Bonus Episode: Most Absorbed Part Deux!

It's part 2 of 2 of the bonus episode where Cir and Nick talk documentaries, albums, movies, and then slip into five minutes straight of Swingers quotes. Take a listen, because it's your last chance to hear bad audio quality before we unleash the new Beast Duels/On The Rocks Studio next week.

Top Ten Movies of 2012, Part 2

No time to waste. It's part 2 of the best 10 movies from last year.

8. Skyfall

I have been critical of Sam Mendes in the past, particularly of his vapid and self-indulgent (yet Oscar award-winning) family drama American Beauty. Mostly because that movie is fucking terrible. But the fears I had of his helming the most recent project involving the worlds most beloved spy were assuaged when I saw Skyfall.

Again starring the blonde Bond Daniel Craig, Skyfall immediately has the vibe of a departure from the Bond oeuvre as we witness 007 get shot and apparently fall to his death. Mendes succeeds here in mixing great action with acting and character development, elements often overlooked in similar successful blockbusters. And while the Asian/French female of the two Bond girls in the film is wasted and essentially meaningless, we are introduced to Eve, a sexy rookie spy played by Naomie Harris of 28 Days Later fame. Craig again shines as the smooth yet tortured Bond, and is successfully joined by Academy Award winners Judi Dench and the intensely creepy Javier Bardem.

In addition to wondrous action scenes, the film also includes sly references to other films. When we're introduced to the primary villain, he slowly and methodically walks down a forest of computer machinery, akin to the final scene of Welles' The Third Man.

And earlier, when Bond gets an impromptu visit from a lovely young lady, they share a sexy asexual moment reminiscent of Angie Dickinson and John Wayne in Rio Bravo.

But most importantly, the way Mendes excels here is in creating a fun action film which finds a way to be emotionally compelling and artistically stunning.

7. Django Unchained

In 2003, Quentin Tarantino released Kill Bill Part I, in which an unnamed female assassin played by Uma Thurman begins her revenge on her former colleagues who had previously attempted to murder her. Later, in 2009, Tarantino took his revenge fantasy one step further with Inglourious Basterds, a retelling of World War II in which young soldiers are on the hunt for Nazi scalps. In 2012's Django Unchained, Tarantino's latest feature film, he again delves into revisionist history and revenge thrills, this time on behalf of the black slaves in America.

Django Unchained re-teams Tarantino with the  Oscar-winning star of Inglourious Basterds Christoph Waltz (in another film that netted him an Academy Award) and introduces Tarantino to two successful young actors in Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx. While it lacks the rhetorical panache which opened the film Inglourious Basterds, Django combines majestic cinematography, quick-paced and witty dialogue (primarily by Waltz) and two of the year's most vile characters in Calvin Candie and Stephen. In the particularly brutal Mandingo-fighting related scenes we see the depths of the depravity, and Tarantino shows us the extent of what is truly at stake in this movie.

Stay tuned to the Beast Duels Blog for numbers 1-6 from 2012 soon...

Bonus Episode: Most Absorbed Part 1

It's another Beast Duels Bonus episode. Join Nick and Cir as they talk about the things they absorbed the most; those movies, TV shows and books they re-visited hundreds of times until they knew them by heart.

Also stay tuned at the end for a brief sneak peak at the new Beast Duels/On The Rocks Studios.

When Can We Have Ray Guns?

I love Science Fiction. Who doesn’t, right? So, like many, many other people out there, I would love to have a raygun or a personal space ship or a virtual environment that I can step in to and experience amazing things. Now, I realize that these things are entirely fictional and stand no chance of being made available to the public, or being developed at all.

That’s the bad news.

I know, the government having no desire to make moving at the speed of sound and instantly vaporizing mountains is a bummer, but some good has come from the pages of comic books and old novels with unevenly cut pages.

For instance, did you know radar was actually invented while trying to create rayguns before World War II?

Boring. I know.

Experiments into making lasers into high powered weapons has made some headway though. Science and engineering have figured out how to destroy objects with lasers and blind people with them (not a joke, there is actually a UN protocol on blinding combatants with lasers), but the major issue out there is making a portable power source capable of deploying the lethal beam.

So if there are any of you junior scientists out there, working on lasers won’t give us rayguns any fasts. What we really need you to be developing tiny batteries that contain the force of a thousand white hot suns.

©2013 DEDWIN HEDON

REVIEW: THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD

Hello my scholars! Can't get enough of the California desert? Have you been wondering what else could possibly be lurking in the Salton Sea? Wouldn't you be delighted to know there's a classic 1950s monster movie with the perfect combination of atomic absurdity and realism?

MST3K smarty-pants fanboys might think they know everything about The Monster That Challenged the World, but lemme tell you, they are dead-ass wrong. 'Monster has everything you could want: badass cars, useless children ruining things, very official sounding SCIENTIFIC theories, the dilemmas of being a working mother, the plight of small-town museum owners, and an only slightly Freudian mollusk monster spraying toxic mucus. 

It's streaming, I don't know what you're waiting for.

Top Ten Movies of 2012, Part 1

Well, it's the middle of March which means it's time to take a look back at the best films from 2012. Yeah, we're not very punctual on the Beast Duels blog, but for chrissake it's free so cool your jets. Anyways, here are the first couple of films that cracked the top 10.

  10. Secret World Of Arrietty 



In the year's best animated film, the legendary Studio Ghibli of Japan released their 16th feature film. Based on the children's book The Borrowers, Secret World of Arrietty takes place in... well, the secretive world of Arrietty. Arrietty is a plucky and adventurous teenage girl who lives with her parents in the countryside of Japan. Arrietty is sweet, likable, and so small that she's barely larger than a sugar cube. Arrietty and her family are borrowers, diminutive people who live among us. They "borrow" household items from us under the cloak of night, creating their own fully-developed world within our own. Voiced by Atonement's Saoirse Ronan in the UK and Bridgit Mendler of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel fame in the US, Arrietty is accidentally spotted by one of the people living within the house. Fortunately, her fear is assuaged when she learns that the boy who spotted her is, despite being a hundred times her size, her own age. The two form a sweet friendship that verges on romance, were it not for the prejudices held by their families and huge discrepancies in stature. The relationships formed in this movie are wonderfully developed, but what makes this a true Studio Ghibli film is the world it fashions. Arrietty's home is fully-formed and imagined with intricate detail, a beautiful look into the holes in the walls within our homes.

  9. Cabin In The Woods



There have been a number of self-referential horror movies in the past, most notably 1996's Scream and more recently Tucker and Dale versus Evil. But no film has managed to deconstruct the entire genre as intelligently or as funnily as Drew Goddard's Cabin In The Woods. We meet the protagonists early in the film, a redhead, her blonde friend and her boyfriend, his jock friend and the token pothead. They travel to the titular Cabin In The Woods for a weekend vacation and to get off the grid. What follows is a laughably absurd barrage of horror movie tropes, from the (not-so) virginal protagonist to inexplicably splitting up to cover more ground when danger strikes. In sending up the slasher flicks, what director and co-writer Joss Whedon accomplish is a hilarious descent into well-worn cliches. They offer an explanation for audiences' reactions for decades as they've shouted at their TVs "don't do that! Why are you doing that???" Their film is half-homage and half-mockery of the genre, constantly reminding the audience that they are indeed watching a film. They repeatedly ask of the audience why it is they attend and enjoy horror films, while simultaneously celebrating the genre. With Cabin, Joss Whedon again proves he can be relevant in a post Buffy and Firefly world. That and the billion dollars Avengers made.

Stay tuned for numbers 7 and 8 on the Beast Duels Blog.

SCIENCE: THE SALTON SEA

First, some background info: I grew up in a very old house, filled with very old things. I spent a lot of my childhood listening to 100.7 WMMS (when it was still good) and digging through the attic, then assembling my treasures in a way that suited my tastes. One of my favorite collections (that now lives in my kitchen) is old, brightly colored cookbooks: the kind published by the appliance manufacturer or a particular brand of evaporated milk or vegetable shortening. And the highlight of my cookbook collection is one from the Imperial Valley Date Farmers, called DATE MAGIC.

Doesn't that look FABULOUS? Anyhow, this little book inspired a lifelong Aspergerian obsession with all things California Desert---dates, Queens of the Stone Age (and all that that implies), and most of all, the Salton Sea.







At the turn of the last century, the Colorado River was diverted in an effort to irrigate the Imperial Valley. Flooding combined with above-average rainfall over the next few years created a new body of water where an ancient lake once was. Birds flocked to it, and some intrepid fishermen introduced mullet, sargo, and corvina. Commercial fishing BOOMED; in fact, Salton Sea fishing replaced Atlantic ocean fishing during WWII.

By the 1950s, the real estate market descended on our little inland lake. The Salton Sea area was marketed as Palm Springs with a waterfront, "The Riviera of the West," and all the cool kids were there.

(source)

How could all this possibly go wrong? Well, years of above-average rainfall meant flooding of waterfront property. Agricultural runoff increased salinity, decreased the oxygen levels, and there were massive, grisly die-offs of fish, then the birds contracted a vicious case of avian botulism, then cholera. Anyone with means moved away. 

These days, the area around the Salton Sea is reminiscent of your favorite post-apocalyptic wonderlands: vast expanses of undeveloped land (purchased decades ago as investment property and forgotten), flooded mobile homes,  painted garbage mountains, an abandoned military base, roadside nudists, and the occasional pile-up of fish and bird corpses. Before his death in 1998, Representative Sonny Bono pushed for legislation to preserve and restore the sea, but that could take decades, and the lake may dry up on its own account by then.

If you want to learn more about a century of well-intentioned agricultural interference turned into an ecological time bomb, check out the documentary Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, narrated by the only man who could do the place justice, John Waters.

Episode 17: Science!

This week, Nick, Kyle and Mike discuss Science! 

Some of everyone’s all time favorite movies and television shows come up, including Star Wars, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy, The Terminator and Firefly! 

Things take a left turn quick though and soon Albert Einstein and Bill Nye, the Science Guy are in a knock down, drag out, fight to the death over the Greatest Scientist in History! 

Everything finally gets back on track when the boys discuss their Top Five Bad Science Movie Moments. 

Even if you hate science, this weeks episode is sure to have you donning your lab coat and safety goggles.

Sponsored by Nikola Tesla’s Hugh Jackman Cloning Machine!

00:30 Meet the Beast, Science

16:43 Beast Duel: Einstein vs. Bill Nye, the Science Guy

24:38 Top 5 Bad Science Moments in Movies

The Original Assassins

Through history, many things have been said about the original order of the Assassins. Their enemies claim and continued the lies that they were users of hashish, making them into villains in their drug-free, Muslim culture. This has been said of them for hundreds of years, that the only reason the great Hassan-i Sabbah kept his followers in check was with drugs and illusions of paradise.

The truth is a little simpler than that. Hassan-i Sabbah liked to call his followers Asasiyun, or the people who are loyal to the foundation of the faith. He used the younger, stronger, most agile of recruits to carry out murders against his enemies and their supporters. They weren’t only skilled at killing, they were smart enough to blend within the lives of their target. The men, what we would consider high schoolers would be able to speak like their target, move like their target and think like their target, but the most important part of their mission was to never sympathize with their target.

The Assassins were formed at a very tumultuous times in the history of Islam. Not only were they fighting for strength against Christianity, who had their own force of super soldiers in the Knights Templar, but also against other sects of Islam who sought the Holy Land and the power it included for their own.

Just like it is portrayed in video games and movies, Assassins preferred to kill their targets in a public space, blending in with the crowd and eliminating or threatening their prey in broad daylight. After all, what better way is there to win the favor of a people you wish to oppress, by killing their oppressors right in front of their eyes.

Two centuries of murder, intrigue and espionage is a lot for the modern order of Assassins to live up to.

©2013 DEDWIN HEDON