Space Junk

This weekend I watched two movies I had no intention of seeing but kind of thought "why not" and did. To paraphrase Stewie in Family Guy, I watched them because there was a lot of color, shapes and movement to hold my attention. Those two movies were blockbusters from last summer, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Transformers. Despite being made by different people and existing as two separate franchises, I felt as if I had seen the same movie twice when I was done. Let's check off the reasons why:

• Both movies involve the end of the world as we know it
• Both movies have a heavy military presence
• Both movies hinge the fate of the world on the gumption of a young man
• Both movies star actresses whose main contribution consists of heaving bosoms in super tight clothing while kicking ass
• Both movies feature vehicles galore
• Both movies involve an enemy from space
• Both movies feature heavy damage to buildings, cities and vehicles
• Both movies play up a big act of sacrifice
• Both movies have missles, missles, missles!

So what differed between the two? Well, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer can make the dubious distinction of saying it was better than the first Fantastic Four movie. The only geek-tastic moment was the unveiling of the Fantasticar, which was great until I saw it had been product placed by Dodge. Great, the Fantastic Four is built ram tough and will need a trade in after 30,000 miles. Even the iconic Silver Surfer can't keep things going, though it did leave me with a need to play Joe Satriani more often.

For Transformers, it was directed by Michael Bay and you know what that means. It means if this was a sentence directed by Michael Bay, it (cut to next shot) would (cut to next shot) have (cut to next shot in slo mo with unnecessary camera movement) a (cut to oversaturated orange colored shot with more unnessary camera movement) lot (cut to shaky handheld point of view shot) of overdirection with the attention span of a five year old. But kudos to Shia LeBouf for running and yelling like the action hero in training he is (he'll appear in the new Indiana Jones movie next).

Whats sad is that both movies were junk and not even in a so-bad-it's-good way. I even enjoyed the cartoon Transformers movie more than these films, at least that one had the voices of Judd Nelson and Orson Welles plus the lame animation from the tv series to give a sense of continuity. As much money as was spent on making both these features, the end result was much less than meets the eye.

Top 100 Favorite CDs- Numbers 34 and 33

Toto - the only rock band to truly sport the High School Chess Club look. I think they're running because they've spotted a Rubik's Cube.

I'll actually knock out number 33 fairly quickly-

Asia - Asia (1982)

I've covered Asia enough over the past month or so that it's hard to think of something different to say, particularly since this was the debut album and it was played in it's entirety when I saw them live (and couldn't be happier about it). So what's left to say? It's one of those ultimate Mr Mike albums, I'm surprised I didn't rank this higher but I wrote this list out like 2 years ago when there wasn't much happening with this band. The only thing left to add is I consider this album to have Steve Howe's most aggressive guitar playing in his career, he really makes a statement here.

Number 34 I'll write a little more about-

Toto - Toto IV (1982)

Another classic from the same year, a brother from another mother if you will. This album made it the year of Toto, they had three Top 10 hits including a #1 smash single, won like a gagillion Grammy awards and for a brief moment made studio musicians seem cool. Toto was down in the dumps career wise before IV, their debut album was a big seller but the two albums that followed stiffed. For IV, Toto made a move towards the Adult Contemporary and AOR markets simultaneously by pooling their experience backing just about every L.A. solo musician and translating it into savvy arrangements.

"Rosanna" was the lead single and went all the way to #2 on Billboard and won the Grammy for Song of the Year. The bouncy bit of pop rock with swinging horns and an impressive multitracked synthesizer solo was a winner on Pop, Rock and Soft Rock radio. The second single, "Make Believe", is a personal favorite that should have been a shoo-in for Soft Rock radio but found resistance instead. The third single was "Africa" which became a huge #1 smash at the start of '83 and forever ingrained that hook "I bless the rains down in Africa" in the minds of anyone near my age. Fourth was the power ballad "I Won't Hold You Back" which followed the momentum of "Africa" into the Top 10.

These hits showed a Toto that was on top of their game, each song embedded with a monster hook, expert playing and a layered approach that rocked somewhat hard but still remained soft enough for mass consumption. Other great tracks include the R&Bish "Waiting For Your Love" and the straight up AOR of "Afraid Of Love". The band's hot streak bled over to their session work, as Michael Jackson's Top 10 hit "Human Nature" was written by a band member.

It would be obvious to include "Rosanna" and since I'm obvious it's here in it's entirety. The most well known trivia is that the song is about actress Rosanna Arquette who was dating a member of the band at the time. But the song wasn't written by the person dating Rosanna but a different band member. Can a guy stoop any lower than writing a love song to his friend's girl? I'm sure if there was any tension it was resolved with Platinum records and Grammys but that's still pretty weird. Additional trivia, the dancer in the video is Cynthia Rhodes who was a singer / actress who had a hit as the replacement singer in Animotion with "Room to Move", appeared in the films Dirty Dancing and Staying Alive and married pop rocker Richard Marx.

In addition to "Rosanna" is an amusing bit called Yacht Rock that I came across on another blog I can't recall right now. Anyway, it tells the fictional story of how "Rosanna" was written.

Toto "Rosanna" and Yacht Rock

Computer Blue

"Where is my love life? Where can it be? There must be something wrong in the machinery."

I've made some changes to my blog sort of accidentally on purpose. The pictures stopped working on the main part of the posts for some reason so I started posting pictures on the sidebar. Then I changed the template and rearranged the whole mess to fit the change. This morning, I found out on my wife's computer the pictures in the main part of the posts show on other people's computers, just not mine. But by then I had changed the blog already. It was clear to me my computer had been possessed by the spirit of Prince to do wacky things just because it can. Thankfully, I was able to turn the computer off before it started wearing assless chaps. So I changed the template again to this sort of polka dotted shower curtain look which works for me for now.

Anyway, the blog has a new look which was probably a little overdue. And all this reminded me of the old movie Electric Dreams (1984) which was this boring movie about a guy trapped by his computer. So, here's Phil Oakey of Human League performing his lost solo soundtrack song "Together In Electric Dreams" from the movie Electric Dreams. And I think I'll throw on Human League's "Human" too, just because I haven't heard that song in decades.

Phil Oakey "Together In Electric Dreams"

Human League "Human"