...and they lived happily ever after. Smith & Lady: poets, artists, photographers & adventurers.
Our relationship was forged to the soundtrack of Yoko Ono's magic,
frenetic, love-laden song, "Walking On Thin Ice." ( play song )
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I’d like to hope that in this age of digital storage, creation does not become banal; I hope we all feel that we have more access to creation, and that we all can become more emeshed in this like, joy of creation with each other.
I hope there’s some way we can work together to consume the proper amount of resources on this planet. To sustain our current rate of consumption, we would actually need seven planets, seven planet Earths just to sustain this. So, it’s very important. I’m committing to this art project, an idea I have of visualizing ideal reality and acting on this real reality to bring it more in accordance with the ideal reality.
Maybe Heaven is supposed to be this Planet. This is the butterfly that’s going to carry me home, and this is the trash I’m going to pick up later, I hope.
Movies help form public opinion, so let’s see which films have so resonated with the public mentality that they’ve spawned innumerable sequels, prequels and remakes, thus morphing into Famous Film Franchises.
It’s somewhat scary that there have been 6 Rockys and 4 Rambos, but at least some serious quality triumphs with the five Attacks of the Killer Tomatoes.
(This list is an amalgamation of several online lists and may contain serious errors – after all we all know the internet lies. I did spot checks and frequently got dissimilar answers from different sites.)
Sherlock Holmes – 98 different films
Tarzan – 89
Hopalong Cassidy – 66
The Three Mequiteers – 51
The Bowery Boys – 48
Charlie Chan – 47
Godzilla – 34
Carry On – 31
Blondie – 28
Range Busters – 25
The Lone Wolf – 24
James Bond – 23
Scoobie Doo – 22
Taboo – 22
East Side Kids – 21
Barbie – 20
Debbie Does Dallas – 20
National Lampoon – 18
Andy Hardy – 17
The Falcon – 16
Jungle Jim – 16
Dragonball Z – 15
Little Tough Guys (Dead End Kids) – 15
Mickey Mouse – 15
Keystone Kops – 13
Land Before Time – 13
Mothra – 13
The Muppets – 13
Friday the 13th – 12
Gamera -12
Pokemon – 12
Winnie the Pooh – 12
Asterix – 11
Dr Slump – 11
Henry Aldrich – 11
Pink Panther – 11
Star Trek – 11
The Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley – 11
Young and Dangerous – 11
Halloween – 10
Ma and Pa Kettle – 10
Nightmare on Elm Street – 8
Batman – 7
Police Academy – 7
Star Wars – 7
The Howling – 7
Alien – 6
Harry Potter – 6
Hellraiser – 6
Planet of the Apes – 6
Rocky – 6
Saw – 6
Texas Chainsaw Massacre – 6
The Thin Man – 6
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes – 5
Benji – 5
Child’s Play – 5
Death Wish – 5
Dirty Harry – 5
Ernest – 5
Hannibal Lecter – 5
Herbie the Love Bug – 5
Night of the Living Dead – 5
Superman – 5
The Exorcist – 5
American Ninja – 4
Amityville – 4
Die Hard – 4
Final Destination – 4
Highlander – 4
Indiana Jones – 4
Jack Ryan – 4
Jaws – 4
Lethal Weapon – 4
Predator – 4
Psycho – 4
Rambo – 4
Scary Movie – 4
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – 4
Terminator – 4
The Bad News Bears – 4
The Fast and the Furious – 4
Flash Gordon – 4 <<<
The Karate Kid - 4
The Lord of the Rings - 4
The Mummy - 4
The Omen - 4
Vacation - 4
X-Men - 4
3 Ninjas - 3
American Pie - 3
Austin Powers - 3
Back to the Future - 3
Barbershop - 3
Beverly Hills Cop - 3
Blade - 3
Bourne - 3
Care Bears - 3
Crocodile Dundee - 3
El Mariachi - 3
Evil Dead - 3
Free Willy - 3
Friday - 3
Home Alone - 3
House Party - 3
Ice Age - 3
Iron Eagle - 3
Jurassic Park - 3
Look Who's Talking - 3
Mad Max - 3
Major League - 3
Meatballs - 3
Missing in Action - 3
Mission: Impossible - 3
Ocean's 11 - 3
Oh, God! - 3
Pirates of the Caribbean - 3
Poltergeist - 3
Porky's - 3
Resident Evil - 3
Return of the Living Dead - 3
Robocop - 3
Rugrats - 3
Rush Hour - 3
Scream - 3
Shrek - 3
Smokey and the Bandit - 3
Spider-Man - 3
Spy Kids - 3
The Godfather - 3
The Matrix - 3
The Mighty Ducks - 3
The Naked Gun - 3
The Santa Clause - 3
The Work and the Glory - 3
Transformers - 3
Transporter - 3
Underworld - 3
Witch Mountain - 3
I am–or was–an avid Quentin Tarantino fan. Liked his script writing, his film directing, his acting. Still think Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction are great cinema.
Bit I started reassessing him after watching Deathproof, in which Kurt Russell drives around abusing and battering women before brutally killing them with his car. The film ends with three females sadistically beating him to death in a round-robin of violence (which to be fair he has earned). The movie seemed more a tasteless teenage boy sexual fantasy exercise in s&m than the output of a mature artist.
Then I saw his latest–Inglorious Basterds–which is little more than comic book sadistic violence and death using real people. He beats Nazis to death with a baseball bat, and scalps all the rest of the Nazis they kill. The ones they don’t kill, they slowly carve swastikas in their foreheads with big knives in extreme close-up. The movie’s big ending scene consists of machine gunning women, civilians, and Nazis to death while they’re trapped in a burning exploding movie house–sort of how I felt watching it all. The movie made me feel unclean, down, depressed; I felt it was porno violence disguised as comedy. Someone said that Taratino’s parodying America’s love of violence, but one doesn’t satirize a crime by committing the crime. You are what you do.
The movie made me flash back to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ where Gibson has Christ sadistically whipped in extreme close-up slow motion for 20-30 minutes. Halfway through this brutality, the whipper switches to a hooked whip and the movie shows chunks of Christ’s flesh being ripped off in up-close slow-motion chunks while blood gracefully arcs and splatters.
Before The Passion of Christ, I was a Mel Gibson fan, but afterward I couldn’t stop thinking what a sick twisted mind he had to have to hide a bloody splatter flick in the folds of his unhealthy conservative right-wing religious movie. His later drunken hate-filled tirade against Jews just cemented my disgust for him.
Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds has me lumping him with the same sickos that includes Gibson. It’s taken me decades, but I’m at the point where I won’t watch anything by either of them anymore. To me they belong to the same Neanderthal hate mongering clan that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Dick Cheney. May they each be hoist on the petard of their own verbal filth.
Although what is even more frightening than the sickos above is how large their audiences are, how rich they’ve become pandering to these hate-filled violent bigots.
