Tag Archives: Back To The Future

Young Blood!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Mad linkage:

Nudists are seeking the next generation.

The grilled cheese sandwich gets a trendy rebirth.

An absolutely amazing abandoned end of the world bunker.

Animals that have Jack Shephard’s face.

“Only zealots and fools will continue to bow down to the gods of social media.”

Junot Diaz on Tokyo’s insane urbanism.

Relive Bill Paxton in all his glory in James Cameron’s Aliens.

FYI: The last name of the guy who plays Magnitude (which is short for “Magnetic Attitude”) on Community is Youngblood. Pop pop!

Martin Amis on Christopher Hitchens.

Japanese graffiti artist adds Fukushima disaster to famous A-bomb mural.

The haunted pod village of San-zhi.

An interview with Werner Herzog.

Professional online poker player ponders how he’ll make a living now.

Lindsay Lohan & Shenae Grimes: This should be interesting.

Thankfully the death of Osama Bin Laden doesn’t really affect Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Salvador Dali’s TV ads for chocolate, alka-seltzer, and wine.

On Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Roberto Bolaño’s European adventures.

The Naked And Famous.

Jim Caviezel says that playing Jesus ruined his acting career. LOL. Good.

Baby was breastfed by wrong woman!

The man most likely to take top military job has never seen war.

The collected letters of Vladimir Nabokov.

Women are changing the sex industry from the inside, by Molly Lambert.

Guy Pearce cast in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus/Aliens prequel.

Will Ferrell shaved Conan O’Brien last night.

The pictures in this post are from this awesome collection of covers to the various editions of the novel and the two film adaptations of Lolita. Some really interesting design work there, ranging from the incredibly boring to the incredibly tantalizing.

“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”

-Vladimir Nabokov, interviewed in The Paris Review.

But I guess they just happened to miss this one:

from here.

Nikola Mihov’s fascinating photography series “Forget Your Past.”

Relive Bill Paxton in all his glory in James Cameron’s True Lies.

The billionaires go back to school.

Bin Laden’s legacy will depend in part on what Obama does next.

Al-Quaeda: the next generation?

Back To The Future 2 is totally amazing and depressing at the same time.

6 medication side effects straight out of a horror movie.

Tracing that fake MLK quote back to its source.

Hipster animals!

Hot women pandering to nerds.

Contact.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

It’s 365 years later and the end of another year. Was it a good one? A bad one? A combination of the two? Did you make “contact” with something?

from here.

Are you optimistic about the future? What about just tomorrow? What about just tonight? What do you think when you look back on this year that just ended? Are things going according to your plans or are you finding yourself constantly delivered into new and different and exciting and altogether unforeseeable outcomes? Are we living in the future? Or are we just dreamers lost in our own magic spells and writing the story as we trip over the words and the lines and the chapter breaks?

Do you have more questions than answers, or vice versa? Which do you prefer more, sunrises or sunsets? Beginnings or endings? Or are they intrinsically tied together, just like all of us, in the grand scheme of things?

Just curious.

This was an interesting year. As much one full of little victories and joys as it was of big failures and sadness. For me, at least. Things happened. The players moved the pieces across the chessboard. The game continued. It was exciting, it was heart breaking, and sometimes it was just one or just the other, and sometimes it was both. The wheel kept turning.

from here.

Next year is possibly the year before the year the world ends, and that kind of puts everything into some kind of perspective.

If you’re reading this now or read it before, then some kind of contact was made. With you, with us, with it, with “the other,” with nothing and everything and anything that falls in between all of that.

It’s really up to you there, though. It’s all subjective. Just as you choose your own level of involvement in all things (but especially the future), you also bring your own meaning to the equation. In the end we’ll all be getting exactly what we what. The angels of tomorrow will all be speaking the same language: glossolalia.

Things can seem small in one moment and in one kind of light, and loom large in another. Understanding has to be unearthed and earned and meaning was to be extrapolated. We keep guessing, we keep surmising, we keep poking and attempting things and shining our torches into the dark.

And if there’s something out there, then have no fear, we’ll find it.

The Questions.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Pictures from here and here.

And here.

And here and here.

And also here.

The internet is an information superhighway and I want to ride it all night long.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

I had this dream the other night: Picture the protagonist of some indie film as he drives in a car on a plain road in the middle of the nowhere. Either a cool new song by a not well known hip band is playing through the car’s speakers, or there’s an older song, at least 10 to 15 years old, equally hip and recognizable and slightly “ironic” and catchy is playing. The sun is low, the sky is dim. It’s either just after sunrise or just before sunset. The character is driving for a few moments before something happens…

Continue reading →

Tomorrow never knows.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Apparently there was some nonsense on the internet yesterday suggesting that one of the dates that Doc Brown input into his Delorean time machine in Back To The Future was yesterday’s date: July 05, 2010. Sadly, this is not the case, and it was just a cleverly photoshopped image.

The actual date, though, is October 21, 2015:

from here.

Still love you though, Back To The Future. In other news: The original “Judgment Day” in the Terminator movies, August 29, 1997, came and went a long, long time ago before getting repeatedly pushed back as the various aspects of that franchise crawled along.

It’s just a weird feeling though, living in the future the movies of our youth talked about. The future is here, it’s right now, and it’s not exactly what it used to be. What are the other big future dates talked about in other fantastical pop culture? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still have faith in the year we make contact, but I also have questions. And concerns. The future isn’t something I think you necessarily sail into it (or fly your jetpack into), but walk into. It’s a concrete thing, with ground beneath you, and you walk on that ground as you march into tomorrow. On roads. Roads? Where we’re going, we won’t need any fucking roads! Sorry, sorry.

But seriously, the thing about the future isn’t so much concrete totems of amazing that I want to see looming and growing over the horizon (though, yes, I do want to see tower of human achievements built on the plateau of human brilliance)(and robots!), but I think with each step into tomorrow, we need to update and upgrade our imaginations. Our hopes and our expectations and our fantasies about what is to come need to get bigger and wilder and more daring.

We need our dreams, and our dreamers, and we need that hope that when we wake up from them, we’ll be standing in the bright new rays of an amazing and formerly impossible tomorrow, right?

“I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life.”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Today I was minding my own business and this song came on:

That’s Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight.” But you’d have to know that, right? The people who don’t know that are probably these same weird people that I keep running into lately that have never seen Back To The Future or have NEVER HEARD (lower case wtf?) of The Empire Strikes Back. Anyway. Hearing this song today reminded me of four things:

1. I think I’m locked into a vicious cycle of having to always pause whatever I’m doing to do the air drums when the drumming enters this song. Is that an unattractive quality? I hope not.

2. The first time I did the air drums at the exact right time that they came into the song when I was a stupid little kid when one of those amazing moments of victories that you experience as a stupid little kid. I felt invincible.

3. I had a friend named Steve, who… well, that’s a long story for another time. But Steve was a drama major once upon a time and I remember him telling me once over a few drinks how it was his dream to do the lyrics to this song as a monologue on stage at some point in his life. I’m sure by now that Steve has awarded himself quite a few Oscars for performances so far only witnessed by the bathroom mirror.

4. I’ve said this many a time before, but I miss this era in Phil Collins’ career. He was just likable and a simple pop star, but he really mined a dark corner of the human psyche and added synthesizer and that’s what the top 40 looked like back then. Just listen to songs like “Mama,” which he did with Genesis, or “I Don’t Care Anymore,” or even the classic “Against All Odds,” they’re just so sad and desperate and dark and… amazing. There’s this grand urban legend built up about the lyrical content of “In The Air Tonight,” which people take quite literally, assuming that Phil Collins perhaps watched a person drown while singling out the guilty party at a concert during the performance of the hit song he wrote about it, which is a little insane, but is fascinating to watch it grow over the years, mostly by what we call “Telephone” here in America, but they call “Chinese Whispers” in England. It just seems so strange and appealing to me, that period of keyboard and lack of… flash. I mean, seriously, back in the day this guy…

…was one of the leading pop stars of the day and age. This guy…

No joke, that. And yet, pre-Disney soundtracks, he was like the Bob Hoskins of pop.

Prima Aprilis.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

So… the first day of a new month, and you ponder as you recover from the madness of mars, how are you supposed to prepare for a whole new month when the first day of said month is one for joking and tomfoolery and hoaxes. And you wonder about this new month, who does it belong to? The jokers and manipulators or the gullible and foolish?

from here.

That’s a question we can ask ourselves, certainly, but maybe another time.

Cause we are clearly not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

I haven’t seen a lot of great April Fool’s Day jokes out there, not even a tremendous amount of RickRolling either, but Maria pointed out that Joel McHale took over Ryan Seacrest’s site, which is kind of funny to me, and also an upgrade, obviously.

How can Ryan Seacrest’s joke be anything but a failure when it’s a celebration of someone like Ryan Seacrest? An age old question. If you look good and hard at the walls in Plato’s cave, that question is written there, along with mythic super hero hieroglyphics and crude depictions of humans hunting animals and having sex with lightning bolts or whatever crazy thing people were onto back then.

Oh, and then I just saw this:

I giggled a bit at that, I won’t lie.

Oh, and this:

Way to go fake science news, as reported by CNET UK: “A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had traveled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.”

So many lovely references in the CNET UK article there, I recommend you glance at it, sci fi nerds. There’s a nice glance towards H. G. Well’s famous novel in the paragraph above, but the story also references that the mysterious stranger from the future was wearing “wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age,” which is a lovely nod to the fact that, as I shall remind you once again, the new series of Doctor Who starts this weekend with the brand new Doctor.

Oh, and this clips’s decent as well.

Maybe I was wrong before when I saw that time travel was something special about last year, something that was meant to stay in last year and that our lurch towards something big and new and wonderful here in the year we make contact was going to be just that, here, now, in this year. But maybe time travel isn’t done with us yet. At least not in pop culture. I say that half seriously, half in jest, and a whole other crazy half in an attempt to segue into how I think that next week’s episode of Lost, which of course is a Desmond one, makes me think it’ll be similar to “The Constant.”

What do you think? Yes, no, maybe? Oh, who knows. We’ll just watch and see. It’s Desmond, so it’ll be good.

But Benjie Light and I were talking the other day, gabbing and gossiping as we’re prone to do, waxing poetic about things we’d like to see as the last season of Lost winds down and half jokingly, and half in an eerie calm wave of deadly seriousness, we decided that whatever the finale image of Lost is… whether it’s Jack smiling at having found his destiny or a gorgeous sunset or Sayid marching off into the future with a whole bevy of beautiful women on his arm, we’d then like the producers to immediately cut to this:

“Who do YOU care about, Kate?”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

The final season of Lost continues with last night’s slightly more measured, but intriguing episode, “What Kate Does,” an interesting titular callback to season 2′s “What Kate Did.”

It’s interesting how last week’s episode strongly mirrored the pilot, and this week we get a Kate-centric episode, similar to how Kate was the first character to get a flashback episode all to herself with “Tabula Rasa,” and next week’s episode, “The Substitute,” is a Locke episode, so I presume that episode 4 of this season, if we’re following the structure of season 1 where applicable, will be a Jack episode? And at some point we’re getting a Hurley episode seemingly entitled “Everybody Loves Hugo,” presumably dealing how altbro Hurley/Sideways Hurley is the luckiest man in the world rather than cursed.

Ah, but then there’s Kate…

Kate: “I’m sorry I followed you, Sawyer.”

Sawyer: “Which fucking time, you goddamn harpy?”

I was a Kate fan when the show first started, but I don’t think it’s a secret that that slowly eroded as the time flashed all about us, though I’ve probably never hated her as much as I’ve been vocal about it. But the dichotomy in last night’s episode was beyond fascinating, with the Kate we’ve known and grown with over the past 5+ plus years alongside Sideways Kate who landed in LAX and escaped the Marshal to keep on running…

In fact, really, Kate was always a fascinating character if, for nothing else, the juxtaposition of her make up. She is/was our female lead, the character would’ve stepped up to lead status in the alternate universe where the writers followed their original intention to kill off Jack (as potentially played by Michael Keaton) in the pilot, and she’s also a criminal and worse, a fugitive. And even worse: a murderer. And *gasp* worse: She’s not just a suspected murderer, she is indeed guilty. Sure, she had a good reason, as far as she’s concerned, but she did indeed pull the trigger, as it were.

That’s actually one of the things that I do love about the character. Here she is, put here, all of these things and our female lead, the woman we want to root for as she falls into a love triangle, then a quadranagle, then a triangle again, and the writers don’t shy away from it. Warts and all is how they give her to us. And you could argue that she’s just as fucked up as Jack is, but possibly more functioning. Be it copious amounts of tree climbing (something that actress Evangeline Lilly personally loves and requests for the character, it’s reported) or just getting into the mix of things, she knows how to find a goal or a task, no matter how misguided, and run to it.

And there she is on the Island, in one version of the here and now, running again, only this time she’s not being chased, she’s doing the chasing. And it wouldn’t be Kate if it wasn’t a bad decision leading her to a dead end. Only this time, the dead end’s Juliet. And a possible future of any kind of Sawyer.

And then there’s the alternate universe Kate, or Sideways Kate. Again her fate is intertwined with Claire and Aaron. She’s on the run. There’s a nice little appearance by Arzt, referencing both Midnight Cowboy, but also Back To The Future, part 2. And when Christian hit Sawyer with his car door (before they went to do that “more masculine” kind of running away from a situation: drinking). She runs into the tough guy mechanic, similar to Wayne and early Sawyer, the kind of man Kate always finds herself gravitating towards? And weren’t we all hoping for a little more from the resolution to meeting the couple who wanted to adopt Claire’s baby? Obviously that would’ve never happened, but I guess I was just hoping for… more. And then there’s those that also get swept into Claire’s fate, like Dr. Ethan Goodspeed (here again the character whose appearance is all a neat gimmick and/or a marker to let the viewer know where we are on the show’s sprawling and ever expansive totem pole of a timeline). “I don’t want to have to stick you with needles if I don’t have to,” he says and we all have a nice little chuckle. “That Aaron’s gonna be a handful!”

But there’s a lot of interesting things going on in that hospital room as baby Aaron is possibly born/not born right there. The return of the Joan Hart alias! The readouts say it’s October, not September. And Claire gives Kate a credit card, which I’m just assuming will have some interesting numbers on them. But none of it felt as special as that brief momentary glance between Kate and Jack as she was spiriting away from the airport…

Just remember, Kate: He walks among us, but he is not one of us.

But then we’re back on the Island. Kate eventually leaves Sawyer, the walking wound, who’s dumped his engagement ring for Juliet and, so he hopes, some of his grief for her. But the problem is, without those, he has nothing. Which leaves him in a perfect place for Fake Locke/”Flocke”/The Locke-ness Monster to come and find him at…

But Sawyer has nothing for Kate, that’s sure. So where does she run to next? Back to Jack? In search of Claire? Somewhere to find herself? We know what she’s done, but the question now is more about what Kate does next and it could be anything.

And the temple! So much there. Is Jack finally starting to regain some of his balls and own parts of this show again? Sayid is alive! And not a zombie! And the former torturer is tortured. Again!

There’s an awesome The Empire Strikes Back reference there, post-torture. Also, is that some of the protective ash being blown over his body during his “diagnosis?” Dogen types on a typewriter! Aldo returns! And he’s still kind of a pussy. And Sayid is… infected? By “the sickness?” By the Smoke Monster? The same as the French team was “infected?” The same as… Claire?

Disappear here.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

You know what they say, man: Whatever happened, happened.

Some quick thoughts on last night’s Lost:

And Commander Light kind of confirmed for me what I was thinking here, that this was just a little bit of a bland episode, yeah (it was a Kate episode, after all)(but I am glad to see the return of the single character-centric flashback/forward format), but man… even the dullest episode of this show (and no episode is exactly what I would call “dull,” but even if it was) just needs a little appearance by Richard Alpert to turn it all around.

Not only is this guy slick and cool at an almost Sayid-esque level, but he just exudes mystery. And answers. That you’re not gonna get from him.

A guy with a torch who says “Fuck you and your sonic fence,” isn’t going to be the most forthcoming expositional figure. Who says the stong, silent types are a thing of the past? But, then again, this is 1977 after all.

Okay, back to those quick thoughts:

Kate. Seemed like she kinda had her life together, but then reset to being the fuck and run gal she’s gotten too comfortable being. She says she’s coming back to find Claire (to which the audience says, “Who? Ohhhhh, right. Her.”), which I don’t think any of us really believe, but then again, I’m glad she didn’t say it was about Sawyer alone. I’m glad that he’s just a part of it.

Sawyer. Possibly the most positive and upwardly mobile character development on the show?  You know, maybe. I was joking with someone the other day that I can’t wait til we get those Lost action figures where you press the button on their back and they spout out one of several different catch phrases. All of Sawyer’s will just be, “Son of a bitch!”

Juliet. I still love her. And the thing about Juliet, especially evident in this episode, is what I’ve been saying about her all along: The creators have clearly given this character all the DNA of a tough, strong person who is both resilient and fragile at times, a go getter, and someone who can make things happen. The catch is with her always being the fourth wobbly leg on the love triangle table, she can only show these sexy lioness qualities when somebody is off in the jungle delivering Hitler, Jr. to the Others.

Jack. I kinda feel Jack here. He kind of drops some real talk on Kate, harshly, but it needs to be harsh. He loves her, and because of that, both her and he have turned him into a welcome mat. And now… well, now, he’s basically Locke. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing or why he’s there, but he’s strong in the idea that there is a purpose out there for him and he’ll find it. And until then, he’s going to make some sandwiches and maybe take a quick shower if you don’t mind.

Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk. Wait… what? The third issue of this miniseries written by Lost‘s Damon Lindelof came out this past week, following hot on the heels of the riveting issue #2, which came out like… three years ago? Just reading this thing I can tell you right now with some certainty that Lindelof is the guy who rights a majority Ben’s dialogue. This whole issue (and series so far) has his beats and his cadence can be imagined a little too easily as the “conversations” progress. Also, it starts off with a man being torn in half, which is always nice.

Hurley and Miles. Coupla post modern Cassandras, am I right? Two things here. First: The characters have been through so many crazy shit moments that I think they kind of accept some of it a little too easily. And thusly, when they try to reason out the logic of, you know, shit like time travel, they come off as idiots. And by idiot, I’m really specifically referring to Hurley here, though I like his reference to Back To The Future (an important collection of pro tips when one is doing the temporal quantum nasty). Thankfully we had Miles sitting in for Faraday, who I have to say, is sorely missed.

Secondly, Miles proves here what I’ve been saying about him for a while: He’s totally Charlie 2.0, but with a much cooler and heretofore far too underused ability.

Little Ben/Hitler, Jr. You know, I liked this kid better when he was laying face down in the mud, and before his gaping bullet wound changed ventricles, but hey, whatever. Now he’s… about to be changed? The not remembering anything that happened, well, that just makes sense, and the “always be one of us,” yeah, that too, but what fascinates me is Richard’s saying: “He’ll lose his innocence.” Oh? Really?

My theory: Remember when those wacky French kids got sucked down that Cerebrus vent a few episodes back right outside that simply fascinating fucking temple that we’ve seen far too little of? And later Rousseau accuses her lover at gunpoint of having been changed by the Monster (which he claims is not a monster, but the temple’s security system)? I think that whatever is about to happen to Ben is along those lines. I think that’s why Ben is able to slip off into the hieroglyphic room during Keamy’s siege last year and summon the Monster.

Also, Ellie and Widmore (whom Richard Alpert does not answer to, he tells us). I’m fascinated to see what Widmore is up to at this point (I kind of assume that he’s the leader of the Others somewhere around this point in time) but am I the only person who has no problem seeing (1950s) Ellie again?

Oh, and that ending… Man, what a wonderful reminder of why we all love Locke, whom I feel shines possibly his brightest in his moments playing off of Ben. “Welcome back to the land of the living… you bug-eyed son of a bitch.”

Next week: The mother fucking Temple! And quite possibly the answer to whether or not Ben’s violently murdered Desmond’s family! See you in another week, brotha!