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"You could have picked a better place to stand....."
2002-12-18 02:40:34
Very short entry.
Yes, I went to see The Two Towers.
The good news is that it most definitely doesn't suck. Easily a good followup to the first, although opinions might differ on which is better.
GO
SEE
IT
Just a few non-spoiler comments.
IT'S THREE AND A QUARTER HOURS LONG! Jeez. We got outta the theater at 3:40 AM from a midnight showing. DON'T BRING A DRINK OR YOU WILL BE IN AGONY. (I anticpated this bit.)
Previews. Couple good, couple bad, couple abysmal, one of note. Watch the X-men 2 preview closely. You get a couple of frames of Kurt Wagner in there (heavy CG, but nothing too bad looking yet)...and unless I'm very badly mistaken, an asian woman fighting Wolverine that could only be Lady Deathstrike. (Hmmm....I'm almost certian I'm wrong...but who else could it be with those fingers?)
Movie proper:
There's a scene with ninjas. (Not as cheezy as it sounds...look, I'm just setting up a joke here.) In the scene with the ielephants. Watch closely, and observe how they totally fail to flip out and kill people.
I may have to start actively hating Star Wars. Sauruman looks out over his army, and my first thoughts are "Oh NO! CLONES!"
OK, Legolas. Mounting like THAT you're just fucking showing off.
Smeegul's monolouges are the only part that will probably be yelped about extensively on the net. Oh, and a few little bits added just in case any of the ladies were starting to wonder about the way Aragorn was always hanging out exclusively with men.
You have never seen battle scenes like this. Trust me.
Now I crash. Work in morning.
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“Hail Wassamada hail! / Better we should be in jail! / Hey Wassamada U!”
2002-12-15 14:40:19
Who is it that keeps checking my journal when I haven't updated? Hmm... I don't know if I should be worried about stalkers yet... :)
So my labmate and I are going out to lunch at the only decent place to get a meal on campus (no assumptions y’all, she’s a married woman) and as we’re walking out, she mentions some of the things she’s looking for to send back to her family in Greece. For her mother, she’s looking for a doll or a stuffed animal of Sunggles, the fabric softener bear, ‘cause her mom always thought it was cute.
I stop in my tracks. “Snuggles?”
“Yeah.”
“I know Snuggles!”
(Incredulously) “You know Snuggles the bear.”
“Yeah!”
“Personally?”
“Sorta…”
For those of you who don’t know, Snuggles is voiced by Corrine Orr, who was also the original voice for Trixie from Speed Racer. She’s been to AWA a couple of times now, and I actually sat and talked to her for about an hour on her first visit. Great fun, and now I get to make a claim of celebrity acquaintance so absurd I don’t think anyone else can match it. :)
“I know Sean Connery” “I know Jimmy Carter” “I know Stephen Hawking”
“I know Snuggles the fabric softener bear!”
“Ooooooo”
It’s been a pretty boring week from most angles of consideration. Just the standard fare of seeing friends and struggling to get work done without the looming presence of my advisor, who was out of the country for a net of about two weeks. I did actually get stuff done, but not nearly enough by my own consideration to justify myself, so I’m sure he’ll agree. Dammit.
Yesterday, rather than truck off to the movies ONCE MORE to catch the new Star Trek movie (whattaya think I am? A movie watching machine?) I stayed in and dicked around on the computer for several hours. Got my ass kicked in Warcraft AGAIN. The only positive side to my strategy now is that I’ve sufficiently mastered LOOKING imposing enough that I always get saved for last by the winner, but they easily wipe me out. The basic problem is that undead (my favored race) really suck at siegecraft, either controlling or resisting, since their siege machinery is horribly weak and slow.
After confirming once again that whatever enabled me to make videos on my computer is well and truly busted (really need to look into buying a committed computer for that) I successfully determined that solitaire is the most damnably frustrating game on my computer. I got well and truly obsessed and played the stupid thing until two in the morning when I finally won a game. Wasn’t entirely a loss, though, as I managed to catch….on AMC of all places…most of Halloween 6. I didn’t catch the opening, but it was easy to tell which one it really was. Why? ‘Cause of Donald Pleasence.
Halloween is one of the odder slasher series out there. Despite the recognizability of the main villain in pop culture, it was never really intended that he look like that. The white-with-black hair mask worn in the first film was actually torn off near the end of the first film, and we got a good look at the surprisingly-blah face of the unstoppable killer before Dr. Loomis blows him out of the second-story window. (With nothing more contrived that just taking the precaution of carrying a revolver with him.) Naturally, Myers disappears at the end of the film, but, unlike most continuing series wherein the sequel takes place years later…the second Halloween picks up an hour and a half after the first one ends (A twist I always liked about the series. Much more believeable) when Myers follows his intended target to the Hospital she’s been taken too. My point (yes, I had one) was that Myers discarded his signature mask this time around, and went for a Styrofoam jack-o-lantern. See, the theme was just supposed to be Halloween costumes, not any particular costume. Unfortunately for continuity nit-pickers, Myers got well and truly roasted at the end of the second film, burning to ashes in the hospital hallway. Apparently, even for a slasher flick star, this death was severe enough to put him out of action for an entire movie, and the third Halloween (Season of the Witch) was a ludicrously dumb conspiracy-flick involving an ancient warlock and his plans to turn children into festering piles of insects through magical medallions (derived from the triliths at Stonehenge) attached to dime-store Halloween masks. See, the original theme was APPARENTLY supposed to be not “run from the crazy killer” or “run from the crazy killer in the trademark mask” but “Halloween is a scary time when evil comes out to play.” Sort of a dark-themed Twilight zone covering a series of varying plots, not just a slasher flick. An admirable aim, but the third film was so flamingly dumb and boring that it trashed any attempt to change the theme right there. Fans fixated on the first two films and decried the third as idiotic and disappointing for its lack of their favorite characters. (Mr. Pleasence wasn’t in this one either, stripping the series of any sense of continuity.) I believe I may have coined the phrase “Halloween I, the night of Michael Myers….Halloween II, the return of Michael Myers…Halloween III, where the HELL is Michael Myers?” but I’ve heard assent from nearly every other fan.
So, anyway, the producers decided that making money was more important than going along with their original, slightly-too-high-minded concept, and they gave the fans what they wanted with three more slasher films, pulling Myers out of the recuperation ward. I’d never seen any of these films, having been warned away repeatedly by friends who told me they were awful sellout flicks. Catching the latter half of the sixth film, I can say that’s not entirely true. Honestly standard fare for a slasher flick…a little lower on the “class” (note the quotes) scale for a followup to the first two films, but around the range of the more pedestrian Friday the 13th flicks. However, there’s one aspect that just made the film difficult to watch, and was the reason I could identify it so easily. Donald Pleasence looks sick. It’s well known that the famous actor died while making this film, and his performance underlined the fact painfully. According to his biography, he died due to complications with heart valve replacement surgery, and his failing heart is plainly evident. He walks with a pronounced limp. He appears to be always out of breath. His lines are fumbling and lacking in emphasis. He’s ashen-pale for all the segments I saw. Frankly, I thought he was going to collapse and die at any given moment.
It’s really quite a pity that this was his last film. Donald Pleasence is something of an icon for a man who never considered any part beneath him. The fact that he starred in the first Halloween, a low-budget slasher flick when he was nearly sixty after he’d already been well established with roles in The Dirty Dozen, Fantastic Voyage, and You Only Live Twice (As Ernst Blofeld, the original Dr. Evil) bespeaks a commitment to the media, a willingness to take risks, and an openness to an amateur director previously only know for his work in rubber monster flicks. Hell, he’s been in MSTied movies on more than one occasion…the worst of which had to be Pumaman. The only other actor I can think of (well, at the moment…I’m sure there are more) with a similar record would be Tim Curry… Heck, Mr. Pleasence was 76 when he died, and still doing cheap slasher flicks. Try getting that level of commitment out of the current breed of rich pampered actors.
Of course, the series continued on without him. H20, or Halloween 7 (20 years later) was supposed to be the end of it all, and happened to be the first horror flick I caught in the theaters. (I wanted to go with a group of friends, but THREE TIMES IN A ROW they backed out at the last second and dragged me to another movie…once WHILE WE WERE IN LINE FOR TICKETS. Piss me off…) The seventh one ignored…well…pretty much everything after #2, and was the reappearance of Jamie Lee Curtis, Myer’s original target in the first two films, conspicuously missing from subsequent installments. The gimmick this time around was that the film was released on the 20th anniversary of the original, and, of course, Jamie Lee Curtis had actually aged 20 years in that time. Funky with the continuity stuff, huh? The film had some exquisite “quality kill” moments, and featured an appearance by LL Cool J, who’s contract kept him safe and escaped from the film with little more than a bump on the head. Anyway, it a typical “we really mean it this time” ending, Myers gets decapitated with an axe. Somehow he’s up and running around again by last year when “Halloween 2002, Resurrected” came out a month after Jason X. Never got around to seeing it, but I understand that Busta Rhymes wanted in on this slasher flick action and got hisseself deaded.
Believe it or not….that wasn’t the review. I’m kinda outta neat stuff to talk about, as I’m just stalling, waiting for Christmas break at the end of next week. We’ll (the fam) be driving up to the great frozen state of WI, and everything else is pretty much on hold ‘till then, other than shopping and the like. Mount DVD is as imposing as ever (have avoided adding to it) but the only things I’ve been watching out of it are my Farscape DVDs, and I’ve no intention of reviewing that until the series is well and truly over. (Not concluded, as the recent stupefyingly dumb cancellation of the show occurred so fast there wasn’t any chance for a conclusion to be written in.) I understand that the final missing episodes of the fourth season will be aired starting in January, so I’ll just hope for the best, and look into getting profoundly disappointed when it’s over. Also, from the rate at which the DVDs are coming out, I’m just hoping ADV actually DOES finish putting out all the seasons. It’s somewhat stalled out in the middle of the second season, and my comic shop is slowly ordering fewer and fewer as interest peters out. I got the fourth double-DVD collection, but had to return it when it turned out that it was a store-diplay only version (“Do not buy or copy” text popping up all the time). I haven’t seen another release of those episodes since. Thinking about it…I wonder if that happened to all of the DVDs, and the resultant problems with replacement bankrupted the line. Hope not. Third season is where the real fun stuff starts, and I don’t especially want to pour more money into the coffers of bootleggers, even if the series is unavailable anywhere else.
I get the distinct feeling I’m repeating things I’ve said before, so, rather than consider the ramifications of having run out of interesting parts of my life to share with y’all, I’ll just move on to the review.
Animation this time. Disney’s latest offering. “Treasure Planet.” I always wondered how much effort it would take to ruin a classic.
But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. As I discovered while talking to a colleague, not everyone out there has actually read Treasure Island, and most only know it from the parodies and made-for-TV movies, which all disagree on major points. So, reaching all the way back to the 8-year-old me, a brief summary of the salient points. (Excuse slight inaccuracies, It’s been a REALLY long time.) Jim Hawkins is a serving-boy working in a seaside Tavern/boarding house sometime in the mid 1800’s. He befriends an old seahand living there who tells wild stories of his days of a pirate under Captian Flint. One day, a blind old man staggers into the Tavern, locates the old seahand, and delivers “the black spot” (mark of death) to him. The seahand subsequently dies of fright, and Hawkins finds a treasure map among the old man’s belongings. Escaping the tavern with his mother right before pirates ransack the place, he finds someone willing to finance a voyage and hire a crew. Skipping ahead a good bit, Jim, traveling along as the cabin-boy befriends the cook only to accidentally discover that he, and most of the newly hired crew, are, in fact, the pirates that ransacked the old tavern, with John Silver, the cook, as their captain. Hawkins warns the captain and the loyal crewmembers just before landfall and the mutiny of the crew, and they are able to escape the pirate’s clutches by rowing a longboat to Treasure Island. The pirates, however, have the map, and hunt down the burial place, only to find it long empty. Hawkins and the captain, meanwhile, encounter a crazy old man named Ben Gunn who was marooned on the island by Capt. Flint. In his spare time, Gunn has dug up and moved the treasure to his own hiding place, just to spite the long-dead pirate. In the end, the good guys win, the pirates get marooned, and Hawkins, in a fit of fair-play, helps the old one-legged Silver cast off his longboat from the beach before he can be caught, he deciding to take his chances with the sea in a rickety longboat rather than face a trial. A classic story well told, and a well-earned classic.
Now, Disney’s version. (Actually, one aside first. The first ads for “Finding Nemo” the latest Pixar flick, are previewed before Treasure Planet. Looks good and funny, although less intensive than previous films, due to the fields and fields of blue water.) The story is, in theory, roughly unchanged. The character development shifts, however, to focus on Jim’s lack of a father. “Major theme alert! Absent parent! Excuse for angst approaching!” Disney, as has been pointed out to me by a rather overly-moralizing friend, normally has something against mothers. Nearly all the animated Disney characters are absent a mother. Jim, however, is absent a father, and this is given as the reasoning for his being a reprobate. After the required backstory (Jim, as a child, “reads” a holo-book telling the legend of Capitan Flint and the Treasure Planet, before being put to bed by a badly-voice-acted mother.) we’re introduced to Jim as he hover-boards over the strange and alien landscape of his homeworld, skidding around inside of a foundry (or refinery, or possibly mining outpost…it’s rather unclear) making for a lot of high-intensity action shots and cool panoramic scenery before he gets pulled over by the cops. Now, I usually take introductions like this as a warning. They’ve just decided to spend umpty-thousand dollars on enormous high-action animated sequences where the only dialogue is “wha-hoooo!” And, more likely than not, they consider that character development. Frankly, I preferred the introduction of something like “The Road to Eldorado” where the characters are engaged in high action introductions…but are simultaneously participating in an near-vaudevillian act of witty parries and ripostes rather than just demonstrating how large the film’s budget is by trying to wow the kiddies in the front row with “radical moves” on a flying skateboard. Le sigh.
The major problem with the film, however, shows up next. Jim is delivered home by the cops right on cue when his mother (while running the tavern) comments on how much he’d shaped up recently. The robotic cops then go straight into a rapid-fire take on Dragnet. (Monotone delivery, “we see this all the time, ma’m,” etc.) It was kinda funny, but something was wrong. Dr. Doppler, the future funder of the expedition, is also introduced at this point as he fumblingly tries to stand up for the boy, only to be summarily rebuffed and skitter nervously back to the table. Again, this should have been funny, but something just felt wrong. It wasn’t until significantly later, and many more of these “shouldn’t I be laughing at that?” incidnets that I realized what was going on.
Disney was copping out.
Every character in this film is a cheap copy pulled from somewhere else. They’re actually counting on you to put this together in your head so that they don’t have to bother with introductions or development. Let’s see. Hawkin’s mom is the “harried but loving mother of a troubled child who has grown tired of sticking up for him every time he gets in trouble.” Remember her? Dr. Doppler is the “highly intelligent book-learned academian who, nonetheless, has no practical experience with the world as he reveals with his fumbling attempts to help out and his ludicrous preparations for the adventure.” Sound like the main male character of “Atlantis” to you? Later on we meet “The dignified authoritarian Captain, virtuous and true, who’s attention to detail and quick manner of correction of stock character B (Dr. Doppler) reveal the efficient, but insultingly condescending in it’s authority, manner of the character.” The captain, of course, is accompanied by “right hand man, strong and stalwart, fiercely loyal to stock character C (Capt.) and unquestioning in his obedience, living only for praise from character C’s lips.” Then, there’s the pirates, consisting of a bunch of empty, comedic relief figures, John Silver “brutal scallywag who, nonetheless, finds some of the tarnish rubbed off his heart by the similarity of the plight of main character A1 (Hawkins)” and finally “backup baddie who’s even worse than stock character D, finds out about D going soft, and plans skitterings and machinations to replace D himself…the ‘badder than the bad guys’ bad guy.” That leaves only Ben Gunn, “stock crazy character designed to spout nonsensical non-sequiters and provide comedic relief at any opportunity, voiced by Martin Short.” Think Aladdin’s Genie. Hell, they’ve even got an animal sidekick, “Morph” a floating, multi-form jelly blob acting as John Silver’s parrot, and serving a kind of dumbed-down version of Ben’s part.
Well, what’s so bad about all this? It’s not like Disney hasn’t used these character templates before to reasonable success. Heck, some of them even became favorite characters from the films.
The problem is that Disney’s not even trying to pretend that they’re not rehashed figures. In each of these cases, a character shows up, and within their first three lines, the character has been entirely explained and developed. Disney’s hitting the key notes necessary for us, the loyal audience of many years, to twig to which character is being presented, and accept the template so they don’t have to bother developing it. Compress everything down to make room for other stuff. The captain’s one of the worst examples. Within six seconds of first catching sight of her, she’s surveyed the ship, complimented her first mate, corrected / ridiculed Doppler three times, assigned Hawkins a post, and insulted the crew. The rest of the film is a lot like this. Nearly every character is introduced through humor, unfunny in its predictability and attempt at utility. There’s more attempts at humor for each individual character than for development, ‘cause the writers just assumed you’d know what was coming. The best parallel I can think of is the stock characters (secondary explorers) from Atlantis, and they way they all got one line to introduce and explain their characters.
Now, this alone would be enough to sink the film. But I ain’t done yet. I mentioned earlier that it takes effort to ruin a classic. What I meant by that was the manner in which the film nearly dismisses the events of the story. Admittedly, they got off on the wrong foot with me by entirely eliminating Old Blind Pew. He’s the pirate who delivers the black spot to Billy Bones, and frankly is the character who had the strongest impression on me from the book. The withered old man with startling strength in his hands who forces Jim to take him to Billy Bones and managed to be an imposing figure despite his blindness. Well, he’s completely gone. Billy Bones isn’t a regular at the tavern in this film, he just crash lands on the dock, staggers out of his ship muttering and hollering stock ominous warnings about “The cyborg,” then collapses and dies after handing Jim the map (mysterious spherical rubix cube). Perhaps the most important event of the story, and they squished it down into a ridiculously melodramatic scene. Not a good sign. Most of the other events of the story are treated similarly, truncated, abbreviated, or replaced entirely in order to make more room for other stuff. Only the apple barrel gets the full treatment without any real abbreviation. There’s no real mystery about John Silver’s identity, they practically hang a skull and crossbones around his neck when you first see him. There’s no real suspense in any of the scenes either. I honestly think the writers just expected you to know the story, so they didn’t feel like they had to do a good job telling it themselves. Ben Gunn’s part in the film shrinks notably as well, as he didn’t move the treasure this time. All he really does is provide a warning about a booby-trap on the treasure after it goes off (he’s a robot and they plug his memory back in), and…well…crack bad jokes.
So what were they making all this room for? Remember that flying-skateboarding scene? More o’ that. Most of the room appears to have been made for high-energy action sequences with characters charging around on the ship, or enormous panoramic views of disaster and special effects. (The ship, incidentally, is an open galley with “solar sails” and rockets affixed where the rudder would be. It’s even steered with the classic wheel. It appears that there’s plenty of air in space. They even sail longboats around in space with no ill effect. But I make allowances for that.) The most groan-inducing one of these went something like this.
“Oh my gosh! That sun! It’s going SUPERNOVA! Everyone bring down the sails!” etc.etc.
Four minutes later…
“Oh my gosh! It’s becoming a BLACK HOLE! We’re getting pulled in!” etc. etc.
Oh, there’s also the song. Only one, thank God, as I would have walked out if the hideous pirate crew had started singing, but it was still dripping sufficient pine tar to make the ship’s decks sticky for the entire voyage. It was mostly used as a flashback reviewing the exit of Jim’s father and TRYING WITH ALL ITS MIGHT to make John Silver be a foster father for the kid.
Of course, they also save time in the more general sense, as the film is only about 1 ½ hours long. (Hard to estimate with all the previews.) To which I ask, why? A few more minutes here and there would have made this film infinitely better.
Still not done with the criticisms yet.
Character design. Abysmal. At its best, it was forgettable. At its worst, you didn’t even want to look at it. The pirates were the worst. Three were designed solely to be one-shot jokes (one pirate was only a head, and he was sitting on another pirate that was only a body…while the third communicated through fleshy trunks, sounding like a long sequence of wet farts…called a “flatulon”), others were so plain and low-detailed that they looked like they belonged in TV animation as background walkers. Jim himself was totally unremarkable beyond his haircut. Dr. Doppler was a little better (sort of a humanoid beagle) while BEN was just a clunky mess. None of these characters looked like more than fifteen minutes went into the design of any of them. John Silver was a major disappointment, as they decided to make him a lardass. I always pictured him distinctly different. Instead of merely missing a leg, they decided to go whole-hog (heh) and give him a cybernetic leg (somehow supporting him through a bellows system), cybernetic eye (which flipped open to give us a magnified multi-spectrum view of the surroundings) and a cybernetic arm (the real star of the show). All of the cybernetic bits were CGI, while the rest of the character was cell-painted. The actual animation quality for him was fairly good in that they matched the CGI to cell painting better than I’ve seen most anywhere else. Only a little slippage of movement, displacement, or discrepancies of positioning. The arm was actually pretty cool, as it acted as a swiss-army knife, flipping and switching out an impossible number of modular attachments, including a hand, a set of articulated three-grapplered insect-like arms, a torch, a cutlass, a flintlock (laser guns looks like flintlocks in a charming little anachronism), a crutch, a cannon, and a vise. Nonetheless, the rest of the character was mostly just a fat slob, and not all that imposing as a pirate captain. Morph, his parrot, is just annoying. He parrots other characters by forming miniature versions of them and repeating their last lines. He really only serves as a source of annoyance to the other characters, and an occasional cartoon-y comedic relief with the shapes he makes.
The only character that was actually well designed was the captain. Standing opposite from Doppler, she’s kind of a cat-girl minus the tail. Slightly shorter than Doppler, she has the flattened head and drawn-back ears of a pureblood Siamese (well…caricatured Siamese), although a light cream in fur color (with blue eyeshadow) and darker ears which rotate and flick slightly depending on her mood. (Nice touch.) She dresses impeccably in the navy blues of a turn-of-the-century captian, along with white gloves through which her long claws extend. Her VA work (Emma Thompson) is so hackneyed it hurts at times (much like most everyone else, especially Jim’s mom, although a good deal of the blame lies with the dialog writer) and the humor from her character relied on her being so TERRIBLY BRITISH, but they did manage to get fluid, graceful motion down pat for her character, especially when the mutiny is discovered and they have to run for the longboats. Of course, her initial spat with Doppler (and their cat-and-dog like relationship) means that romance is brewing (since there’s no one available for Jim) and they hook up by the end…an event much more humorous in light of the original text. She’s really the only character worth watching the film for.
So, is there any reason to see the film at all? Actually, yes. Watch this film to see the animators have fun. The animation in some sequences, specifically the high-action chase and fight scenes and some of the panoramic segments I mentioned above, is superb, as are occasional little details like Silver’s arm. There’s an especially good sequence right at the end as they try to outrun the collapsing planet by aiming the ship through a portal, but Jim has to speed ahead (on a flying skateboard, of course) to change the destination before they get there. It’s like the lava chase scene from Aladdin, only better. The humor is pretty bad, mostly for trying too hard, but there were a few jokes that elicited a laugh from me, so it’s not a total bust.
Basically, the flick is aggressively mediocre. It’s actually worse than Titan AE (although I didn’t hate that flick as much as everyone else did) for a surprising number of similar reasons. It’s a return to the style of film that trashed most of Atlantis, with an overly-forced attempt to cram in the humor that made “The Emperor’s New Groove” one of my recent favorites. Don’t see it in the theaters unless you’re REALLY into the animation. If you’ve got access to a bigscreen TV and you’ve got a thing for completeness, rent it when it hits the $2 rack at blockbusters. It ain’t worth $6, and it’s nearly gone from the theaters anyway. When I saw it, there were six other people in the audience. Disney really needs to try and tell a new story with new characters before it entirely ruins its legacy.
Next time, who knows? Mayhap I’ll revist the start of my reviews with a look at The Two Towers…or maybe that’ll be pointless for this crowd, since you’ll see it anyway.
- Kill the pig. Drink his blood. 2002-12-07 00:59:24 Crud. Fucked the formatting. Sorry for the uber-paragraph.
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“When the line goes dead…..sowillyou!”
2002-12-07 00:55:57
Yes, I have given into the peer pressure of all the deserters from the AMV.org Journal system, and created a livejournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ersatzinsomnia/
Never fear, though. I have no intention of shutting down this journal. Instead, I’ll update identically to both of them. May make for a bit of disjointed-ness, but the AMV one will come first in the “answers in the text” department. (Speaking of which, Omnistrata: Ew. I meant prints in the same manner as people who leave nose-prints on glass panes when they bump into them. Oh, and IIRC, it was established that Motoko weighs about 2/3 of a ton…) Might put a bit of introductory schpiel on the livejournal, but that’s it.
Huh. My French roommates and a couple of their friends appear to be playing strip poker in the front room of my apartment. Unfortunately, there’s only one girl in the game, and it looks like she’s winning by a lot, so I’ll be staying in here, thank you very much. Besides, they’re all talking in French, and I’ve no desire to be the designated “fifth wheel.”
To be honest, my relationship with my roommates this last semester hasn’t been any good. After tolerating the regular inanities of being “best buds” with my roommates the previous session, I decided, purely on a whim, to hate the new ones this time around. Saves on discussion of chores, avoids the stupid pleasantries early in the morning, and means I don’t have to worry about hurting any feelings when I turn down the fifth offer of football tickets. It really was done entirely on a whim, and out of a desire to NOT HAVE TO ANSWER THE FUCKING PHONE AT THREE IN THE MORNING FOR SOMEONE NOT SPEAKING ENGLISH. Jeez. If I had a nickel for every time I had to answer the phone for my Indonesian roommate last year, I’d be a millionaire. At least half of those times, I’d answer the phone, and the person would either prattle incomprehensibly for a minute before realizing I wasn’t Daniel, or they’d just be silent for a few seconds and hang up. Annoyed the PISS outta me.
‘Course, I kinda hate all phones in the first place. Can’t really say why, except that they unavoidably ring when you really don’t want to have to be speaking to anyone. Think about it, any other appliance in your house you are completely in control of. They intrude or leave at your whim. The phone, however, is designed for some outside individual to suddenly, without warning, barge into your life and strike up a conversation. I don’t conversationalize real well when I’m not prepared for it. Doesn’t help that I’m working at the computer closest to the phone at work, either. We have one Indian, one Greek, and one Chinese at work, so I get more than my fair share of language-barrier interceptions there too. It’s come to the point where Sandy’s mom (who doesn’t speak a word of English) waits until I pick up the phone and shouts “SANDY, SANDY, SANDY!” into the receiver until she’s handed over. You want to see a language barrier in action? Try telling this woman “Sandy’s not here. She left for lunch twenty minutes ago. Call back in an hour.” “SANDY! SANDY! SANDY!” *Sigh*. It’s really kind of sad, as she always sounds so desperate.
‘Also hate the ringer. Maximum noise, maximum intrusion into your own private reality, maximum annoyance, to ensure you pick up immediately. Also forces you to run for the phone, ‘cause someone set the ringer on the answering machine to “3” and you’ve never been able to figure out how to change it back. (Some engineer, hunh?) The real hatred from last semester came from the fact that I was invariably the only one around on Friday nights when the phone rang (Farscape night) and it was clear in the other room. *RUNS LIKE A BAT OUTTA HELL* *click* “WHAT DO YOU WANT? NO HE AIN’T HERE! HE’S NEVER HERE ON FRIDAY NIGHTS! GO AWAY!” *click*
Doesn’t help that the phone made a habit of ruining my holidays every year, especially on my birthday. I have a large extended family, and every member of them had to call and wish me a happy birthday. Several of them are rather lonely individuals who would pull me in to lengthy dissertations while my birthday candles melted in front of me. Traumatize a little kid that way. But if you’re at all rude and try to get out of the conversation early, then the GUILT settles in. THEY called to wish you a happy birthday, and you respond by being rude? WhatalittleBRAT!
So I guess the message here is to always assume that I’m in a bad mood when you call me on the telephone. Don’t take offense. I treat everyone like that.
Speaking of family, I was home with mine this last weekend, hence the no-typ-ey. Thanksgiving was fairly good, although I managed to contract a cold six hours after the vacation started, and had a hideous sore throat by the next morning. Right after dinner with the folks (parents and some first cousins we happened to move in down the block from before we even knew they existed) I went upstairs to lay my aching bones down for a minute and woke up forty minutes later with my throat on fire and my ears stuffed up. Geh. Other than that, the dinner was pretty good. The cats had been stuffed down in the garage to avoid them pulling their standard stunts at the table (it’s amazing how quickly you’ll show a cat what it is you’ve got on the end of your fork once they’ve sunk a claw into your elbow) but they were let up during the cleanup. Unfortunately, someone lost track of Sneakers, and he managed to get a paw over the teetering edge of my cousin’s antique turkey-platter, flipping it and an entire spiral-cut ham onto the floor. Profuse apologies and a generous helping of superglue later, all was right with the world.
Spent a good bit of time over the weekend organizing the last six months of comics into the “indefinite storage” in my parent’s basement. (I live in a 10-foot cube! Cut me some slack!) I’d forgotten that the last time around, I’d just hit a point and gone “to hell with it” and tossed everything left over into one of the boxes and called it quits. Well….that box is full now. Need to get more. One of these days I’ll run out of things to talk about here, and I’ll actually get around to telling you about the titles I collect and why.
In other news….you ever have one of those moments where you remember something from the distant past right outta the blue, and you suddenly realize something about it that you never thought of before? Like finally understanding a joke you haven’t heard in years, or realizing that your SO was sleeping around on you? Well, about a week ago, I realized that second semester of my sophomore year in undergrad…I was an idiot. See, I was interested in taking this one course in philosophy, but could never seem to get into it, as the freshmen and sophomores got last pick of the classes. Lacking the time to take an English minor, the motivation to take more German classes than was absolutely necessary (I suck at languages), the stomach for any more science, the priority for any film classes (got into those later), or the aesthetics for art, music, or classics, I ended up taking every 1000-level philosophy courses offered to fill out the humanities requirement. (Emory has one of the most stupidly complicated and/or systems for prerequisite courses I’ve ever seen.) The readings were, by their very nature, simple and logical, even if their authors fought with this through their choice of language. (ST. AUGUSTINE! Do you PLEASE think you could find a way to abbreviate “That which nothing greater than can be imagined? “ You only use it fifty times a page here!) At any rate, one of the courses asked us to write an essay on one of the key concepts of any of the blah blah blah, you get the idea. I, contemplating the piddly little six-page report we had to write (philosophy was normally taken to boost one’s GPA at Emory) was suddenly struck with what I thought was a fairly concise refutation of Descartes founding principle. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s the one summarized as “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes goes through a couple dozen pages of philosophical proofs to come to this base principle, on the idea that all thought can be confused, and all sensation can be tricked. Thus, in the philosophical proof of…well…EVERYTHING, we cannot rely on any of these as the foundation basis for true understanding of the world. Memories can be remembered incorrectly or implanted, so discard them for consideration here. All of our senses can be fooled, so remove them. What is left? Present, right now, thinking. That, says Descartes, is irrefutable, so it is the appropriate point from which to begin the philosophical definition of existence. I, being the clever ass that I was, said “but wait! You are assuming that something without memories, and without any sensory input is capable of rational thought! I hold that anything reduced to such a state would be unable to perceive anything in relation to itself, be thus unable to distinguish the concept of “self,” and thus be incapable of anything resembling rational thought about existance! HA! “I think…” is too great an assumption!” My teacher (who, now I realize, was humoring me in an attempt to pull me into the philosophy department) confirmed that this was, in fact a very interesting idea, and gave me an A+.
As of a week ago, I suddenly realized that it was complete crap. I wasn’t even addressing the point of Descartes work. Descartes work didn’t care about the exact thoughts of the person so afflicted as to loose all memory and sensation, except insofar as he uses this individual as a template from which to explore further “irrefutable” proofs. (His later proofs are much more refutable.) His point was, that once all outside input has been eliminated as possibly faulty, and once it’s all been removed from the subject mind, the mind itself is still there, thinking whatever one thinks about stuck in an insensate, memoryless void. Whatever it is that thinks, is in there thinking. Its basic function, the ability to think, is not created by input, which might be illusory, and yet it exists, which it could tell (if it possessed the facility) because it CAN THINK…in whatever capacity it does. Whether or not it is capable of perceiving and remarking on its own existence is moot, as it would still be thinking. Thus, I, who distrust everything, can therefore be certain of only one base fact, that I exist, as there is a thing here (wherever that may be) working at a thought. The thought may be tainted by input, but the fact that something is working on it proves that there is something there. Therefore: “I think…and because I have a thing which is capable of thought, I can be certain that I do, in fact, exist.” “I think, therefore I am.”
You I ain’t so sure about.
Well, I caught the latest Bond flick out at the theaters with my family during the TG holiday. But I ain’t gonna talk about that movie. (Well, just one little bit…the film used the thermoptics (well, the optics anyway) idea I spoke about earlier on GITS, SPECIFICALLY IN THE WAY I PROPOSED. Wait…crap, I think I just talked about the optics bit with Bowler. Crud, I’ll have to post that bit to the journal when I get a chance. At any rate, they don’t answer the objection I had to the system concerning angle-of-incidence viewing adjustments either…ah, a discussion for another time.) Fact of the matter is, it’s a fun movie, return to old-school Bond, with silly deathtraps and ludicrously-named henchmen, and it’s already been talked to death. I’ve been covering the popular movies for too long now, and I thought I should get back to the basics. The real reason I started doing these reviews.
Schlock Horror flicks.
And have I got a treat for you.
You thought Jason Voorhees was tough? Michael Meyers unstoppable? Pinhead unavoidable? This film goes after the most omnipotent, lucid, indescribable, and intangient mass of societal development. They’re everywhere and nowhere. They’re coming to get you. You know what They say. They only come out at night. Sometimes They come back. Yes, it’s those far distant relations of giant ants.
They
Ohh, this is gonna be good. A one word title. And a damn silly one. They’re in theaters now. If you missed the ads, you can be forgiven, as there were barely a handful. If you blink, it might be gone from the theaters entirely.
The film’s official title is just “They,” but apparently the title was ambiguous and confusing enough that it’s always listed as “Wes Craven’s: They”. Except, of course, all that won’t fit on the title placard. So, in the end, you find yourself going to the 7:30 showing of “Wes Crave”. Hell, this is fun just writing about They. (Not Them, those are the giant ants.)
Before getting to the movie proper, though, I have to note the previews. For the first preview is worth half the admission alone. It is the trailer for….”House of 1000 Corpses.” Whooo hoooo! Rob Zombie got funding! It’s being introduced as “The horror film they didn’t want you to see” a title particularly ironic in this case (“They” heh). What they fail to mention is who “They” are in this case. Here, it happens to be the initial producers who didn’t want the film to be seen. Rob Zombie (yes, the metal rock star) has been a big fan of horror flicks for a long time, and has commented on the recent commercialization of the genre with mega-star teen actors, big budgets, etc, much along the same lines I’ve noted on. Now he’s making his own horror film. I get the impression that he’s vowed to drag horror back down into the gutter where it belongs…and where the greatest, most classic shocking works were made. The first producers to fund the film apparently didn’t actually BELIEVE that Rob would be actually using THOSE scenes he’d written into the script. They must have thought he was exaggerating or trying to impress them. He wasn’t. They dropped the funding and the film floated in limbo for a year and a half. I don’t know who’s producing it now…but they’re taking a hell of a risk. Maybe they’re just counting on it being a cult phenomenon…which it will if the stuff Rob has said is true. The preview, fortunately doesn’t give much away. Teens lost out in the back of beyond…gas station…creepy old house…lotsa screaming. Actually looks a bit like Rocky Horror meets the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Should be good fun. I gotta find someone to see that one with me.
(Oh…before I go further, I’d just like to object to the ads now in the theaters. Previews I love. Ads I don’t mind. But if that flaming idiotic coke ad with all the racers comes around again I’m gonna have to shoot someone.)
The other previews were pretty fun too. “Darkness Falls” I’m pretty sure was initially titled “The Tooth Fairy”…as there’s an action figure (NOT A DOLL) of the desiccated monster that’s been out for months, and it lists the film’s title as “The Tooth Fairy.” And everyone’s favorite practice in predestination is around for another go in “Final Destination 2”.
Darkness falls and They start. (Heh.)
We start at the beginning of Monsters Inc. Yup, right there in the kiddie’s bedroom. In a thunderstorm. Mom really wants little Billy to sleep through the night in his own bed, but Billy knows that They come after him in the dark. They come out of the closet and from under the bed. They’re dark and fast and computer-generated. Poor little Billy forgets the last cardinal rule about staying all the way under the covers.
They get Billy.
Jump forward 19 years. We’re introduced to Laura Regen (Julia Lund), a bright, up-and-coming master’s student in psychology. Short, blond hair. A bit scrawny. The girlfriend of Riley from Buffy:TVS. She and Buffy’s-least-interesting-ex are getting’ busy when she gets a cell-phone call. From Billy. He’s a childhood friend of hers. Seems that being “gotten” as a kid wasn’t quite as terminal as we all expected. Still, it looks like it fucked Billy up pretty bad. She meets him in a night diner. He’s strung out. He’s worried. He’s wounded. He’s babbling.
Then he tells Laura the entire plot of the film, pulls out a gun, and shoots himself in the head. (It must be a fairly low caliber, as there doesn’t appear to be any exit wound, despite managing to splatter Laura with a few droplets.)
Laura appears a bit perturbed.
They start to take an interest in Laura.
At the funeral following, Laura runs into two college friends of Billy’s, Sam and Terry (Dagmara Dominczyk, lady from “Count of Monte Cristo” who obviously had a handful of extra consonants and nowhere to put them.) Sam and Terry, it appears, had something in common with both Billy and Laura. They all experienced extreme night terrors as children.
Hokay, night terrors. Night terrors are an actual phenomenon that affects a goodly portion of kids once or twice before they grow up. They are NOT standard nightmares, but a kind of waking-dream. Some sort of breakdown between the dreaming state and the disengagement of muscles. A child experiencing a night terror can appear fully awake, walk around, respond and react to his surroundings, even be wakened out of a nightmare INTO a night terror. Instead of wakefulness, though, it’s some kind of hallucinatory state where the child will see things that aren’t there, remember events that didn’t happen, and talk to people who aren’t there or be unable to see those that are. My next door neighbor growing up used to have them. They usually end up being more terrifying for the parents than the kid, as it seems like their child has suddenly gone stark raving mad. They can be rather dangerous, as the kid might flee from an imaginary pursuer straight down the stairs, or injure themselves while flailing against “monsters.”
Great horror fodder.
Sam and Terry start talking to Laura about the things that Billy had seen and talked to them about. The two of them have dug up a diary of Billy’s and have been pouring over the incomprehensible babble therein, because, you see…
They’ve started having night terrors again. Wooooo.
As you might guess, things start to degenerate for Laura from there. We get a nice, long night terror from her perspective where we get a nice, good look into the place where They live. Uh…sorta. They start taking a much more active interest in our main characters. Terry ends up doing a reprise of the most famous scene from “Cat People” (either one, it’s in both versions), while Sam shows us that people live in more places than just under the stairs. They “mark” Laura with the insertion of a long…what? Splinter? Bone fragment? under the skin of her forehead, leaving a distinctive wound. Laura runs to Riley, but his previous experience with unstable blonds makes him a less than sympathetic shoulder. They close in.
Now, I’ve probably given the impression that I really loved this film. That’s not really true, you’re just seeing the enjoyment I’m getting out of writing about horror once more. This isn’t a bad film, but it is fundamentally flawed in several aspects. The first, and biggest flaw, unfortunately, is Laura. She’s scrawny. This actually plays to the character nicely, as she’s rather petite, and not terribly overdeveloped in the bustline, so in many of her scenes tiptoeing through the dark, she looks exactly like an overgrown child. The baggy workout clothes she favors helps this along. Really quite a stroke of brilliance in the casting, since, of course, They are something that we fear as children, and to fear them now reduces us back to children. To see a confident, professional businesswoman suddenly reduced to a five year old child cautiously tiptoeing into the dark with the simple change of a camera-angle is a masterful stroke. However, her build lends to something not quite so useful. She has a girly scream. I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to phrase it. It’s too high-pitched. It’s tinny. Because of that, it sounds faked. She has one scene of extended screaming (at the end of her night terror) that just sounds and looks bad because of it. When I hear an honest-to-God scream, I don’t want a “woke up in the theater at the scariest part of The Ring” shriek, I want the full-throated hysterical sob of someone who actually thinks they’re gonna die. Put some gusto in it. A Scream Queen Julia isn’t. On the other hand, she does have looking strung-out and babbling-incoherently-enough-to-get-committed down pat, as demonstrated by the end of the film. Second is the night terrors. I just happened to know what they are. Good thing, too, ‘cause they never really explain them in the film. Several of the plot points feel badly forced, mechanisms for inserting a little skin into the flick. Another point has to do with “the rules.” They follow some kind of rules, the reasons and meaning for which are never explained. This is good, as it lends to the mystery of the situation. However, one of the rules is that They can’t come out in the light. The problem is…this film really isn’t that dark. By all rights, They shouldn’t come out at all. I kept getting confused as to what time of day it was, as there always seemed to be a window somewhere pouring suffused light into the room so the camera crew could shoot properly. Admittedly, if the scenes were any darker, we’d never be able to see They at all, since They’re kinda build for the shadows.
So what, exactly, are They? Are they scary? Spooky? What?
I have no fucking idea. They are DAMN fast. They stick to the shadows. You don’t get a good look at one for the ENTIRE FILM. I can’t even tell you if They’re roughly humanoid. They have joints that fold up into themselves so they look like a spindly bundle. They have at least one appendage with two long fingers and a thumb. They’ve a dark-ish grey skin. They have faces like toothless corpses. Beyond that, I really can’t say. They might have multiple heads. They might all be different. I just don’t know. The CGI was similarly hard to evaluate, although They did seem to have too-fluid movements…but again, how am I to judge?
In many ways, this could be seen as a retread for Wes Craven. After all Freddy, is the prototype for dream-based monsters now, and the night terrors could be seen as that quite easily. Actually, though, They work profoundly differently, but in a common direction. They creep about to bat and worry the quarry. Freddy was much more of a confrontationalist. They really aren’t dream-based at all…uh…I think. (Jury’s out on that one.)
Now a quick aside. I have a friend named Brandon who is the only person I know who thinks the end of Cowboy Bebop sucked. He says it’s stupid that the main character died. He hates the “unresolved” nature of the rest of the crew. He was looking for a heroic end.
Brandon would hate this movie.
For, you see, as every child knows…They always win in the end.
Hell, it’s the “infamous They!” Laura can’t even muster enough wherewithal to threaten them in any way.
So, in conclusion, this is a B flick. Good ideas. Slippery CGI. Slightly sub-par acting in a few cases (just long enough to keep pulling you out of the film). Nothing in the way of plot holes or anything TOO obviously out of place. Wrapped up in a nice theme, though. (Come to think of it…Lovecraft would have loved this flick. Alternate realities, malicious, hunting evil, creatures never fully defined or seen, and the profound connection to dreams. Were he still alive, HPL would probably have delighted in seeing They inducted into the Cthulhu Mythos. (Remember, all you purist snobs, he wrote for the pulps, and did so happily.) They are almost certainly not one of the other Mythos in disguise.
This is not a horror film for people who want everything explained. By the end of the film, we hardly know more than we did after the first ten minutes. (Keep the covers over your head.) The film keeps its secrets. It’s not for people who need a happy ending. It’s not for people who require that every film they see be a polished, cut diamond, shining radiance in every facet. It’s for horror fans who don’t mind $8 ($6 for students…milking that grad student status) going into a B-rated flick where the authors really wanted to tell their new and unique…if unpolished…story. In many ways, this film is trying to do the same thing as The Ring did so successfully not too long ago. New take, unique direction. Actually, this film contained more…uh…contemplative silence than a typical Craven flick. Perhaps this is the film that he really wanted to make while churning out potboilers like “Wishmaster” for the sci-fi channel.
Watch this film if you always wondered what They looked like. Maybe you’ll have better luck than me.
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"Bring down another bottle of wine...Maria"
2002-11-28 10:29:06
Omnistrata: Let's put it this way.
Do you think Aramaki has to keep buffing the assprints off of his desk from where Motoko always leans on it?
:)
Happy Thanksgiving all!
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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