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Amtrak, B-Movies, Web Development, and other nonsense

Month: March 2013

HEWEBNE: outbound

March 16, 2013 / / 0 Comments

This coming Monday I’m giving at talk at HighEdWeb New England about collaborative development in open source, focusing on liberal arts colleges. If this were one of my movie reviews that would be the “A plot.” The “B plot” is that I’m taking the train to the conference, and that unusually for me it’ll be 100% new mileage.

The conference is Mount Holyoke but I’m taking the Vermonter from New York up to Brattleboro. There are two reasons for this. The first is that my friend who’s picking me up lives closer to Brattleboro than Amherst. The second is that this train will be rerouted to the west bank of the Connecticut River in a year or two, and I want to ride the old route before that happens. Again, I’m that guy.

The ride in from Easton to New York was uneventful. Trans-Bridge Lines does a good job. Its buses are comfortable (for 90 minutes anyway) and the free wifi gets the job done. I-78 was remarkably empty. The only hiccup was finding New York Penn overrun with mouth breathing collegians dressed in green. Sigh. Amtrak Police finally showed up with a bullhorn and cleared them out. Yay!

Today’s Vermonter has five Amfleet cars: four reserved coaches and a cafe/business class car. At the front is an EMD AEM-7, one of Amtrak’s venerable “toasters” now in its fourth decade of service. It brought the train up from Washington and will pull it to New Haven, where we’ll swap it out for a GE P42DC “Genesis” diesel locomotive. We have to do this since there’s no electrification north of New Haven. Lunch today consisted of a turkey panini (good), hummus plus pretzel bits (okay), and iced tea. I’m pleased to finally ride over the Hell Gate Bridge but it really is more impressive from the park below looking up.

Early into New Haven and the power change starts at once which means no head-end power (HEP). I think of this as a staple of American railroading, though very few passenger trains do it now. The long-distance trains which travel south from New York (Silver Star, Silver Meteor, Crescent, Palmetto) change engines in Washington. The Vermonter does here in New Haven. The Pennsylvanian does in Philadelphia. I think some of the upstate New York trains do in Albany (switching from dual-mode electro-diesel to straight up diesels). Fascinating to think about the long-haul diesels which run, essentially uninterrupted, for fifty hours on the Western trains.

I hope I don’t offend anyone (too much) when I opine that Connecticut, at least what I can see of it, is ugly. Admittedly March is an unkind month for viewing the outdoors when there’s no snow on the ground.

We hit our dwell stops (New Haven and Springfield) with plenty of time to spare. Amtrak’s issuing a faster timetable on Monday, and I’d say that’s reasonable. I’ve arrived or departed from Springfield numerous times over the years but this is the first time I’ve headed east. We go as far as Palmer, and then perform a thankfully rare “backup” maneuver. There’s no northeast/southwest connecting track at Palmer, so we have to make what amounts to a J-turn in railroading–crossing the connecting track, stopping, throwing a switch (manually, no less), then reversing direction. The re-route I mentioned earlier will eliminate this step.

Here’s some very crude text art illustrating what we’re doing:

            C
            \_ 
             \\_________________
A_____________\_________________\(E)______B
               \
                \D

A-B is the CSX main between Springfield and Boston. C-D is the New England Central Railroad. The direct intersection between the two has no switch. We pull past toward B to the switch at (E), then backup on to the second track which links up at C. It’s horribly slow and inefficient. You leave Springfield at 3:15 PM. By 3:45 PM you’re just getting down with this nonsense and heading north.

Amtrak’s obviously embarrassed about it. There’s a nice long warning about it over the PA, emphasizing that this is normal and planned. I think the only constituency who enjoys this are the railfans who gather since it’s such a great photo-op.

I’m now on the stretch that Amtrak will leave in a year or two. This New England Central RR track is rough; some stretches are worse even than CSX around Buffalo, which has always been my “gold standard” for an unpleasant ride. It makes no sense to rehabilitate it of course when Massachusetts and the Feds are fixing up the new, more direct, route. I don’t disagree with the logic at all. Still, damn. There’s some talk of new service over this route to link Amherst with New London. I don’t see it getting done without serious federal money, and there are other more pressing passenger rail projects.

As I submit this we’re fifteen minutes out from Brattleboro and dead on schedule. No better way to travel.

Leaving the Lake Shore

March 10, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I keep track of all my train mileage because I’m one of those people. By my reckoning I’ve done over 41,000 miles on Amtrak alone and another 10,000+ on other systems, mostly in Europe. A full quarter of my Amtrak mileage is on a single train: the Lake Shore Limited, which operates between Chicago and New York, with a section to Boston. I’ve taken it to three Moodle Hack/Doc Fests: Summer 2009 at Smith College, Winter 2010 at Lafayette College, and Summer 2011 at Hampshire College. I’ve ridden it to a pair of weddings. I took it to HighEdWeb 2012 and B-Fest 2013. I’ve made three trips on it in the last eight months. This makes writing the following all the harder: Lake Shore Limited, I’m afraid that we may have to break up.

Here’s the situation. I have cause to make the trip between New York and Chicago at least once a year for the B-Movie Festival in Evanston, Illinois. I’m likely to make it another time for business related to the German Studies Association, and it’s a fair bet that I’ll make at least one trip for pleasure to the Midwest. I’ve never made less than two round-trips in a calendar year since 2009. I’ve done one already this year, another is booked and at least one more is on the horizon. I’m just not sure I can do it on the Lake Shore Limited anymore. I think my future lies with the Capitol Limited.

7 things I don’t like about the Lake Shore Limited

  1. The eastbound departure time from Chicago. The Lake Shore Limited is Amtrak’s cleanup train, handling misconnecting passengers from the west. This is a necessary and useful function, but the 9:30 PM departure is a hardship. You’ve got to find dinner in Chicago, though if you’re a sleeper passenger they give you all the wine you want. If the Empire Builder got stuck in the Dakotas you might be a few hours late leaving.
  2. The eastbound afternoon crawl across upstate New York. Because of the late departure time from Chicago you spend all the daylight hours between Buffalo and Albany. It’s very, very boring. You do get lunch.
  3. CSX’s handling of the train in western New York. Amtrak is dependent on the freight railroads for dispatching. CSX does an absolutely terrible job between Schenectady and Rochester. They’re incapable of getting the train though on time. It’s just frustrating.
  4. The toilet in the Viewliner roomette. Amtrak experimented with the design of the Viewliner and included a toilet in each roomette. There’s no problem with smells or anything like that it’s just…awkward…in an already confined space. I can’t tell you how many times I wished for a public restroom instead, even though it meant a walk.
  5. The track quality around Buffalo. It’s very rough around Buffalo, and westbound you hit it around midnight (ish, depending on how badly CSX screwed you, see point #3) which guarantees you’ll be woken up.
  6. The Amfleet lounge. I’ve discussed this in the various route guides linked above but the Amfleet lounge/cafe simply doesn’t compare to the Sightseer Lounge on the Capitol Limited. There’s no good place for sitting and watching, and perhaps more importantly there’s not enough seating.
  7. The Amfleet lounge, Part II. It’s located on the back of the train because it travels to Boston. If you’re a New York sleeper passenger you’re walking through five coach cars to reach it.

The Capitol Limited improves on all these points. Its most significant drawback, of course, is that it doesn’t go to New York–it terminates in Washington, D.C. Passengers traveling to and from New York must take a Northeast Regional. That adds about four hours to the trip, allowing for connection times. This April I’m testing out taking the Capitol Limited westbound. We’ll see how it goes.

The Rig

March 4, 2013 / / 0 Comments

The poster for The Rig.

Here’s the pitch: it’s an Alien rip-off set on an oil rig. No, not Proteus. That’s the one with the heroin smugglers. No, not Leviathan either. That’s the one with Peter Weller. This one stars William Forsythe (Stone Cold).

This looks like it was shot for TV. The color is washed out and almost Matrix-like in the use of green. It’s really unpleasant to look at. The CGI is used sparingly but it’s not very good. I swear the helipad looks like an optical drive.

Oh boy are we in for a long haul. There’s a decent ambiguous opening involving a robotic submersible, somewhat undercut by an onscreen reference to the “Weyland Corporation” (groan). This is immediately destroyed by a cringe-inducing “family discussion” between the Karl Urban Experience and the Kid (Who Can’t Handle Line Reads). We soon also meet our other tropes: the Foreigner, the Black Guy, the Woman, the Expendable Roughnecks, and the William Forsythe (played in this case by the actual William Forsythe).

This is an Alien rip-off: it gets graded on its kills. The first is well-done: the set-up is obvious but the timing isn’t, nor was the location of the creature. We also aren’t shown anything. Spielberg did that in Jaws because Bruce didn’t work; later filmmakers do it because they can’t afford the effects shots. Still, if we learned anything from the Star Wars prequels it’s that more effects aren’t an unalloyed good. I shudder at the thought of what the Empire Strikes Back would have looked like with 2000s-era effects technology.

Now it’s raining. And still with too much green. Someone saw the Matrix and thought that those were the elements that made it kick ass. The Foreigner eats it next. Again, the kill is suspenseful. We know it’s going to happen but the film pauses. It shows more of the creature but waits on the big reveal. And then, unfortunately, we’re back to the social drama crap aboard the rig. I never expected to write the phrase “the sleeping with the oil rig boss’s daughter plot was done better in Armageddon,” but there we are.

There are characters on screen. Were they introduced before? We’re going to call them Thin Guy With A Beard and Wise Older Fellow Who Probably Dies Soon. Oh God, WORDS. Why are they still talking? What the hell is going on? If the screen wasn’t tinted green I’d assume we’d switched to a different film.

SPOILER. Forsythe eats it. I feel cheated. He died like a sucker and now everyone left in the film is worthless and weak. How much time is left? Oh no: we’re only 36 minutes in. We’ve got an hour left and it’s only getting worse. In another part of the movie the Karl Urban Experience is having sex in the shower with another character. This goes on much longer than is strictly necessary, because it’s that kind of movie. It’s also not all that exploitative, because the people making this movie aren’t very good at making movies.

We now launch into the obligatory what’s-going-on-search-the-ship montage, set to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony for some reason. I see what they were going for, but it doesn’t work with the tight confines of an ostensible oil rig.

We’ve decided that Wise Older Fellow Who Probably Dies Soon (who has lived longer than expected) is actually Muldoon, though he has a modified speargun instead of an automatic shotgun. Now we have yet another heart-breaking (not actually) flashback to William Forsythe. I hope he’s getting paid for these. I’m not sure Muldoon is still in the same movie as everyone else. Pity. I’m liking his better, which seems to involve skulking around outside an oil rig with a weapon and murder in his eyes.

We’re back in the Other Movie. This thing is padded something fierce. Finally, at about the 55-minute mark, our suspicions as to why the creature wasn’t shown earlier are confirmed. Oh my. Looks like a Sleestak who wandered off the set of Land of the Lost. The Karl Urban Experience and the Thin Guy With A Beard are now leaving the comparative safety of the control room and descending into the bowels of the ship. Presumably, this is so they can be killed more easily. Suddenly our movies unite, as Muldoon finds the idiots and intones (I’m serious) “we’re being hunted.”

Continuing in this theme we have our “Clever girl” moment and the sad music plays. Not only did Muldoon fail to kill to the creature, but he failed to explain his plan. He’s a complete waste.

I should mention now, since I didn’t earlier, that The Kid is starring in a third, almost entirely separate movie. The only other character in that movie is some kind of Big Boss played by Art LaFleur who, like Forsythe, is way above this material. He only has two scenes. We haven’t seen either in some time and they’re clearly not on this rig. See above: padding. There are 25 minutes and…three characters left (the Girl, Karl Urban Experience and Thin Guy). That’s like eight minutes per character, unless the creature invades the third movie and attacks the Big Boss or the Kid. At least we’re down to two movies.

Karl Urban Experience has his big heroic fight scene and we’re down to two characters. We had a lot of boring staging and stalking before that. The camera work really is incompetent. The fire “effect” when our survivors finally burn the creature isn’t much better. The Girl survives and we fade out to the rescue chopper…

Oh God, the movie isn’t over. Why isn’t it over? Now we’re back on the third movie, and the Big Boss is going to find out what happened on his rig. He brought the Kid with him, because of course he did. After an unnecessarily long sequence we find out that Karl Urban Experience yet lives (of course), and Big Boss uses Muldoon’s weapon to kill the creature. Finally credits roll.

Excuse me, WTF?

Plot 0 / 8
Actors 0 / 8
Effects -2 / 8
Dialogue 0 / 8
Atmosphere 3 / 8
TOTAL 1 / 40

See the B-movie metric for an explanation of this outcome.

Anaconda

March 2, 2013 / / 0 Comments

 

Roger Ebert is a sucker for old-school adventure movies. He copped to this weakness in his review of Congo, which he described as “a splendid example of a genre no longer much in fashion, the jungle adventure story.” Perhaps this explains his otherwise inexplicable decision to award 3 1/2 stars to Anaconda, a film not otherwise honored by posterity. It’s a good, even great, B-movie, but I have to ask what curve he graded this on.

Admittedly, there’s much to recommend the film. Its cast is top-notch: Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuher, and Danny Trejo. Voight gives the most memorable performance as a crazed, Peruvian (um…) swamp-rat. It puts me in mind of Depp’s later performance as Jack Sparrow, in that it’s so bizarre you just have to accept it on its own terms. The individual characters, even the ones just along to be snake-fodder, are given some depth. The production design is sound and the direction competent. The CG effects looked dated, but then so do those from Air Force One. CG was still in transition in 1997 and much of it hasn’t aged well. Conversely, Fifth Element still looks gorgeous.

It’s also worth remembering that we’re only a year out from the dreadful The Ghost and the Darkness, a similar film but set in Africa with lions instead of snakes. You’ll never see a review of that here because I’ll be damned if I’m going to set through that interminable slop again. If you’re not going to make a great movie at least make it entertaining. Also, no film which includes a character inquiring “hey, is that real dynamite?” can be all bad. We’re going to skip over Kari Wuher’s inferior line reads, the waste of Ice Cube and Eric Stoltz, and the general worthlessness of Owen Wilson.

And yes, it was real dynamite. Well, real dynamite in the film. Fake dynamite in real life.

I would class this as a Jaws rip-off. We’ve all seen Jaws; all modern monster movies descend from it and adopt its structure, its tropes. The real interest is in whether this Jaws derivative/rip-off offers anything new or at least executes its ideas competently. Examples of films which do include Deep Blue Sea (novel take on character death scene) and The Car (creative mashup of monster-hunting triumvirate). Compare Tentacles, an incompetently-made Italian ripoff starring Henry Fonda, and Jaws 3, which (ineptly) transposed the original to a futuristic theme park administered by a villainous Louis Gossett, Jr. Anaconda‘s contribution is a main character working at cross-purposes to the rest of the heroes and a truly inspired performance from Voight. The Golden Raspberry nomination for this role was undeserved, though John Wilson did list this film as one of the “100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made.”

Anyway, the opening concept is that a “National Geographic” crew is heading up the Amazon River to find some long lost tribe. Along the way to pick up Voight who offers to be their guide for his own inscrutable motives (because of course). As is the case in these flicks things go from bad to worse throughout the first and second acts, setting us up for the showdown with the titular monster in the third. The only real points of interest involve the invariably grisly deaths of the main characters and the escalating madness of Voight.

Anaconda goes about its work with grim efficiency. Its design owes much to Jaws. We get a rack-focus shot and many ominous scenes at night punctuated by spotlights. Characters exchange meaningful glances. Characters are crushed by anacondas. The surviving characters then exchange more meaningful glances. All the while Jon Voight acts at right angles to everyone else with a permanently crazed expression on his face.

Plot 3 / 8
Actors 7 / 8
Effects 3 / 8
Dialogue 3 / 8
Atmosphere 7 / 8
TOTAL 23 / 40

See the B-movie metric for an explanation of this outcome.

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