Terrible Analogies

I first laid eyes upon the movie Naked Lunch while wandering through a video store late one night in Japan.  Why I was in Japan sporting two rows of stitches in my face isn’t important, but there I was looking for a video to watch whilst lost and stranded in a foreign land when I happened upon a bin of used VHS movies.  Casually pushing around the chaotic jumble of Japanese packaging looking for anything resembling an english film I spied an eerie alien face peeking through the suffocating pile of torn cellophane and crushed blunted corners of cardboard packaging.  Extracting it from its analog tomb I had in my grasp an english version of the movie Naked Lunch.  What this movie was doing in a nondescript store on a quiet street in Morioka I couldn’t say, but I held in my hands a cheap english movie in a strange land, and for that I was grateful.  It was something I could watch in my phone booth sized hotel room to help me pass the time while I figured out how the heck I was going to get back to America without a passport.

Man, what a mind frack this movie was to my then twenty-year-old mind.  Having read Junky I was familiar with William S. Burroughs, but I wasn’t familiar with David Cronenberg and how warped his imagination was.  I had to pause the movie and take a breather when the orgasmic talking insect typewriters began to verbally rape the protagonist of the film.  

Since then I’ve come to appreciate David Cronenberg and his version of Burroughs’ unfilmable novel Naked Lunch.  I can’t imagine anyone other than Robocop playing the bug poison addicted fugitive.  Peter Weller pulled off an amazing Bill Lee (Burroughs’ real-life alter ego)…and kudos go out to the lactating alien, without whom this movie would be but a shadow of its glorious self.  

I’ve since purchased three different versions of this film (and if it ever comes out on blu-ray it’ll be four), the last of which happens to be a Criterion release.  I’ve scanned a few pages from the included booklet for your amusement.  I would like to recommend this film, but that’s difficult to do because I know some people simply would not be able to handle the notorious weirdness that Croenberg is infamous for.  If you can handle Videodrome and the much tamer eXistenZ (both of which are amazing films), then I think you’re ready for a screening of the sublimely twisted Naked Lunch.

Again and as always, click the images to embiggen…

I hadn’t seen The Who’s Quadrophenia in years, and the wife had never seen it, so last night we tore ourselves away from TMZ’s 24/7 coverage detailing in painful increments the death of John Travolta’s son, settled down with a bag of popcorn and, with the cat passed out between us, watched what was a much more entertaining movie than I remember it to be.

Quadrophenia centers on Jimmy Cooper, a mod stuck in a confusing point in history. The year is 1964 and little Jimmy is at odds with himself and his surroundings.  Pulled between opposing forces while searching for his own identity, Jimmy is torn between a musical scene in flux, parents that doesn’t know how to raise their own children, and mates that covet pills over friendship.  Lost in a blur of pandemonium and schizophrenia, Jimmy must make sense of it all in a time when he desperately needs direction. When answers are elusive and heroes and villains aren’t what they appear, where can Jimmy turn to make sense of it all?

Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll this ain’t…

Oh, and apparently this DVD is “rare”.  I didn’t know I was sitting on a gold mine

The warning at the beginning of the DVD

Quadrophenia defined

Riding to the fateful Brighton riot

Mods attacking the Rockers

A young Sting just before The Police broke big

The White Cliffs of Dover

A friend of a friend asked me if I would like a copy of Gran Torino.  “What an odd question,” I thought, since he knew I already had a copy of Gran Turismo but hadn’t played it in months.  Before I could decline his offer he, like a politician glad-handing for donations and promising favors, placed an unlabeled DVD in my hand, looked me square in my non-lazy eye, and said with a raspy growl, “get off my lawn…”

Last night while bored and sober I recalled the awkwardness of that moment.  Reaching into my laptop bag I slid the DVD out of the front pocket and into the PS3.  I was immediately greeted with a heavy-handed warning that I was “RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS DISC AND ITS CONTENTS”.  Seconds later the title screen for Clint Eastwood’s latest cinematic endeavor Gran Torino materialized.

Ah, it all finally made sense.

One question still remains: Did this boot originate from an Oscar/Awards review copy?

UPDATE: There seems to be a bit of confusion regarding this post.  I don’t condone the practice of piracy, but if somebody out of my sphere of influence hands me a disk and asks that I watch it, my curious nature tends to kick in,  compelling me with sharp jabs and prodding urges to comply.  I have a huge DVD/Blu-ray collection, and am one of the hard-core supporters of the movie industry.  Having more movies than should be allowed I have no need to partake in movie piracy.

A friend at work knows I’m a huge DVD fanatic, and with a single e-mail sent me into a self destructive downward spiral of extreme wanting.  Ya see, the wife and I have been shopping around for a PS3 for its Blu-ray capability, wireless connection to the internet, and the automatic firmware updates it performs as they’re released.  We were unable to find one for less than $400.  The e-mail this particular friend sent me was for a 15% discounted price on a new 80Gig Playstation 3 being offered by Dell.  

This discount is still available, so if you want to take advantage of it, please act quickly.  After the 27th of December 2008 the offer disappears.  Click on this link, then input CTV2$2HX963145 into the coupon code.  I managed to snag an 80Gig PS3 for $350.  

Woot!  It’s shipped!  I’m finally diving into the world of Blu-ray, and I couldn’t be happier.  I’ve already ordered a few titles for Christmas, so Santa should be getting us started with upgrading our DVD collection to the Blu-ray format.  I *think* the big guy is hooking us up with copies of:

• The Ultimate Matrix Collection
• 300
• Batman Begins
• The Incredible Hulk (2008)
• Starship Troopers
• Hellboy 1 & 2
• Iron Man
• Wanted
• Pirates Of The Caribbean box set
• Hell Ride
• Transformers

Monday: We need to change all local administrator accounts company wide.  This, of course, falls to me.  I’m not a programmer, but I know enough to get by.  Upon investigation I find that there’s a total of 1253 servers that need the local admin password changed.  I’m beginning to dread this week already.

Tuesday: Begin writing a program that will crawl the network and change the password.

Wednesday:  Testing is successful.  I think this project is in the bag…uh, my manager now wants the developer account password changed, and now I’ll need to reset the password expiration countdown to zero, and expire in 90 days.  Coding resumes. 

….and a hard drive goes south in a blade….and the sharepoint server has run out of HD space…and a VP is asking for a server to be built in VM….argh!

Thursday:  Yay for me!  I’ve managed to lock out the admin account on nearly 100 machines while testing my program.  Code in a quick fix.  …heck with this, I’m going to the gym.

Friday:  Manager says, “Oh, by the way, we’ll need to change the rmadmin account at the same time we change the administrator account, and we need this done asap.  And can you unrack the Whale rack and send the equipment to S&H?”.  Unrack the equipment and then continue coding.  I’m worn out, feeling like Wilford Brimley on Valium.

Manager then says to me, “Can you come in on Saturday?  We need the passwords changed before Monday.  This is project critical.”  I begin wishing I packed a flask on my person.

Saturday (6am): Program successfully crawls the network, making changes to the administrator, developer, and rmadmin accounts, setting the countdowns to the required dates.  For a variety of reasons, only 102 servers fail to change.  Complete these failures by hand.  As I’m about to walk out the door another blade server begins to have issues with hardware.  I take the easy way out of this and convert the server to a VM and finally walk out the door exhausted, vowing not to pick up the phone on Sunday.

What can I say…I live for this shit.