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The Empty Balcony: Three Kings There haven't been that many films made about the Persian Gulf War. A quick search in the tubes only turned up a handful. A quick, forgetful war (from the American perspective, anyway), there would have been no real lasting impact on American society wrought by the conflict had it not been for our recent misadventures in the desert. We tore a bloody swath through Kuwait and Iraq for one hundred days in 1991, and came home intact and victorious. We seemed to dictate everything that happened on the ground and in the air. The war was fought on our terms completely. Mistakes were few, casualties were few, while damage inflicted on the enemy was severe. We decided when it began, and we decided when it was over. For us, it was the perfect war. Our only problem was we failed to recognize that the enemies of the future could learn lessons from it. Read more... 06.30.2009 Rover Image #52 
06.30.2009 The house that once stood in a lot on the corner of West Market and North Highland had been a wine seller's business in its last legitimate habitation. The house had been empty for years by the time it was torn down. Funny enough, even the corner where the house once stood is gone, the stretch of Highland that reached Market having been paved over to make way for an expanded branch of the Akron Public Library. Now that's progress. Read more... 06.22.2009 Rover Image #51 
06.22.2009 One day into filming of 1964's "The Train", director Arthur Penn was fired at the urging of star Burt Lancaster and replaced with John Frankenheimer. Penn had apparently conceived the film as largely a cerebral examination of the effect and importance of art to the French national consciousness during the Nazi occupation. A not unworthy aspiration, and one that could someday make a fine film. In hiring Frankenheimer, who had such films as "Seven Days in May" and "The Manchurian Candidate" under his belt, the decision was made that the plot of "The Train" should be driven by tension and action. Read more... 05.19.2009 Rover Image #50 
05.19.2009 There was a startling sight off the foot of Manhattan this morning. A Boeing 747 trailing a fighter escort was seen making multiple low passes near the Statue of Liberty and many tall buildings in Jersey City. In response, some buildings in Jersey City and in Manhattan were evacuated, for fear another terrorist attack was under way. However, this wasn't the case. The 747 was the backup plane for Air Force One, flying by New York City for an Air Force photo shoot. Apparently, the city had been made aware of the flight path by the Federal Aviation Administration. The NYPD acknowledged this, but also said that it had been barred from alerting the public. What were they thinking? Read more... 04.27.2009 Rover Image #49 
04.25.2009 The Empty Balcony: Apocalypse Now "Apocalypse Now" dropped into my cinematic experience like a bomb. When I was a teenager, I had been vaguely aware that it was a film about the Vietnam War, but I thought nothing more about it other than that it had an interesting title. I had seen other Vietnam War films, notably "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket", and felt like I was familiar with the material I would see in "Apocalypse Now", so there was no great rush on my part to seek it out. Also, there wasn't anyone my age (somewhere in the early years of high school, I'm not exactly sure when) who had seen it, so there weren't any peer recommendations or condemnations to go with the film. Read more... 04.22.2009 Rover Image #48 
04.22.2009 The New York Mets are playing a home game against the Florida Marlins on Tuesday, April the 28th. There are plenty of good seats available, but I'm not interested in those. Good seats at a ballgame are a luxury that my friends and I cannot afford. Nosebleeds have been the order of the day for all but rare occasions in my sportsgoing life. Good seats are reserved for rare gifts from corporate contacts or semi-retired acquaintances ready to rip through their retirement funds. The most expensive ticket I've ever bought was for a Yankees/Indians matchup at the Stadium last year for sixty-five bucks...in the upper deck. A similar seat in the new stadium goes for twice that amount, now. But this article isn't a rant about the high price of seats at sporting events. It's about fees. Read more... 04.20.2009 Rover Image #47 
04.20.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: The Transporter Sometimes I watch movies so you won't have to. I sacrifice hours on lazy Sunday afternoons abusing my eyes and my sense of taste not just because I enjoy bad cinema, I do, but because some bad movies descend so low that even cinematic shit-eaters like myself can find no redeeming qualities to them whatsoever, and viewers need to be warned to avoid them. Like a signpost jutting out of the desert warning of rattlesnake country ahead, or a toxic waste dump, consider this article a harbinger, for there will be trouble for those who ignore it. Read more... 04.17.2009 Rover Image #46 
04.17.2009 Will They Be Called "The Bush Six"? Six former Bush administration officials who were responsible for developing legal arguments justifying torture are likely to have criminal investigations opened against them by a Spanish court. The court is claiming jurisdiction because Spanish citizens were held at the prison at Guantanamo Bay and have said they were tortured. The case is going before a judge, Baltasar Garzon, who has a history of bringing charges against overseas defendants, including Augusto Pinochet. Should the cases move forward, arrest warrants will likely be issued. Read more... 03.31.2009 Rover Image #45 
03.31.2009 The Empty Balcony: Logan's Run Once again, the future is a terrifying place. This is a lesson that Hollywood continues to hammer home to moviegoers. Whether or not anyone is listening...well, that will be evident when we finally arrive in the future, won't it? If the future is a place packed full of brain-eating zombies, cold-blooded murderous cyborgs, endless desert landscapes blasted with nuclear radiation, gigantic mutated insects, alien slave drivers, and any other myriad threats to the existence of mankind, then we have obviously failed to protect ourselves. Heed the warnings of science fiction, fair citizen, for to ignore them is to sow the seeds of our own destruction. Read more... 03.30.2009 Rover Image #44 
03.30.2009 The Daily News and The New York Post both splashed their front pages in the city yesterday with headlines about the renaming of the Freedom Tower rising on the World Trade Center site. "NO MORE FREEDOM" read the Daily News, while the Post roared forth with "FREE DUMB TOWER". New Yorkers can shell out a buck a day for these cupfuls of indignation. Read more... 03.28.2009 Rover Image #43 
03.28.2009 Film Reviews from the Empty Balcony: Burn After Reading Watching a Coen brothers movie is sometimes like attending a blind tasting. There won't be any swill waved under one's nose, but just what is in the glass could be surprising, or disappointing. Read more... 03.23.2009 Rover Image #42 
03.23.2009 This entry gets a little blue. If you don't mind dirty words, click here... 03.03.2009 Rover Image #41 
03.03.2009 Film Reviews from the Empty Balcony: Soylent Green The future is a rough place in Richard Fleischer's 1973 film "Soylent Green". Especially New York City in the year 2022. The population is 40 million, the city is in the grip of an endless heat wave, and apparently the only things to eat are colored crackers. At least the green kind, Soylent Green, to be particular, seems pretty popular. Man, of course, is to blame for the calamities of this bleak future, as the film demonstrates in an opening photographic montage that is artistically compelling. Read more... 03.02.2009 Rover Image #40 
03.02.2009 The saga continues. Only a few weeks after taking his seat in the Senate, dubiously but legally, it appears the Senate's initial wariness towards Roland Burris may have been well founded. First, Burris swore in an affidavit that neither he nor his representatives had any contact with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich or his representatives prior to his being chosen to fill Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat. Then, he stated that he had been asked to raise money for the Governor's reelection but had refused. Now he says that he did attempt a fundraiser for the embattled Governor prior to his appointment, but had been unsuccessful. Read more... 02.19.2009 Rover Image #39 
02.19.2009 Film in the Tubes: Sushi Conveyor Simplicity can sometimes be sublime. Thus it is with a little film that Andy Scearce made in Japan a few years ago. Read more... 02.16.2009 Rover Image #38 
02.16.2009 Film Reviews from the Empty Balcony: Robocop Dystopian future societies are the stuff dreams are made of. They are what grows from the seeds of our own decadence and shallowness. The moral bankruptcy, and sometimes outright horror, of the settings of films like "Blade Runner", "A Clockwork Orange", "THX 1138", "Escape from New York", and "Soylent Green" wouldn't be possible if writers and directors didn't look around them and see the lightning speed with which we throw ourselves into unknown futures, sometimes without regard for so many of the present realities which work so well and don't need change. The ever-present message is that change, sometimes jarring change, is inevitable. Films that look to the future warily revolve around placing the viewer in the role of Rip Van Winkle. When the theater lights dim, the familiar world of today dissolves into the freakshow of tomorrow. The overriding questions always being: Why are the people onscreen comfortable with this? Why doesn't everybody see how wrong things are? Read more... 02.06.2009 Rover Image #37 
02.06.2009 A quick note before I begin. In the last article under this heading, I cited three open Senate seats, in New York, Delaware, and Illinois. After that article was posted, then President-elect Obama named Colorado Senator Ken Salazar as his pick for Secretary of the Interior. Colorado's governor, Bill Ritter, named Michael Bennett as Salazar's replacement. They've managed, thankfully, to avoid controversy. If only such could be said in the cases of New York and Illinois. Read more... 01.27.2009 Rover Image #36 
01.27.2009 Three days after Barack Obama's inauguration and the new president has instituted perhaps the toughest lobbying rules for prospective and former members of his administration in the history of the office. He has revoked the veto power of former presidents and vice presidents to hide their papers from public view. He has signed executive orders setting a closing date for the prison at Guantanamo Bay, set up a panel to review the status of all prisoners there, and ordered the CIA to close its overseas black sites. He has ordered that all detainees be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, and interrogations follow guidelines established in the Army Field Manual, which prohibits waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions, forced nakedness and sexual humiliation, exposure to extreme temperatures, and other techniques up to and including direct physical harm. In announcing that order, President Obama became the first person in the Executive Branch in about seven years who was not lying when he said the United States does not torture. Read more... 01.23.2009 Rover Image #35 
The scientists in charge of the earth rover are sick of writing captions. 01.23.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Horror Express "Horror Express" is one of those good bad movies. The budget is low, the plot has twists and turns which serve little purpose than stretching out the running time, and a middling celebrity makes a token appearance to swipe a quick paycheck in exchange for lending some prestige to the film. Ah, Telly Savalas. During the 70s, cheap European horror films must have been how he expensed vacations. His name is in the credits, to be sure, but the title of the film could easily be changed to "Where's Telly Savalas?" Kojak takes his sweet time making his entrance, but such bliss, for Savalas plays a Cossack captain in command of soldiers in Siberia. He's gruff and flamboyant all at once, smoking cigarillos and drinking vodka, never quite sure if he should talk with a Russian accent. It looked like his scenes were filmed in a day. Anyway, Savalas isn't in a starring role. Read more... 01.19.2009 Rover Image #34 
The rover captured this image in the remains of a power station. 01.19.2009 In the City - The Subway Touch Rule Never touch anything in a subway station. Never lean on a column, sit on a bench, or, God forbid, do a pull-up from a rafter. Subway stations have been coated with a hundred years of filth. Brake dust, rust, flakes of lead paint, rotten food, rain water drained from the street, dog piss, rat piss, human piss, vomit, all kinds of fecal matter from all kinds of sources. There's no reason to believe the rare occasions when things are sprayed and scrubbed down that everything is cleansed. Even the smell of the air, a truly unique odor, tells one all they need to know about the tunnels. In the cars, it's different. There are three options. Sit on a dirty seat, a thin layer of clothes between you and the plastic; hold onto a metal bar; or surf, holding nothing and risking falling on the floor, which is just as bad as lying on the track bed in some cars. In fact, the ideal situation would be to ride the subway in a deep sea diving suit which, upon exiting, is dipped in gasoline and set on fire. 01.13.2009 Rover Image #33 
The rover thought this beast was sleeping, until the camera's shutter closed. 01.13.2009 Film Reviews from the Empty Balcony: The Last Man on Earth/The Omega Man/I Am Legend The three films adapted from Richard Matheson's 1954 novel "I Am Legend" vary widely in scope, story, and distance from the original source material. They are all shaky and mostly forgettable, but "The Omega Man" maintains a special place in cinema as one of star Charlton Heston's many 1970s forays into post-apocalyptic science fiction. For that, it is the most interesting of the three adaptations, if not the best, edging "The Last Man on Earth" by a close margin. Read more... 01.09.2009 Rover Image #32 
The rover captured this image in the midst of a strange east coast dust storm. 01.09.2009 Everyone who loves rock and roll has an opinion about the best album ever recorded. Is it "Electric Ladyland", "Who's Next", Led Zeppelin's fourth, "Abbey Road", something else? The arguments one way or another are endless, and fill a damn large percentage of late night bar talk. Every music magazine one could think of has lists all over their web pages. Top 100 albums ever, best 500 songs, best punk albums, folk albums, classic rock albums, alternative albums, 60s albums, 90s albums, all coming out the wazoo. For me, all the history of modern music, rock, blues, jazz, coalesced and circulated in a massive storm over a recording studio in Los Angeles in May 1970. For two weeks The Stooges channeled all the hectic and destructive energy of loud music and put it on tape. The result was "Fun House". Read more... 01.08.2009 Rover Image #31 
This image may look poignant or picturesque, but if the rover wasn't made of metal, it would have frozen it's ass off getting this shot. 01.08.2009 In the City - The Rice Box Rule When living in the city, never buy rice from the corner store that comes packaged in a cardboard box. There is no liner in the box, and you can't see inside. The rice just sits in there, snug against the smooth, brown sidewalls, in an imperfect seal. After you pour out a cup into some boiling water and all sorts of brown stuff floats to the top, that's when you realize that at some point between harvesting, processing, packaging, and sitting on a shelf, your box of rice became infested with bugs. Rice in a plastic bag mitigates this problem. Look in the bag, check for bugs. No bugs? Buy the bag, and store in the freezer. 01.03.2009 Rover Image #30 
Bolt. 01.03.2009 |
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