Music Babble

I never saw that and I think the only thing that made me ever want to see it had to do with the idea of Dolph Lundgren playing a crazy priest or whatever it is he plays, but I dasn't do it, Huck. I also recall Gibson's X-Files episodes as being pretty weak (the Stephen King one was definitely pure crap.) As with all discussions involving me and William Gibson, I'll point out that the only one of his books besides Neuromancer that I cared for at all was Idoru, the middle book in a trilogy (and on top of that, I didn't like Neuromancer at all when I read it for that SF class back in 2002--it was so damned hard to follow! I only appreciated it when I re-read it years later.) His worst, Virtual Light from 1993, came out one year after Stephenson's sizable hit Snow Crash and seemed to be taking after that book, but poorly.

Keanu seemed to star in flop after flop between Speed and The Matrix, some nurd once told me that if you want cinematic excruciation watch the films Keanu appeared in during those years. I can't name any that I've seen. Nothing seems to stop poor old Keanu though, he just keeps chugging along.

When I was a kid, I really liked The Net. It had all these high tech depictions of the Internet that were a few steps ahead of what the 1995 Internet was actually like (people hearing each others' voices in a chat room!) and computers with GUIs that seemed way better than mine, and for that reason I seemed enthralled at scenes of Sandra Bullock frantically typing out emails to get her identity back and beat the villain, which is some generic Bill Gates tech-head clone who I don't think even has any onscreen dialogue. Of course, I haven't seen the movie in 20 years but I can remember lots of it (Bullock accidentally stumbles upon a conspiracy that destroys her when she clicks a little "pi" symbol on a screen; the low point is probably Dennis Miller dying of a coughing fit.) I miss being able to enjoy thrillers with short shelf lives; back in my HBO days I did that all the time. Also Bullock in her early 30s was impossibly hot for a computer programmer.

Another hilariously dated 90s Internet bit occurs in the first Mission: Impossible movie where Tom Cruise tracks down Vanessa Redgrave on frickin' USENET (posting coded messages on a Christian/Bible discussion group) and her email address is "max@job3.14". Which obviously couldn't be a real email address even then.