Category: General

In the mood for an offbeat movie, I picked up Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris from the local Best Buy this weekend.

Like many geeky boys my age, I grew up on a steady diet of cheesy sci fi flicks, including the large number of 1960 Godzilla and Gamera movies involving men in rubber-monster-suits beating each other up while destroying large areas of cardboard model cities. And for those of you who’ve seen some of these flicks, but have forgotten, Gamera was the giant turtle that was the friend of children everywhere, enemy of alien brain eaters and their pet sixty story tall lizards, and who also happened to have rocket engines that could switch places with his limbs.

Much like Godzilla, Gamera has had a recent film makeover in the form of three recent movies, starting in 1995. They’re all pretty decent, when you consider the competition in the giant monster genre, and actually come off better than the japanese Godzilla revival that occurred just prior.

The third movie is definitely of interest for those looking for a film that doesn’t hold back in terms of the actual consequences of giant monsters duking it out in populated urban areas. The movie revolves around a young girl who’s parents were killed during the events of the first of the three films, when the big turtle accidentally crushed the building her parents were in. Seeking revenge against the shelled giant, she releases Iris, a rather well-executed tentacled demon who’s more than willing to take revenge on Gamera.

While the story is technically about giant monsters, there’s more than enough plot revolving around ordinary humans, and most of the fight sequences are shot from the vantage point of many of the helpless people caught in the carnage erupting around them. The film pulls few punches in showing that while Gamera is technically on the side of the humans, many will die in the clashes. One fight sequence graphically shows what happens to a street full of people when one of the turtle’s giant fireballs misses its intended target, and by the end of the night the news estimates of up to 20,000 dead fill the televisions.

The effects aren’t always perfect, with the early fights looking closer to something out of an early Sam Raimi flick, but the latter fight sequences are really well done. Overall execution also is somewhat hit or miss, but along with the complex plot, prove to be something that rises far above the rather basic genre that spawned the film.

My baby brother, Nick, who’s been over in Iraq for nearly a year now, is on a plane heading towards the States as I type. He should be touching down by 3:30am, and will no doubt be assaulted with parental attention from my Mom, who’ll be waiting at the airbase.

Wiener dogs love warm covers straight out of the clothes dryer.

I’m currently reading the book Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting: The Astonishing Power of Feelings by Lynn Grabhorn. I picked the book up while in the local Borders bookstore along with a book of trivia entitled Do Fish Drink Water? and Dave Barry’s novel Tricky Business. Walking by the self-help table, the book was essentially an impulse buy, as much as idle curiosity as any actual intent of self-improvement.

The general gist of the book seems to be the claim by the author that a Law of Attraction will attract situations, objects and people into your life that mirror the feelings and thoughts that occupy your mind and soul. Unfortunately, the author attempts to explain this using a rather over-enthusiastic, yet deeply flawed, understanding of advanced physics, and just about everything from electromagnetic fields to string theory get name-checked in the process.

For the most part, though, I’m merely ignoring the pseudo-science explanations, as I can far more easily believe in the base of the author’s theories, which is that our feelings can have an actual physical effect on the situations we find ourselves in. For example, the idea that being happy can attract similarly happy people to you. I believe this has nothing to do with electromagnetic waves of feeling frequencies cast about, but instead the fact that our subconscious minds can detect far more faint stimuli than we credit them for.

My belief is that hunches and intuitions come from our subconscious minds picking up on any number of low-level stimuli from our environment, including signs broadcast by others (ie, pheromones, breathing rate, subtle motions, etc) and attempts to communicate these findings to our conscious brain through general thoughts that we interpret as such things as gut feelings.

Now, I also believe that since we are very much connected to people outside of those we know through chains of relationships, such as a friend of a friend of a friend, also known as six degrees of separation, we can affect people who have some sway in our life indirectly. Waves of these subtle stimuli based on our feelings can be transmitted up and down these chains of people, like waves along a stretched slinky, eventually to be echoed back to us in actions and events that we might not even connect in our daily lives.

It’s interesting stuff, and is certainly giving me a few things to chew on in the meantime while I continue to read through what the author is recommending.