On the Edge of Winter

Last night I watched the second episode of Fringe, "The Same Old Story", which aired September 16, 2008. I got some strong X Files vibes off this one, though not at all in a bad way. It was fun watching the trio investigate a serial killer who impregnates prostitutes with rapidly aging foetuses.

Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson give TV sizes performances while John Noble is definitely cinema as Walter Bishop. He's entertainingly brusque and the gags about his faulty memory are cheap but still funny. Anna Torv's Olivia is a little bland but I like how they gave her some impressive Sherlock Holmes moments.

I'm watching Fringe on Max (formerly HBOMax) which I realised I could get a 2.99 a month subscription to if I get the one with ads. They actually placed the commercials in the commercial break moments on the show which is kind of a nice thing for the pacing. It's been years since I've seen new commercials and I feel like it's a particular psychic link to pop culture I've been lacking. I've been having "broadcast editions" of MST3k playing while I cook dinner, episodes transferred from people's VHS collections including commercials from the early '90s. All those Mentos commercials and Big Red commercials and--damn--Sears commercials. I still have some shirts from Sears. I got to be careful with this nostalgia.

I heard Mystery Science Theatre 3000 didn't make its minimum donation goal during its Turkey Day marathon this year. I can't say I'm surprised. The new episodes are only streaming on the show's own dedicated streaming service, the Gizmoplex, which is slow and expensive, so I haven't been able to watch it and I imagine a lot of other fans can't. What I have seen from episodes shown on YouTube is a generally inferior product to all the episodes readily available on YouTube or Shout Factory on Amazon Prime. And, of course, RiffTrax. Joel Hodgeson, series creator and original star, may have a great creative mind but it seems clear now that Mike Nelson was really who held the show together. He was head writer from the second season, when the show first premiered on Comedy Central, and now apparently he's the only one with the business sense to make the format financially sustainable. It's always been a cheap looking show with a small fanbase but increasingly large budgets due to the need to pay for the rights to the movies being riffed--the minimum donation goal for the new season was over four million dollars. Oh, well. We'll always have the memories.

That Old Satellite

As a self-respecting cinephile, I don't divide my attention between movies and anything else. If I'm watching a movie, it's in a dark room, with headphones if I don't have a good sound system/environment. I certainly don't sew or text or play video games while a movie's on. The only exception I make to this rule is Mystery Science Theatre 3000. A show I started watching in junior high school, in the early 1990s, MST3k is a show about a man and two robots showing outright disrespect to bad movies. I don't usually sit down and give it a dedicated viewing anymore but I like to have it on as atmosphere when I'm cooking dinner. I've been doing that for years. Last year, I discovered something really marvellous. On YouTube, people have been uploading "Broadcast Versions" of the series. That is, people are uploading their old VHS recordings of episodes complete with commercials.

I haven't had a TV with channels since 2013, and even then, I hadn't watched regular television for years. Listening to these broadcast editions, I'm reminded of a time when they were a normal part of life. When stars could come out of commercials, like Rebecca Gayheart became a star after appearing in Noxzema commercials. They were such a normal part of the public consciousness.

There are so many '90s movies I've totally forgotten about that I see trailers for on these broadcast editions. A few days ago, I saw a trailer for a stupid comedy about a kid and a gorilla called Born to be Wild. I noticed Peter Boyle's name in the credits and I thought, "Wait, he's dead, isn't he?" before I remembered I was watching a commercial from 1995.

Maybe it's bad I'm indulging in such nostalgia. I guess it's pretty Japanese. People love nostalgia here. One of the most common words I hear people say is natsukashii, "How nostalgic!" It reinforces my feeling that I'm not exactly homesick but timesick. I don't want to go back to San Diego where gentrification is gutting parts of town I liked and other parts of town are getting boring, ultra-expensive restaurants. I guess you can never go back home again. But you can see it on YouTube.

Finland is Lots of Miles from Japan

Behold, the fruits of an English lesson I gave to-day. I was asked to talk about Finland on short notice to a class of special needs students (I work at a junior high school in rural Japan). What do I know about Finland? All I could think of was the Monty Python song which, in retrospect, would've been pretty useful given that it specifically mentions Japan in the lyrics--the kids love it when their own country is referenced in the lessons. I also thought of Nightwish, the Finnish metal band I like, especially their stuff from when they had an opera singer on lead vocals. I drew a big bear (on the right) because I knew there were bears in Finland. Otherwise I had nothing until I remembered The Sampo.

Or as it's sadly better known in the U.S., The Day the Earth Froze, which is the version with bad English dubbing. It was famously featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But the original film is based on Finnish mythology and was co-directed by the great Russian fantasy director Aleksandr Ptushko, whose films are criminally difficult to acquire decent copies of in the U.S. So I started by drawing trees and then the mountains and the lake. Then I explained how the hero rode on logs, and I explained what a log was, and told them how one day he saw a beautiful woman and how they both were victims of a witch's jealousy. It was easy to put it all into simple English and I think it was a pretty good basis for a lesson plan.

The Day the Earth Froze was always one of my favourite episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, a case where there was a strange blurring of the line between mockery and appreciation, at least for me. The film has some genuinely amazing visuals.

I remembered the host segment where Joel and the bots ask the audience to figure out just what a Sampo is. So when I came to my own version of the story I put it to the students--when the witch, who lives on a miserable island, jealous of the people in the village, demands the Sampo in exchange for freeing the beautiful woman, just what might the Sampo be? One of the students suggested, "Life."

"Maybe!" I said, "Good answer!" After all, you might say a big lump that spews endless quantities of salt and gold is basically life.

On a slightly unrelated subject, here's a giant bug I saw outside my apartment this morning.

I thought it might be dead so I tapped one of its antennae with the tip of my umbrella expecting it to scurry away if it was alive. Instead, the antennae slowly, lazily swung back. As though to say, "Yeah, I'm alive, and you don't scare me, human."

Mac is the Turkey

For many of us, Thanksgiving means Mystery Science Theatre 3000 because of the "Turkey Day" marathons that used to run of the series back in the 90s. Since series creator and original star Joel Hodgson reacquired the rights to the series a few years ago, the marathons have resumed on YouTube. This year, NetFlix also debuted the second season of the series' revival, produced by Hodgson and starring Jonah Ray, on Thanksgiving. I watched the first episode to-day in which Jonah and the Bots watch and riff on the infamous 1988 E.T. rip-off Mac & Me.

They still haven't abandoned the gimmick where Jonah has to relive the experiences detailed in the theme song every episode, something I got tired of two episodes into the first season. Him getting sucked up in a chute at the beginning in the middle of a host segment feels a bit artificial but the revival series generally feels a bit more mechanical. It's very slick and Hodgson assembled a lot of talented people but it lacks the essence of the original series which had more of a sense of a group of funny people hanging out and watching a bad movie yet at the same time committed to the reality of the two puppet robots. The cheapness of the sets and costumes somehow enhanced it.

I don't mind Jonah but Hampton Yount and Baron Vaughn are still weak, unremarkable, and needless replacements for Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy. Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt are both very professional as the mad scientists who force them to watch bad movies but the show still feels more like a tribute to the old series than a continuation. The performances feel more consciously stylised, lines are delivered much faster and don't seem as natural, another thing undercutting any possibility of an organic feel like the old series'. But I did laugh at some of the jokes. Their comments on the soundtrack are particularly funny, especially lines about Alan Silvestri's peculiarly enthusiastic score.

I actually saw Mac & Me when it was in theatres, my family and I were tricked into thinking it was a real movie instead of a long commercial for McDonald's and Coke. It didn't take us long to be disabused of this misapprehension. To-day, the movie as a spectacle, an artefact of soulless 80s commercial mediocrity, is more fascinating than any of the jokes from Jonah and the Bots, which actually felt a bit tired. Maybe it was bad timing for me, too, because a couple days ago I saw the McDonald's I went to as a kid was being demolished. The movie consequently took on a more pathetic quality, a glimpse of the glory days of a company whose sales have been declining. The fact that it was always so soulless somehow making it even sadder, like the ghost of Jacob Marley. Jonah quips about the "finishing move" of product placement at the end when the creepy little alien kid is wearing a "McKids" shirt and I was just struck by mild nostalgic nausea. That's right, I remembered, those poor assholes actually pushed a clothing line.

Ronald McDonald won a Razzie for Worst New Star, the film itself won Worst Picture and Worst Director when it came out. So it's been taking a beating for a long time, I'm not sure Jonah and the Bots brought enough new to the table.