The Lawnmower Man

The Lawnmower Man is a 1992 movie which unfortunately has not aged well. This is one of the "cyber" sci-fi movies of the 1990s, and the idea of what 'the computer world' was back then does not translate well now.

If I remember correctly, the reason I rented this movie is because Stephen King's name is on it. If you look at the movie poster, it does say "Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man".

But does the movie have anything to do with King's The Lawnmower Man short story from 1975? Barely. King in fact sued the producers of the film for attaching his name to it, stating that the film had "virtually nothing to do" with his original short story. Did he win the lawsuit? Yes, but it took him two years to do it. The studio had to cough up 2.5 million in damages.

Anyway, the point is that if you were expecting The Lawnmower Man to be any good because of a King storyline, you'll be sorely disappointed as it's nothing but 1990s-flavor Hollywood sci-fi schlock.

Back when I watched this movie in the 90s, I loved it and thought it was really cool. When I tried watching it again recently, I couldn't even get halfway through the film.

Just about every 5 minutes I was wincing at Hollywood's idea of what "high tech" was. Here are two examples:

Almost every time the lead character does something on the computer, it talks to him. When he records a journal for example, the computer says "journal started" or something like that. And of course the computer's voice is a monotone female.

The "secret lab" the lead character works in has the worst lighting imaginable. Dark, subdued, cool blue lighting is all you ever see, what you see of it. Scientists in this movie never have to see what they're working on, apparently. And to note, this same crap is still practiced today in modern TV cop dramas. CSI in particular is notorious for this. The lab is ALWAYS dark. Yes, the one place where bright light is needed more than anywhere else, and it's dark - but it looks cool! Yeah, that's just ducky.

I got 47 minutes into the flick, could not stand the schlock any further and had to turn it off. Being I know a fair amount about computers now compared to the early 90s, what the movie tries to pass off as usable high tech is a complete joke now - almost as much as Bad Guy Brimley's fax machine. And heck, even if I didn't know jack squat about computers, I'd still think the tech is a joke in The Lawnmower Man.

Aside from the tech crapola, is the movie any good? Not really. Although you can follow along with what's going on easily - which is a plus - there's way too much filler and not enough story, so things are dragged out just to fill screen time.

I turned off the movie right before the movie goes into total CGI mode, where is where all the budget went; I know from that point forward it's not a film but basically a cartoon until the end.

Maybe someday when I'm in the mood for cartoony film CGI of the early 90s, I'll watch the rest of the movie.

Rich's Sound - Single Coil Strut

This is what may be the first in a series of posts on how I get my specific guitar sound. I receive many questions on the subject, so hopefully this will answer a few of them.

In this installment, I'm going to talk about why I prefer a single coil pickup over a humbucker.

To begin, I'm not opposed to humbuckers and in fact own a guitar with humbuckers in it, so I don't want you to think "Rich never plays guitars with humbuckers in them", because I do. You don't see me playing a humbucker-equipped guitar often simply because I prefer the single coil sound. If you happen to play a guitar with one or more humbucker pickups in it, I'm not telling you humbuckers are "bad". I'm just saying that the single coil sound is what I prefer.

What I appreciate most about single coil pickups is the brightness of the sound. Humbuckers by nature have more midrange tone in them and to me sound "flat" because of it compared to a single.

A Stratocaster guitar in SSS configuration allows me to use every setting on the guitar whereas I can't do that with a humbucker, or at least not easily. In an HH configuration I'm usually limited to two settings that I can make work for me, that being bridge-only or neck-only with the middle setting (bridge+neck) being altogether worthless concerning my specific sound. In an HSS configuration I can only use 3 settings. Bridge, middle+neck and neck because the H combined with the S doesn't do anything for me.

For guitars with humbuckers that have a split-coil option, I run into the same problem. My Schecter C-1 Classic even though HH does in fact have a 5-way "mega switch" selector from the factory that splits the coils into singles to get 5 tones, but again, of those 5 I can only use three that actually work for me.

Singles on their own using wide spacing is the "natural" way, so to speak, that a Stratocaster guitar works. The single coil pickup defines the personality of the Stratocaster guitar as far as I'm concerned.

Again, I'm not saying that humbuckers are bad, because they're not. But a lot of the sound you hear from my playing is a direct result of single coil pickups. Yes, they're bright, clacky and twangy, but that's the way I prefer them.

720k

I never really used floppy disks that much, and only did because I had to and not because I wanted to. And man did it tick me off when they went bad, which happened a lot. Back in the day there was this WWF wrestling game I had for my Commodore 64. It was expensive and I really, really liked playing it. It was two 5.25-inch floppies and then one day the second disk went bad, even though I oh-so-carefully took great care of the disks and properly put them away after each use. I was not happy. Just about all of my other memories with floppies are exactly like the one I just described. The floppy was just notoriously unreliable. It wasn't a matter of if they would fail but when.

I have a 720k disk I have in my possession. One of three, actually. They're for my Alesis Datadisk which I no longer use. When I bought the thing, the eBay seller was nice enough to provide a 10-pack of double-density disks with it. Why DD disks? Because the Alesis can't use high-density. All that would happen if you chucked a 1.44MB disk into the Alesis is that it would format it at 720k because for whatever reason, Alesis didn't use a high-density floppy drive in the Datadisk.

I wondered if those 720k floppies were still usable, so I attempted to format them. I discovered you can't format a 720k floppy in Windows XP or any Windows beyond that unless you use FORMAT from the command line a very specific way, which is:

FORMAT A: /T:80 /N:9

That formats 80 tracks with 9 sectors per track, and the floppy is at that point usable; you can copy files over to it and whatnot.

Why did I bother doing this? a) just to see if I could, and b) they wouldn't be usable in my Win7 box otherwise since that OS cannot format a 720k floppy.

Do I plan on using them? No. In fact the only reason I have a floppy drive in my computer box is because the case doesn't have a cover for the floppy bay. If I didn't have a floppy drive in there, it would just be a big dust-inviting hole.

Come to think of it, I should replace it with a card reader.

EDIT: Bought a card reader. 17 bucks, shipping included. Will arrive before the end of the week. Time to kick that floppy drive to the curb. :)

B movies from the 80s

There are three B movies from the 1980s that as far as I'm concerned stand out more than any other. H.O.T.S. (1979, not 80s but close enough), Screwballs (1983) and Porky's (1982). All three of these epitomize what raunchy sex humor is supposed to be in a B movie.

I consider the best of the three Screwballs, because that movie is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny in several places. The best part as far as laughs go is the bowling scene, no question. Also it should be said that concerning the storyline, as ridiculous as it is, you actually really get into it. It's a high school movie, but the jock, rich kid, prep, fat kid and nerd all band together to go after this one girl. This does not happen in high school flicks because there are usually lines drawn between the cliques. Not in Screwballs. The pretty girl is actually the 'bad guy' here. What happens at the end is satisfying - and not for the obvious reason. You'll have to see it to know what I'm talking about.

Another thing about Screwballs is that the comedy in the movie is genuinely well done. Director Rafal Zielinski did know a thing or two about timing (in comedy, timing is everything), the writing was done in a way that was easy to follow where you really want to know how everything turns out, and the over-the-top characters (like the librarian) are just plain goofy-awesome.

As far as H.O.T.S. and Porky's go, eh.. yeah, they have their moments but they're not easy to sit through.

Something to note is that internet adult video ruined the B movie industry completely. The entire reason to watch these flicks was to have a good laugh and see boobs. Mostly boobs. That was it. When internet adult video happened, B movies died a very quick death, never came back and never will. Guys could now see boobs in seconds just with a few clicks of a mouse, so why bother with the movie?

A kid today would probably question why guys watched these movies back in the day at all. The answer is really simple. It was a way to rent a soft adult flick without being overly obvious about it. Guys could actually discuss these movies in public and wax on about the comedy scenes without being labeled perverts. Try talking about a real adult movie like that. You can't. Parents also let us watch movies like this because there was no outright sex in them. Boobs everywhere? Yes, but acceptable.

And by the way, any one of the three movies, as bad as they are, are far more entertaining than any real adult movie you could watch because they're actual movies. That much is true.

That same kid would probably watch these movies and say, "Oh, that's just like American Pie!" No, no no.. American Pie and other movies of the ilk got (as in outright stole in some instances) their ideas from 80s B movies originally.

the firm

The Firm is a flick I'm surprised I haven't written about before. I've watched it at least 4 or 5 times.

I honestly don't remember where I saw this movie first, but I can tell you it wasn't in the theater. It was either on TV or something I saw in the movie rental store that looked interesting. I did know this movie was a lawyer flick and there are times I like those kind of films because they have a very traditional movie-making style to them. Usually they have zero special effects, a very earthy soundtrack (as this one does, no question), and wholly rely on the story itself to push the movie along. In other words, no magical superpower whiz-bang thing saves the day at the end of the third act. Plot points must be established for the movie to hold together else it will completely fall apart and quickly. Fortunately the story here is decent enough to keep you interested.

The Firm is a lawyer movie released June 1993, and like all lawyer movies, the mob is involved albeit only very briefly. Think of it as a 2.5-hour long episode of Law & Order.

Cruise in his typical style overacts like crazy in this movie and has basically zero chemistry with Jeanne Tripplehorn who played his wife. Jeanne, by the way, is unbelievably hot, or at least she was in this movie - but her and Cruise just aren't believable as an on-screen married couple. Just doesn't work. However every other actor, which included Ed Harris, David Strathairn, Gary Busey, Wilford Brimley and Gene Hackman to name a few - did awesome. They pick up the slack where Cruise and Tripplehorn couldn't cut the mustard.

A note about Brimley: He's a bad guy in this movie, and wow did he pull it off. You totally believe the character he plays is an evil dude.

What totally destroys this movie is the fact the story hinges upon technology limitations of the day in several places, but the one that will make you laugh out loud is this:

There's a point when a fax is sent to Bad-Guy-Brimley's headquarters containing really important information. This fax prints out on thermal paper (the "curly" kind, remember that?). It just so happens that it's the last piece of paper in the machine. It falls out (where's the paper tray?), curls up and rolls under the stand the machine is on.

Later on, while Bad-Guy-Brimley is in Bad-Guy-Headquarters, he notices the fax machine is beeping loudly and literally says:

What the hell's the matter with you guys? This thing's out of paper!

Then he notices the rolled-up fax under the machine. Now the story can continue.

Yes, this really happens, and bear in mind this is supposed to be a really tense scene in the movie - but today it's just laughable at best.

This really got my curiosity going because I was certain plain-paper faxing existed at the time. Turns out it did. Canon introduced the first plain-paper facsimile machine in 1987 - but this movie is telling me that a multi-million-dollar law firm in the early 1990s couldn't afford one? I don't think so.

In other words, a fax machine's thermal paper idiosyncrasies is an actual plot device in The Firm. Very cheesy.

There are also several instances in this movie where paper and faxing play really important moments in moving the story along.

Given that in the early 1990s the fastest way to send a photo across a great distance was by fax and that there was no other way to do it faster, the machines do get a fair amount of screen time.

What's even crazier is that in the movie, a fax sent from Memphis Tennessee to the Cayman Islands. In the early 1990s that probably would have cost close to 10 dollars in long-distance fees just to send that one fax. It was probably sent at 9600bps or lower. Today the same thing could be done via email or by just snapping a full-color high-resolution photo on a phone, and have it be there in seconds.

With today's modern tech - even the cheap stuff - there's no way the story being told in The Firm would hold up at all. That thermal paper goof? Never would have happened in today's world as it would have been nothing more than a text message. The photo? Would have been sent by email or phone as I said above.

Was there text messaging in the early 1990s? Yes, but no matter how much cash you had, you couldn't get it. The first-ever SMS message was sent in the UK in 1992 and the first commercial SMS in Sweden in 1993. It wasn't until late 90s where people here in the US were using it regularly, so it was not an option at the time The Firm was made. Yes, you do see cell phones being used in the movie, but only for voice because that's all that was available at the time.

I still like The Firm as it is a good movie. From box office sales worldwide, it made a ton of money. But when watching it now, I can't help but chuckle whenever I see the walrus complaining about his fax machine being out of paper.