July 30, 2004

• A couple weeks back I had a lovely thrift store find: A LaserDisc player. Remember LaserDiscs? They're like giant CDs designed to store movies. They're as big as the old vinyl LPs, and it takes up both sides to store a whole movies'-worth of data on them. So during the middle of the movie, you have to turn over the disc.

  My landlord has a LD player, and it's here in the house. It's a rather sucky one, or maybe it just needs cleaning, but it's lacking in picture quality. I know this because when I first moved here, I bought a LD at Half-Price Books to play on it.

  That LD was (and still is) 'For All Mankind,' which is a remarkable movie. It's one I've been wanting to find for a long time. It's the only movie I've ever been to the premiere for, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; some astronauts were there, and Al Reinert told about how great it was making the movie.

  The movie was shot on location in space. It's about spaceflight as the Apollo astronauts experienced it. It's edited together from raw NASA footage, with interviews and source audio telling the story.

  My friend Robert used to joke about sci-fi movies being "Shot on location... IN SPACE!" and here it's really true.

  Anyway, the point here is that I found a new LD player (well, new to me), and the story here is that the very night I found the player, I also found a used book store with a lot of dirt-cheap Hong Kong action LaserDiscs. So last night I fell asleep to the first half of 'Butterfly And Sword.'

  'Butterfly And Sword' is a really beautiful martial arts movie, but the plot makes no sense at all. The plot usually suffers in this genre, but this particular plot literally makes no sense at all, even allowing for the language barrier. And that's OK, since it's all just spectacle anyway.

  And, also, since it's a nice pre-dream dream to be having while vegetating on the sofa.

  • 3:13 pm
  • 1 Comment