Watch Oingo Boingo instead:

David Blaine will be suspended above the ice rink in Central Park for 60 hours.  It only takes maybe six to get there, so it’s not too late if you want to watch him. . . well, . . . hang there.

Asked why he does the dopey shit he does (I’m sure that’s not how the question was framed), he said this:

Magician Blaine to hang upside down for 60 hrs | Entertainment | Reuters

“I like to do these things because it gives me a different perspective, for a short duration. But that perspective is important to the rest of my normal existence,” he said.

So, Dave: have you ever done something which altered your perspective to the point that you realized what a useless douchebag you are to the rest of us?  You should try something like that.

I share Jamie Piazza’s psychic pain when I read that they’re actually going to remake Rocky Horror Picture Show.  The remake will be done by the original producer, which elicits a certain “Bucket List” quality to the whole idea, only serving to make it much, much worse.

Here’s the thing about it: not to step on anyone’s aging second-childhood fantasies, or anything, but doesn’t anyone that the original was so great because it was so bad? That was the point.  Remaking it will only improve on all the things that made it worth watching.  That’s not good.

As for Jamie’s request for nominees for the Frankenfurter 2009, go give him some suggestions!  I’m getting mine in there right now.

Here’s a ripple you might not have considered: the high cost of gas hurts everybody who drives to make their living, especially those on slim margins, but its really hitting the music industry locally.  I imagine the same holds true elsewhere.  The irony is that what I’ve always viewed as a strength of Rochester’s geography is now it’s weakness: you’re a relatively short drive from a huge number of highly-active music scenes, from New York to Toronto, from Philly to Cleavland.  But the problem is, you have to drive to those places in order to make a decent showing of yourself.

Something saggy this way comes.  The television show about teenage high school students starring thirty-something actors that made me cringe throughout my high school career even as I watched it (in the vain hope that I would have something to talk to Jeannie Peirce about) is making a come back. . .  with the original stars:

The Associated Press: Shannen Doherty back in `90210′ ‘hood this fall

Brenda Walsh is all grown-up and returning to Beverly Hills, 90210, this fall.

But cast members of the new CW spin-off, “90210,” are speculating whether Shannen Doherty will be equally mature when she reprises her role as Walsh.

No more fresh fruit at the Peach Pit.  Gone are the episodes about Brendon getting his drink dosed with MDMA (Extasy for you kids out there) and wild, drug-laden nights in TJ.  In their place: episodes about prune juice spiked with Viagra and wild, Metamucil-fueled early evenings at The Pottery Barn.

Get those DVRs set!

Now that Bob Duffy is fully ensconced in his role as mayor, there is a profound and noticeable uptick in the number of things going on in downtown Rochester for which he is to be commended.  I’d really like to extend my appreciation for a man trying very hard to bring more people into the city and make it a destination rather than a dare for people in the suburbs.

But the only downside to the current selection is - and I don’t want to appear ungrateful - the fact that almost everything seems to revolve around ribs, bar-b-que and blues music.  Don’t get me wrong, I love all those things, but there needs to be just a bit more diversity in the selection.

Last year, they had the Big City Summerfest.  This year, they appear to have opted to split that one big festival into a bunch of smaller festivals.  The trouble with this is that they all seem disjointed, it’s difficult to stay up to date on what’s going on, and when they mostly seem to involve the aforementioned elements, it just seems like a pile on of one thing.

So, I’d recommend (though I’m sure they’re not listening to me) that a “Big City Summer Festival Series” be formed around the idea of all these individual festivals, even some of those festivals that were not previously associated with it, maybe.  That way, you’ve got one “brand” on a large number of downtown city festivals, giving them some synchronicity, and you can share one website (with however many ancillary sites you’d like) to find out what’s going on all summer long.  Obviously, Park Ave Fest, Corn Hill and all those others would remain their own entities.

Mayor Duffy?  What say you?

My wife and I got tickets to see The Dark Night at Tinseltown last night.  No time to rest when I got home, it was straight out to get some running around done, eat a meal at Pixley’s in Gates (yum!) and into the packed theater to watch the latest incarnation of Batman.  What a way to end one of those horribly long weeks following a vacation.

The Batman “franchise” has undergone a surprising array of changes over the decades.  Where even most major comic heros either never extend beyond the ink or do so only sparingly, Batman seems to have caught our imaginations like a prism, extending from it’s dark roots through the campy seventies television show I grew up on, to Tim Burton’s graphic cinema-novels and the subsequent failures of imagination, and most recently, into it’s current incarnation, a dark psycho-thriller with rubber suits and explosions.

If that last description seems a tough series of archtypes to pack into a couple hours worth of movie, that’s because it is.  But Christopher Nolan seems to take a page from George Lucas to accomplish this, allowing the great sets, awesome toys and breathtaking stunts to take their proper place as setpieces for the characters to play with, rather than dominate the screen just because they’re expensive.

Thus instead of becoming yet another knock-down, drag-out adventure film, The Dark Night gets deeper into some of the subtext themes Tim Burton touched on - hinted at, really - but didn’t delve into.  At it’s core, this movie is not about good and evil as it’s been presented in some reviews I’ve read, but a much deeper and scarier conflict between order and chaos.  It is really along this border that most of our conflicts as humans truly lie, often putting us at odds with what we think is good and evil, and this movie goes to lengths to find as many ways to blur the lines between all four that it can.  For the first half of the movie, I began to wonder if this movie wasn’t one of those that apologizes for the popular political themes of the day, but not to worry: it doesn’t.

And of course, Batman’s role is more often than not on the side of chaos, much though he would wish it otherwise.  This is the real conflict in the movie.  What unfolds is a panoply of moral relativism where nearly every character finds himself on the side opposite his preference.  It’s a fascinating thing to watch; not at all an uncommon theme, but rare in this genre and flawlessly original in its execution.  You can see this sort of tension in many a Little Theater European production, but it’s especially entertaining when this whole psycho-drama plays out amidst great special effects and heart-pumping action.

If I have one complaint - and of course, I do, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this paragraph - it’s that the first half hour of the movie is edited surprisingly badly.  There is a frenetic pace to the cutting between scenes and camera angles that has nothing to do with the plot and only serves to make that all-important first few moments of the movie unsettling in the way watching television while someone else flips through channels is.  To some extent, it seems driven by the need to get a fair amount of back-story out of the way ahead of the rest of the movie, but it’s just sloppy.

And really, that’s just a quibble.  Beyond that, this is a highly entertaining and thought-provoking movie which takes it’s place in that oh-so rare pantheon: that of movies actually worth the bullshit prices they charge at the theater.  It’s another discussion, of course, but it’s gotten to the point where it makes no sense to see certain types of movies.  Who wants to risk $19.00 on a comedy - a genre always dancing on the edge of lame - when $5.00 gets you the same movie in high-def at home a month later?

And one more note, for those of you who actually need it: don’t bring your fucking toddlers to see this movie, please.  You would have thought people would have learned their lesson with the original Tim Burton Batman.  Nope.  But I guess it’s not about learning lessons, it’s about irresponsible parents whose personal entertainment is more important than their kid’s restful sleep for the next month.  Hire a baby-sitter, pawn the kid off on your parents, or stay the fuck home and watch the Food Network.  This movie isn’t for kids.  Sorry.

One really does need to think deeply before attempting any kind of “viral” or “guerrilla” ad campaign tactics:

‘Dark Knight’ Promo Goes Awry

NEW YORK A Dark Knight promotion, featuring a chocolate cake wired to look like an explosive device, prompted a San Antonio news station to call in the bomb squad earlier this week.

Echoing the Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare in Boston in February 2007, the low-budget guerilla campaign delivered some unintended results for the Santikos Theater chain.

“Causing that kind of disturbance with the bomb squad and police officers was never our intention,” said Meghan Vincent, a rep for the eight-theater chain in Texas. “This was not exactly the kind of press we were going for.”

Ah, well. Good to know a terrorist incident wasn’t what you were going for. You just kinda over-shot, that’s all. . .

BTW, the wife and I have tickets to see The Dark Knight tonight at 7:45. I’ve not read an even marginally poor review of this movie so far. I’m totally stoked.

I’ve never been all that big a fan of AC/DC, though I did see them at Sars-stock (AKA, The Rolling Stones and Friends benefit for Toronto). Still, they’re a bedrock Rock-n-Roll music making machine that deserves plenty of respect. Or at least, they used to. Now, they’re living in Wally World:

Report: New AC/DC Album To Be Wal-Mart Exclusive

AC/DC’s next studio album will be exclusively sold at Wal-Mart stores in the United States, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The as-yet-untitled Columbia album, which, as previously reported, was produced by Brendan O’Brien, is expected in the fall.

I was going to write this post last night, but opted to leave well enough alone, in hopes that anyone who might have visited the page yesterday would have seen my Memorial Day video tribute.

But now the holiday is over, so let us begin. If at the opening of the new Indiana Jones movie you were confused as to how a fifties car could drive 65+ miles an hour through brush desert without leaving it’s wheels in a rut or it’s oil pan on a rock, you wouldn’t be alone. If when the kids in said vehicle pulled up on a desert road amongst a military convoy and challenged the lead driver to race you wondered why any kid of reasonable intelligence would do such a thing in the mid Fifties - the height of McCarthyism, the height of the Red Scare, the height of Ike’s military-industrial complex - you doubtless would have been in good company. And if, when the soldiers revealed themselves to be Ruskies posing as U.S. soldiers, you wondered why the hell they would do something as trivial as actually take the kids up on the race, well then my friend, you have taken your first baby steps into a larger world of idiocy that is Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.

I’m no movie critic and generally take critic’s assessments of movies with a very large grain of salt. Indeed, when I read a review of this movie on MSNBC that said this movie was “all the stuff you expect out of Indiana Jones movies, but nothing interesting,” I naturally assumed that this person was a typically snobbish movie critic. In point of fact, this movie was ten times worse than he described it and I have to wonder if he didn’t step out of the theatre half way through to go play with his Star Wars figures. I wish I would have done the same.

Because I certainly don’t expect much of an Indiana Jones movie other than plain good fun, but I’d like the plot line to at least make some limited sense and I’d like the stunts to seem at least mildly physically possible. Sadly, neither came to be in this movie. And while I would never recommend anyone take safety tips from Indie, I do have to make a special note: kids, if you find yourself in the middle of a nuclear blast site moments before impact (George Bush still has a few months to make that dream a reality) you’re going to want to find yourself a better shelter than a Fifties refrigerator. It won’t work like it did - beyond all reason - for Indie.

And the movie just keeps going like this, from improbable plot line to impossible stunt, for two hours, three locations and three crypts of near exact decor. It gets to the point that you just stop really watching and just start observing. Even worse, in direct contradiction of the afore-mentioned review, there is one overriding missing element that could have made this movie a bit more livable: some gratuitous, comically gratuitous violence and gore. No one’s face melted, no one’s back was thrashed into an airplane’s propeller, no one got crushed in a big wheel thing, no one’s still-beating heart was removed. . . I mean, what’s the point?

For chrissakes, they didn’t even pop any rotten corpses out at anybody in the temples. What the hell is an Indiana Jones movie without corpses? And bugs. Lots of creepy, crawly bugs. All there was were a couple of lame-ass scorpions. What? Were the beetles too expensive? There was one snake, whose introduction was the most flaccid, ineffectual moment of silliness in the entire movie.

But I begin to believe that all my childhood sci-fi directorial heroes have gone senile and become doddering old fools, parodying their own works. From the insufferable dialogue in the Star Wars prequels to the juvenile impossibility of the new Indie movie, it makes me think the best policy going forward is to avoid anything associated with Skywalker Ranch.

If anything, please take this post as a warning to at least avoid this movie, lest the entire Indie franchise be tarnished for you as it is for me.

Late Note: Perhaps the most telling thing about the movie is the fact that every single promotional image - from movie posters to Snickers kiosks - features images of Harrison Ford from twenty years ago.  Instead of a fun movie where we could have a little fun with the aged Indy taking over his dad’s role, we have a movie equivalent of Harrison Ford’s second childhood.