Inappropriate Behavior

I'm just putting the above inappropriate promotional bit up to remind everyone that my long-suffering pal, Steve LeCouilliard, is offering a pre-ordering option on his Xeric-award winning comic, Much the Miller's Son! Go here for details. Won't you feel the silly goose if you miss out? I believe he's signing these and giving away a little sketch in each book to sweeten that pot. How capital! (I'm placing my order next week! Though I suspect Steve'll send me an I.E.D instead of a sketch 'cause of my rather rude ad above...)

Oh, and before you kill yourself because you can't get a copy of Book 2 of Much the Miller's Son, go here, to this page on Amazon! (or, I guess, you could go here, to Steve's Paypal page to get a copy...)

Right, now to business...

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (B) A documentary about the epic struggle between the sinister Billy Mitchell and the good-natured Steve Wiebe in having the top score in 'Donkey Kong'. There's a rather clueless statement made by one of the enthusiasts of the 'Classic Arcade High-Score' clan, and here it is:

Walter Day: I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted the glory, I wanted the fame. I wanted the pretty girls to come up and say, "Hi, I see that you're good at Centipede."

Oh, IMDB has given me another one:
Billy Mitchell: No matter what I say, it draws controversy. It's sort of like the abortion issue.

The big question is, if the filmmakers had said to anyone, fellas, relax, it's just a game, would the participants have gone mad with fury and turned this goofy movie into a tragedy? You come away with the impression that Mitchell and Wiebe are kinda damaged souls, willing to devote their lives to being really good at a particular thing, irregardless of how important that thing is in most people's lives.

If you didn't know any better, you'd swear it was a mock-documentary, like Best of Show or Spinal Tap. If you feel that the filmmakers are exploiting the obliviousness and single-mindedness of Mitchell and Wiebe for a cheap laugh, might I point out that we currently live in a time where the rule of 'bad publicity is better than no publicity', a rule the cretinous Charlie Sheen seems quite happy to exploit...


Megamind (C) It's a lazier version of 'Despicable Me', if such a thing can be believed. Can we have a moratorium on cueing up classic songs for comedic value in kid's movies? (Megamind ends with the leads dancing around to Michael Jackson's 'Bad'. Despicable Me ends with the leads dancing around to the Bee Gee's 'You Should be Dancing'.)


Look Around You (A) Brilliantly deadpan comic take on school science programs. It's a tribute to the British style of comedy that a lot of the humor comes from the willingness of the creators to make the pacing slow enough to resemble the glacial pace of those classic sciencs shows of long ago. It's a comedy that works if you bring something to it. The closest thing on this side of the Atlantic that I've seen that comes close is Mr. Show's brilliant 'Marylin Monster's Pizza Palace'. (David Cross plays a Marilyn-Manson type rocker-turned entrepreneur narrating a staff training video for his pizza franchise... Oh, here it is, on Youtube! Thank you, Youtube!)