Author: Eric

Movie review: “Kong: Skull Island” (2017)

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“You heard of the U.S.S. Lautmann? Neither did the public. Out of a thousand young men on that ship, I was the only survivor. They told my family she was sunk in battle, but I know what I saw. It had no conscience. No reasoning. It just…destroyed. I’ve spent the last thirty years trying to prove the truth of what I learned that day. This planet doesn’t belong to us.”

King Kong’s rugged origins as oversized simian emperor of the lush, forbidding, prehistoric death trap Skull Island constitute an archetypal adventure story that has rarely ever shared the screen to the degree it deserved, despite being a prominent aspect of almost all the big ape’s previous cinematic incarnations. It’s a straightforward though hydra-headed equation that can set forth with confidence in most any direction a fairly competent, fairly ambitious director might choose: Man against monster; monster against monster; man against the unknown; monster against monsters (squee!); man against the elements; man against nature (however unfairly extra-natural the island’s odds often seem); even man against man, assuming it doesn’t slow things up too much. Continue reading “Movie review: “Kong: Skull Island” (2017)” →

Bill Paxton: An Appreciation

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Bill Paxton’s characters always seemed like they were up to some mischief, or, failing that, up for some. The hint or indicator springs from the face, and his was a deceptively expressive one, with its deep, handsome lines, wide, slightly gap-toothed smile, and flinty grey-blue eyes that fairly danced with life, ill-contented to ever sit idly by while others made their mark or had their fun, desperate to be wherever, and with whomever, the action was. Action became Bill Paxton’s calling card over time, but he brought the same levels of play and professionalism to grade-Z schlock that he did to ponderous prestige pictures, and reliably came out of the transaction as one of the most memorable things on the screen. The kind of resume and cinematic archive he now leaves to the ages couldn’t possibly be the product of luck alone. Continue reading “Bill Paxton: An Appreciation” →

My Top 20 Albums of 2016 + supplemental lists

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Introduction

Oh, I definitely know I’m late. Believe me when I say that I have no wish to belabor the foul memory of 2016 any further than is absolutely necessary. Truly, it was a vile year, brimming with breathtaking, heartbreaking upheaval on both a political and societal level, and a cavalcade, practically a mocking, extended holiday parade, of unfortunate mortal departures from the worlds of art and film and music, such that I’d never before quite experienced in my own four+ decades on this rock. Eventually, of course, you grow old enough that your heroes die. It’s as incontrovertible as the sunrise. 2016, then, was the year that stated that truism for the record unequivocally, then restated it, reinforced it, and underlined it like an unbalanced grade school teacher a thousand times in neon ink. Continue reading “My Top 20 Albums of 2016 + supplemental lists” →

Steelers Thoughts #14 (1/24/17): Kryptonite Burns/Red Sun Poisoning

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Pittsburgh Steelers v New England Patriots

After a charmed, inspiring, dependably hardscrabble nine-game winning streak that might as well have paired with Oscar-winning Jerry Goldsmith accompaniment and protective detail from a coterie of animated Disney mice, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ gilded royal coach turned back into a pumpkin Sunday night in the manner and place it has so many times over the years, against the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game. Before a justifiably frenzied crowd of 66,000 jolly Affleckian sub-townies, Boston chowderheads, Revolutionary War reenactors, and other loveable regional stereotypes, the Steelers’ resurgent, frankly overachieving defense picked an auspicious occasion and opponent on/against which to revert to general ineffectiveness, and its offense could not make up the difference. Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #14 (1/24/17): Kryptonite Burns/Red Sun Poisoning” →

Concert review: Napalm Death

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also appearing: The Black Dahlia Murder, Misery Index
Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, Ohio – November 11, 2016

Though it’s easy to imagine the opposing viewpoints, it is all but impossible to be of two minds regarding Napalm Death, the inimitable, uncompromising extreme music institution that sprung like a bio-weapon from the industrial grit of Birmingham, England over thirty years ago. In that disposition, the restless, resilient grindcore pioneer is, ironically, very much of a piece with its most recently identified natural enemy, semi-scrupulous billionaire real estate mogul Donald J. Trump Continue reading “Concert review: Napalm Death” →

Post No. 150: Various Forks in the Road (v.3)

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Every 25th post, darkadaptedeye takes a planned break from normal business to plumb the shallow depths of its author’s psyche and/or overtly explore the locked attic of memories it only ever really dabbles in otherwise. You might think of it as a pit stop, or maybe a soft reboot. In “Danse Macabre”, Stephen King termed his own such digression “An Annoying Autobiographical Pause”, which I choose to think was kind of charming. Please know I take seriously the challenge of making patent self-indulgence interesting – actual results be damned – and I appreciate you being game. We’ll return to our irregularly scheduled programming shortly…

You can’t get here from there. Believe me, I’ve tried.

What you are currently reading is the third drastically different iteration of/attempt at DAE’s milestone 150th post – labored over, intermittently but to an insipid degree, over a five-month hiatus during which bystander and well-wisher alike could’ve been forgiven for believing I’d abandoned the store entirely instead of merely neglecting it shamefully. Continue reading “Post No. 150: Various Forks in the Road (v.3)” →

Movie review: “Creepshow” (1982)

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“Har-ry! The lady fair is waiting for her knight in shining corduroy!”

Whether or not we might remember or care to acknowledge it, the world owes a debt to the creators of EC Comics, the trailblazing, still romanticized horror imprint that thrived throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s. At the dawn of the Cold War, a period that would seize the globe in a vice grip of apprehension for decades to come, EC titles such as The Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt subtly defused the steadily mounting popular paranoia in their young readers by getting them to focus instead on stirring yarns concerning implacable, supernatural terrors, in effect teaching them, at a time when the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed increasingly real, if not yet omnipresent, to maybe stop worrying so much about the bomb, a solid decade before Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove took their own crack at it. Sure, EC seemed to say, the world is a dangerous place, but that’s conventional thinking, not to mention boring. Continue reading “Movie review: “Creepshow” (1982)” →

The Ballad of Lefty Pitdweller and the Ticket Master

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NOTE: What follows is a long, winding, bumpy, and circular road, even for this blog. Caveat reador.

My relationship with Ticketmaster – the nefarious online concert access cartel – has been a long and contentious one, though never particularly complicated. My feelings on the subject are not at all mixed but, rather, pure as the driven snow. Ticketmaster stands not just in mere ideological opposition to me. It vexes me, tweaks me with purpose and zeal, and does just about everything during our regular, uncomfortable interactions but spit in my eye. It is my rival, my enemy, my nemesis, and the bane of my concert going existence, which has otherwise brought me so much joy, both fleeting and lasting, and memories built for a lifetime’s contented recollection. Continue reading “The Ballad of Lefty Pitdweller and the Ticket Master” →

Movie review: “Warcraft” (2016)

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“Sounds like a trap.”

“It is not.”

“Could be.”

“It is not.”

“Could be.”

“It is not.”

Who knew orcs had such soulful, expressive eyes? That, after a touch over two hours of simultaneously bland but colorful cartoon CGI carnage, was my main takeaway from Warcraft, the would-be flagship of an undeniably ambitious, already likely doomed new Sword & Sorcery franchise that unfortunately comes years, if not decades – which would predate its source material – too late to avoid standing out from today’s blockbuster marketplace in exactly the wrong way. The original Warcraft trilogy, a trailblazing and obscenely popular video game series on whose first volume – Orcs & Humans – this film is ostensibly based, in many ways seems tailor-made for the big screen Continue reading “Movie review: “Warcraft” (2016)” →

DVR Hindsight #15 (6/13/16): The Americans – Season Four finale

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The Americans – “Persona Non Grata” – Season 4, Ep. 13 (FX) SPOILERS

History must exist, at least on some level, if only to lay bare the shocking inadequacies of textbooks. As a child of the 1980s, when it was still theoretically swirling around me, my conception of the so-called Cold War between global superpowers the United States and the Soviet Union was nevertheless a severely limited one, as a sort of unbearably tense extended cease fire that had drawn on more or less since the end of World War II. The combatants were surely enemies to the core – with fingers on the nuclear trigger and alternately heroic and dictatorial intentions, depending on whose books you were reading – but, aside from high profile incidents like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, they were each too wary of the other’s power and resolve to risk provoking any escalation of hostilities. Continue reading “DVR Hindsight #15 (6/13/16): The Americans – Season Four finale” →