Good movies that suck Vol. 1 : Black Narcissus

Black Narcissus sucks.

How can you say that??? It's Powell and Pressburger at their best! Jack Cardiff's cinematography was never better! I'll admit, it has all the makings of being right up my alley, yet for some reason it just doesn't work.

High altitude insanity? Sounds good.
Losing one's faith? Right on.
Futility of missionaries? Uh-huh.
Horny nuns? You betcha!

Then how can it possibly suck?

Exhibit #1 : The backgrounds.
Much fuss has been made over Jack Cardiff's cinematography, and rightfully so. The colors are striking. Has there ever been a better use of color in a film? Maybe In the Mood For Love, and Peeping Tom come closest.

However all of it is killed by the lousy backgrounds. They completely remove me from the film and remind me that this was all done on a set. Everything looks impressive until you take a close look at the backgrounds. They are quite obviously painted backdrops only a few feet behind the characters. Damn you Criterion. The transfer is so good it reveals too much.

Exhibit #2 : This clown
I know a convent in the Himilayas is about as remote as you can get, but come on. This is the guy all the nuns are going crazy over? Even this dude can't be sexy there. Look at those shorts! Rolled up shorts and sandals are sexy nowhere. It's wholly unbelievable. That guy should be getting laughed out of there.

Exhibit #3 : Deborah Kerr's makeup
She's supposed to be a nun yet her makeup is impeccable. She's my nunsploitation fantasy.

Too bad Black Narcissus. You had so much potential.

Behold, the MAME cabinet

This thing took a ton of work to make, and I hardly ever have a chance to play it. Damn you family! It's sitting in my brother's basement, and he lives on the other side of town.

We started completely from scratch. It took both of us to run full sheets of MDF through the table saw. It was tough work. I ordered raw arcade parts off the internet and hooked them all up to a keyboard encoder. There are 4 microswitches in each joystick, and one with each button. So each press corresponds to a keyboard press. We also added a trackball and a spinner. They work a little differently. They have optical sensors so they essentially work the same way an old mouse does. If you really want to be a psycho you can manually create a spinner from old mouse parts.

From the pic you can see that we did the control panel layout ourselves too. That was pretty tough. My brother got a sheet of plexiglass for protection. So we drilled holes in everything, layed some artwork down on the panel, and wired it up. Those with a keen eye may notice the control panel artwork is from the original Space Invaders screen overlay. Old games only had a few pixels to work with, so to give the illusion of depth they added screen overlays. The monitor was actually down in the cabinet and it reflected onto a mirror with this art over it.

I took an image of the Dig Dug marquee down to Kinkos and had them print it out on backlit material. We stuck a little flouresent light behind it, and it looks great.

These pics are pretty amatuerish because my brother took them. It looks really good. The only thing missing is a bezel to hide the monitor. It's a 22" monitor. Typical arcade machines have 19" monitors so we have a pretty huge display.

Sooner or later I'll get around to reviewing some strange games from Japan like Poker Ladies.

God, his basement looks terrible in these pics. It's been cleaned up a bit since these were taken. It's a tragedy that thing isn't sitting in my game room.

You don't want to see her angry

My baby is evil. She has her father's eyes!!!

Actually she's about as good as they come. All babies are difficult at first, but around 6 months she started sleeping really well, and we entered "The Golden Age." She was easily transported, she was calm and reasonable, and was a genuine pleasure to have around.

That's not quite the case anymore. She's acting much more like daddy now. If things aren't working the way she wants them to work she'll turn on a dime and start freaking out. This photo is untouched. It was taken right after I tried to take away her spoon.

The world needs me

Goddamnit. I fought it was a long time, but I finally caved into the demands of humanity and created a blog. Here, I shall spew forth my brilliance. I guess I finally realized that it was just cruel to keep my genius all to myself.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, "You're welcome."