Day: December 13, 2007

Yikes. Remind me to stay the hell away from Soho:

New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman’s voice right in her ear asking, “Who’s there? Who’s there?” She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, “It’s not your imagination.”

Indeed it isn’t. It’s an ad for “Paranormal State,” a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an “audio spotlight” from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before. For random passersby and residents who have to walk unwittingly through the area where the voice will penetrate their inner peace, it’s another story.

Via Warren Ellis, who adds, “I’m starting to feel like sf writers such as myself should be running apologies on the inside front covers of our books.”

Erik the Viking is Terry Jones’s Yellowbeard, which is to say, essentially, that it’s really, really bad. It stars lots of people who I know ought to be funny, and have been funny in other things, but the end product is just a stillborn misbegotten mess. In his review of the movie, Roger Ebert wrote, “Every once in a while a movie comes along that makes me feel like a human dialysis machine,” and that the movie “represents some kind of comprehensive lack of judgment on Jones’s part.”

As a Monty Python fan, it and Yellowbeard just made me sad. Even Fierce Creatures has Michael Palin running around in a bumblebee costume. (If I had my way, every movie would have Michael Palin running around in a bumblebee costume.)

Now there’s apparently a new “Director’s Son’s Cut” of Jones’s film. I don’t know how they arrived at this odd concept, or who thought financing a new cut of the film on DVD was what the world needed. But the best that Nathan Rabin of the AV Club can offer is: “Perhaps a 15-minute cut somewhere down the line will finally correct the film’s abundant pacing problems and the long, dry stretches between mild chuckles and modestly amusing gags.”

He also warns that “if current trends provide any indication, around 15 years from now, Jones should absolutely kill with Erik The Viking‘s smash-hit musical Broadway adaptation.”

I wish he was wrong about that, I really do.