimm

Well, that’s what she would do nowdays. But fairy tales all happen long ago and far away in a magical place. Or something like that. Since most of the fairy tales we’ve been playing are loosely based on tales of the Brother Grimm, though, I decided to play a clip from a 2005 movie named The Brothers Grimm:

The Brothers Grimm clip

All right, is this freaky, or what? And yes, various sections of the movie are loosely based on assorted fairy tales, and this is the “Little Red Riding Hood” section.

2-1-09 The Girl and the Wolf

Yes, Shanoah, there are a lot of wolves in fairy tales. But they’ve got it rough in the 21st Century. As James Thurber, author of The Girl and the Wolf, wrote, “It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.”

This is an animated short, by Jonathan Button, of Thurber’s movie… and what Little Red Riding Hood should have done when she saw a huge wolf lying in bed in her grandmother’s clothes.

By the way, you can read Thurber’s story – written about 60 years before Shrek, no less- in all its pithy glory here.