Lists

2000-2009 – Looking Back

I was going to write a witty (at least witty to ME) countdown of the 9 most memorable things about the past decade, but I decided not to. Sure, there's been PLENTY of stuff to make fun of for the past ten years – so much so that it's hard to really just single out 9 things.

Instead, I'm just going to wing it here and write a little about whatever major events happened that made an impact on me. I'm not going to number this, but as always there's no importance to the order of my lists – just the order in which I write them down.

So, without any further ado — The Zeroes Remembered.

Michael Jackson Dies Suddenly

While he may have died suddenly in 2009, his body of work will always be here to entertain us. The king is dead – long live the king.

 
Mike Imboden Breaks into Comics

And the world of comics will never be the same again. I don’t know if that's for better or worse, though.

 
%$#@^ers Attack the United States

I could rant for hours here, but we all know what happened in 2001. There's no need in beating a dead horse with a topic that will probably just end up with people arguing anyway.

 
Mike and Kim Imboden Celebrate 20 Years of Marriage

It was a bumpy road, but we made it. And I couldn't think of anyone better to have ridden it with.

 
Mystery Science 3000 Closes Shop

While it sucked to see it end, the final episode rates up there with the last episode of Newhart as one of the most satisfying conclusions in TV history.

 
The Rise of the Zombie

While not new to the 2000's, it was during the past decade that the living dead "came to life" with tons of movies, books and great comics like "The Walking Dead" and "The Living Corpse" (yeah, that second one is based on a bit of bias. But it's MY list!)

 
New Orleans Is All But Destroyed by Hurricane Katrina

Again I risk stepping into political territory, but how can this not be mentioned? Monumental $@%&-ups by local, state and national governments shows the world that for all of our bravado, we're still pretty bad at taking care of our own. The visions of dead bodies and destruction looks like a horror movie.

 
Barrack Obama Elected President

So much for staying out of politics. For better or worse, Obama shatters the racial divide and becomes the President of the United States. Bible thumpers and right-wing freaks go insane in the months following.

 
Kim Imboden Becomes a Teacher

Hard work and dedication pay off as Kim realizes a dream of hers and becomes an elementary school teacher. As a footnote, the scandal and fall of the telecom industry – namely MCI/Worldcom – played a huge role in her getting here since she had been moving up in the ranks and had management written on her when everything crashed thanks to a few greedy jag-offs. Proof that there sometimes really is a silver lining to a dark cloud.

 
The Y2K Bug

Hahahahahahaha. Although, come on, you've gotta admit it would have been… "interesting" if everything had ground to a halt and stopped working.

 
The Shot Seen 'Round the World

Britney Spears, in a swirl of self-destruction, flashes her c-section scar and vagina to the world as she drunkenly climbs from a car. Proof that fame can easily tear down what it creates, she goes insane in the months and years to come.

 
The Internet

From Facebook and Twitter to online shopping and porn sites featuring midgets dressed as Ewoks, the Internet has changed not only the way we live, but the way we live with others. The jury is still out on whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing.

And with that last one, it's appropriate that I end this. Good golly, Miss Molly – there's TONS of other stuff worth mentioning, but we'll leave it at what we've got. I'm sure you've got some, so feel free to post away in the comments.

See ya' next year!


Happy Turkey Day

To all my American friends – Happy Thanksgiving!  Today is not just a time to stuff yourself with enough food to feed an entire Ethiopian village for a week, watch football and give thanks to friends and loved ones – it also a time to rejoice in some bad movies.  Following in the footsteps of the late, great, Mystery Science Theater 3000, today is a day to sit and watch some real “turkeys” – the worst that the movie industry has foisted upon us over the years.  So to help you along in this grand tradition, I offer you my list of 9 essential episodes you should watch while you digest today’s over-indulgence.  As always, it’s just a list – there’s no importance to the order other than it’s the order in which I typed them up.

  • Episode 204 – Catalina Caper
  • Episode 302 – Gamera
  • Episode  322 – Master Ninja I
  • Episode 424 – Manos, The Hands of Fate
  • Episode 512 – Mitchell
  • Episode 513 – The Brain That Wouldn’t Die
  • Episode 521 – Santa Claus
  • Episode 904 – Werewolf
  • Episode 1013 – Diabolik

There are many, MANY more “must-see” episodes, but this a good list that gives you A little Joel, a little Mike, the last episode and lots of laughs.  Plus, it even includes a “Christmas” movie to help you along in the holiday season.

So, enjoy – and remember that when you touch yourself, the saints cry. Hikeeba!


Top 9 Foreign Language Films

I honestly have no idea what made me think of this list. But since I did, here you go.  I purposely left off martial arts movies – even the “artsy” ones like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and hilarious ones like “Kung Fu Hustle”.  Even though they both transcend their martial arts roots, I didn’t think it was fair to list them, otherwise I could have filled a whole list with just Jet Li and Jackie Chan films.

Here, then, is my list of Top 9 Foreign Language Films.  As always, there is no particular order.  Except for the last one in the list.  That IS the best one.

Gojira, King of the MonstersIshiro Honda
Run, Lola, RunTom Tykwer
High TensionAlexandre Aja
[REC]Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza
Battle RoyaleKinji Fukasaku
NikitaLuc Besson
Hard BoiledJohn Woo
Pan’s LabyrinthGuillermo del Toro
The Seven SamuraiAkira Kurosawa

A couple of comments:

If you’ve never seen THE SEVEN SAMURAI, I can’t stress how good a movie this is. It’s long, so be prepared, but it’s worth every minute. Once you see it, you’ll notice a lot of things that have been done in films since then, first and foremost being the story iself.

The unedited Japanse version of GODZILLA is a totally different movie than what you might recall the Perry Mason version being.  Not that the Americanized version is light-hearted and fun, but the original is a dark film with a powerful message.  Certainly a far cry from the drop-kicking Godzilla I first met as a kid back in the early 70s.

I could comment on each one, but then this would be very long, and my lists are just lists – I don’t explain ‘em or anything unless someone asks for a rationale or the topic comes up in the comments.

So – there ya’ go.  The Top 9 Foriegn Language Films according to Mike.  Go watch ‘em!


Twenty-Three

The following twenty-three people have crossed my mind today.  I have no reason why.

Marie Osmond, ‘Super Dave’ Osborne, Mickey Mantle, Mr. Greenjeans, Fatty Arbuckle, Roger Rabbit, Laverne DiFazio, Carrot Top, Freddie Mercury, Robin Hood, ‘Superfly’ Jimmy Snuka, Harrison Ford, Vincent Vega, Jack Lemmon, Dean Wormer, Babe the Blue Ox, Moe Howard, Kimba the White Lion, Johnny Bench, Gerry Rafferty, Rod ‘He Hate Me’ Smart, Michael Myers and Akira Ifukube.


RIP John Hughes

Holy shit, man.  My formative years are dying left and right.  Michael Jackson a month ago and now John Hughes?  Damn…  John Hughes movies helped a gazillion teens in the 80s realize that being different was okay and that everybody wasn’t as different as you might think.  That it didn’t matter if you weren’t part of the “In Crowd”, you could still come out on top.  As a writer, director and producer, Hughes put his Midas Touch on dozens of movies and helped launch (or boost) the career of just as many actors and actresses.  From “Sixteen Candles” and Molly Ringwald to “Mr. Mom” and Michael Keaton, he was to comedy what Hitchcock was to suspense.

So, in loving memory of a man who I never met but who had a fairly profound impact on me both in molding my sense of humor and making my teenage years a little more bearable, I present a list of the top 9 movies that John Hughes either wrote or directed (or did both).  As usual with my lists, there is no set order.

SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984, writer and director)
THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985, writer and director)
WEIRD SCIENCE (1985, writer and director)
FERRIS BUELER’S DAY OFF (1986, writer and director)
PRETTY IN PINK (1986, writer)
MR. MOM (1983, writer)
SHE’S HAVING A BABY (1988, writer and director)
VACATION (1983, writer)
PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES (1987, writer and director)

G’bye, John. Thanks for everything.


Cool Video Games

I like video games.  I’ve played them in one form or another pretty much all of my life.  From Pong in the early-mid 70s, to the Atari 2600 to today’s Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii.  So, with 30 some years of playing video games behind me, what have some of my favorites been?  I’m keeping this to stuff from within the last 15 years or so, and, like always, it’s not in any special order.
 
Duke Nukem 3-D
It wasn’t the first "First Person Shooter", but it was the one that gave the genre some attitude. Prior to Duke, you controlled a silent, lacking in personality gun-toting killer.  As Duke Nukem, you were treated to witty one-liners (even if most of them were stolen from other sources) and a character who openly had a penchant for hot babes. In fact, the women seemed to be Duke’s driving force; mess with the women and feel Nukem’s wrath.
 
Deus Ex
Part RPG and part shooter, Deus Ex forced you to face some moral choices and offered various ways to play the game.  You could run and gun, try to be silent and deadly or a combo of both.  Upgrades allowed you to fine-tune your character to your liking.  And while the story choices didn’t offer tons of variations, there was enough deviation to give you the illusion that your choices resulted in your outcome.
 
Star Wars: Knights o/t Old Republic
A step up and beyond ‘Deus Ex’, "KOTR" gave you the choice to play as evil or good (Sith or Jedi) and these choices DID impact the game.  Add in the fact that it was Star Wars, the ability to wield all sorts of cool Force powers and a twist ending that rivals any Hollywood movie and you one of the greatest games ever.
 
Resident Evil
Not the first "survival horror" game, but certainly the one that brought the genre out in the open.  Clunky controls, D-list caliber voice acting and ham-fisted dialog aren’t enough to drag this one down.  Zombies, zombie dogs and mutated monsters coupled with plenty of puzzles (some simple, some kind of hard and others just frustrating) made them game fun.  Jump scares and some fairly horrific images made it scary.  At least scary enough that you didn’t want to play it with the lights off.
 
Fallout 3
Post-apocalyptic Washington, DC and the surrounding area.  I might be a little biased since this is my neck of the woods, but it’s kind of cool to see areas I know and check for a slight level of authenticity.  Like ‘Deus Ex’ and ‘KotR’, you make moral choices here and, unlike those two games, those choices have lasting impacts on how the game plays out.  Act like a jerk to someone and the info you needed from them might just be gone forever.  A wide variety of weapons makes up for the fairly small number of different types of enemies.  The quests are fun and just walking around shooting bad guys (or good guys) is entertaining.  The only drawback to this being a perfect game is the level cap you run into as you advance your character.
 
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Taking the red-hot Grand Theft Auto 3 and making some game play changes, graphic updates and setting the game in a fictional Miami-like location was how a really good game got better.  Maybe it was the 80s setting which meant 80s music, but ‘Vice City’ was loads of fun.  Go where you want, do what you want – the GTA "sandbox’ game play has been aped by many and very few have pulled it off as well as GTA:VC did.  Great voice acting, a decent plot and fun quests make up for the few short comings the game play might have.  Nothing beats pushing 100mph down busy streets while ‘A Flock of Seagulls’ blares on your car stereo.
 
Full Throttle
Playing this Lucas Arts "point and click" game was like playing a cartoon.  A bada$$ cartoon.  Your character, Ben, played like Duke Nukem’s cousin as he battled his way through evil biker gangs, comical scenarios and a nail-biting ending. If there is a God, this will get a release in Xbox Live marketplace.
 
Phantasmagoria
Horror by way of live action scenes.  It was mostly just a point and click game, but the gory and well scripted story played out over something like 6 or 7 CD-ROMs and was very hard to put down. You played the female protagonist as she explores the creepy mansion that her and her slowly-going-insane husband recently purchased.  Haunted by demons and the specter of the former owner, there is plenty do besides watching cut scenes. 
 
Marvel Ultimate Alliance
Throw a good number of Marvel Comics’ coolest characters together, pit you against a variety of different levels and missions and let you pick and choose which heroes you want to use as your four-man team and you’re on a good start to making a good game.  Throw in alternate costumes for the characters and make a few of them unlockable and you’re moving up the ladder.  Add some RPG elements to it and make the gameplay fun and easy to pick up on and you’re almost at the top.  Ultimate Alliance had a few faults, but nothing major, and certainly nothing that takes anything away from the game.  Not the greatest game of all time, but for a fan of Marvel Comics and the characters, it was a must-play.
 
There’s tons more that could have easily made this list, but this is what I’m sticking with for now!  What are your favorites?


Music Videos

Today’s Michael Jackson memorial got me to reflecting on his music and, more accurately, his music videos.
Michael elevated the art of the music video – there’s no denying that. What, until Billie Jean and Beat It came along, was usually the band lip-synching on a stage, or actual concert footage, it was now something that told a visual story that mirrored the song in some way. Other acts saw the success this garnered Michael and they started getting into the act.  Soon, the music video was way more than just the performers, uh, performing.  Animation, elaborate sets and mini movies were the standard.  And there’s no doubt this helped sell boat-loads of LPs and cassettes. I know it worked on me.
I LOVED music videos.  We didn’t have MTV at the time (our cable company didn’t offer it) so we were left with Friday Night Videos and an old, awesome show on WTBS called "Night Tracks" which was like four hours of videos every Friday and Saturday night.  I had a lot of videos I looked forward to seeing and, in fact, I’ve probably forgotten way more than I remember.  I preferred the ones that told stories.  Videos of the band or singer just doing their thing were boring.  I wanted mini-movies.  And there were plenty of them.
Here’s just a handful of the ones I remember the most.  Maybe not "favorite", but certainly cool enough to rate a spot on a list (which, as usual, is not in any order):
 
The aforementioned "Billie Jean" and "Beat It".  Both opened a lot of doors and helped propel Michael to the superstardom he deserved.
 
"Take on Me" by A-Ha.  The chick was cute (and so was the guy, I suppose) and the animation was pretty basic.  But when that camera panned around the real girl and cartoon guy and they switched from real to cartoon and vice versa?!?  Instant hit.
 
"Money For Nothing" – Dire Straits.  Not so much a "story" video, but the animation was new at the time and it looked really cool..
 
"Shadows of the Night" and "Love is a Battlefield" – Pat Benatar.  In one she’s a spy flying a plane in WWII and in the other she plays a runaway who gets roped into being a hooker who fights back. 
 
"Thriller" – Michael Jackson.  Not having MTV worked in my favor because this made it’s debut on Friday Night Videos.  Probably the coolest video ever, if only because it has dancing zombies.
 
Like I said, I knows there’s tons more.  And one of these days I’d like to actually get around to finding copies of them and making a "mix-DVD".
 
So, thanks Mike. Thanks for helping to make the music video more than just a 4 minute concert clip.


Mash-Ups

There’s a lot of mash-ups out there – the trick is finding the good ones.
Oh, what’s a mash-up?  For the few that DON’T know, it’s when someone takes a couple (ore more) seemingly unrelated songs, mixes the tracks together, bits and parts here and there, and ends up with a new song.  The chorus from one song might sound good over the beat to another, etc., etc.
There’s a whole community out there that’s into making these things.  I’m not involved with any, I just look around from time to time to find some of their efforts.
So, like I said, finding the good ones can be tough.  But when you do, it’s worth the time.
One such one (that just came on my iPod) is "You’re The One That I Want in the Next Episode" which mixes John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John with NWA.  Sounds crazy, but the result is a blend that sounds like it was written with each song in mind.  It’s put together by Disfunctional DJ.
A couple others worth looking up:
 
"Guns ‘n’ Hovas" by DJ Axel
"Every Car You Chase" by Party Ben
"Let the Music Give Me Shelter" by Go Home Productions
And, for everyone that likes to whistle, this EXCELLENT one, "Whistler’s Delight" by DJ Riko
 
Go track some down.  It’s almost like listening to some of your favorite songs for the first time!


Top 20 MJ and J5 Songs

I like to do lists.  They’re fun.  Kim laughs at me for it, and I’m sure if she slipped into armchair shrink mode it would me wanting to make order of a world of chaos (or some such gobbledy-gook). Anyway, since I like lists, what better than a list of my favorite MJ and J5 songs?  Nothing today, that’s what!
 
Some of these will be obvious, others maybe not so much.  And breaking in my own tradition, these ARE ranked with #1 being my all-time fave.  It might not be what you think!
 
#20 – Never Can Say Goodbye
#19 – Who Is It?
#18 – Give in to Me
#17 – Dancing Machine
#16 – Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)
#15 – Leave Me Alone
#14 – Working Day and Night
#13 – Rock With You
#12 – Smooth Criminal
#11 – Dirty Diana
#10 – Black or White
#9 – Man in the Mirror
#8 – The Love You Save
#7 – Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough
#6 – Thriller
#5 – Beat It
#4 – Billie Jean
#3 – I’ll Be There
#2 – ABC
#1 – She’s Out of My Life
 
So, why is "Thriller" only #6?  Because I’m not rating the video.  If that were the case, it WOULD be in the top spot.  So why "She’s Out of My Life"?  Not because it reminds me of an old girlfriend or anything like the song is about.  Nope.  It’s #1 because Mike sings the hell out of it.  He IS the person in the song and you can feel it in his delivery.  When his voice cracks at the end you almost want to choke back a tear with him.
Agree?  Disagree?  Comment away and we can discuss!


This Sunday is Father’s Day

In honor of this coming Sunday, which just so happens to be Father’s Day, I’ve decided to do a list.  That, and I’m itching for 4:30 to get here so I can gedouddahere.
 
So, here’s the Top Nine Dads from TV and Movies.
 
1) Darth Vader
2) Atticus Finch
3) Ward Cleaver
4) John McClane
5) Archie Bunker
6) Cliff Huxtable
7) Homer Simpson
8) Prof. John Robinson
9) Mike Brady
 
Now, like all my lists, that’s all they are; Lists.  Don’t look at it as a ranking from 1-9, it’s just the nine best.
 
Agree or disagree?


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