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Especially if that thing is cats.
2004-08-04 00:34:32
Well, as those of you who’ve been paying attention (and not being sarcastic V_V ) know, I’ve finally gotten the chair in at work that I’d been waiting on. How petty is it that that was the major event of the last week? How further petty was it that I was disappointed to discover that they’d ordered me a chair that didn’t match all the other nice ones in the lab?
Eh.
I’ve been surprisingly busy this last couple of weeks, so you’ll have to excuse the lack of posts. I haven’t been out to the theater in about a month, and haven’t had a chance to watch more than an episode or two worth of Farscape DVDs from the mountain for almost as long. A good deal of this is coming from work, and just a touch from things I said I’d do for friends, but a large portion is from the organization of AWA. I’m seriously getting worried about this year. Several well-made plans are crashing down around my ears, and I keep getting further and further behind in just about everything. Not a real crisis yet, but damn near approaching, it feels like. Just for the contrasting irony, Quu tells me we’re well ahead in all the tech and contest stuff.
However, I’m also starting to get to that stage of dangerously overworked and preoccupied where I can’t seem to accomplish anything worthwhile and just hang around until it’s time to take a break or go to sleep, so tonight I’ll do a bit of writing in an effort to re-establish more than a passing connection with the person I am when I’m not converted into a soulless drone by running the fucking statistics on the data AGAIN because we want to graph it ANOTHER way to see how it looks. Gahhh....
Ah, the office. I confess, I had no idea how much I would enjoy my new desk in the office. Of course I’m sharing it with two other people, but they’re pretty quiet most of the time (as I like to think I am). The simple ability to retreat away from everyone and honestly WORK. Or, if so inclined, browse a website or two without constantly being afeared that the boss is looking over my shoulder. Hell, half the great part’s that I don’t have to answer the lab phone or listen to the constantly-running chemical hood anymore. There are two things in the world which irreparably destroy my concentration. Ringing Phones and running water. Both were directly behind where I worked.
Seriously, I was in the lab for about twelve hours on Sunday (getting data off tapes) and I didn’t even mind since I could retreat into the solitude of the office when I entered the data into the computer. Got a lotta work done.
Got a lotta <lj-cut text="'Shadow' listened to as well">“Shadow” listened to as well.
See, since I’ve been working my tail off recently (trying to keep up what with the vacation days scattered around), I’ve begun multi-tasking my entertainment rather intensively just to get some imaginative stimulation into my system so I didn’t go into complete mental hibernation. So, during my latest round of experiments, I discovered that an episode of “The Shadow” lasts almost exactly as long as a single plate. There’s no danger of me getting distracted, because I have to switch fields faster than I could write down data, so I’d just been recording the whole thing to watch on playback (in accelerated speed for easier counting) and coming in over the weekend to get the data. So, I prepare the blood sample, set up the flow chamber, start flow, pop in an 70-year old radio show, and go to town. Then, on Sunday, I come in, pop another show in, and play two episodes for every plate as I take the data off the tapes.
At the moment, I’ve got something on the order of 230 episodes in MP3. It’s been doing wonders for keeping me awake and alert during the process.
Review? Nah. I’ve burned through so many in an afternoon, I’d never catch up. I’m actually kinda convinced that “The Shadow” shouldn’t be taken in such large doses, because I’ve had Orson Wells’s voice haunting me with some of the catch-phrases the same way you’ll get a song stuck in your head. It’s been going on for a few days now, and I’m starting to worry. “The weed of crime.....bears bitter fruit. Crime does NOT pay.....the Shadow knows....MuuuhaahaahahhaHAHHAHAHHHAH!”
But I have really started to appreciate the workings of the show. Lamont Cranston’s invisibility, telepathy, and ventriloquism really are very simple tricks to the people who read comic books even a decade after he first went on the air, but its very simplicity lends to wonderfully elaborate stories. (Not all the time, there’s some stinkers in there too, but not as many as you’d think.) Half the time the Shadow just becomes a hound, Orson’s exquisite voice worrying away at the conscience of the weakest link in a mob group. Other times a well placed taunt is enough to prompt rash and foolish action. And sometimes just being there and discovering the nefarious plot is sufficient to undo the villain of the week.
‘Course, there’s some signs of the times in the shows as well. I’m certain that a couple of the episodes would’ve been considered extremely open-minded at the time, but they’d get a much cooler reception these days. An (Australian) aboriginal makes an appearance in “Message from the Hills”, and though he’s the “village chief” he’s a slow-talking cliché of the “noble savage”. He ends up saving the day by calling telepathically for the Shadow when his white master’s (their words, not mine) diamond mine is raided by a military group, and telepathic calls get a group of natives to hunt down and kill those who flee the Shadow. No doubt it was considered a generous characterization to give the tribal elder mental powers a fraction of the Shadow’s and a noble world-weary ever-enduring attitude, but honestly the characterization is tainted by the condescension shown in a more stereotypical episode “White God” where an evil scientist with a few simple tricks convinces an island full of “natives” to worship him as a god and perform live sacrifice. (Extremely weird episode, BTW. Discovering one female victim who survived, the Shadow convinces her to appear before the village while he speaks for her. “Surely the appearance of you come back from the dead and speaking in a masculine voice will overawe these simple natives.”)
On the other hand, there’s a few in there that are really laudable. If I’m not mistaken, when the Shadow goes up against “The White Legion” he’s actually fighting the KKK in proxy. The KKK’s history is particularly nasty, as you can well guess, but cast a much wider shadow than most people know. HUGE membership peaking out in the early 30’s (doing this from memory so may be a bit off) with massive political influence (able to hand-pick governors and senators through a combination of intimidation and old-fashioned baby kissing, it wasn’t just after blacks, but Jews, Catholics, (hate to admit it, but it was largely a Protestant membership) immigrants, and anyone who got in its way. Downfall was rather spectacular and came about some time in the mid 30’s. A young charismatic leader of the group, groomed for the top position, took an admiring lady-friend on-board a train during a long journey. The young woman was raped and brutalized so badly by the man that she died a day later, shortly after she was able to give a full account to the police. The man went up on trial, and when he discovered that the KKK didn’t feel like getting him off the charges, he spilled _everything_.
I’d like to think better of the show, and that it swung out before the public tide turned against the KKK, but it’s likely that this episode came some time after the court and newspaper explosion that brought the KKK crumbling down. Anyway, “The White Legion” had all the earmarks of the KKK. Masks and hoods, kidnapping people in broad daylight to stand before mock “juries” before executions. Even a position somewhat recognizable as a “Grand Dragon”. And, of course, the rampant political corruption when it’s found that the head of the Legion is the Judge in the State Court, trying the very cases the White Legion was accused of.
Hoo, let’s see.... some of the inventive ones... “Circle of Death” was a nice inventive one. Simpleton madman who hates crowds is setting off bombs in the theater district, killing dozens, but they can’t figure out how he’s getting the bombs in. Turns out he’s just a night watchman in the subway under construction. He steals some blasting dynamite from the worker’s shed, climbs up under the street, and when a car stops at the stoplight overhead he lifts out a manhole cover and tapes the bomb to the undercarriage. Lights a two-minute fuse and four blocks later it blows up. Remarkably clever.
One of the more ghoulish ones (“Death Beneath the Chapel”......there’s a lot of “...of Death” in these titles. It might even be where the cliché started...) involved an academic philosopher shriveled by disease who has to be carried around by a deaf-mute servant. The philosopher, affected by his condition, develops a bleak and miserable philosophy which he passes on to his students, resulting in their suicides. When the dean fires him, he plans to blow up the graduating class during the rehearsal. There’s a really neat ending, but it’s too complicated to go into.
Then, of course there is the Shadow’s most nefarious villain. One that plagues him constantly, through “Triangle of Death” to “Firebug” to “Rescue on Death Row.” The villain I call “Cotton Wool” who nefariously wraps himself around the actor’s microphones and prevents us from understanding a single word of the following adventure. Ah well. I suppose some degradation should be expected after 70 years.
One last note on the Shadow. Apparently Pennsylvania Blue Coal only sponsored the show for the first season. They were followed (thus far) by the far more insipid and annoying Goodrich tire company. After being warned only a few times about the dangers of skids and blowouts....about the “windshield wiper effect” of the Goodrich “lifestop” tires.....I was more than ready to hear once again how my family might be saved from the troublesome colds and chills that come with irregular on-again off-again heating by sending today for a trial ton of Pennsylvania Blue Coal....ask for it by name!
Heh.
Hey, if anyone wants to tell me how I'd do it, I'll consider putting one of the better episodes up for download. Share the wealth and all that.</lj-cut>
So, enough about the evil that lurks in the minds of men. Let’s read some pleasanter fare. Like <lj-cut text="Lemony Snicket!">Lemony Snicket!
The other way I’ve been managing to multitask my entertainment is by reading on my way to and from work and when I take my lunch. In this way I’ve plunged my way all the way up to the sixth book of “The Unpleasant Sequence of Events”, which is through the entire second box set (entitled “The Situation Worsens”). For those few of you who were wondering, no Count Olaf (not Orloff......gahd) didn’t saw off his leg, it was just another disguise. However, he did, once again, manage to bump off the orphan’s latest guardian in the end of “The Wide Window”. That book also contained my favorite quotes from the books thus far. The first was on the occasion that the author, in a typically melancholy way, broke into the narrative at a particularly depressing point to soliloquize his own sympathies.
“Oh, and how I wish I could go back in time to that very moment, back to comfort them in all their despair and tell them that their beloved aunt was not, in fact, dead.”
“Yet.”
The second one doesn’t require any real setup: “Of course, as you all know, if you are allergic to a thing, then you must never put that thing in your mouth. Especially if that thing is cats.”
Heh.
There are similar good lines in the other books, but not quite as memorable. After their aunt is eaten by a horde of leeches, the children are shipped off to their next relative who immediately puts them to work in his lumber mill (The Miserable Mill). This is probably the dullest of the books thus far, involving hypnotism, Count Olaf in drag, and the vision of an infant debarking a tree with her teeth, but it is notable for two points. A) for the first time, a relative of the Baudelaires survives their Angela-Landsbury-like presence, but B) for once, one of the ancillary villains is the one who “gets it” when she (in the only scene I can think of like this in a children’s book) accidentally backs into the big cartoony lumbermill saw.
I just have this vision, Edward Gorey-like of little ink-oval children staring in awe-struck horror as they’re being splattered with flying gore.
What?
After that, they’re sent off to school (“The Austere Academy”, I was beginning to wonder when they'd have to go to school) where they’re picked on by classmates, made to run infinite laps, live in a shack infested with crabs (uh.....the shellfish type) and finally make friends. The Quagmire triplets. Both of them. The Quagmire triplets are in a position of misfortune equal to the Baudelaire children’s vis-à-vis their being orphaned by a fire and having a great fortune they aren’t allowed access to yet, and then they become even more equal vis-à-vis Count Olaf, who succeeds in kidnapping and whisking away the Baudelaires’ new friends by the end of the book, right before Violet, Klaus, and Sunny get expelled. (Fav. Quote: “Shyness is a curious thing, because, like quicksand, it can strike people at any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down.")
At loose ends again, they go to live with yet another relative, just as ineffectual and simpering as the rest, and manage to get themselves thrown down a 67 story elevator shaft, visit the ashes of their old homestead, and arrive just in time to not rescue the Quagmire triplets from Count Olaf, who whisks them away again. I liked this book (“The Ersatz Elevator”) primarily because it’s one of the few other places that I’ve encountered the proper use of “ersatz”.
Oh, for those interested in the movie, I’ve bothered to locate a trailer: http://www.unfortunateeventsmovie.com/enter.html?e=pxqhug0jw9
It looks like they mean to do the first three of the books in one movie. Doesn’t bode well, but could be amusing, depending on your ability to tolerate Jim Carrey. (Bruce Almighty is just over the edge of my Carrey tolerance, and I couldn’t bear to catch a moment of “The Grinch.”)</lj-cut>
Finally, a movie review! Which one?
Well, not Spiderman 2. Yeah, I saw it, but so did you, so what’s the point? I will echo Lilek’s point that “when we were kids reading the Spiderman comic, we didn’t think we would ever actually see fights this cool.” I could nitpick the little pieces (apparently Stan Lee’s full time job now is to pull little children out of the way of falling masonry) but instead I’ll just note that Doc Oc’s exit line “I will not die a monster” is hella cool.
Haven’t seen Catwoman. Yeah, I know, you all wanted me to rip it to pieces for you. Well, chew your own damn steak for once, there’s only so much I’ll subject myself to for y’all.
Haven’t seen “The Village,” which I’m now hearing sucked, but I’ll probably see it anyway. Gotta give credit for a cool trailer, though.
Nothing else is coming out, is it? Good, I gots me no money anyway.
And no, the review isn’t the massive epic I’ve been promising. The workload has been bearing down on me too much to even contemplate starting that, and I have a wedding this coming weekend out in Colorado I have to attend, so I won’t be able to write it up then either.
Hell, I’ll get started on a bit of it after this. The size is the intimidating thing. If I don’t break the livejournal limit twice on the review, I won’t have done my job properly.
But in the meantime I’ll select something from the pile o’ crap horror that’s been accumulating (well...accumulated.... haven’t added to it recently and the three-tier mount DVD is starting to tilt....fail me not, Jenga skills).
Oh....y’all are screwed. It’s a Brentwood box set. I just can’t seem to stop buying these things. No extras in the whole box, but come on....$15.50 for ten movies? Who could pass that up?
So, for your approval <lj-cut text="The Demon">“The Demon”
This is, surprisingly, a fairly not-suck movie. This is surprising because the first 60% of it is REALLY fucking boring. It took me three tries to get through this film (I was trying to watch it on sequential nights after my shower, and it just didn’t hold my attention enough to want to keep watching it. It’s also really stupidly structured, but we’ll come back to that.
We start on a dark night. Not stormy, but oppressively muggy with menace. A strange man breaks into a secluded house and kidnaps a young girl from her bed. (Don't worry, no "Last House on the Left" this.) The kidnapper, it turns out, is a serial killer with his own special style. He strangles people with a length of cord while wrapping a plastic bag over their heads. He tried to kill the girl’s mom this way (but fails when dad comes home early), and later, hitchhiking on the road, he’s picked up by a guy who JUST WON’T SHUT UP, and does him in in the same way.
Bleh. Thus far nothing to write home about. Well, settle down for the long haul, there’s a lot more to get through.
The parents of the murdered girl call upon the services of a psychic, Cameron Mitchell. (Think William Shatner only older, and with a more controllable......manner of.......talking. He’s been in a HELL of a lot of flicks, but his career coasted downward near the end, and he ended up in a lot of low-grade fare like “The Toolbox Murders” and this piece.) There’s some lengthy acting...and then some more acting...and then there’s a long scene where he molests the pillow from the absent girl’s room.
Of course, that’s a bit unfair. The story tells us he’s trying to pick up a vibe on the killer so he can see into the killer’s mind. Mitchell does about as well with the scene as he can, considering the material he’s been given. Poor guy.
Now we get REALLY boring. We go to a couple of completely unrelated women (Jennifer Holmes....remember “Misfits of Science?”...looking remarkably like Kim Cattrail in a couple of scenes) in another town teaching kindergarten. One’s apparently been selected by the serial killer as his next victim. Now we just wander for a half an hour or so. The psychic keeps trying to tune in on the killer, and manages occasional flashes, but nothing useful ever comes of it. The target and her roommate go out and have dates. Mr. killer shows up in the background of a few scenes to spook them occasionally, and makes an attempt on someone else, but nothing’s really moving the plot forward. There’s even a gang fight, eight guys against the killer, and he takes them all out, but it’s got nothing to do other than demonstrate his strength. It all feels disconnected, like we’re watching different films spliced together. And there’s a reason for that. The film desperately tries to keep our attention with occasional nude scenes (and severely dates itself when we spot a billboard for The Amityville Horror in the background, or when we notice an apartment where the shag carpeting is crawling up and consuming the furniture like kudzu) but really, it’s just marking time.
Things only start moving 55 minutes in, when the father of the missing girl spots a sign from the psychic’s memory, and goes in to investigate. The killer turns out to be ready for him, and breaks his neck while lifting him off the ground with that classic Victorian strength. (You know, the old horror stories where a man didn’t have to be eight feet tall and disfigured to be monstrously strong. Where Hyde was merely a man with the will to carry out his evil whims. Where strength could be wearing a waistcoat and watch, and hold out his fists in the Marquis of Queensbury manner. Eh, that was my impression, but I doubt that’s what was intended. Just that the killer uses raw, brutal strength.)
So. The father dies. Same day, the body of the girl is discovered strung up a tree and skeletonized. (At least, I guess it was the girl. There’s a scene, and some kids find a body...and then we cut away. That’s it. No id-ing of the body or anything.) So the psychic goes back to the mother to express his condolences. So she shoots him.
Wait....... WHAT?
That means the entire first hour of this ninety minute film was a completely pointless segue.
Killer kidnaps girl. Psychic advises. Father goes for vengeance. Girl dies, father dies, psychic dies. ENTIRE FIRST 2/3 OF MOVIE CUT OFF FROM THE FILM. Who the hell’s idea was this? What was the point? We didn’t learn anything or progress the plot.
What complete crap.
So, we join our other movie on track B and go back to the kindergarten teachers.
GOING ON ANOTHER DATE. *sigh* It’s sweet and all, but where the hell is the plot? What does this have to do with anything? Another extended nude scene to distract us from the swiftly disintegrating movie. (No, neither of the boyfriends is the killer. He’s shown preparing while both women are in bed with their respective dates.)
It gets a little better with the concerned boyfriends finally being told about the girls’ stalker, but nothing comes of it.
Finally.....FINALLY we get to the good part. And I don’t just mean that because the killing starts, I mean that, very suddenly, we find a gem in this dungheap. Segments good enough, suspenseful, horrific, and well-executed enough to rewatch. I also finally clue into what’s going on.
The film is trying to ape Halloween. It’s not obvious unless you’re actually watching it, but the psychic is playing a character very similar to Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), the expert who is constantly issuing dire warnings that aren’t taken seriously...running around the city hunting for the killer because of his special knowledge, but always arriving just a moment too late. The main girl, of course, is Jamie Lee Curtis, running around (we’ll come to that) barely clothed, fleeing the killer throught the house before finally improvising a way to fight back. Of course the others victims from Halloween are all wrapped up in the girl’s roommate, who lies laid out and dead for our target to find. And, most importantly, the killer is Michael Myers. Brutal, unstoppable, but almost casual in the way he strolls after his victims. The killer here is a bit more human, but there’s still that edge of almost mechanical progression of killing that we see in Michael or the later Jasons. Even the garb is vaguely familiar, they both wear whitish plastic masks, and dark, uniform garb. Workman’s blue jumpsuit for Myers, long leather coat and jeans for this guy. Further, Myers’s anonymity is imitated here by a fairly clever director avoiding ever filming the killer’s face. Mostly. There’s a few brief flashes where we see general features, but we never get more than that. The camera’s always pointed to one side, or it’s dark, or moving, or he’s wearing the mask.
He gets into the house by strangling the first girl’s boyfriend in the car when she’s dropped off, and then simply knocking on the front door. The girl (first one home) doesn’t think to check the peephole, and he floors her with a surprisingly brutal uppercut, knocking her out, and then carrying her upstairs to kill her elsewhere.
Truly classic moment when our target girl is dropped off by her boyfriend, and they’re reassured by the presence of the other boyfriend’s car, not spotting his corpse in the driver’s seat. Long, nicely structured suspense as the second woman prepares for bed, unknowing that the killer is in the house and her friend is already dead. Good contrasts of light and dark, well edited, really surprisingly good pseudo-Italian considering the crap that came before. Then, just as she’s catching on, the killer throws the fusebox. What follows is classic slasher fare. Finding she’s locked in, discovered bodies, lots of screaming (whoa, whatta pair of lungs), really startling soundtrack, concerned-but-not-enough-to-interfere neighbors, chases that run round and around the house while the killer plods after, breaking down flimsy doors, throwing furniture around, etc. Hell, a random radio even turns on and recites a passage from Revelations 19: “and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.” I suppose the parallel of blood was actually what they were going for, and not the Jesus Christ analogy.
She actually finds a working phone and calls her boyfriend for help, which, as always, is completely useless, but for such an absurd reason. He charges out to his car to drive to the rescue, and the key breaks off in the lock. Similarly, when the girl tries the front door, the handle comes off in her hand. A wonderful “you have got to be KIDDING me!” moment, there.
She actually escapes into the crossbeams in the ceiling, but dropping her robe in her hurry. (Yeah, naturally.) While she’s crawling around in the ceiling, trying to remove some tiles so she can get out, there’s a great scene of the killer shredding the robe in fury, shown in shadows on the wall. See, there’s another innovative aspect of the story here. The killer actually has razor-fingered gloves, the first incident of that particular toy that I’m aware of. Pre-empts Freddy by about five years.
Anyway, he eventually follows her up into the attic, they fall through the ceiling, there’s more chasing around, and finally she turns, improvises a trap, and stabs the guy in the neck. He ends up bleeding out in the bathtub. Honestly, this part looks kinda lame, and in perhaps the most surprising turn of the film, he’s never unmasked. We never see what his face actually looks like, although, weirdly, he doesn’t appear to be wearing a mask in some scenes. We’re looking at his face (looks just like pale makeup) then cut away, then cut back and a grayish-white mask is now slightly detached from his face. I can see a much cleverer movie lurking under these few throwaway points. Something about a hideous killer manifesting demon-like attributes. “Becoming” his killing gear by melding with the mask/razor gloves, truly becoming a blank slate defined only by his killing of other people. There was a little of this in the film. At one point he disappears at will in plain sight. There was just a little bit of an interesting “is he supernatural or not” question. If this is what they were actually trying for, though, then they were either too unskilled or too obtuse, or had too little money to do it correctly.
In summary, twenty minutes worth watching in a 90 minute movie. Thank God for the fast-forward button. It should also be noted that the print is terribly dark. Several scenes were practically unwatchable. Most of the rest of the scenes were just pointless.
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Shamu vs. Blondie
2004-07-26 02:06:11
(Aside: sorry everyone. Neither the epic review (trying to track down two missing volumes before I start) nor the political rant (in an effort to piss some of you off, I have to hunt down a few Bible passages for a pre-rant before I start) this time. Coming eventually.)
How utterly absurd.
So let’s say, just for the sake of it, that I, somehow, have managed to earn the truly momentous privilege of getting an office at work. True, it’s only because other people who haven’t been here as long as me have graduated leaving the slot empty and my status as most senior senior in the whole building means they have to begrudgingly give the slot to me, but nonetheless, it’s a privilege and it’s got four solid walls, a door and a window, and it’s all for me.
And the two people I’m sharing it with.
But that’s OK, ‘cause they’re really quiet, and don’t have any annoying habits that I’ve detected as of yet.
Of course...my furniture consists of a desk.
That’s it.
No chair.
The really ironic thing is that one of the other girls has also just moved in, and she didn’t get a chair either, so she just brought along a chair from her old desk. But I can’t do that. Why?
Because someone has stolen the chair from my old desk.
That’s OK, though, because I never really used my desk for working anyway. There was no computer on my old desk, so all I could do there was write longhand (something I rarely do at this point, since my handwriting on unlined paper has degenerated to the point that I’m the only one who can read it) or read, and I could do that just as well sitting on one of the labstools at the lab computers. (Those are four feet tall, so no using those in the office either.)
So I head out into the hall and snitch a chair from the lunch spot until the wing manager can order me a new chair. Problem solved.
‘cept I can’t really move into my office yet. Because I don’t have a filing cabinet for the three metric tons of scientific journal papers and assorted illegible notes that are stored up in nicely ordered ragheaps on my desk. Oh, my old desk has a filing cabinet, sure. But I can’t take that one into my new office. Why?
Because the maintenance people waxed it to the floor.
Yeah, glued it right down solid. They did something similar to a shipping crate that we’d received an artery bioreactor in, and when we sent it back for a redesign we thought the thing was made of lead. Till we pried it up and took about two square feet of tile with it. Oops.
So all the papers have to be sorted for usefulness to try and get some of them to fit into my new office. Slow and tedious process, but that’s OK, ‘cause I’ll finally get to do work at the floor level, sitting in a normal chair, with some kind of a damper for all the noise in the lab wing. ‘cept I can’t move my computer into the office. Why?
It’s connected to the only working printer in the lab.
(Going to break form here, since it’s the only part of the whole mess that actually pisses me off. I go to move the computer into the office, and one of my lab mates goes “Wait! You can’t do that! Someone might have to print something!” So I ask what she advises instead, and I’m told to put the thing back. Then my boss comes in later that day, I start to pose the question, and a group, including the SAME PERSON who told me to put the computer back interrupts the question with an extended explanation of what I SHOULD’VE DONE. An explanation that actually makes NO FUCKING SENSE. I’m too exasperated to rebut in front of my boss, he takes on the “do I have to tell you people everything?” attitude, and leaves. I confront the person in question, and she basically admits that she had no idea what she was talking about, as does the rest of the group. And they INTERRUPTED THE QUESTION with their nonsense answer.)
Anyway, I manage to get my computer into the office, set it all up, even print to the lab printer without any problems. All’s good, right? ‘cept I don’t have a key. Security concerns, gotta go through channels, get the paperwork filled out. Should only take a couple of days. Expecting it Monday.
Which means I come into work today and realize I’m locked outta my office, with all my work inside. Clever, huh? Do all the cell culture work, come back to my room, try to do the work from there. Not much progress, so I figure going into work to have access to the stuff that hadn’t made it into the office yet is better than nothing. I leave the car behind so I won’t be tempted to knock off early. And I take along the third Lemony Snicket book.
Yeah, it’s a kid’s book. I spotted that it was going to be made into a movie (starring Jim Carrey as the evil Count Orloff) so I was a bit curious and regarded the books with the same bemused regard that everyone regarded the first Harry Potter book when it came out. Besides, it looked suspiciously like a cross between Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey, and with ingredients like that, how can you go wrong? I’ve grown a touch curious about children’s books lately when it became evident (through HP) that someone had discovered that children would read truly enormous books if they were actually well written. So when a friend tossed me the first box set of books (and a reassurance that I could burn through each in about an hour) I took her up on the offer. All the reading I get done now is done during the walk to work, so they’re just about the right length to take ten pages at a time. Hell, she handed me the box set yesterday night, and I’m already on the third now. They really do only take about an hour and a half apiece. (I understand there’s eleven thus far, but this box set tops out at three.)
A review? Eh, why not. Not like it’ll take long. The books themselves are about 160 pages apiece, but the books are physically tiny, almost exactly the dimensions of Tokyopop’s releases of Helsing (sorry, HelLsing) or related titles. There’s an illustration at the start of each chapter that’s very reminiscent of Edward Gorey without actually imitating his style. More detail than you’d find in Dahl’s books either, while reminding me of....something. There was a comic that Dark Horse put out called “The Nevermen” which has a style a bit reminiscent. Somewhere between stained glass and Gorey. The writing is set at about half the reading level of Harry Potter. Very linear stories carefully explained out at each step. The narrator intrudes all the time, most typically in entreatments for the reader to put the book down and find something more pleasant.
You see, the books are titled “A series of Unfortunate Events” for a reason. They concern the adventures, if “adventures” is the proper term for it, of the three Baudelair children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. The first book “The Bad Beginning” starts off, after multiple requests from the author for the reader to turn their attention to some pleasanter fare, with the three children being orphaned, as their parents, their home, and all their possessions are burnt up in a house fire. Things go rather downhill from there. Living briefly with a secondary character named Mr. Poe, who, as is typical of all the friendly adults in this book, is remarkably dense when you are trying to tell him something, the children are quickly shuttled off to be adopted by and live with their nearest living relative, Count Orlof.
Count Orlof is the villain in the book, and he’s a Villain with a capital “V”. Naturally, he treats the children horribly, making them do awful chores, providing only a single bed for the three of them (so they have to take turns), and keeping the house a disgusting mess. Spindly, uni-browed, and sporting a personal motif (an eye) tattooed on his ankle, he’s an actor with a horrible freakshow of a theater troupe, all of whom follow his direction in his horrible plans.
What plans? Well, rest assured, dear reader, that he’d have nothing at all to do with the children if there wasn’t a good reason for it. It seems that Violet’s parents had left their sizeable fortune in a trust fund for her when she turns eighteen (she’s the oldest, at fourteen, Klaus somewhere around ten, and Sunny young enough that she’s not actually able to talk yet.) and Orloff is determined to get his grimy fingers on that money. The first book basically covers his first attempt, in which he tries to trick Violet into marrying him under the pretext of performing in one of his troupe’s plays, so he’d have complete control of her assets. Klaus, the bookworm of the group, with the help of a friendly neighbor, figures out the plot. Orloff convinces the children to go along with it anyway by the simple expedient of tying and duct-taping up Sunny, placing her in a birdcage, and hanging her out of a third story window in the house. They don’t play along, and he’ll drop her. As if that wasn’t bad enough, one of Orloff’s henchmen makes it quite clear that Orloff will be doing away with them as soon as he’s got their money anyway. Violet, the “inventor” of the group, tries a daring rescue with a cobbled-together grappling hook, but fails. Eventually, the trio outsmart Orloff, Violet escapes matrimony, but Orloff escapes the clutches of the police, free to menace them for (presumeably) the rest of the books.
Sure enough, Orloff shows up in the very next book, “The Reptile Room”. Mr. Poe has tracked down another distant relative of the orphans for them to be adopted by. In a respite from what is sure to be the misery that will typify the rest of their lives, this relative is wonderfully pleasant to be around. Montgomery Montgomery is a world famous herpetologist who keeps an enormous glass-walled room filled with the snakes and lizards and toads that he’s collected from around the world. Of especial interest is a brand new snake which Dr. Montgomery has just discovered, and is named “The Incredibly Deadly Viper.” Naturally, it’s not poisonous.
Dr. Montgomery is preparing for a trip to Peru to further his studies and plans to bring the children along with him. Naturally, they are thrilled, and bury themselves in the tasks of research and preparation he’s set them to. But, of course, it’s all gone bad.
Count Orloff, in disguise, shows up at the house as a new assistant for Dr. Montgomery. He’s shaved off the unibrow, grown a beard, and painted over the tattoo on his ankle. The children instantly see through the disguise, but aren’t able to tell Dr. Montgomery of the danger he’s in, because every time one of the opens their mouth, Orloff slides a long wicked-looking knife out of his pocket and stands ready to stab one of the other siblings to death. Orloff’s plan this time around, apparently, is to spirit the children off to Peru, where the children can be done away with more readily and he can once again get at their money.
Dr. Montgomery actually senses something is wrong, and makes to leave his ersatz assistant behind on the trip, but before the orphans can anticipate Orloff’s next move, the Count kills off the kindly Uncle in the night by injecting him with snake venom and faking a snake bite. Once again, Klaus’s reading and Violet’s inventing come to their rescue (with an assist by Sunny), Orloff fouls himself up with his own boasting, and once again Orloff makes his escape out from under Mr. Poe’s nose.
And the children are homeless again.
Thus far in the third book, their new relative is well-intentioned but not nearly up to Dr. Montgomery’s standards, and Orloff has just put in his appearance, in disguise once more. Apparently, to avoid being identified by his tattoo, he’s sawn his own leg off and replaced it with a peg. If this trend of gradual mutilation of Orloff continues throughout the book, he’ll resemble nothing so much as Steerpike.
The four of you who got that can pat yourselves on the back.
So how are the books? For what they are, they’re surprisingly enjoyable. The author’s melancholy writing almost perfectly apes the constant impending doom of Edward Gorey’s drawing style, while retaining that same touch of over-the-top humor. You can almost see the rough sketchy outlines of ovoid-headed children playing unwittingly at the edge of a cliff. Plus, there’s a bare handful of things in the book that make you realize it’s written while keeping in mind that many of these books will be read to children by their parents. Like the recent trend of slipping more mature humor into allegedly child-targeted films. The best example thus far is in the second book, during descriptions of the reptile room.
“Are there any snakes in this room that are dangerous?” Violet asked
“Of course,” Uncle Monty said. “You can’t study snakes for forty years without encountering some dangerous ones... There is a snake in this room whose venom is so deadly that you heart would stop before you even knew he’d bitten you. There is a snake who can open her mouth so wide she could swallow all of us, together, in one gulp. There is a pair of snakes who have learned to drive a car so recklessly that they would run you over in the street and never stop to apologize....”
Later on, the children learn about the care of the snakes. “He taught them not to give the Green Gimlet Toad too much water, and to never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian Wolfsnake near a typewriter.”
The only other thing of note about these books, is they’re the most aggressive attempt I’ve ever seen at increasing children’s vocabulary. Every time a word longer than two syllables crops up, it’s followed by a phrase or two explaining it in terms a young reader would understand, and usually with a touch of humor added. This is doubly impressive in that the author also explains “dramatic irony” “hackneyed” and “cliché” simply enough that it would correct even the most egregious abuser. And by “egregious” I mean “a person who does a bad thing repeatedly without caring for the consequences” and by “consequences” I mean “I have been reading too much Lemony Snicket.”
All in all, I approve. They’re no Roald Dahl, but then Dahl never really did much in the way of book series (excepting “The Great Glass Elevator”, sequel to that Chocolate Factory book), so we’ll accept the failings as they stand. I confess, though, that I don’t know how they made a movie out of the first book. There just isn’t all that much there. They could tell the whole story in 40 minutes without leaving anything out. Stretching it to 90 means A) it’s a musical or B) it’s gonna be really stylistic and artsy, or C) it’s gonna suck. Possibly all three.
So, anyway, I walk to work, reading the book, and find the office open! Halleluiah! Both of my office-mates are there working away, so I settle down and do a good 4-5 hours work. Remembering something I’d forgotten to feed, I step outside to warm up the media, get myself a snack, and come back to find the office locked. With all my work inside.
And Lemony Snicket dammit.
The book must be better written than I’d thought. I wanna know what happens. The office’s only window is exactly positioned so I can see my book sitting just where I can’t get at it.
Then I step outside, and it immediately starts pouring.
Good thing I left my car at home, right?
A dash all the way back to the car at my apartment, hit a drivethrough, and come into my room with a soggy combo meal from Krystal.
And the cable’s out.
I’m not even mad, it’s just sort of a gape-mouthed gesture at the sky.
What? Really, what? Did I miss a memo?
On an entirely different note, and at hyper-speed while my hair dries so I can get to bed:
Hellsing the manga SUCKS.
Good GOD this is badly written.
Seriously, TJ, thanks for the loan, I do appreciate it for satiating my curiosity, but this stuff is some of the worst comic tripe I’ve read in ages. Every. Single. Character. Has their attitude dialed to eleven. Every frame has WWF entrance music playing behind it. This is the biggest problem I have with much of the anime and manga coming out, namely that every character has reverted to the “badass of all badasses” type, especially the heroes. I’ve reviewed Hellsing the anime before, so it should be enough to say that they kept everything I abhorred, and removed everything I liked. They’ve amped up the “Cripps vs. Bloods” Protestant vs. Catholic turf war to the level of a video game (geeeeee hos-a-phat....do they have any Christians of any denomination on their staff, or are they just winging it from rejected scripts of “Judge”?). They’ve practically removed all the nice subtle “what monster am I becoming” moments from Serias, and reduced it to.....well....to her saying exactly that line and nothing more. It’s all just big splash pages of anti-tank rounds tearing through animate corpses and Alucard being the badass king badass of all badass’ badasses. And the two water balloons stapled to Serias’s chest. (Dear Lord, who makes their shirts?) Worst of all was the degeneration of Ingress. They still fuck up the “Sir” thing in translation, but I liked her in the anime as the reserved but hard-as-nails slavedriver boss of the unit. Her entrance in the comics had me flashing back to that initial hint of dominatrix in Motoko’s introduction in the first TV series. (Cigarello’s were a nice touch, though.) I swear, this property must’ve been bought for an anime based solely on a couple of cool character designs. Serias’s semi-corpse look is a bit better in the manga, Ingress is still pretty good, and I suppose Alucard apes Vash enough to draw in the crowds (done better in the anime IMHO). The only thing I actually benefited from reading the manga is that I found out A) the Judas Priest (heh) speaks with a nearly unreadable Irish brogue, and B) the “trowel swords” I’d been trying to figure out previously from the anime aren’t trowels, but bayonets.
Which still doesn’t succeed in making sense. -
Blerg. Eat kitty.
2004-06-20 23:13:08
Grahhhhh. Crap. Got work to do, and absolutely no motivation to do it. Bunch ‘a stuff. Some of it important. And late.
God I’m tired.
Got blood on Friday, dammit, which meant punking out on my teaching-assistant responsibilities and working until 5:30 AM. Which meant getting to bed by 6:30 and up at 11:00 (to turn up the FUCKING THERMOSTAT.....I hate undergrad roommates) so I could go out and buy ready-made hamburger patties and like 8 bottles of soda to take to the AWA staffer’s picnic, to which other people brought truly absurd amounts of food, and barely dented my contribution, sending me out to Winder for the weekly game half-conscious and carrying raw meat. The game was under-attended, little progress was made, and on the first fight occasion following my taking one (count ‘em ONE) single solitary level of “Frenzied Brezerker”, I absurdly failed my will save and killed one PC and four NPCs in ONE ROUND.
How? Well, our traveling accountant turns out to be something of a hovering nuclear warhead if you hit him hard enough.
New record, but not exactly a good thing.
Drive back to work at 2:00 AM, work another hour, crash at home at 4:00 AM, then have to get up at 11:00 again because my mom, laid up by her eye, couldn’t make it out to shop for Father’s day, and I was sent to proxy-purchase stuff, bring it home, and present it.
Hung out with the folks for a couple of hours, came back here and crashed for two hours. Felt like shit, and while the nap woke me up, I now have that scummy “was I drooling all over my face?” feeling you get when you crash in your clothes and someone turns down the thermostat again. Vile taste in my mouth.
Poked in a bored manner at the work I had to do for an hour or so, but I’ve given up at this point. Boss will be displeased, but he was never really clear on what was expected anyway, so I’ll just go with that tack tomorrow morning.
And now I find out I missed Mike’s birthday. Dammit. Woulda’ gotten him something too. Not sure what, but I coulda’ gotten it while out doing my own Father’s day shopping.
OH! Father’s Day. I have one exceedingly cool father. How so? For Father’s Day, I got him: the latest Asterix book (he has a complete set of the English translations stretching all the way back to the 60’s), two Marx brother’s movies (A Day at the Races, and A Night in Casablanca), and a book called “Dr. Seuss Goes to War,” a collection of Dr. Seuss’s editorial cartoons from 1942-1943.
That shopping was actually done on Thursday, simultaneous with a beerfest movie-search on the occasion of me not getting blood Thursday. The only real kindred spirit at my work is a friend of mine who works in the confocal microscopy room. Everyone else that I see on a regular basis in the building is just boring as hell. No common ground to converse from. Anyway, on a previous occasion he and I hung out after work, broke out an 8-pack of Guinness, and watched Buckaroo Banzai. This time I didn’t have anything really good to proffer (he was unimpressed by mount DVD, not being a primary horror fan) so we hit up Borders while doing Father’s day shopping. Found out that he’d missed Fight Club, so we settled on it. Great film. Might review it in the context of the chauvinist text it is (what....feminist text isn’t pejorative but chauvinist is?) should enough interesting material turn up in the commentaries.
No reviews this time. Plenty still piled up (God help me, I’ve started in on another Brentwood Box set) but I haven’t the motivation. Just trying to find something to do for the last hour or so of this weekend before I’ve got to hit the sack again. First free time all weekend. Naturally, don’t know what to do with myself.
Oh, did notice my first official unfriending. Nity appears to have cast me off as so much dross.
Eh.
Disappointed but not entirely surprised. We “friended” one another from a “friend whoring” post of ferrett’s, where people were looking for new link-ups. Next to nothing in common, and my rather lackluster posting as of late probably caused her to loose interest during a housecleaning of her links. To be honest, I’m not sure when she de-friended, since hunting around now reveals that she’s gone friends-only, the lj equivalent of pulling all the shades down and turning out the lights when the Fuller Brush man shows up on your doorstep. That’s more disappointing, since she’s quite intelligent and holds some carefully-thought-out ideals on controversial topics.
Wait.....she was friends-only before. So she had to purposely trim me out, not just stop reading us individually. Awwww. Now I am feeling bad.
Oh well. I’m happy with my list. Barely have time to read them all already.
-
Are you drinking your Ovaltine?
2004-06-16 23:20:10
Oh for fun.... http://www.kontraband.com/index.asp?p=%2Fhtml%2Fall%2Fshow%2Easp%3FID%3D1327
Whoop. I left y’all hanging last time, didn’t I? Well, in brief, the news is very good. My mom’s detaching retina was caught quite early, they were able to do the laser surgery very quickly, and she’s healing much, much faster than anyone expected. She was supposed to be laid up for six weeks with an eyepatch, but it’s been only about ten days and the doctor’s already told her to take it off. The first four days were murder, though, ‘cause she had to keep both eyes covered (seeing something in her good eye would cause the post-operative one to track & focus, which it couldn’t do to heal properly) and she was bored, depressed, and frightened out of her mind. Cats did their best to help, but Sneakers is a regular space heater if he sits in your lap too long. I spent part of that weekend with her, and we “watched” the Belmont classic run.
It’s oppressively muggy outside right now, but that’s nothing like what it is in here. So much stuff to comment on going on in the world. So much crap going down everywhere and being mis-interpreted. Like the Nevada-chan thing, and the shock from some quarters about how the internet cliques adore this girl....making little anime-icons out of her. Me? I’m not surprised. This is happening in a country that made Issei Sagawa a talk-circuit celebrity after a clerical error during his extradition meant he was mistakenly released from custody. Far as I know, he’s still wandering around free.
And the politics. Ohhhh the politics. God, the things people will eat up unquestioningly.
But you know what? I haven’t the time. My time sans boss is rapidly drawing to a close (he was out of town) meaning oppressive loads of crap work should be descending on me very, very soon. Any attempt to address the issues of the day in the detail necessary to make informed decisions would take far more time than I could possibly manage. I barely have enough time to go through my e-mail as it is. Hell, I just spent a couple of hours composing a very carefully-worded response to an AMV question that I had to write up TWICE because the fucking window blinked out on me. Grahhhh.....
So where did all the attached text come from? Mostly it’s the stuff I was talking about in my last post, with some segments excised. It was rattled up one night when my internet connection went down hard and I was left with no way to do the work that I needed to. I may add another movie review to the bottom of the two here, but I went through and plucked out the incomplete political commentary, because it really did degrade into a rant, and I haven’t the time or energy right now to spell out the problems in detail. Ah well.
There’s always been a great deal of vigorous discussion about how the real world tends to drive down and bury the real “dreamers” of the world. “Dreamers” is usually taken to mean the highly creative and inventive individuals, among whom the speakers always count themselves, but it’s occurred to me recently that we’d be hard pressed to even really recognize dreamers if we encountered them. Dreamers really doesn’t refer to the painters and sculptors or writers (though, of course, those aren’t specifically excluded from their ranks either), but simply the people who are willing to open themselves to the possibilities the world, real or imagined, contains. Here, let me give you an example.
Neil Gamian linked a few weeks ago to a site that featured a group called “improv anywhere.” In it, the group told of their prank-like exploits in setting up a reading and a book signing for one “Anton Chekhov”. Yes, THE Chekhov. Despite the fact that he’s been dead for over a hundred years.
It was a grand old prank, with a full reading performed by a look-alike to an audience that was mixed parts confused and adoring. Making no attempt to dissuade the audience of their initial impression that this was, in fact, Anton Chekhov speaking to them, the less well-informed were quite excited. At the signing afterwards, they got their little signed copies of his plays and stood in line to speak with him for a few minutes or shake his hand, much to the bemusement of the “agent” members of the troupe wandering around and eavesdropping on the crowd to discover how well they’d pulled off their little stunt. In the sum-up, the “agents” estimated that the crowd was evenly divided into fourths. One fourth didn’t know who Anton Chekhov was. One fourth knew who he was, but didn’t know he was dead. One fourth knew who Anton Chekhov was, but really wasn’t sure whether he was dead or not. And the final fourth knew who he was, knew he was dead, and saw straight through their joke. Fortunately for the group, this last fourth contented themselves with an outburst of laughter before wandering off, and didn’t decide to ruin the game for everyone else.
None of those people, to my mind, are the dreamers. The dreamers, to me, are the people who knew who Anton Chekhov was, knew he was dead, and yet still hoped that this might be him.
Think about it. All of the stereotypical fantastic stories we read begin with something out of the ordinary happening, something inexplicable and fantastic, which the characters stumble into, and the most trusting, often those who don’t know better or those who dare to hope, get swept off on a great grand adventure. Remember reading these stories as a kid? Ever remember swearing to yourself that, if the situation ever presented itself to you, if a strangely bedecked alien stumbled into your home begging for help, or if a time traveler showed up on your doorstep, or a spy moved in next door, or you woke up in a strange otherworldly place, you wouldn’t hesitate, you wouldn’t give it a second thought, you’d throw in with this odd individual, leave your whole world behind, and charge off into the great unknown to have that grand adventure you know was just waiting for you?
Remember when you gave up that it was ever going to happen?
Well, here we had Anton Chekhov, one of the greatest playwrights ever, over a hundred years dead, signing books in the park. And, in surveying the crowd, the “agents” deduced that the only options available to the crowd were ignorance or ridicule.
Come ON! Something flat impossible standing right in front of you, and you don’t even consider for a moment “what if......what if it’s real?” You don’t think “time traveler”, “distortion in space”, “channeler of the dead”, “immortal”, “day pass from heaven”. You think “fraud.” The essence of those stories that you read as a kid were always that someone happened to be at just the right point at just the right time when the once-in-a-lifetime event happened. And that the character saw it, and, through chance or intent, TOOK it.
Instead, we snicker at the ones who believe, turn, and walk away.
Congratulations, we’ve delegated ourselves to the role of the inconsiderate, close-minded looser who gets left behind in chapter two.
What did this? What’s really killed the dreamers? Is it that we daren’t to believe in the fantastical anymore after so many years of disappointing mediocrity from the world? Fear of ridicule must play some part in it, it being such an essential part of the world we live in. There are few things worse than being laughed at these days, whether it be for our admiration of something that doesn’t pass muster with our peers, or beliefs which might be somehow discounted by a flippant yet biting oh-so-clever remark. We’re taught that imagination is a great boon, but only in the context of momentary diversions from our humdrum mediocrity. To actually follow through your imagination into the real world is either the retreat of the true losers or gullibility of the most extreme sort. No one over the age of twelve really believes that stage magicians can perform magic. Instead of a show of wonder and spectacle, magic shows are mental challenges. Rubix cubes for the audience members to puzzle over. Even the profession itself is determined to remove the old mysticism it’s acquired over the decades, insisting that we refer to the performers as “illusionists” instead of magicians...lest someone, you know, take the “magic” part seriously. And there’s always Penn and Teller to suck the last iota of wonder out of the performance by showing us the walk-through of how it’s done.
I dunno. Something bothered me about the Chekhov signing when I first read about it, and I’ve finally managed to put my finger on why. Thought y’all might consider my “insight” on the matter.
Me? Well, I try. I keep a few dreamer habits that most people would probably consider crazy if they knew about them, but honestly it got squelched out of me just like everyone else. I’ll tell you this, though. I would’ve gotten his signature.
Ah well, enough of that. The stack of flicks sitting here waiting for reviews has gotten pretty damn thick, so let’s see if I can’t whittle them down a bit since I’m stuck here at home with a non-functioning internet connection (dammit....I’ve got stuff that needs to be done tonight, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna go back into work just because I can’t get at my e-mail).
First up is probably old news for everyone, so I’ll be brief. I caught Shrek 2 a couple of days after opening night and went out to see this recent challenge to Disney’s supposed animation supremacy. Let’s see.....
Shrek 2 is awful. I mean, it’s just so damn improbable. And the plot holes! Really, how can they expect us to swallow all these inexplicable jumps? Like, if it took a week for Shrek to travel to the land of “Far Far Away”, how did Shrek’s friends come to his rescue in just a couple of hours? If Fiona is really in love with Shrek, why can’t she figure out the switch? If donkey is really in love with Dragon, then what did Dragon turn into when he drank the potion? Did it interfere with her labor?
And another thing, how could Donkey desert his beloved at a time like that? I mean, the gestation period of dragons can’t possibly be that quick that she didn’t know until after Donkey left.
Come to think of it, how are we supposed to believe that sex works between the two of them? And the genetics involved! Really! How can they....
Wait.....
Something’s wrong here.
Whoops. Sorry everyone, I was wearing my “Van Helsing Sucks” goggles.
Shrek 2 was an absolute riot. Hilarious. Better and faster-paced with joke delivery than the first. I got the feeling that, much more than the first, this flick was just an opportunity for the writers to relax and the animators to have fun. The first one was all tied-up and tense with uncertainty about itself, trying to be both hilarious and heartwarming, spontaneous and ridiculous one moment, and then trying to get at the core dramatic point “ogres are like onions”, selling us on the idea of an ogre falling in love. By the sequel, we’re already sold on the idea, and we can just commence with the fun-having for the rest of the flick. Sure, there’s a newly created crisis or two, but the obstacles are more clear-cut and are really just there to get the dynamics of the humor and action going.
The writing is just priceless. There are a couple of weird plot holes in it (see above), but we really don’t care, since it’s all in good fun setting up the jokes. The scatological humor is less prevalent than previously, we lost that godawful “All Star” song from the first flick (Smash Mouth has had one good song, and everything else is just remakes of songs other people have done much better), and, most important for me, there’s less of Cameron Diaz in this movie.
(I really, really hate Cameron Diaz. She’s my least favorite actress in Hollywood, and the only films I can stand her in are this one and “Being John Malkovitch”. She’s not all that good here, either, since I just can’t “get” her as a woman with a Lois-Griffin-taste-for-crass-humor like Fiona is supposed to be.)
I know no one else cares, but Fiona spends much more of this film off screen while Shrek and co. go barging around the countryside.
I don’t want to give all the humor away, so I won’t go into it, other than to say A) watch for the COPS reference B) watch closely to see where the Starbucks (“Farbucks”) patrons all run to when they desert the shop, C) count how many times it skewers Disney, D) sobriety tests for the Headless Horseman, E) clever and not-overplayed point with the king, and F) see if you can spot the Garfield reference. Hell, I think I want the soundtrack just for Cpt. Hook’s song!
But I must say something about my new favorite character. Antonio Banderas is the voice of Puss in Boots.
This is just brilliant. To my memory, Puss is the only famous fairy-tale creature who’s actually killed an ogre, making him a perfect addition to the troupe. You call Jack or the Tailor to kill giants, you’d have to call Puss to kill ogres. (Watch the flick, you’ll understand. It makes sense in context.) Plus, being a cat person, it’s just about my favorite fairy-tale of all time. The silver-tongued little cat with a pair of boots is somehow able to transform his master, the poorest of a dead miller’s sons, from hopeless pauper to landed baron in the course of a day or two. He nets royal clothing, riches, a wife, and a castle and lands just through the skill of his words and, in the end, the quickness of his paws. A storyteller within a story. The perfect embodiment of “cattitude”. And Banderas does right by the little guy, being noble, nicely timed, and simultaneously utterly hilarious. The animation of him is superb as well. They got Puss’s cat-like moves down and melded nicely with his human stance whenever he’s in the boots.
Only two things stand against the flick. The first is that it takes a bit for the movie to get up to speed. The other is that they make a big deal about a rivalry between Puss and Donkey for Shrek’s friendship, but it just sort of disappears near the end. Felt like a scene between the two of them was missing where they either “make up” or at least call a halt to the hostilities for the sake of the emergency. Heck, just a couple of lines would do it. At one moment, Puss hisses at Donkey, and the next they’re all hunky-dory. But this stuff is really minor, and barely detracts from the film at all.
In summary, GO WATCH. ME LIKE. Probably pick up the DVD when it comes out, much as it galls me to ever send $$ towards Cameron Diaz.
Next up (‘cause my internet still isn’t working, despite restarting my computer three times, dammit) we delve into the stack for another Italian horror flick. If you’ve spent a reasonable amount of time perusing the horror section at any Blockbuster in the past decade or so, you’re probably familiar with this one. It’s always used to round out the alphabetical ordering, since it’s titled simply “Zombie.” Of course, that’s a little too non-descript, so It’s listed as “Lucio Fulci’s Zombie”, and it’s got a fairly memorable cover photo of the title character, snaggle-toothed, rotting, with a knot of earthworms coiling out of one eyesocket. That’s the pic you’ve seen before, but if you’re anything like me, it piqued slightly less than enough curiosity to satisfying it by renting it. Well, it wasn’t resisted when I went on that splurge last week, and it was top o’ the pile, so now I get to satiate everyone’s unhealthy appetite for “what the hell is THAT?”
I’m pretty certain I’ve reviewed something by Fulci before, but I can’t remember what because my FUCKING INTERNET IS DOWN. (As if I didn’t have enough to do tomorrow.)
Predictably enough, this is a movie about zombies. The living dead rising up outta the grave and shambling among the living to feed on their flesh. I went through a dozen or so of these a while back, so the real question is not “what happens” but “what’s this one got that the others don’t?”
Don’t worry, it’s got at least one unique point. And we’ll be getting there quick. But first we visit a mysterious isle. A burlap-shrouded and bound form rises slowly from a bed, until a gunshot blows a hole in its head. Then it settles back to rest. The screen goes black, the credits start to roll, and we’re told who’s responsible.
MAGNETO!
Well, no. Not really. But I think the biggest shock of the whole film was when the name Ian McCullough scrolled past. Not the same guy, though. In a moment of supreme irony on the commentary track, this lead actor said the following:
“There’s a colleague of mine in the theater who happens to have the same name as me. I find it astonishing that this movie became so popular in its time that it has been seen by more people than have EVER seen the other Mr. McCullough acting.” Ouch. Extreme, obscure irony.
Anyway, we start the movie proper with a derelict yacht drifting into New York harbor. (A touch of Dracula’s arrival to the new world...) After attempts to raise the captain are unsuccessful, a couple of cops with the harbor patrol go out to investigate. The place is a wreck, garbage and rot scattered about the cabin with uneaten food rotting in the stifling interior. (In an especially vivid image, there’s a handful of centipedes squirming around on a piano keyboard.) One cop, investigating below, happens upon a disembodied hand and the ship’s zombie, fearing for the loss of his leftovers, makes an appearance.
The makeup here is really rather good. Not the top-notch CGI and impossibly expensive puppetry glistening gore and cartilage we’re used to in today’s zombie movies, but damn good for coming out of Italy in 1979. Some really nice effects (“nice” in the classic gorehound sense of “gooey, organic, and at least somewhat believably textured”) are accomplished with prosthetic pieces and elaborate, layered makeup. This zombie’s a good example, as, during the struggle, a good half-inch thick of skin layer sloughs off in the cop’s hand, revealing rot and nondescript squirmy things beneath. The blood when the cop looses a carotid artery is pretty good too, although just a hair’s-breadth too bright red. The other cop issues no fewer than eight orders for the zombie to “not move” before blowing holes in him till he falls overboard.
The next bit is pretty predictable, if very weirdly dubbed. The cop’s corpse gets taken to the city coroner for a fairly standard “is the body moving?” scene that’s revisited in the closing moments of the film. The boat belonged to a missing doctor who was last seen traveling to the Antilles islands. His daughter shows up determined to find out what happened, as does a marauding journalist on assignment to dig up a good story. (The journalist’s boss is the worst dubbed of the entire film, even while the man sitting across from him is talking normally. It’s so weird that in a scene following you can’t immediately tell if someone off-screen is talking, or the guy center-screen is just absurdly off-timed.) Some blather, the two sneak aboard the crime scene after dark and fake a romantic interlude to avoid being arrested. They each get a piece of the puzzle and decide to go track the doctor’s travels.
Bit of local scenery, and they’re off in the Caribbean, trying to charter a boat out to “Matoub,” the classic “the locals won’t go near it” island of all horror films. They convince a vacationing couple to take them there while the couple goes sightseeing and scuba diving.
Flash to the island (Matoub, naturally) from the beginning. We see an unhappy marriage between the island’s doctor (Richard Johnson) and wife (Olga Karlatos), devolve to the drama of afternoon hard liquor, slaps, angry retorts, and worries about something turning up on the island.
Flash back and forth to some meaningless bits and pieces (including jungle drums on the island? Is that even remotely appropriate for the region?).
Then we get the really memorable bit. Back on the boat, the vacationing couple decides to stop for a bit so the girl whose boat they’re renting can go scuba-diving. Naturally, since this is a European-made film from the late 70’s, she scuba-dives topless in a thong. That’s not the memorable bit, though. (Welll....uh....yeah.) We follow her underwater as she swims around taking pictures of the reef and the colorful fish swimming by.
Then a shark shows up.
OK, my first reaction to this was “holy crap, that’s a REAL shark!” And it is. They’re not compositing the picture or anything (unless that tech was a lot better in the 70’s than I thought), that’s a real shark swimming around twenty or thirty feet behind the woman. It’s not a huge shark or anything, only about 3 or 4 times the size of a man, but it could easily take a bite out of your leg considerable enough to make you limp for the rest of your life. The spots along it’s dorsal side I think designate it as a tiger shark, but I’m not sure. (No ichthyologist I) And this woman is swimming twenty feet from it, literally wearing less than a swimsuit.
I don’t have a lot of phobias, but when I was little my chronic ear infections kept me from learning how to swim until I was nearly eight. By that time, I’d seen the first two “Jaws” movies. Sharks leave a really lasting impression on me. So I was impressed. I didn’t think sharks could be trained sufficiently to really trust them with actors. The woman finally spots the shark, scrambles around a bit as it swims placidly by, and surfaces, shouting for help. The shark “rams” the boat (OK.....everyone lean to the left....NOW). The girl hides out in the reef....and a mysterious, rotting hand reaches out for her.
Yup, bottom-dwelling zombie. Stuck between a zombie and a shark. DEFINITION of screwed. And yet, she manages to get away. Then.....you guessed it.
Zombie vs. Shark.
What. The. Hell.
Seriously, they should’ve just titled this movie “Zombie vs. Shark.” The actor playing the zombie, walking along the bottom of the ocean (presumeably weighted down), without an oxygen tank, physically WRESTLES WITH THE SHARK for several minutes.
I really don’t know what I was seeing there. Is it possible to drug a shark to the point that it will tolerate being manhandled like that? Is it possible to wrangle or over-feed a shark to that point? I thought sharkskin was severely abrasive and would cut you up if you tried something so foolish as to hold onto a pectoral fin? Hell, the shark makes off with a prosthetic arm of the zombie at the end. For heaven’s sake, WHY ISN’T THERE A COMMENTARY TRACK? (Whoops, there is. But it’s the head actor who wasn’t there for that scene....his only comment was “I think I remember hearing that the handler was ill that day...”) The most reasonable explanation I can think of is that I don’t know my sharks real well, and it’s a nurse shark....but I still don’t think one of those would tolerate being mistreated like that when a quick flip would put it out of range. The thing’s not a model, either. We can see the gills flexing and the mouth working in the close-ups.
Predictably, that scene is real hard to follow, but they manage fairly well. The doctor’s wife, back on the island, is left alone with the movie cameramen for the night, so we’re treated to a long shower scene (naturally). After getting dressed, she takes two sleeping pills, looks up, and sees a zombie at the window. Damn. What timing. Retreating to her bedroom, there’s a tense (nicely done) struggle with the door as she tries to barricade herself in, but a hand explodes through the slatted upper half, and catches her by the hair. Pulling her slowly out through the door, she gets her eye impaled (in close-up of a fairly good prosthetic) on a jagged shard of wood as she’s pulled through the door.
“Gorehound classic” is a pretty good way to describe what follows. The boat, damaged by the shark attack, puts into Matoub (in “Catfish bay?” Catfish? Aren’t they freshwater?), where they learn of the zombie disease and the fate of the woman’s father. (There’s some talk of a new juju man in the village causing the curse, but half of the movie treats it as a disease. Not sure precisely what we’re supposed to believe.) There’s no coverup with the doctor spitting right out about “walking dead”, the standard disbelief from the newcomers, but the doctor assures them that the problem is not yet widespread. They wander around some really nice deserted setpieces, and the doctor is dropped off to tend to a new patient. The visitors are sent on to check on the doctor’s wife. Major gorescene, with four undead eviscerating poor dead Olga, and a couple more slowly......blocking......the........exit.
While fleeing, the ship’s captain manages to totally wreck their car, proving that he breaks EVERYTHING he pilots, while the gradually building mass grave in front of the hospital makes us wonder if the doctor has any patients who ever lived. We also get treated to the first time I’ve ever seen the GUY twist his ankle and have to be helped along at the inopportune moment. (In his defense, a later examination shows that his foot is half-off.) Of course, when they take a moment to rest, they manage to sit down in the middle of a conquistador graveyard. Really, really nicely-done classic bits of hands bursting through the earth, zombies rising like Dracula, and taking great honkin’ chunks out of people with 200-year old teeth. (Hey....the corpses might’ve sopanified...it could happen....) They loose the topless scuba-diver to an impressive piece of prosthetic neck-work, though the blood’s too thin.
They’re really popping up now, left and right bursting out of worm-eaten graves by the roadside, long overgrown with tropical foliage. They are the slow, stumbly type, though, proving once again that zombies are an evolutionary pressure against the inattentive.
Things are well into the traditional downward spiral. The remaining living all form a club at the hospital, and the undead all gather outside, trying to convince the bouncer to let them in. Naturally things degrade quickly, the numbers dwindle, and there’s a final desperate dash for the boat while the hospital burns to the ground. The final bit of irony is when they turn on the boat’s radio and hear about the similar disasters plaguing New York. That cop from the start of the film had risen and started his own little plague. We close on the image of a steady stream of zombies trudging along the girders of one of Manhattan’s bridges.
All in all a top notch gorefest, though little else. A classic, but uninventive plot. A lot of makeup effects were achieved that I wouldn’t have though possible (or possible to do believably) with simple prosthetic makeup. To be honest, I was having trouble staying awake for the whole film, but that was only because I’d taken some medication right beforehand. The good doctor is something of a Johnny one-note with his constant insistence that science must have an answer, some of the victims would’ve had a better chance if they hadn’t spent so much time screaming, and the nudity is pretty standard and actually good for the subgenre.
But man, that zombie vs. shark fight. That’s just freaky.
In a final bit of irony, the lead actor in the film commentary had never actually seen the film. Never having seen a rough-cut, he went back to England afterwards only to have the film completely banned there. An American fan got him a copy, but it wasn’t on PAL system tape. It was interesting hearing him be grossed out by the bits he hadn’t been on set for. </lj-cut>
Soooo.....tack on another movie? Why not?
Mostly because I have work that actually needs doing, but what the hell. Ulcers don’t build themselves, you know.
Still....what’s in the coffers?
<lj-cut text="Harry Potter">Harry Potter? Nah. Day late and a dollar short to review that one. Everything that can be said has been, and I agree with most of it. Let me just add a ha’penny’s worth, keeping in mind that I greatly enjoyed it, but would rank it as the least of the three out thus far.
Essentially, what a lot of the fans are missing, and what the non-fans aren’t admitting, is that some of the story threads that were excluded were actually essential to the film. The story just flat doesn’t make sense in a few places without them. For example, we get a brief lecture on what a werewolf is, and how it’s different from an Animagus. But left out are the essential details of what an Animagus is, that they’re extremely rare, and that Animaguses have to be REGISTERED. Unregistered wizards with the ability to shape-change at will have a great advantage at secrecy and spinning plots, which is why it’s so important to understand that Padfoot (Sirius), Prongs (Potter), and Wormtail (Pettigrew) were unregistered. On a similar point, the film makes a big deal out of Black’s escape from Azkaban....how no one knows how he did it..... and then we’re NEVER TOLD. The quicker audience members assume that his turning into the dog let him get out, but that’s quite a jump without knowing A) about the unregistered animagus thing and B) without knowing that Dementors are BLIND.
Then there’s the nonsensical Patronus. The stag form that the spell takes is entirely out-of-the-blue, and unexplained, since we don’t know that the strongest version of the spell forms into a shape with special association for the wizard.... and that Harry’s father was an animagus that could change into a stag. In fact, A) we’re never told that James Potter was an animagus at ALL, much less an unregistered one and B) we’re never told that he was “Prongs”, rounding out the troupe. Hell, it’s not all that clear that they were all at school together, or that Snape was their nemesis. Hell, just a mention of how Lupin acquired the lycanthropy would’ve done wonders for continuity.
The divination teacher’s prophecy also came out of the blue. The mood and manner brought it across somewhat, but it’s clearly pointed out as a true prophecy in the book, and explained in detail later. Here it just sort of drops into the well and is totally forgotten. If it wasn’t for the fact that it would wipe Trelawny away completely from the story, it could have been left out without any losses.
When the whole troupe went out to the Shrieking Shack, Harry mentioned that he thought he knew where they were going. But we’re never told why. We’re never told that the shack got it’s name from the Marauders, who locked Lupin up in it during his outbreaks of lycanthropy when they were at school together, so of course Sirius knew of it as a good hiding place. Or how Snape knew of it. (Come to think of it, in the book, if Lupin and Snape knew Sirius was stalking around, why didn’t they suggest the shack to the cops as a likely hiding place?)
All the other complaints are mostly fritterings. I didn’t much like the transposition of the geography around Hogwarts, but others have commented on that extensively. The quidditch match was cut down heavily, but could have been left out altogether with a careful re-write. Dumbeldore substitute, etc. Essentially, the whole film should have been at least three hours long. This is (I think) the most complex of the HP books, and simply couldn’t have been told in the time allotted it. By trying, the director had to jam all the events together so hard that they ended up a confusing muddle so complex that you can’t really tell when you’re supposed to be confused and when you’re not. Nevertheless, the acting was quite good in places (especially Lupin, who grew on me immensely with a nice classic take on the “tormented soul” werewolf), the story is quite good if you can puzzle it out, and the place is fun, if distinctly directed differently from the first two films. Again, I enjoyed it, but not as much as the second one.
(Oh, and the director really over-used the fuzzy-iris transition.)
Finally (for tonight) The Chronicles of Riddic.
Whoa.
This movie is HUGE.
It’s like a three-way collision with chicken truck full of Mad Max, a sports car with a tank full of Star Wars, and a freighter hauling a load of Dune. To quote Calvin, “this oughtta be good.”
But first, background, for those who don’t know. Riddic was a character that Vin Diesel played in a summer sci-fi schlock hit called “Pitch Black.” The film was a middling success, and widely derided by all my friends who are in the computer animation industry. The film was notable on three points. A) Riddic was a pretty cool character, all things considered. A convicted either serial killer or mass murderer (never really distinguished which) with “shined eyeballs” (some sort of darkvision), and a barrel full of ‘tude, he strode confidently through an absurdly dangerous situation alternately leading and betraying a troupe of refugees from their crashed transport ship through a desert to a spaceport. B) The black Muslim character on a space-faring journey in search of “New Mecca” not only wasn’t the first one to die, he was actually one of only two characters to survive! (The other being a young girl disguised as a boy.) and C) They killed my favorite actress in the movie, Claudia Black (Aryn Sun from Farscape) in the first fucking fifteen minutes of the flick. Dammit. At the end of the flick, Riddick pulls the two last survivors outta the fire and takes them off-planet.
Now, Chronicles of Riddick is an enormous movie. What do I mean by that? I mean that the world they are playing around in is a great and towering structure of pieces moving and tectonic plates of plot striking against one another. This doesn’t mean that the plot itself is complicated...in fact, quite the opposite is the case. But the complexity of the world in which the story takes place is so wide, it’s almost like entirely different films. You remember the prologue in the original “Dune” movie? Where there’s a fifteen-minute lecture on the history of the planets concerned and how the politics of one affect that of the others, spelling out the interests and motivations of all the main characters? This film coulda used that. If Dune hadn’t had that prologue, the film still would have been comprehensible, as each of the relevant points are spelled out somewhat in the character interactions. Hell, to be honest, I don’t think anyone picks anything up from that lecture the first few times through. Nonetheless, Riddick could have used one of those.
Here, let me try.
The universe itself is populated by humans who have spread out and colonized hundreds of worlds. Having never met up with intelligent aliens (though some of the wildlife is entertaining) the humans settled down and have grown apart from one another for many thousands of years. One planet so settled is the relatively young planet of New Mecca, a planet of religious contemplation where many faiths are welcomed to practice peaceably amongst one another (though they are not above defending themselves). Elsewhere, however, is another settled world, the homeworld of the Necromunga. A war-obsessed race, all things to them are fighting and conquest. The central ethos of their civilization is “you keep what you kill” enabling rising in the ranks via killing superiors. Though not detailed, presumably there is a one-on-one honor aspect of the ethos, and enormous wealth is available to those who would risk killing another successful conqueror. Central to their ethos is the coming of the “Underverse”, implied to be a kind of reverse-heaven, where their loyalty to the code results in some ultimate reward. The commander of the Necromunga is the Lord High Marshall, a strangely spiritual being who has visited the sacred homeworld of the Necromunga, and returned “half dead”, his spirit partially separated from his physical form, granting him strange ethereal and near-Matrix like abilities. The current Lord High Marshall is leading the Necromunga on a rampage of conquest and recruitment. Their forces break out of warp and swarm the entire surface of the planet with thousands of fighters and footsoldiers, as well as the specialized living seonsor arrays “lensers”. (An obscured reference to “Lensemen?”) When the populace are rendered defenseless, they begin forced conscription to replenish their numbers and expand the army. The soldiers are kept loyal to the cause by a method of physical and mental cleansing that somehow forces (or STRONGLY suggests) conversion to the Necromunga religion, leaving scars on the side of their necks
Mediating, to what degree is possible with a marauding army and the realms upon which it is indiscriminately preying, are a race of self-appointed neutrals, the “Elementals”. Mystics and sages in the realm of high science, their very existence seems a confirmation of the old adage that “any sufficiently advanced science will be regarded as magic” and the corollary “and vice versa.” The Elementals appear to be beings made partially out of the very air around them, and hold positions somewhat similar to the “living computers” from Dune, specialized strategists able to tell you the odds on any event. What their true purpose is, is hard to say, though some whisper that their manipulations and the way they have the ear of both the free worlds and the Necromunga puts them in a position to manipulate the entire universe at will. Rare creatures, their very existence is doubted by some.
Then there are the Furians. A race gone for thirty years, driven to extinction by some of the first conquests of the Necromunga, they were marked specifically for extinction, their race refusing under any circumstances to bow beneath the yoke of Necromunga conscription. Newborn children strangled with their own cords, the Furians are thought extinct, though, being, in essence, human, it’s possible a few could have slipped away and hidden among the other races of mankind.
Running the edges of these great conflicts there are always a few enterprising stragglers. Mercenaries wander the grey zones, for hire by private enterprise or preying the ever-growing list of bounties set on the heads of individual undesirables. Bounties caught are drug to penitentiary work-outposts where self-sufficient jails use them for slave labor in exchange for keeping them locked up. Central offices or regional distributors run a standard list of the bounties paid for particular convicts. When a bounty is brought in, the “numbers are run” to evaluate the worth and payout to the bounty hunters who caught him. Some of these outposts, however, are so far out in the back of beyond that they require days for sub-space communications to reach them. When a price is confirmed, the jailors take their cut of the head, and pay the remainder to the bounty hunters. Presumeably the central office forwards them the funds to replace the payment...likely a standard upkeep pay by local governments to keep the most violent, dangerous, or politically unfavorable individuals under lock and key until their “accidental” death on a work crew. The jails run by their own standards, handling prisoners by their own reasoning with no supervision by anyone. Some have gained reputations as harsher or more inescapable than others, but none have the wherewithal or the pull from governments or neighboring planets to defend themselves for long against a Necromunga fleet, should that half-dead eye drift in their direction.
Now, see? That is a HUGE universe to be playing around in. All these weird plots colliding at strange angles and taking off in different unexpected directions. As much as it would have served the purpose of this film to go ahead and tell us this stuff narrative style at the start of the film, they elect instead to go at it piecewise, bringing in points only when it becomes relevant, a bit at a time. This gives a pointillist view of the universe, one difficult to take in all at once until you can “back up” near the very end and see everything altogether.
An interesting idea, but one far more ambitious than they really had skill to work with. See, as ludicrously impressive this enormous, highly-detailed, Heavy-Metal (magazine) noir is, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the writing just isn’t up to the task. Both in the general plotting, and on the individual lines.
Much of the film depends on our ability to accept Vin Diesel as the holy mother of all action badasses. The lines he’s given to deliver are so absurdly overblown and melodramatic on occasion, that he can’t pull them off without getting an unintentional laugh out of the audience. He’s trying to get some kind of Charles Bronson / Clint Eastwood / Mortal Combat vibe going, but he comes off as affected and trying too hard. For example, you know how in old 50’s sci-fi movies the scientists would always dramatically take off their glasses when they had something important to say? Well, Riddic does the same thing with those goggles of his. Except he does it ALL THE TIME. He must do it thirty times in this flick, because every.....other.....line.....is.....so.....damn....important! The other actors really aren’t given much better material to work with either. Oh, there’s some good stuff in there, but when Kyra has to say the line “I know that look...I don’t even have to see your face to know it’s there.” Addressed outta the clear blue sky to the back of Riddick’s goggled head, it’s almost self-parody. The more experienced actors are able to wring something good outta this lousy writing, especially Colm Feore, who manages to nicely pull off a fairly delicate character stereotype from the old Heavy Metal mags...the ever-so-slightly sickly dictator, wrapped within the confines of his own self assurance... just crazy enough to engender thoughts of usurpation in his closest advisors, but the masses are blindly devoted to him. Dame Judy Dench also pulls a rabbit out of her hat with her character, an Elemental who’s really only a bit piece, but granted some level of interest and personality by her take on the two dozen lines she’s got.
I won’t go into the plot in detail, ‘cause it’s surprisingly complex for what is essentially a action-SFX flick. The plots all intertwine weirdly as well. There’s the conniving wife trying to maneuver her husband to usurp the Lord Marshall, there’s the peril of the planet of New Mecca, there’s the strange sort-of captivity of the Elemental, there’s the tracing and tracking down of Riddick’s old friend Jack and the welcome he receives there, there’s the rivalry of a stumbling group of mercenaries hunting down Riddick, the quiet desolation of a “triple security lockdown” prison, a rescue attempt, a revenge thread, a race against the sunrise, a family torn apart, a prophecy, and a story of love and redemption. All happening at once. Is it any wonder the characters got rather lost in it?
The set design on this flick is an amazingly strong point. Detail is everywhere within the Necromunga and on the planet surface. Enormous sculpted faces loom out of hallways, statues bracket main hallways, weird and interestingly new effects lend a distinct taste to the flick (especially the Lord Marshall’s half-dead effect), bits and pieces of highly detailed daily lives offer insight into the characters’ worlds (like when Dame Vaako colors her eyes with a soldering iron) and elaborate iconography is built up with no explanation of its significance, leaving us to wonder what it means. The best example of the latter is an execution switch that the Lord High Marshall throws when he sets off the execution of a conquered planet. The lever is sculpted into a man riven through with several large spikes. What does it mean? Hell if I know, but it’s really damn cool and original.
Oh, and keep an eye out for the secondary character Furian who shows up near the end of the film. I swear, he looks just like TJ.
One last bit. The movie pile has really built up over the last week or so, but I haven’t the endurance to write up another review. However, in reading the “Girl Genius” latest issue, studio Foglio has earned my everlasting amusement. In the back of each comic they’ve had a coded message. It’s a fairly elaborate code, requiring a key to assemble properly. The key and decoding device, however, were originally published in issue #0, which I didn’t pick up and is impossible to find.
However, someone assembled a really cool-looking program that does the decoding for you. Downloading it and plugging in this month’s code revealed a website address that just gave the solution to one of the games attached to the inside cover. However, in the middle of the message, it suddenly broke into a different font (one of the code tricks) and asked
“Are you drinking your Ovaltine? Just checking.”
Daymn. Obscure, and infinitely appropriate.
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Serious crisis
2004-06-05 00:43:25
Well, I had lots of crap to write about. In fact, as a one-in-a-milennium non-gaming Friday, I was gonna make a night of knocking away the pile of vids awaiting review sitting next to me. Few days ago, I already piled up two full reviews. But I ain’t gonna post ‘em now.
Yesterday I went to see the new Harry Potter movie. Blood was crap ‘cause my cell cultures weren’t confluent, and I might as well spend the night doing something enjoyable. So I team up with Tim from work, and we arrange to go to the midnight showing.
‘Cept Tim isn’t all that punctual. I spend until....uh.....7:30? at work waiting for him to get his act together so we can go get tickets (and incidentally hit the comic store for the weekly inoculation). Long story short, between him treating me to dinner and the running around town necessary to get tickets, I don’t make it back to my room until 10:00. Laze around until 11:00, pick up Tim and go to the movie.
Tonight I get a call from my dad. Seems that my roommates didn’t bother to give me a message yesterday. Or today.
My mom was in the hospital with a detached retina. Emergency surgery, the whole nine yards. Prognosis is good, but God dammit, these are her EYES.
And I was off in a comic store discussing the failings of current-gen X-men.
We’re celebrating her birthday tomorrow.
It may just be a reflection of my massive fuck-upped-ness, but I’m hit with an equal portion of overwhelming worry, and bottom-of-the-gut guilt. The whole emergency happened before I found out about it. Doctors, specialists, surgeons, and surgery. And the biggest concern I had was being off watching a fucking kid’s movie. I wasn’t there for them when they needed me, and it may just be dead coincidence that I didn’t find out, but I should’ve been there. I don’t talk about them much, but my parents are complete saints. Really. I hear all my friends complain about their dysfunctional families, and I just can’t relate. In my entire memory of existence, my parents have gotten into an argument that resulted in mother crying exactly once, and my father has had to sleep on the couch twice. How I ended up so thoroughly fucked up, I’ll never know.
My solution? To misquote Cerberus, “I’m gonna drink whiskey until the left side of my stomach starts hurting.”
Which means the preceding paragraphs are probably a bit more to-the-heart than I should really post in a public forum. So I hope everyone will excuse me if I retreat from the rest of the world for a bit. My family needs me.
(Incidentally, Starphoenix, sorry if I was a bit of an inconsiderate shithead. Your presence caught me completely off guard, and I’ve never been good at mixing my different groups of friends.)
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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