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Up, Up, and Away!

15 Mar

March 15, 2011

According to an article in the NY Daily News and elsewhere, a team of  folks working on a National Geographic TV show replicated the flying house in the movie Up by actually flying an empty house (it had no interior) with 300 giant balloons.

Personally I don’t get it. It is cool, I suppose, at least until NORAD decides it is a threat. I don’t know if I would go up in it, but in this world where stories about people flying in balloon-powered lawn chairs is common I guess there is no shortage of pilots. Or, depending on high this thing goes, space cadets.

However, this does give me an excuse to repost one of my favorite movie reviews. I warn you in advance, it is way, way out there, a mix of Nazis and HP Lovecraft with at least one awkward sexual reference.

From 2009, I hereby present My Review of Up.

—–

Up is Disney/Pixar’s sequel to last summer’s Down, the ill-advised animated biography of Satan.

This is the first Disney film aimed squarely at the geriatric set. It opens in 1939. Young Carl Flopsweat is at the movies seeing the latest installment of his favorite serial, The Air Adventures of Stuttgart Nazi. This was the ninth and penultimate chapter. Reich colonel Stuttgart Nazi, in his zeppelin The Spirit of Valhalla, had finally reached the fabled Plateau of Leng. There, following clues laid out in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, he hoped to travel to lost city of R’lyeh and resurrect the Old Ones, which would lead to the Thousand Year Reich. However, in the cliffhanger, Stuttgart Nazi found himself face to face with the ancient Jews of Abraham. Would Stuttgart defeat the Jews and bring about the Aryan glory of Germany? Come back next week for the final exciting chapter.

Carl Flopsweat was very moved by this. It was 1939 and you could go to the movies all day on one nickel. You’d see a newsreel, a serial, some cartoons, a B-movie, and the main feature. It was possible to stay in the theater all day. This led to long, long lines for the bathroom. It was while waiting one of those lines that Carl’s imagination would soar. “Wow,” thought young Carl. “I wish I could be a Nazi.”

Carl didn’t become a Nazi but he did beat up a man named Goldfarb. However, that was still in the far future.

Young Carl was imaginative and would often pretend to be his hero. He would dress in the official Stuttgart Nazi helmet and junior Nazi Air Ace uniform, goose-stepping his way across town. It was on one of these jaunts, where Carl would pretend to round up “undesirables,” that he met the girl he would love forever, Eva.

Eva was everything Carl was not. She was smart and strong, while Carl was puny and stupid. In fact, on their wedding night, she made him ride reverse cowgirl. The one thing they shared was their love of The Air Adventures of Stuttgart Nazi and a desire for racial purity. Carl pledged that one day they too would fly to the fabled Plateau of Leng and found a nation of racially pure Aryans. However, Eva soon died after a night of autoerotic asphyxiation, leaving Carl old and alone.

Flash forward 70 years. Carl is still alone and racist, living life one heartbeat away from death. Ironically, only his hatred of life kept him alive.

One day Carl was informed by his local council that his house was going to be torn down to build a vitally important shopping mall and that his bedroom was slated to become a Pottery Barn.

“Fuck that,” Carl said. “I’m going up.”

So Carl did the only logical thing.

Did he:
A- get a lawyer and fight the city?
B- move to Florida?
C- die of a heart attack?
or
D- fill a gazillion helium balloons and float away?

The answer is C, he died.

No, he didn’t die. He launched his house into the air in an attempt to reach the Plateau of Leng and fulfill the promise to his dead wife, the same promise he had totally ignored for seventy years. At any time he could have bought a plane ticket to South America, but I told you he was stupid.

Along for the ride is Mungo Jerry, a Junior Platypus Ranger. Mungo has every badge the troop has to offer. He earned the Camping badge, the Squeezing Lemons badge, the Bathing the Elderly badge, and only needs the Befriending the Near-Dead badge, which he hopes to earn with Carl Flopsweat.

The ride was anything but smooth. First, Carl had badly over-estimated the power of the balloons and he shot up to the stratosphere. He barley managed to cut away some of the balloons and come back to a manageable altitude before he blacked out. Secondly, NORAD picked him up on radar and shot an ICBM at him. Only some fancy flying kept the house from being blown to smithereens. Lastly, he left the plumbing unconnected and anytime he or Mungo flushed the toilet, the refuse shot straight down and out the house, hurtling to Earth at speeds usually not reached by feces.

Little by little Mungo Jerry got on Carl’s nerves. “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” “Where are we going?” “Why do you have so many balloons?” “Who is ‘Adolph’ and why do you have his autograph?” The only thing that kept Carl from firing Mungo out of a window was the question of who would give Carl his sponge bath.

Eventually, what goes up must come down, and come down they did, somewhere near, but not quite on, the Plateau of Leng. The plan was to tether the house to Mungo (he was a bit rotund) and walk it over to the plateau and set it down. However, before they had traveled a yard, they were set upon by the savage Hounds of Tindalos, minions of the mad god Ithaqua, the Wind Walker. Carl, fortunately, was well-versed in ritualistic combat and displayed the five-pointed star of C’thulu, from which the hounds turned and ran.

“Gee,” said Mungo.
“Shut up and pull the house, monkey,” said Carl.

Unbeknownst to either of them, a shoggoth, which is the spawn of the Elder Gods, had settled on the roof of the house.

Also unbeknownst to Carl or Mungo, but very much beknownst to anyone who still followed this predictable film, Stuttgart Nazi was also on the lost Plateau of Leng, and he very much wanted to capture a shoggoth for his own arcane rituals. (This despite Stuttgart being well over 100 at this point.)

As you may well imagine, it isn’t too hard to track a floating house, and Stuttgart Nazi tracked Carl and Mungo and invited him to his Floating Lair of Doom. Of course, he didn’t call it that, he called it Ernestine, but with all the evil Hounds lurking about and the stench of blood in the air, well, Carl should have known better.

Stuttgart took Carl on a tour of his Museum of the Arcane and Eldritch while Mungo ate some candy. Stuttgart showed Carl his human ear collection, the Hall of German Experimentation, and his own private and very personal collection of German shizer porn. Carl was impressed.

Well, one thing led to another, and the film soon degenerated into your standard “who can get the shoggoth first and use him to summon The Lurker on the Threshold?” You’ve seen it a thousand times.

In the end, Carl killed Stuttgart Nazi, proving that even an old man can still kick ass. He captured the shoggoth and sacrificed Mungo in a ritual to bring forth a creature of the Dark dimension, but accidentally turned himself into a banana.

Disney/Pixar’s Up was a hit at the local senior center, where I viewed it with some of the inmates, er, residents. Those who remained awake by the end were both envious and appalled by the characters, with many curious about the shizer porn. Others had just had their meds and were made happy by the pretty colors on the screen.

Pixar is hard at work on Sideways, the stirring story of a man, his pet rat, and a crazy plan to burrow to Mars. It is due out next summer.

—–

If for some reason you like this review and your brain damage isn’t too severe, check out my review of Disney’s Ratatouille. It has no Lovecraft references but a lot of Star Wars stuff. And more Nazis. Who doesn’t like their Hitler humor?

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Stopping the Phone Book Insanity. (Phone Book Blog 4)

14 Mar

March 14, 2011

Regular readers of this blog may recall that last year the various companies dumped enough phone books in my lobby that we could have built a second (and probably cleaner) building next door. The proverbial house of cards would have nothing on us.

After yet another company’s useless phone book was dumped in my lobby I (metaphorically) ran out on the porch and shook my fist, yelling that they better keep off my lawn or else. Or else what? Or else another blog. This one prompted a response by someone who is actually in the phone book biz and tried to defend them. Sad, really.

Well, no less a respected newspaper than the New York Times took up my call. OK, so they were probably planning the story anyway, but I say that I prompted their article about the utter waste that is the printed phone book. Flying in the face of all reason, not to mention facts, I stubbornly say that I scooped them.

And that was not the only time I have scooped the mainstream media.

I assume that by now you have clicked on those links and are now thoroughly up to date with all the ways the phone book is unneeded. Of course I also assume that the United States will have a sound fiscal policy in my lifetime so I may not be too secure in my assumptions. (However, I do think that I am safe in my assumption that the Mets will not make the playoffs this year. Or next year.) In short, the internet gives tons more info and the phone book doesn’t list cell phones, which only a measly ten bazillion of us have.

The phone book is roughly 4.2 times more useless than the average human appendix. At least the removal of an appendix is an excuse for a doctor to charge enough to make his next four boat payments. What does the removal of a phone book gain anyone but a more crowded landfill? Sure, we can recycle them, but who wants to go through all of the bother when it would be so much easier to not print the book in the first place?

It isn’t like the production of the phone book keeps a lot of people employed. All it takes is one guy to go to his computer and hit “alphabetize.” Hemingway does not write phone books. Granted he’s dead, but were he alive I suspect he would not write a phone book. And the printer? The phone book is a once a year contract. I’m sure they could find another high school newspaper to fill the time if they stopped the phone book.

And we’d have a lot more trees.

One group of people the phone book does keep employed are the people who write those silly ads that scream ARE YOU INJURED? and ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION. Who needs them? The less things that scream erectile dysfunction the better.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that someone actually needs the phone book. And yes, I really do believe there are one or two people like that in every city. Elderly shut-ins looking up the names of old friends to see if they are deceased. Weirdos who like to see their name in print. The random business owner who stubbornly believes that a four line ad in the yellow pages gets them more traffic than promoting their website on Google. But do all those people need five phone books? One phone book is enough to stand on to reach the top shelf. If you need more height go stand on a chair.

Phone Book Season kicked off late this time around. Last year by the end of January we had already inundated the sanitation department with seeming millions of phone books tossed out in the street. For weeks little kids were making forts out them and playing cowboys and personal injury attorneys. This year the phone book didn’t stick its head out of its hole until the third week of March. It saw its shadow, came out, and Mayor Bloomberg fired it and 4,600 teachers despite having a budget surplus of about 3 million dollars. (True dat. The teacher thing, anyway.)

But a funny thing happened on the way to my lobby. (No, not this blog- I said “funny.”) For some reason we have so far (fingers crossed) only gotten one company’s phone book. Last year we had five. And get this- instead of the about 1/4 trillion books we received last year, we got only enough books for less than half of the apartments in the building. I know what you’re thinking- how many people took the phone book this year? Good question. After a week of watching the piles sit there like lumps of dirt- or just like phone books, take your pick- it looks like maybe four were taken. And this is a six-story building.

There was a new twist this year. Along with the phone book we sometimes get a restaurant guide from a phone book company. That one has all the takeout menus we usually find shoved under our door and later toss away in one handy volume so we can toss them all away at the same time. We didn’t get that this year. Instead we got an attorney guide. That one I took.

My main reason for taking it was to see if my lawyer was in there. He was not. But I don’t take that as a warning sign. If it doesn’t bother me that his letterhead has another lawyer’s name scratched out and his penciled in with a purple marker why should this? And besides, the volume is only about 60 pages thin- a mere pamphlet, really- and seems to list the same dozen lawyers over and over. Look up personal injury and you’ll find a huge full-page ad for “Lawyer Company X.” No, that is not their real name. I don’t want to be sued; these are lawyers I’m mocking! Turn to bankruptcy and you’ll find the same ad for “Lawyer Company X” but with “personal injury” changed to “bankruptcy.” Want to make out a will? Same company, same ad. The only thing that is different between them and my lawyer is that mine was too cheap to buy an ad.

So the lawyer book is a waste but it takes up less room and killed less trees so I don’t feel so bad about not recycling it and just tossing it down the garbage chute.

(I reread that sentence, saw I used “so” three times, began it with a conjunction, and it is thisclose to being a run-on. I left it anyway. Sometimes it is the voice that counts more than the content. Especially this content.)

The bottom line of all this mishigas (Google it) is that I fully expect this to be only the opening salvo in my war on sanity- sorry, I mean war on the phone book. One company down, four to go. If the tanking economy means we will only be getting a sensible number of phone books, for that one reason I am grateful that New York is in trouble.

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