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Now children, who among you knows the story of the Smiler and the Beast?
2004-04-10 18:02:25
Quick point before the quiz:
Well, I’m an idiot. I was digging through a bunch of old Asimovs, and came across a review of Miazaki’s full library on the occasion of the release of “Spirited Away” in the states. The editor loves all the films, of course, but he pointed out something that I totally should have spotted in my own review of it (link), especially considering the extensive comparisons between it and Alice in Wonderland. He pointed out a resemblance so strong that I don’t think it could possibly be coincidental. He pointed out who Yubaba looked like.
The Duchess.
Hell, she’s even got a baby, although this one never turned into a pig. Really, the relative size, attitude, just about everything about Yubaba screams that it’s an homage to the Duchess.
I just wanted to apologize again for the false alarm. In doubled-over retrospect, though, it may have been a proper attention-getter, considering the further depressing events of the last few days. I hope the inevitable bloodbath signals a slaughter of the continuous ranks of saboteurs, mercenaries from Iran, and power-grasping idiots so severe that recruitment for anything resembling something similar in the future is quashed for good. The numbers are small, and all the reliable reports I’ve heard label the groups as the worst of the remaining Feyadeen rag-tags and zealots. But they’re hiding among civilians, and trying to pull the Marines into bloody, messy, urban warfare that was mostly avoided the first time around. But these are the Marines we’re talking about, and all the nastiest of the remainders are out in the open now while all the citizens are staying at home. I’ll keep praying for the best possible result, and keep supporting the troops in what I consider an honorable, if dangerous, undertaking.
On to a lighter subject…..MEME!
1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:
“…they leave an enduring legacy-half elf children.”
2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?
Poster on the wall.
3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?
Cast commentary on “Aswang”.
4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is:
1:35
5: Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?
1:14
6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
Car going by outside.
7: When did you last step outside? what were you doing?
Going out for Krystle’s
8: What are you wearing?
Not much (just got outta the shower).
10: Did you dream last night?
Hmmm….don’t remember.
11: When did you last laugh?
About an hour ago, at something said in the commentary.
12: What is on the walls of the room you are in?
GAH. Hokay, left to right, Posters or wallscrolls or prints of: John Constantine, Chi-Chian, FLCL, Giant Robo, a sillouhette target with a bunch of holes in it, Wolfgang, a Hasenjagd poster I snitched in Dortmund, Joker and Harley Quinn, JTHM, Armitage III, Lola Rennt, lead from Night of the Living Dead III, a “Rage” card, Gorey’s “Gashlycrumb Tinies,” Skuld & Merl fan-art, Princess Mononoke (signed by Neil Gamian), Neuschwenstein, Whelen’s “Lovecraft’s Nightmare”, and Magik. Should get my friend’s oil painting up at some point.
13: Seen anything weird lately?
Uh….no actually. Bunch of Tech alumni who couldn’t care less about the finals count?
14: What do you think of this quiz?
Came back and did it after being so far behind the curve, didn’t I?
15: What is the last film you saw?
In the theaters, Hellboy.
16: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
Pay off student loans. Then Borders and the comic shops would tremble at my approach.
17: Tell me something about you that I don't know:
I really hate my job.
18: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
Green president, House, and Senate. That ridiculous party would spontaneously combust so quickly we’d never have time to swear any of them in. The fallout would ensure a sudden death to ludditeism in the face of new technology.
19: Do you like to dance?
If I could.
20: George Bush:
And politics permeate even the recesses of the most trivial of momentary distractions.
21: Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?
……having trouble not over-thinking this. Nora. There.
21: Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?
Anything but Matt. Matt is a terrible, boring name.
22: Would you ever consider living abroad?
Only if it was some place where Enlish was the native language. I’m terrible with languages, and an inability to communicate would be murder on me.
So, I’ve gotten into a bit of a rut with these posts. I don’t know if it’s just a momentary malaise, or something more enduring, but mostly it’s been a willing distraction every time I lost an opportunity to write another entry. Maybe I’m intimidated by the new “watched flicks” pile forming next to mount DVD, awaiting reviews. Maybe I’ve finally gotten bored with the genre (these things go in cycles....it’ll come around again). Dunno if I’ll be shaking things up and trying out different posting styles or just leaving off posting entirely, except in comments to other people’s journals. I think much of the whining is manifesting because of an unwillingness to tackle anything more solid or meaningful here anymore. That, and my writing in general seems to be spiraling downward. I go back and read my older stuff in the AMV journal and wonder where all that apparent talent at clever turns and entertaining language went. My friends are always more than willing to heap praise on whatever recent missive I jot out, but that’s probably more of an effort to cheer me up (hence my constant “look at me!” whining) than any real assignation of quality. (No, this is not begging for comments again.)
Really, the recent stuff, what little there’s been of it, sucks. Stupid and, above all, formulaic. The original intent of this journal was as a place to play around with what little talent I have and hone it into an expert quill so I could do some real story writing. It worked for a bit, but now the major talent I’ve learned seems to be the ability to write at great length on autopilot.
So, as I said, I might or might not be shaking things up in the near future. Hell, maybe I’ll even make a post that doesn’t require me to lj-cut it in six places.
But not quite yet.
I’ve seen a bunch more movies (“bunch” being a quantity somewhere between two and four, exclusive), but two of them have already been seen by pretty much everyone else on earth, so I won’t bother with a full review, just the usual lengthy summary of my impressions.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a good flick, but it successfully highlighted my own shallowness when I realized that I would have liked it a lot more had it not been so popular. Had it not been so popular I could go around telling people about this great film starring Jim Carrey where he actually manages an understated character. This film that accentuates an interesting and emotionally real story with just the right touch of special effects without overdoing it. This film that would make a perfect date flick. A story with good characterization and a nice, touching end looping back on us, and involving a girl just loopy enough to be endearing.
As it is, I can say all this, and everyone just goes “yeah, I know. I saw it on opening night.” And I loose all chance of waxing rhapsodic about it, instead listening with a bored ear to THEM gush over it.
This is one of the petty reasons I prefer niche cinema. There’s just too fucking MUCH of everything else that I end up on the tail end of all the really popular films. Everyone’s said everything that can be said about the really popular flicks by the time I make it into my seat. Ah well.
So I ended up being the one told over and over about this brilliant flick, and getting pulled into the theater by a really cool looking promo. ‘Course everything about the film says ‘date flick’ which makes those of us who spent Feb. 14th browsing the web and drinking heavily feel pretty damn pathetic seeing the flick alone (only solo in the the’atar). But there were those cool special effects.
I was actually a little disappointed in the film by the end. It was a great flick, but so many of my friends had been praising it so highly, they made it sound like a life-changing event. I was a bit disappointed to find it “really pretty good” instead of “OMGWTF good.” Hope I haven’t been doing the same to the rest of you-all.
Carrey did manage a really nice, non-clichéd, understated character. No funny faces, no catch phrases. The transformation from his typical comedic fare to the bookish, almost pathologically shy nerd (um....ow), actually reminded me of 8-mile, and Mather’s character, in that the character is almost a diametric opposite of the attitude we generally assign to their public appearance. (Though I never saw “Man in the Moon.”) It was almost too good, in that the character felt so real that the nicely-scripted lines that came out of their mouths felt ever so slightly false. Like we were watching a film.....if that makes any sense. Hmmm. “More legitimate than the fiction they were in?”
Eh.
The special effects were actually a big disappointment for me. They were good, and really nicely appropriate in several places (the best of the bunch was the slow fade of all the books to blank dust jackets in the bookstore during the scene where he asks Clementine out) but the ads had lured me in with the promise of a near-psychedelic romp through a dissolving reality. It never really elevated to that level, though there were some nice reinterpretations and building of ideas. (The house collapsing, the inverted eyes, etc.) Uh, did anyone else feel the urge to shout “Oh NO! The NOTHING is coming!”
Just me, huh?
Oh, and I can’t stress how funny I found it that Elijah Wood was playing a complete and total pathetic looser with the ladies.
The ending was a nice encapsulation of the whole film’s concept, which was, essentially, hopelessly romantic. The cynic and bitter bastard in me rebels at such an ending, but I know that’s really my problem. Weirdly, the closest parallel in feel, mood, and story progression would be “Being John Malkovich.” Strange, almost unexplained process leads to uncannily weird situation. Characters really don’t know what’s going on, and keep trying to feel their way through the situation they’ve found themselves in, and the different threads of the plot wind around one another like a caduceus. (Excuse me that last ego-inflating little turn of phrase. Had it in my head and had to get it out.) The air of pervasive fiddling with unknown processes much bigger than they are, and the believable response by actors acting-so-well-to-be-ordinary-folk-it-almost-comes-across-as-bad-acting has a weird parallel between the two films.
In conclusion, if you haven’t seen it, break out of jail or dig yourself up and see this film. You’ll love it. I was mildly disappointed, but still enjoyed it.
Then, actually getting slightly ahead of the curve for once, I went to see Hellboy.
Now, in order to appreciate what was done here, you really have to be a fan of the comic. This is not to say that they don’t give adequate background, or they don’t have enough characterization, or you won’t be able to follow the concepts. On the contrary, not only is the film based on an essentially simple idea (essentially a cross between X-files, X-men, and Indiana Jones), but the film does an admirable job of filling everyone in on the concepts and characters.
No, the reason that you have to read the comics is to get the full impact of a comic book adapted almost perfectly to the big screen. There’s been a lot of talk about how “this film is the greatest comic book film ever.” I don’t think that’s true, but I do think it qualifies as “the greatest comic book ADAPTATION ever.” There have been other comic-book films that will be remembered longer, and told more compelling stories, but no other flick has come so close to perfect emulation of the style and thrust of the source material.
See, I really like Hellboy comics, but I’ll be the first to admit that they’re pretty thin. At their core, they’ve got some neat, well developed ideas. Storylines that feel like they were plucked from pulp novels of the 20’s and 30’s (or, considering their prevalence to bring in Nazis as the villans, somewhat later), or, alternately, digging around in traditional legends and myths for source material, much like Gamian’s work. While very well told, the stories are strikingly Spartan. Mike Mignola is a master at stripping excess material from storylines. Watchmen this ain’t. Everything’s stripped down so far that it aids the feeling that you’re reading a myth or legend at times. That means little in the way of side-plots and stories, and fill-up with what I normally decry as “manga-fied” large panel shots of scenery or action sequences, but here there’s so little plot that you can actually get through it all despite the modern-comic structure (instead of protracting out a battle over three issues....I’m looking at you Exiles....).
This makes the source perfectly suited for film.....so long as they don’t overcomplicate things. The overall effect is to tell a lot of character development and motivational material in a very few panels....usually while there’s other stuff going on. Show, not tell. No extended talky segments, except where backstory is concerned, but nearly all the character development in Hellboy is done through the art. (Go read some yourself. Penny arcade provided this link to a lot of the online comic material: http://www.hellboy.com/z-old-design/hbcomicsonline.html) Plot is devoted to a straightforward action/adventure/supernatural/occult/horror retelling, and time is rarely taken out for “personal moments.”
Speaking of which, the art in Hellboy is, if anything, even more Spartan than the stories. Gaping caverns are a series of spiky stalactites and stalagmites drawn in the 2-dimensional jagged outline of a child’s work. At its most extreme, characters are little more than two-dimensional silhouettes with eyes and mouths. Often, the detail lies only in heavy shadows so deep that facial features are lost in jet-black shadows, with an “all or nothing” approach to shading. (The size of Hellboy’s brow means you rarely get a direct look at his eyes. All the more impressive that the artist can get such volumes of characterization out of gestures and glances.) Much like Picasso, Mignola is able to get a remarkable amount of emotion out of just a handful of lines. Some villains are even worse off, with blank or un-emotive faces rendering them alien and unlikable next to the human protagonists. The wind-up clockwork Nazi ninja was an absolute stroke of genius in that respect. (Having not read a lot of Hellboy, I don’t know if he’s cannon.....if he came straight from the books or was invented for the film) The egg-shell featureless face, except for two opaque lenses, is, I kid you not, EXACTLY how Mignola would have drawn him. Mechanical, impassionate, you almost feel like they’re doing battle with one of those wooden mannequin figures artists use to try out poses with. To that degree, Kronen feels much more at home in this film than the supposed “main” villain, Grigori Rasputin. Like Frankenstein and his monster, all eyes are fixed on the horror of the monster, though Frankenstein is the real evil.
So let’s go down the list. Characterization: near perfect. Ron Perlman is as close to a direct incarnation of Hellboy as we’re ever likely to find. In an interview, Mignola mentioned how, on the few times Perlman was out of costume on set, Mingola would think to himself “oh COOL! Ron Perlman is here!” forgetting for a moment that he’d been working with him every day for months as Hellboy. The writing of his part was ever so slightly smarmier than I envisioned Hellboy being, but only by the tiniest margin. Just too many jokes for an accurate representation of the comic, but pulled off nicely. Quips during fights, smug twenty-something attitude, disrespect for authority, all works nicely in the characterization of this guy, though I always got more an impression of timeless age for the character. That probably has more to do with the weathered, rough nature of Mignola’s drawings, though. The art is so dark and weathered that the addition of speech bubbles seems uncannily intrusive in a medium so dependant upon them. The scene with the kittens was pushing it, but it was all in good fun.
Abe Sapien was a real triumph of costuming. I never had a real strong grasp of the character, though, and his portrayal in the film was a little twitchier and more spastic than I was expecting. Sapien could certainly take care of himself in the comics, although probably not against a critter like Samiel. Also, I’m not sure how I envisioned his voice, but I have to agree that the lilting Niles Crane wasn’t what I was expecting. Nonetheless, still quite fun.
Liz: Again, near perfect. I know only a little more about her character than Abe’s, but they got down her characterization nicely. Dark, brooding, introverted, haunted even. The only “normal” looking character of the BRPD (later additions include a homunculus and a ghost in a containment unit), her emotional problems nonetheless somehow make her more of an outsider in the world than any of the others. I was a little disappointed that they went with the blue flame effect for her than plain old fire, but that’s a stylistic thing I can overlook. The romantic link with Hellboy at the end was pandering a bit, and at least a little out of character for them both. They’re both such private stoics that I’ve
Rasputin: Eh....felt kinda half-formed. That’s sort of in Mignola’s tradition, dealing with legends like himself, but there were a lot of gaps involved, dismissed with a phrase or two at the right time. Helps that I’ve never gotten a real grasp of Rasputin as a horror-host villan.
Sammael: Ah, THERE’s the sort of critter we’re used to seeing Hellboy square off against. However great the danger, however complex the motivation, it always comes down to a brawl with ol’ red. It’s just the scale that shifts.
Everyone else: Who cares? Well, dad, of course, but I never read that story, so I can’t comment on it. The new tagalong agent was little more than a Watson, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the banter with Clay, and the scene where the director offers advice on Cigar smoking. (Incidentally, major kudos for including the cigars in the film, and not cleaning it up in deference to “thetruth.org”. We’re all awaiting the travesty that will be the black-haired, clean living, non-smoking John Constantine, I’m glad to see it hasn’t permeated EVERY scriptwriter out there.)
Visual style: Mike said it best when he noticed that certain scenes were exactly as Mignola would have drawn them. Does mean a good bit of standing about in shadows for part of the film, though.
Plot: A good deal more complicated than I’m used to seeing in a Hellboy comic, but not overly so. The romance story felt a bit tacked-on, but, as I said, they’ve gotta pander to their audience, and a two-hour movie isn’t long enough for either Hellboy or Liz to break outta their shells. The bit with the kid on the rooftop was hilarious, so I’ll forgive them a bit of a break in character (I don’t think Hellboy’s quite THAT immature). The crucifix bit at the end felt a little cheeseball, but only because it couldn’t have been acted the way that Mignola would have drawn it. The dark Cthulhuoid Lovecraftian gods were a good choice for the real impending doom of the film. Hellboy’s faced off against Lovecraft-homages before, and they made for some of his best stories. Especially loved the weird, sorta-concealed nature of them in their prison in the darkest regions of space. If it was based on one of the first Hellboy stories, I don’t know it, but it worked well enough.
(Another major kudos for the opening quote. “De Vermis Mysteriis” (Ludwig Prynn c. 1542) is a Lovecraftian tome of forbidden knowledge almost as well known as the Necronomicon. Gave me a good laugh before the film even started.)
Plot holes: yeah, there were some. Mostly erring by lack of inclusion, but some plain-ol silly ones too. (Like how did Mr. boyscout not get incinerated by Liz when she took out Sammael? Or why didn’t Sammael duplicate _again_ after that? The creature was burned to death the first time, and it didn’t stop him. Does Hellboy just heal real fast, is that why his cuts and scrapes disappear by the next scene? Why didn’t the wound with the egg in it heal over before he got back to base, then?) However, picking on them is rather missing the point. This film is enormously about style, and that it’s got in spades. That’s another common point with the comic. Legends are dug up and confronted, mostly for the pure joy of their depiction, not for the telling of the tale. In “the Wolves of St. Augustine” Hellboy pokes around a deserted town for a while with a researcher, and uncover a key clue. The researcher, prompted by the clue, recites a legend about a cursed noble family, giving us the origin story of the baddy responsible. Then we’re confronted by the ghosts of the Wolves, there’s a bit of a chase, and a showdown brawl with the beast responsible. No real elaborations, just straightforward storytelling for the pure joy of the imagery and presentation.
In the end, the best adaptation of a comic I’ve seen yet. If you like the comic, you’ll like the movie, and vice versa, although the comic has very little of the romance and less of the humor.
Soooo.......Aswang.
Hmm...
You know, there were a couple of reasons I decided to pick this flick up. A) It had this really artsy cover that was all dark and spooky and ominous without telling you anything about what the film was actually about. Like the cover of the original “Ringu.” There’s a pregnant woman sitting in a chair off in one corner, and there’s a big spooky face looming in the remaining 9/10s cover. Also, I recognized the little “Sundance” participant logo there too. And down across the bottom? Four word movie review:
“This movie is nasty.”
Well, that’s nothing special, but you know who said it? None other than the man himself, Joe Bob Briggs.
Well, that’s gotta settle matters. If Joe Bob Briggs thinks this flick is nasty, it must be something special.
But still, $14? I’ve got this copy of “Nightbreed” over here for $2 less.....
B) I actually know what an Aswang is. (OK, stop snickering, it’s not pronounced like that.) Courtesy of a gift from Mike a while back. An Aswang is a female Filipino monster or witch. It has all the traditional nebulous Filipino monster powers, flight, shapechanging, moving as a shadow, etc., but it’s primary distinguishing point is its forty-foot tongue. The Aswang will perch on the roof of a home, and slide its long tongue down through the thatch or in through a window, where it can feed on the sleeping inhabitants. It likes intestines and liver, but its favorite food is unborn children, which it will suck all the life out of, causing the mother to miscarry. How exactly it gets at the child isn’t mentioned, but I don’t think I have to draw you a picture.
This is an exceedingly nasty legend, but one that’s pretty damn inventive. I was really curious what kind of a story they could write around the creature....and it has that Sundance logo.....hmmmm.
C) Plus, it’s a Filipino monster, right? Foreign flick! Score! In a genre where the unexpected is essential, sometimes the most rewarding thing you can do is hop to another continent where they have different ideas about storytelling and suspense. If I remember correctly, the Philippines have their own home-brew movie industry that’s gotten a solid reputation among schlock horror houses, but is practically never exported to the US because no one ever wants to take the time to translate everything from Taglog for such a tiny niche market.
So, plunk down the money, cart the movie home and watch it.
Let’s backtrack, shall we?
A) Forgot the cardinal rule of absurdly bad horror. If there’s nothing in your film that would really stand up to being put on the cover, go all nebulous with the imagery, or get that artist from Iron Maiden to sketch you something completely unrelated. Joe Bob Briggs is an excellent, frank, and highly honest reviewer of crappy horror flicks. However, a four word review leaves a lot of room for interpretation. I should really look up the rest of that review.
And Sundance?
No one knows why this film was chosen for Sundance. Even the directors couldn’t figure it out. They got panned in “Variety.” But, as the directors said, “getting panned in Variety for being at Sundance is like Audry Hepburn announcing that you’re bad in bed. Hell, you were THERE, which is more than you’d ever expected.” (Yes, weirdly dated reference...weirdly dated.....weird)
You know what really should have cued me in? The little distributor logo “Mondo Macabro.” The Luchadore masks in the distributor intro were really worrying me.
B) The story......actually the story ain’t half bad. I’ll come back to it in a bit.
C) Yes, this film was made in that great exotic locale known as.......Milwaukee Wisconsin. Cue laughter.
Having said all this, the film isn’t horrible. It’s not good, but it’s not horrible either. A few good moments here and there, the film comes out somewhere near the bottom of “mediocre” for me, and just near enough the top of “bad” for most people to at least wonder how it ends.
But the DVD.....the DVD is great. There’s a little documentary attached as well as two separate commentary tracks that are all an absolute riot. These people are great. They all know that this is a second or third grade horror flick that they ended up making and they’re all pretty blasé about it. Honestly, the C- the film gets is boosted all the way up to an A by the commentary tracks alone. The directors had some sort of narrator from Mondo Macabro prompting them non-stop throughout the film, pulling out the weirdest anecdotes. (The Scooby-do cop that gets killed trying to come to their rescue is the drummer for the Violent Femms. The mansion the movie took place in had to be cleaned out in a hurry one night because Bill Clinton shot one of his presidential campaign ads there. The closing song was a gift from the members of the band-that-would-soon-be-Garbage (minus Shirley Manson)). The actors all ridicule their own performances, bursting out laughing at every horror-cliché expression they pull in the different scenes. “Now here, I remember not knowing what the hell I was doing.” They add their own cartoon sound effects to scenes. This isn’t the greatest commentary track I’ve ever heard, but it improves the film immensely.
All in all the film sounds like it came together in a very “American Movie” manner. (Still need to see that.) The guys spent their parents’ money to make it, their most expensive, important prop broke the first day of filming, it was sleeting on the days the actors had to run around in nightgowns, and they decided on impulse to have a chainsaw fight between two of the characters. At best, they were all stage actors, the lead male being better known for his yearly performance of “The Music Man.” In the final distribution they had to change the title to “The Unearthing” (uh....nothing is unearthed anywhere in the film...) They weren’t having fun, exactly, but dammit, they made their movie, and I’m glad that the weirdly misplaced Sundance screening got them enough publicity that they were able to sell distribution rights and make a small profit after everyone was paid. It makes you feel for them, weirdly.
For once, the plot is fairly straightforward, so the summary shouldn’t take nearly as long as usual.
The opening is actually really cool. They have a traditional Philippine (uh, maybe....anthro 101 was a long time ago) shadow-puppet play silently acting out the basics of the Aswang, a large cut-out dragon-like creature flies up and perches on the home of an overly-pregnant woman. Its mouth opens and a long snake emerges. A hero shows up, does battle with the Aswang and rescues the woman. Meanwhile we fade in and out of a flame-engulfed background while two entwined forms pander to the audience.
Cut to Katrina. She’s gotten herself into a bit of trouble by having unprotected intro with her boyfriend. To get herself out of this little problem, she’s signed a contract with a Peter Null (“paternal” as explained in the commentary) who needs to have an heir to inherit his mother’s estate. Katrina and Peter will travel out to his mother’s apple orchard mansion, and Katrina will act as his wife. Peter will leave his real wife behind. The actor who played the lawyer had all of four lines, but was battling a massive hangover, and literally reads his lines off the script in front of him, disguised as the contract. Katrina and Peter drive out into the boonies of Northern Wisconsin on Lake Michigan. There’s a moment where they get pulled over for speeding by the sheriff (Victor Delorenzo) but, setting up what might be called a “theme” in a better film, are immediately let off the hook when the sheriff recognizes Peter. Deference to money, and exception in the law to the very rich. They show up at the house and meet Peter’s mother, Olive, her Filipino maid “Cupid” (this isn’t that wacky a name....apparently a tradition of fanciful names in the islands), and the exotic chicken that lives in their foyer.
Yeah.
There’s also Peter’s “touched” sister Claire, who lives in an adjacent wreck of a home, and is never seen. (She turns out to also be Peter’s wife....) To cut to the chase and ruin the tension, the whole family are Aswang (excepting, of course, the actual Filipino), and they’ve brought Katrina back so that the fetus she’s carrying can nourish the ailing matriarch of the family. On the first night, Peter....uh....indiscreetly checks......uh.......on the baby while Katrina is tossed in the throes of a weird, artsy nightmare. Nothing is shown, really, other than Peter’s positioning, but apparently it was the first scene of the movie they actually shot, and none of the actors had ever met before.
The next day we meet a strange doctor wandering the premises, who’s found a bunch of weirdly cocooned small game animals in the surrounding area. Katrina invites him to dinner over Peter’s objections, and there’s a bit of descriptive narration scenes over the extremely awkward dinner, including the introduction of the Aswang idea. Little known to the Nulls, the doctor knew all this already, having encountered an Aswang in the Philipines during his military stint there, and having come here now on the hunt for them. Needless to say, both he and his dog are quickly eliminated by Claire. Really neat, nasty, grotesque, but low-budget feeding scene results.
Meanwhile, back at the orchard, mamma Null decides it’s time for her to have a bit of a taste. Cupid carries her up to the roof, and she slowly extends her tongue (looks like an inch-thick slim jim) over the edge, onto the tiny balcony, through the doors, and into the bed with Katrina. Katrina, feeling something VERY weird, wakes up, and she pitches into the battle with the vacuum-hose. Finally, she gives a sharp tug. This does two things. It slams the doors shut on the tongue. And mamma Null looses her footing on the roof. Sliding forward, she tumbles off the roof and ends up hanging four feet off the ground by her tongue.
Frickin’ hilarious as it sounds.
Peter shows up and cuts his mother down. (OW!) Katrina slips out and into the neighboring cabin (doh!) where she finds the nearly-comatose doctor wrapped up in webbing, and Claire returns wielding a ....CHAINSAW?
Whoa, shifting gears a bit here.
Katrina disposes of Claire by hittin’ the ho’ with a hoe. (The gardening kind.) Peter shows up, and goes into full “American Psycho” mode. Really, he does an admirable enough job at this point that he could have competed with Christian Bale. Verbally berating Katrina over her “untrustworthiness” in the contract they both signed, he chases her off into the night. Best scene of the film is him standing on the edge of the porch watching Katrina run into the woods while revving the chainsaw and screaming “This is AMERICA! We have LAWS here!”
Remember that bit about money and privilege? Yeah, not all that deep an exploration, but enough here to be a legitimate theme. Substitution of law for morality, use of the law by the rich to victimize those in need of the $$$. Blah blah, yackity smackity.
Katrina eventually finds the cop, we get the standard “whose word do you trust” runaround, and the cop ends up dead after rethinking his decision. (Shoulda stayed a drummer.) Katrina wakes up back in the cabin, chained to the wall. Or, more specifically, chained to the window. (The cast members on the commentary kept yelling for her to break the window....or just untie the chain.) Mamma Null dies (suffocates in her respirator) while they’re trying to “prepare” Katrina for the feeding, Katrina chops off her hand at the wrist to escape, more chasing, more screaming, Peter eventually tackles her on the front lawn. The cabin has caught on fire at this point (for real, the building was scheduled for a controlled burn, and the fire department was kind enough to help out for the movie) and Cupid emerges with an axe. At this point we discover that Katrina’s kid, through the extensive “sampling” of the family, has become an Aswang as well. (Again, nothing completely indiscrete actually shown, but perfectly obvious nonetheless.) Cupid, who never really liked Peter all that much, shifts her grip and takes his head off instead. We end 5 years later on Cupid saying prayers with a little 5-year old girl.
This is a weirdly made flick. It’s got some good scenes of interpersonal tension, Peter Null being creepily possessive of his faux wife, gloweringly hostile towards strangers, and then there’s that whole creepy thing with his wife/sister the acting isn’t half bad, for the subject matter. On the other hand, the supposed “payoff” sick and violent scenes are just laughably silly, or sick in an “ewww” fashion.
Direction is just weird too. The directors must’ve had a real thing for feet, because about 10% of the final half hour is spent watching bare feet wander around randomly.
Amusing anecdotes abound about the distribution as well. Apparently it really hit it big in German-dubbed release for some reason. At a promotional interview, one of the directors made the assertion that Aswang was a “pro-choice” film, mostly to drum up some controversy for better sales. That stunt earned him his very own right-winger death threats. (“Pro-choice film”......uh.... Hmmmm. If Kat had gotten an abortion instead of agreeing to this roundabout adoption, then she wouldn’t have been chased down and murdered by the right-winger epitome (the directors state specifically in the commentary that Peter Null was written as the rich religious-right pastiche).......but supposedly the religious right wouldn’t have wanted her to get the abortion.....so they want to feed on the poor through contracts and legal loopholes.....so they don’t want the poor to have abortions because that would shrink the list of possible targets.....but she ends up punished for doing what “Null” (as the religious right) would have approved of......but she gives birth to a monster.....
OK, I give up. The directors said “It’s a bit distorted, but it’s in there,” but I don’t believe them.)
Extras are pretty chock full for such a mediocre flick. In addition to the two commentary tracks, there’s a “making of” documentary about a half hour long, a handful of trailers, including the earliest one (with all different actors) that was used to raise money, and a narration of a lost scene. Originally, they’d planned an opening in the Philippines that pretty much filled in all the holes of the flick, but they never had enough cash to manage it.
All in all......if you have four or six hours free to experience the hilarity of the commentaries (after watching the film first, or they’ll make no sense)....then you really need to get another hobby. A flick that may live on as a cult hit. Otherwise of interest only to the most devoted of gorehounds.
-
"Mr. Owl, how many hoots does it take to get to the center of my Psyche?"
2004-03-30 13:36:49
"Let's find out....one...twhoo....three................four hundred and sixty seven....four hundred and sixty eight...."
Bastard bird outside my window this morning a 5 AM....
Anyway, I was all set to start in on a big ol' "pity me" session again when my friends list erupted in three areas, with three groups of people that don't even know one another. So, rather than add any grief to the surplus we've already got, I figured I'll do something else. Here, presented for all to see, I give you: the media slore. (Started most of this a few days ago. Please excuse the redundant start.)
I haven’t posted in a while for a bunch of different reasons. Work has been occupying a good deal of my time, and the pressures therein tend to shove out of the way any idea of staying up till one rattling away at the keyboard, since that’s mostly what I’m putting off doing while at work. There’s been a good deal of personal stuff going on as well, but frankly I dwell on talking it over in here during the day, notching up the tally in my head, thinking over the phrasing, adding something more to the list, and come quitting time, the last thing I want to do is dwell on it any more. I am a completely unrepentant night person, and my attitude improves immensely once the sun starts to set, so I see all the pitiable whining for what it really is, and would rather spare all my friends exposure to that.
‘Course it just starts up again when I wake up the next morning. Bah.
The pile ‘o reviews has just about gotten away from me by now. I’m seriously considering granting another blanket amnesty and chucking them all in the storage bin, meaning y’all would never be enlightened as to my snarky comments on:
Beyond Re-Animator. Reainmator 3: weirdly made entirely in Spain with some oddly Italian moments (I’m not sophisticated enough to distinguish between Italian and Spanish cinema) and actors who are all excellently fluent, but just unfamiliar enough with the English language that it reduced excellent Spanish actors to mediocre English ones. Jeffrey Combs, as always, is the saving grace as Herbert West.
“Cat Soup,” excellent highly experimental anime piece with a sadistic bent, but rough and scattered enough in style and story to feel like Bill Plympton stepped into the picture a couple of times. Also way too fucking short.
“Werewolf” ......OK, wasn’t actually ever going to review this one. 2$ gift from some friends (same ones who suffered through Lifeforce) that turned out to be the flick from the MST3K of the same name. Ouch. “So the villain’s plan is to knock out janitors, turn them into werewolves, put them behind the wheel of a car, and have them drive into explosive barrels? BRILLIANT!”
“Bones”, over-thought, underplayed blacksploitation ghost story that fell down mostly on Snoop-Dogg’s inability to pull the character off successfully. (Took until the director commentary for me to realize the ghost was supposed to be _stoned_ for the whole flick.) I’d be kinder to the Dogg, but the man got three mild make-out scenes with Pam (“Foxy Brown”) Grier, so you’ll excuse me if I can’t seem to summon up some pity for him. Token white girl was Katherine Isabella! Whoo hoo! Also watch real close for the bestiality scene that was snipped.
“The Maxx”.......nothing I could say in three sentences would give this masterwork adequate credit. Possibly the greatest cartoon-from-comic adaptation ever. Bootleg DVD and discount-bin VHS.
Two collections of the Best of Zagreb Film. There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who think that animating a man inserting a suppository would be funny......and those who would never THINK of it in the first place. Work all over the place, but only a few that are worth one’s time.
A trailer-tape from Dept. 13 that I got for free from somewhere. It’s always nice to get a glimpse of the absolute bottom of the barrel to recalibrate your system on occasion.
And.....Candyman 3. Actually a fairly good concept and a nice approach to the story with some of the odder, yet legitimate fortunetelling moments (the bit with the egg).....but challenged your suspension of disbelief every time the main girl came on-screen. They got the whitest, blondest girl in the world (Donna D’Errico from Baywatch) to play Daniel Robetai’s great, great granddaughter. OK, 1/16 may not be much, but STILL....
Also, and most importantly, I caught “The Passion of the Christ” in the theaters the week before last. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actual important film before. Or one nearly as powerful. Those of you who are religious will want to bring sunglasses for after. Few faults near the end, but, all in all, as good a film as could be made in this time on the topic. (Especially liked how the daemons and devils were made up in a way that would have been understood _then_.) Perhaps the most interesting, however, is how utterly shocked all the disinterested observers have been to discover how much Christianity was forged in blood, humiliation, and suffering. Too many outside observers have apparently been buying into the fuzzy-bunny, Davey and Goliath image.
(Addendum since I started writing this yesterday) Saw the second Scooby-Doo movie today on a whim. I stopped by the mall for a meal, really, really didn’t want to do the work that I should’ve been doing, and elected to catch a flick. Wasn’t in the mood for horror (whoa.....running a fever?) so caught this one instead. Overall.....eh. Most of the original parody take was accomplished in the first flick, so there wasn’t much to do in the second film other than try and flesh things out. Sarah Michelle Gellar still is totally NOT Daphne (and her hair is getting even blonder for the second film). Fred is strained, and his only attempt at character development is dumb. Velma, Shaggy, and Scoob are nailed perfectly (Velma in particular). This is the official “awww....Velma’s got a date” issue with everything that entails. The date is with Seth Green (Dr. Evil’s son), proving that, despite at least having fun and ridiculing the obvious legacy of Scooby Doo, they weren’t going to go anywhere near the REAL humorous bits for fear of angry parents and making it non-kid friendly. (Popular opinion has held for a very long time that Velma is the cast-in-the-grain lesbian of the troupe.) The only concessions made that sneak near the edge of unacceptability is when Shaggy spots his fans in the crowd by a peculiar whiff on the breeze (presumably a touch o’ the green). Overall....not worth your cash. Catch it on HBO or at a matinee.....dollar theater or something. CGI’s good, but for God’s sake, they actually inserted a plot hole for the sake of a joke. On the plus side, we do see Velma without her glasses and in a tight red leather catsuit, but only as a clumsy attempt to impress Seth. (Again, I say HA! Everyone knows that Velma’s the one that’s a wildcat in the sack.) One good line, too:
Shaggy: This is tied for the most frightening day of my life!
Velma: Tied with what?
Shaggy: EVERY OTHER FREAKING DAY!
Whoo......what else. Well, there’s all the books I’ve been reading lately. Every once in a while I’ll swing out in every direction and start half a dozen books at once. Let’s see what I’m on right now.....
There’s “Selected Letters of HPL, volume III.” Frickin’ book’s been my bane for more months than I’d care to count. Keep renewing it at the library, but never seemed to find the time to make any progress in it. Didn’t help that it’s by far the longest of the five, and now that I’ve got some sustained momentum going I run smack into one of his legendary 60-page missives (and that’s AFTER a few ellipsis to remove the irrelevant bits). HPL really was a fascinating mind, an eloquent debater and an epistolary master, opining and joking on just about every topic of the day. Too bad about the vitriolic racism. If not for that, people other than myself (the geek) and literary scholars might actually look into these old untouched tomes. I’ve been taking this book to lunch with me on occasion, and getting through half a dozen or so pages at a time. Very slow going, but that’s the only way I can take this particular 60-page note. (GREAT LONG DIATRIBE/RANT on the necessity of formulating one’s own likings and dislikings on the tradition of one’s ancestors or environ and not adapting the dilettante habit of pining after long lost or far separated cultures in a manner of childish play-acting for the sake of something new).
Then there’s “The Annotated Alice”. American McGee’s game prodded me into picking up my antiquated little copy (passed down by my Father) again for another read-through. Couple of pages before bed. Maybe another during commercials. Somewhat disheartening, really, as I recalled the annotations to be much more clever and insightful than they appear now. Several of them just strike off as anecdotes more than anything else. (Explaining chirality to point out why looking-glass milk wouldn’t taste very good, when it wasn’t even discovered until many years after “Through the Looking Glass” was published.) Nonetheless, Carroll’s text itself is just a marvelous, mystifying story, working largely on its own system of logic, even in the arrangement of the storyline. Simple word or logic jokes integrated cleverly into the concepts, along with a good helping of old-fashioned fanciful children’s story. (“Please remove your hat in the presence of the Queen!” “But it’s not my hat!”) Hell, I’d forgotten the distinct different aspects of madness in the Hatter, March Hare, and Doormouse, displayed subtly through a wonderful restraint. The Hatter’s nervous, wiry stuttering, vs. the March Hare’s pent-up angry frustration snapping out at everyone. (Brain damage the first, sexual frustration the second.)
Then I’ve been working my way through the backlog of Issac Asimov’s Science Fiction. Have literally stacks of these things waiting on me, and figured I’d better start on them quick or they’d start to rival mount DVD, so I’ve stuffed one in my coat pocket and been reading it as I walk to and from work each morning.
Finally, I’ve been trying to get through the “Kult” RPG sourcebook. The concept looks fairly good (what little I understand of it thus far), and the color text is beautiful, but I’m mired in the midst of the game system right now, and I have to agree with Mike that the system is crap. Utterly simple, except where it’s absurdly complicated in order to try and introduce some balance. Characters whose entire idea is dictated largely by institution of Quirks and anti-quirks until a coherent character emerges. I don’t see yet how this system is playable without succumbing beneath the weight of everyone trying to play their angstiest “heavy” character ever. The game concept has Vampire beat for angst. (I’m hoping mostly to use this book as supplemental text for CoC.) It’s also got an absurd amount of text, even for a base rulebook. Tiny font.
What else has been occupying my time? Why, video games, of course!
Stopped playing Warcraft III after I started to slightly not suck for several games in a row (end on a high note).
Charged through the rather disappointing “Unreal II” that had an enormous amount of extraneous cutscene and character dialogue, intended only to make you feel bad when your well-developed-secondary-character crew all get killed offscreen. Character backgrounds for each of ‘em, complex maybe-romance, end of long-term grudges, high-born boy makes good, the whole works, burned up on re-entry. Pleh. Game itself was also pretty mediocre, with 90% of the opponents just humans in space-suits carrying around different weapons. Opts for the “only a couple of opponents, but any one of them can kick your ass” level design. (not fun) Same plot as we’ve seen a dozen times before: Unknowingly collect pieces of alien superweapon from around the universe for secretly-evil military commander. Hand over weapon, discover truth, try to correct mistake, great big explosion. The weapon was a little clever, but the most fun was the BFG you get at the end. Near-infinite ammo, and when you fire it spits out two singularities (matter and anti-matter) that orbit one another as it travels down the hall....while the gravity of the two singularities pulls everything not tied down up into the bullets where it’s crushed down to nothing. (I know it wouldn’t work. But it was still fun.)
Followed that up with a delightful romp through “Bloodrayne,” a game about a red-and-black leather-sheathed ass, the vampire babe who happens to be attached to it (think “Tomb Raider” perspective), and all the Nazis she kills. DAMN fun, even if you take out the cheesecake factor. The simple fact that there was a single button for “harpoon victim, haul closer, knock down, straddle, feed until dead” made for easy control and great fun. Fairly unique bad guy and monster design.....and the absolutely HILARIOUS fun of going into “Time dilation” mode (slows time for everything) and dismembering Nazis into twenty pieces in slow motion. *Whock* hand goes flying. Nazi screams and tries to run away before he bleeds to death. (Yeah, yeah, it had anachronisms out the whazoo....but it was still damn fun. Also one really nice cutscene in the middle that I wish I could get back to without having to run through the game again....)
Currently charging through “Dungeon Keeper”, a strategy-lite resource organization game I picked up for seven bucks thinking it was something else. Organize a sims-style evil underworld, build up defenses, use accumulated troops to invade other dungeons. Amusing, but long as hell. As always with these games, the computer cheats like a son of a bitch, micromanaging more than any person who has to scroll around the entire board is able to, and pulling best fighters out of the battle immediately before they die. Sneaking in by going the long way around and assaulting multiple points all at once. The bastard. Think I happened on a glitch that lets me win every time, though. Not really all that great fun, as the big battles are always either incredibly unbalanced, or they last forever. This has been a real guilty drain on my time, as I’ll get distracted by it, look up, and discover that three hours have gone by. Not that it’s great fun, but it’s always success by tiny increments and going over the same ground time and again until someone runs out of cash.
And then there’s the comics. Every time my habit slackens off a bit because some great master is retiring or some promising series goes to shit in a desperate attempt to draw more attention to itself, I spot some other great series that’s just starting up, luring me in with it’s siren-song of big, bright primary colors. Let’s take a glance at last week’s haul....
Top of the pile is “Smax” #5. As Alan Moore (the writer) gradually and grandly pulls out of comics for the final time, the series that depend so desperately on him are folding up their shops and heading home, but are accomplishing some endings that are either truly experimental and grandly artistic, or just damn good. The former would be Promethea, wherein, for a finale, Moore is undoing all of creation, literally collapsing his world as a metaphor. The latter is “Smax”. The character comes from an earlier series I absolutely loved called “Top 10.” As “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” was to Victorian Literature, “Top 10” was to comic-book superheroes. It postulated a city wherein _everyone_ was a superhero of one sort or another, and gave us the exploits of the city’s police-force in the manner of an NYPD-blue episode. Wonderfully pulled off, and you could spend hours perusing the background for cameos from every comic book company in the world. (They even did a parody of a Marvel/DC crossover by way of a Tom and Jerry episode. “Look....the CosMouse has just given the ultimate pacifier to the Saturnian Squeaker! Let’s hope it’s enough to stop GalactiPuss!”) Smax was one of the main officers from the series, a gruff, silent type who refused to let anyone get close to him since his first partner died. The limited series follows him as he and his new partner travel to Smax’s home for a funeral....which turns out to be a the fantasy-equivalent of “Top-10.” Seems that Smax is a disgraced dragonslayer from this magic dimension, and while there, he gets hauled into a quest to restore his honor. Sounds grim, but it’s actually hilarious. He had to register his quest with an enormous bureaucracy......his “singing sword” really likes Abba....and they find out that the “death” who handles all the really big apocalyptic events is named “Dennis.” #5 ends the limited series with the final face-off between Smax and “Morningbright” the firstborn dragon. What precisely any of that means gets pretty elaborate and isn’t explained real well, but it seems like Morningbright is some kind of ur-dragon....a dragon so powerful or original that he’s graduated beyond into a sort of incarnate idea. Indestructable, mutable, malleable, and incomprehensibly powerful. Hard to describe, but damn if they don’t get it across. The ending is especially clever. (There’s also some rather interesting....uh....family history having to do with Smax’s home life and origin.) Art’s spotty in places though.
Next up, “Wake the Dead” #5. Promising series that ended up going nowhere interesting. Started off with this really gory “Reainimator” vibe, but in the end it just turned into Frankenstein, and much of the really good art started going south around issue #4. That really does completely summarize it. Start with Reanimator, end with Frankenstein. #5 ends it, and I really can’t recommend it. Stuck it through hoping it would get better.
Then there’s another Alan Moore piece that almost undoes all the good stuff I said about him above. “Hypothetical Lizard”. I’ll buy anything with Moore’s name on it right now...which is apparently what they were counting on. HL is apparently a Moore story that they’d intended to convert to comic format, but had never gotten around to completing, and won’t now. The “comic” is nothing more than the first few pages of issue one incomplete (no words), the drawing script for those pages, and a few character studies. Great. An art-book for a piece that never existed. Waste o’ cash.
Crush #4 follows that, and will probably be the last time I bother with this comic. A Dark Horse piece with a neat little emaciated angular art style. Looked interesting in a “Werewolf by Night” direction, only framed around the social reject goth-girl, but now looks like it’s sunk straight down into a female-Hulk story, complete with shadowy government organization and equally-buffed opponents. Hell, at the end she’s practically thumbing a ride along the side of the road al-la David Banner.
Then there’s the other early-retiree (or at least market-shifter) Warren Ellis with the latest issue of “Strange Killings: Necromancer”. Ellis has come up with a fairly interesting character for his own “wandering magic” idea: a British, ex-military, sort-of-freelance “combat magician”.....whose name I forget. The first few stories were really interesting and demonstrated a working of magic akin to the better days of John Constantine (may he forever stab Keanu Reeves in the eyes for what that man is going to do to him in the upcoming movie). Subtle, sideways-sliding magic that gets around obstacles instead of bulling through them, distaste for the sloppy, respect for the dangerous, and the ever famous irreverent British humor. Last one, though, gave me some doubts. Big softcover-edition graphic novel for the story, but it basically turned out to be one long, drawn-out gunfight between him and a handful of rivals from his old SAS unit. Pseudo-political commentary that never got explored enough to be offensive. Not nearly enough plot to support all that running around and shooting at one another. This new one is pretty gruesome, but looks like it’s going to have better (that is to say actual) writing going on, so maybe the last was just a high-priced slip-up. Here’s hoping.
Next to last is a Hellboy. “The Corpse” by Mike Mignola. Little else can be said about it, other than “It’s Hellboy”. The attitude and mood of this comic is unique to it. Tells a retake on what I think is an actual old Celtic legend, just inserts Hellboy into the hero’s role. Has that great simultaneous respect and flippant irreverence for the subject matter that makes Mignola’s material slide into a simple, but endearing whole. Like if Fox Mulder was secretly Batman.
And then there’s Dogwitch #10.
Ohhhhhhhhh Dogwitch. What can be said about Dogwitch? Well, it’s a thrill every time I find a new issue on the shelves. It’s my unabashed guilty pleasure. Wit and witticism, leather and rubber, goth and kink, sex and violence, story and character, humor and horror, and, for the ladies with leanings, the ass-kicking boots from hell.
Guilty pleasure....I haven’t had this much fun since the first time round the mulberry bush with JTHM.
So what is it? It’s a goth’s wet dream with all the angst chainsawed out. It’s the hollow-eyed horror queen cast in the Tank Girl mold and illustrated by Bishop. It’s the ass-kicking exhibitionist Dom on the set of Blair Witch and the Evil Dead. It’s smarmy and sexy and funny. It’s occult and horror and porn with a plot.
It’s Violet Grimm of the Banewoods.
Vile’s been cast out of normal society after her “free(d) spirits” caused a bit too much trouble as a teen. She lives sort-of on her own in a great rambling, constantly warping and distorting mansion in the Banewoods. The “sort-of” comes from her constant companions and camera crew, a handful of animated dolls and stuffed toys. There’s Ralph, the chain-smoking stuffed dog who mans the camera, and there’s Dolores, the cracked and torn china doll, as well as Violet’s stand-in for a mother hen. The whole crew essentially tags along after Vile on her daily expeditions into the freaky-weird, taping the whole thing and editing it down into videos they sell at the local shock-schlock rental store on the borders of the Banewoods.
Oh, the Banewoods? Well, let’s see her summary: “Bane is what’s known as an outpost town. That means it’s got one foot in this world and one foot in THAT one... you know, the more magically challenged one.... the world of lawyers and game-show hosts and cops......where rabbits are cute and don’t grow to be six feet tall, break into your house in broad daylight and drag you off to their burrows for unmentionable underground Dionysian festivities. The nice bunny world.” (It helps if you know what Dionysian means.)
The stories are mostly episodic, driven by sick humor and self-parody, but there’s a few themes running throughout. In the first issue, one of her “molotov magics” accidentally pulled in a daemon she takes a particular liking to...largely because he offers her a kink she’s never tried before (first time with a suit!), but before they get started the bubble realm they cohabitate starts to collapse and he takes a bite out of her heart so he can find his way back. Several of the other comics circle around her attempts to bring him back, though she can’t seem to pull it off as well as the first time. (Ralph: “Want me to keep filming? ‘Cause your Demon asshole boyfriend ain’t gonna show up y’know. You were doing better than this with the Bruce Campell abduction spells and they never worked either!” Violet: ”Fuck you! I got his watch didn’t I?”) Then there’s her accidental excursions into the Blackness, and her brewing up a batch of sentient ooze called the “Black Treacle.” Her sister Bluebell who’s been.....better. And, of course, there’s always the fun of “Bondoo night”. (If you can’t guess, don’t ask.)
But here’s the unbelievable thing......it’s actually kinda smart. Clever even. Take the latest issue. Mr. Kink (the daemon she’s been searching for) and Violet are finally, accidentally reunited. By way of foreplay they play an impromptu hand of “Shotgun Tarot”. When it was mentioned earlier in the series, I wrote it off as a throwaway idea, but the writer actually got it to work. She and Mr. Kink are dealt six cards apiece for a tarot reading on their opponent. The pot, of course, is all the secrets and truth the tarot draw will reveal about one another, and the interpretation thereof. Some things too painful or difficult to face? Better back outta the game quickly. They both manipulate and read their hands, a card at a time, to show how desperately besotted their opponent is with them. (Not sure if this is coming across properly....essentially a hand that determines fate-wise who is whose bitch.) Violet shatters him with a final triplet of tens. “[Ten of swords] Overwhelmed by your own good fortune, tormented by serendipity....the luck of the Devil. [Ten of cups reversed] Forced to count your blessings! Carrying out that unpleasant duty of actually EMBRACING happiness! Ten of Wands, overload backed by a reversed cup sandwich. The paradox of Demon Love. Game set and checkmate sucker!” The fact this actually works is just stunning to me. An ultimate psyche-out game, massively dependant upon intimate knowledge of both the cards and your opponent.
But don’t get the impression that the comic is at all serious. Largely it’s a boozing wild ride through self-parody, obscure reference, and cheesecake-shot. Like issue three’s “Witchgrinder” that turns out to be an episode-long parody of that one scene from “Barbarella”. Or the issue where she kicks the shit out of the Insane Clown Posse.
One word of caution, though. Don’t judge it by the first issue. I actually started picking it up on episode #2, and I was glad I did when I went back and picked up the pilot. The first issue is really rather roughshod. The character actually comes off as something of a ditz or a horror-hostess, and the comic just looks like packaged creepy fanboy-wank material (especially by the cover. Beyond that, though, it’s all good, and it’s been good enough that I’ve managed to acquire a complete run thus far, something that Mike assures me (to his detriment) isn’t possible now (#4 appears to be permanently sold out). I’d say “nyahhh” but even I’m not that cruel
On beyond comics, what’s left? Why, the RPG games, of course!
At this point I’m running two CoC games, one regularly and one irregularly. The irregular one is kinda difficult because it meets so.....uh.....irregularly, and the players don’t have the attention span for my usual investigation-intensive plotlines. I’m improvising with a couple of packaged games, and they seem to be having fun so far. The last session ended with one player battling weird zombie-like creatures in the engine of a speeding locomotive, and another player seated on the roof of the last car with his pants on fire.
The other game is regular, slower, but usually has one hell of a payoff when we get to it. Payoff was in the last session where I was finally able to introduce a scene I’d always wanted to do, but was never able to figure out how to script into a storyline. An introduction of the wearer of the pallid mask. More amusing, though, was the following, heard during the last session:
Player 1: “Hey guys, watch this!”
*tap* tap* tap* CRASH!
GRAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!
GRAB! *Glompf*
Poof!
Player 2: .........”What do you mean he’s ‘gone’?”
Then there’s the D&D game I participate in. If you’ll all indulge me, I’m going to commit the geekiest sin possible, and tell you about my character. Yeah, I know. But I gotta tell someone for whom this MEANS something.
My current character is a human 17th level barbarian, 1st level ranger (largely for the two-weapon fighting feats). I used to play these highly nuanced, elaborate characters, but I decided for something a little less intensive this time, and am just having fun being the party’s “meat shield.” His natural strength is 20. When he rages, that goes up by six, making it a 26. He also wears a belt of giant strength for an additional six (yes it stacks, we checked) making it a 32.
Just recently the character poured a hell of a lot of money down a hole and had a special magic item made for himself. It’s a ring that does a lot of stuff, but the two important for this story is it grants a +6 enlargement bonus to strength (making him a STR 38) and gives a +10 bonus on bull rush rolls.
Shortly after receiving this ring, we end up teleported to a specific city. The details are elaborate, but all you need to know is that battles from across the country occasionally pop into existence in the center of town. While we’re watching, an enormous (Gargantuan) LAVA DRAGON blinks into existence in the center of town. The city defenders, a group of Archons, flies in to kill the creature before it can level the city. Plainly this was a set piece. Background for us to watch so we can figure out how the city works.
Slow pan to me.
I look at the dragon. I look at my stats. Dragon. Stats. Dragon. Stats.
I’m going in.
At which point the party storehouse hands me another item, granting the benefits of half-dragon heritage. Namely A) flight and B)......an innate +8 to STR. (Yeah, that’s a 46 now for those keeping track.)
I charge in, and BULL RUSH the DRAGON. He’s only been in town for about two rounds, so he’s only about 20 feet off the ground. So I bull rush from above. When all the scores were tallied, I had an advantage of +6 over the dragon. Botch out on the first attempt. Dragon turns around and roasts me but good. 153 points of damage from “lava breath”. The Archons get in another volley. I go for a second attempt. SUCCESS! I drive the GARGANTUAN LAVA DRAGON to within six feet of the ground. Our wizard, standing off to one side, makes a quick estimate of how hurt the dragon looks and goes:
“Uh.....Power word Blind?”
Couple of miraculous rolls later, and the dragon goes blind. At which point our cleric, standing off to one side runs underneath the dragon, stretches up to “touch” range on tippytoe and goes:
“Uh......Harm?”
Another miraculous roll, and the dragon’s been reduced to 4 hit points. Flailing blindly around, he totally misses toasting me a second time. I bull rush again. Success! I drive him all the way into the ground, doing a D6 of damage. I roll a 6.
A 7’ human bull-rushed a Gargantuan Lava Dragon to death.
At which point the wizard (Raven) sidles up to me and says “you know.....as you dealt the killing blow, you have the privilege of bathing in the Dragon’s blood.”
“What will that do?”
“Miraculous things.....”
Well, as you have to strike while the iron is hot, my character quick stripped off his armor, cracked open the ribcage of the Dragon, and sliced open its heart.
AHHHHHHHH!!!!!! 176 hit points of damage.
Oh yeah. LAVA dragon.
“RAVEN....I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK AT YOU.”
(Raven is mysteriously absent.)
Nonetheless, he didn’t lie. A miraculous bonus did appear.
A +19 natural armor bonus to my character’s skin, albeit with an Achilles heel. (Post facto I was told this was a D20 adaptation of a First Edition D&D effect. Don’t expect me to go turning it down....)
Oh, one last thing. As soon as my character qualifies, he’ll be taking levels in.....
Wait for it.....
Frenzied berserker.
I just know I’m gonna end up killing the whole party....
Well, enough of that geekfest.
-
To quote the Chinese proverb...."We live in interesting times."
2004-03-16 00:21:22
(Partially written yesterday.)
<lj-cut text="World Events">Lot of things going on ‘round the world. On every end of the scale. There’s Haiti, where Aristide has been tossed out on his ear, a result richly deserved, if I understand the facts of the matter correctly, but where most of the revolutionary organizations appear to be, if anything, much nastier than the corrupt regime they deposed. There’s Spain, where a terrorist bombing, apparently attributed to Al-Queda, which killed 200 and injured 1400 the day before the national elections has apparently resulted in a full-scale political flight towards appeasement. (I really wish I knew the other issues involved in that election. I’d like to know the incumbent party was defeated for reasons other than their support of US action in the middle east. I would like to be reassured that a terrorist group hasn’t just managed to completely alter the outcome of a national election in a western democracy by targeting innocent bystanders and killing enough of them. I would like to know that a country which only recently slipped away from the last vestiges of Fascism under Franco knows better than to be cowed to inaction by the murderous actions of egomaniacal fanatics. I would like to think that the Basquian separatists won’t learn from this incident. But I know how those responsible will see it.) Then there’s Iraq, where, after some delay, the interim constitution was signed, only a week behind schedule for the July 1st turnover date. And now, as of just an hour ago, I get word that a revolution is breaking out in Iran. The election by way of sham vote of a hardliner to the Iran Parliament resulted in widespread protest. It may have erupted into a full-scale revolution (reports still scattered and inconclusive) when the security police opened fire on protesters in Northern Iran. (And now something similar appears to be going on in Syria.....although the government is claiming that it’s a soccer riot.)
Wow.
I don’t know where this is going. I’m not enough a student of history to be able to project if this signals the collapse of the Iran mullahocracy, or a martial law crackdown, or genocidal purges, or half-measures of appeasement. The fact they’ve got 140 thousand American troops next door, I hope, will decrease the likelihood of option #3, but I really don’t know. Crossing fingers and hoping for the best.</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text="A racket which only a dog could hear">Now, moving on to other issues, I’ve decided to load up this post with a couple of un-friending topics. I’ve been debating posting on a couple of issues for a while now, as I was afraid how my friends would react. Well, ya know what? This is my lj. You’re welcome to read it or not. If I start up a separate, private journal just for those thoughts that might offend someone, it will A) be lying to my friends by omission B) defeating the point of this place, and C) lying to myself to a lesser degree and for different reasons (some of which I won’t be discussing here). It doesn’t help that I’ve been really whiny and angsty lately, largely with self-important mutterings and feelings of insufficiency. I stayed away from posting as I didn’t want to depress people reading, but you know what?
Fuck ‘em. I AM depressed.
I have a right to be all pathetically self-important and whiny sometimes. I’ve a right to express my highly unpopular opinions. I’ve a right to post on politics that will likely alienate me among my best friends. It’s not like I don’t post warnings to that effect, and if y’all judge me you either do it out of concern, or you’re not really my friends.
I apologize to those who have joined recently for getting caught in the crossfire. I don’t really know y’all all that well, (though better than you know me, as I’ve posted so infrequently as of late) so I’m sorry for inviting you in, having nothing to say, and then catching y’all in this sort of confrontational backlash. I’m being a terrible host. Hell, even this self-righteous “I’ll post what I want ‘cause I’m all clever/honorable/honest and stuff” is just regurgitation from a year ago. More whining from the peanut gallery. I confess a secret desire to impress the newcomers as well, so I wanted to bust out with something all clever and clearly written. Fortunately I’ve been disabused of my abilities in that area as of late, so I’m just gonna write whatever old crap falls on my plate with little regard for it’s structure or aesthetics.
Besides, this is the crap I think about. If I don’t post it, I’ve got nothing to talk about.
‘Cept the movie reviews.
And I suspect a distinct lack of interest creeping in there.</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text="Politics....one more time">Anyway, I think I need to go over one of my previous positions, as I’m afraid I’ve gotten it horribly muddled in an unintentionally confrontational post a while back. So, once again, we’ll revisit same-sex marriage. Fortunately, there’s been an incident since my last discussion of the topic which should prove to clear the waters significantly and demonstrate my point much better than before. I didn’t talk about this particular issue earlier lest it look like I wasn’t wishing them well, but now that my pessimistic expectations have been fulfilled; I’ve no reason to hold off.
I’m talking about those 3700 gay marriages in San Francisco.
I think they were a very bad idea.
Now hold on. Just listen to what I’m saying first.
Arguments have been made that this is a great act of civil disobedience in the face of an unjust law. I will agree that the law is unjust, but I think this particular action was distinctly unwise on a _social_ level. I’ve made several statements about the _social_ ramifications of the legalization of gay marriage in previous posts.
To explain why, we’re going to have to dissect the exact motivations at work here. California jurisdiction comes to the conclusion that gay marriages are not legal in the state. Current laws make clear that it’s a state-by-state legal decision whether or not a gay marriage is legal. In response, the governor of San Francisco somehow puts the word out and gets a grand total of over 3000 gay couples married in something like a day and a half. This is roundly declared a brave action by the left-end of the political spectrum, and the 3700 (the remainder over the next few days) gay couples live happily ever after.
Bullshit.
Why?
Well, let me ask you. Are they actually married? Any of them?
No.
No? Why, because they’re the same sex?
No, because all of those marriages were illegal. Which is what the State Supreme court of California quite rightly declared. The governor was handing out marriage certificates, but for all the pieces of paper were worth, he might as well have been declaring himself the king of Persia. He knew he didn’t have the power to marry same-sex couples, but he did it anyway. He could _not_ marry those couples because he did _not_ have the legal authority to do so. All those gay men and women are just as married now as they were beforehand. None of them will be receiving any of the tax breaks given to married couples. None of them will be listed as “married” on the lease to their house. No governmental organization will recognize them as married. Insurance companies will still treat them as a pair of disassociated individuals. Their friends and family (assuming they’re understanding of the situation) will probably treat them as a married couple, and the more open-minded businesses and organizations will as well, where they have a choice…..but they would have done it anyway, even without the official-looking, but entirely worthless piece of paper.
Marriage is one of the few institutions wherein it’s possible to retroactively have your membership revoked. If, years after the fact, it’s discovered that something about your marriage was conducted illegally, the marriage is annulled. This doesn’t end your marriage, it _retroactively_ tells you that you’ve never been married in the first place. (Friend of a friend had his marriage of four years annulled. The reason? Lack of consummation. Better you not ask.) Barring an extremely unlikely legal exemption, that is what will happen to the 3700 gay couples who received marriage certificates.
We’re slowly approaching the point here. I’m certain that for many of those couples, this was an extremely emotional day. Marriage is supposed to be one of the happiest days of your life, and many of the couples likely treated it as such. On an emotional level, this day was likely as significant as if it had been real. But here’s the key point. All the while, they knew that what they were doing was A) illegal and B) pointless. You can bet they’d been following the legal proceedings leading up to the decision that California couldn’t have same-sex marriages much more closely than you or I. (Uh…unless I’m addressing a gay person in California…) Thus, they knew that the “marriage” they were engaging in would have no real significance. The marriage would be annulled, and they’d be back where they started.
So what WAS all this hullabaloo? If it’s not “real marriage” then why do it at all?
Why……as a protest!
It’s an unjust law, right? Therefore, we should protest it, by getting married! Except it’s not real marriage. And it’s got a much worse repercussion.
One of the concepts that’s been (rightfully) scoffed at in all my friends’ lists and across most of the internet is the idea that permitting same-sex marriages will somehow violate the sanctity of the institution of marriage. That it will somehow destroy the _meaning_ of marriage for everyone, violate the sacred bond between a man and a woman created for the purpose of raising children.
How absurd! I mean…violate the sanctity of marriage? Ridiculous! What about same-sex marriage would violate marriage if the current high level of divorce doesn’t? If the Vegas chapels don’t? If Brittany’s ten-minute-marriage didn’t violate the sanctity of the marriage institution, what about same-sex marriage would?
How about getting married solely for a political protest?
Congratulations, San Francisco, you just lent credence to the worst, and most difficult-to-refute (because of the difficulty to define it) argument against same-sex marriage. You got 3700 couples together at the drop of a hat to put on a big-ol parody of the institution you’re trying to gain entrance into. What’s your rebuttal to the state of California saying that they can’t allow you to be married? “Ha HA! We SNUCK in before you could get all your ducks in a row! We issued a bunch of meaningless unofficial pieces of paper and got married in SPITE of your ruling! How’s that for a thumb in your eye?”
Look, I’m something of an optimist on this particular issue. I think that, as shown by the polls, a slim majority of voting Americans don’t want gay marriage, but I don’t think the strong opposition is there. I think that there’s about 10% adamantly against it, 20% adamantly for it, and the other 70% are all clustered around the fence. What I’m afraid of is this protest by 3700 gay couples may have just shoved the 70% in the middle a little further in the wrong direction than they were before. People on the majority side of the fence say “well….I’d be for same-sex marriage, but I’m afraid that gay couples wouldn’t treat marriage with the appropriate level of sanctity and seriousness. What if they just use it as a tool to legalize a promiscuous lifestyle with a continuous cycle of divorces? What if someone uses it as a stepping stone to NAMBLA legalization? What if they just use it as a confrontational political tactic to advance other policies which I oppose, but couldn’t logically stand in opposition to if I’m for gay marriage? What if they just use marriage as a tool, instead of a sacred bond between two people who love one another?”
And the response from the gay community is “Whoa! California just decided against gay marriage! Quick! Everyone who can find someone, get married! It’ll make the national news!” I’m well aware of the fact that many life-long partners may have taken their vows on this opportunity quite seriously, but I’m also equally convinced that many did it just as a form of protest, and, more importantly, that the 70% on the fence will see it that way.
THIS is what I mean by recognizing the legitimacy of the opposing viewpoint. By recognizing and working with complexities. There’s this kind of argumentative blindness going on in politics as of late that’s proving highly counterproductive. The 3700 marriages convinced NO ONE who wasn’t already part of the approving 20% already, and only did DAMAGE to the 70% on the fence. The governor who did this and many of the people involved went into this great fallacy either A) wanting their picture on the evening news (a purpose so reprehensible I’ll assume it’s not the case) or B) without thinking through the eventual legal repercussions of their actions (I’ll also give them credit for not being stupid and discount this) or C) not understanding that this will actively work AGAINST gaining majority approval for gay marriage in the US. It’s like trying to gain citizenship by burning the flag. Perfectly acceptable form of protest (thank God…..I think the only incident that would result in me burning a flag in protest would be the removal of my right to do so) but all you’re doing is turning potential friends into enemies.
Several friends have argued that forbidding gay marriage is against the first amendment on the basis of freedom of religion. This is, unfortunately, an unworkable, impractical argument. Setting aside the obvious objection (being gay is not a religion, and the more complex rebuttal won’t fit in this parenthetical), it’s a confrontational argument. Forcing people to accept something legally when the social feelings stand against it, it’s arguing for imposition of legal strictures to force on the majority something they don’t agree with. Forcing “acceptance.” This is a recipe for social disaster with a very long pedigree. The argument is that once the law forces people to accept gay couples as married, then they’ll understand that it doesn’t violate the sanctity of marriage, and that gay couples will take marriage vows with just as much seriousness as any other couple. This is a wonderfully idealistic view. But A) it keeps getting contradicted in the eyes of the majority by all these fuckin’ stunts, and B) it requires getting a law and decision processed all the way through the DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT that THE MAJORITY DOESN’T WANT.
Look….the margin between those who want and those who don’t want legal gay marriage is pretty damn small at the moment. A reassurance that gay couples would take seriously the institution of marriage, and hold it just as sacred as any other married couple could cause a serious shift and get the laws put in place. These stunts are driving in the wrong direction.
Now, for the real objection to my little analysis here. And I admit, it’s a good one. But I’ve got an alternative. The objection is that these marriages are a form of protest. A way of getting the word out. If we can’t get the word out that gay couples really want to get married (by using this opportunity) then how can we adequately show our commitment? They can’t get married for real, so what other avenues are open to us? How can we say to the American people “look, we treat marriage with the same sanctity that any other couple does” if we aren’t even allowed to get married to demonstrate it? People won’t take seriously “life partner” relationships, because there’s no official recognition of it, and “civil union” smacks rather severely of the “separate but equal” that we won’t and shouldn’t have to settle for.
Well, I’ve got an alternative. It has one big disadvantage that could be overcome, and many advantages to its credit.
See, there’s a lot of disadvantages to the 3700 marriages handed out in San Francisco. Notably, they’re effectively false. Once they are annulled (and I honestly hope that they’ll get grandfathered in, but I sincerely doubt that will happen) these couples aren’t married. Anywhere. Even those states that recognize gay marriage won’t recognize these particular marriage because, legally, they weren’t issued by someone who had the power to do so. If at some point in the future California legalizes gay marriage, they still won’t recognize these marriages….again, because they were illegally registered. (There’s a moderate possibility that the state will work an exception….but only if the courts go to special lengths.) There’s a solution to this problem, and it’s simpler than you think.
Get married. Legally.
How?
The US does allow same-sex marriages. In some states. Most recently, Massachusetts and Vermont have found in their state constitutions that it would be illegal to grant gay marriages (which they permit) any kind of reduced status, as that would be discriminatory. Therefore, by default, marriages of gay couples in Massachusetts and Vermont have full legal status.
So the solution is simple. Gay citizens of California should organize an enormous week-long convoy to drive across the country. Calling ahead to make special arrangements, (including all the trappings of weddings outside of the simple civil service with a justice of the peace..... relatives, crappy bands, open bars, the lot) they reach either Massachusetts or Vermont, and get married. Then they convoy back.
Once they reach California, of course, they will not be married any more.
So what does this accomplish?
Well, first you’ve got thousands of people in California who are legally married elsewhere, but whose union isn’t recognized in the state where they live. That’s a protest issue if ever I heard one, and a very strong rallying point.
Second, you have an entire populace who, literally, will be instantly married by the institution of a law. Someone in the California courthouse will say “ALL RIGHT…..we recognize gay marriage” and all those Mass. or Vt. marriage certificates are recognized and legal, instantly marrying all those gay couples in the eyes of California law. Massive political issue.
Third, you prove to that middle 70% of fence-sitters that gay couples are serious. They’re willing to go to even more trouble to get married than your average straight couple. You respect more the fortitude, determination, and devotion of an individual who’s willing to go through baptism in another religion to marry the person they love, then you’ve got to respect the devotion of a couple who have to travel to the other end of the country….only to receive a marriage certificate that isn’t even recognized by their home state.
Fourth, if it’s organized in a big convoy, greyhound busses and the like…..TELL PEOPLE. Do you have any idea how many news organizations would send a camera crew along for such an event? The US learns via the television. People decry it so much that they miss the obvious advantages of such a system. The 3700 are a big mass flash-in-the-pan for the national news media. It was over too quick. We don’t have any feeling for these couples on an individual level. Hell, several of them were bragging that they got married on their LUNCH BREAK. They couldn’t be bothered to take the day off on their own wedding! How seriously are we supposed to take their wedding vows? In an ideal world we’d trust that they meant it just as much as any other couple.....but we don’t live in an ideal world. Organizing this into a convoy event would drag it out over two weeks or more. Over that time, camera crews could get to know the people as intimately as we would on a reality show or the latest episode of “Friends.” Facile, yes. Pandering, yes.
Compelling?
Yes!
Hell, the distance they have to travel works to their advantage! Going to the opposite corner of the US means they’d hit every local channel of every state they traveled through. It would spread the word from one end of the country to the other.
Fifth, properly timed, it would stick a massive thumb in the eye of GW Bush.
Yes, you heard that right. I, a conservative, am telling you how to ruin Bush’s chances at re-election. I think it would be a cheap shot. I think it would be a rather scurrilous method of forcing a single-issue vote against the standing president…….although, to be honest, you’d just be voting into office someone with only slightly less aggressive arguments against gay marriage. (Then again, Kerry flip-flops so readily with which way the breeze is blowing that you might just get nation-wide legalization. He can’t even remember what his own votes were any more.) But this how you’d do it. Hell, it’d be a more legitimate campaign than the one Kerry’s currently trotting out. (I seriously don’t know how he’s gonna keep it together for another 8 months. He’s already lying about his own past votes in the Senate.)
But it’s so far!
Well…….do you love this person or not?
That, of course, is the major disadvantage. The cost, and the distance. Those, however, can be overcome by a concerted, coordinated effort on the part of some organizer who puts it all together. It’d be even better if it was that same governor doing it in his spare time, and donating a sizeable amount of his own money to the proceedings. It would lend credence to the massive fumble that was the 3700....</lj-cut>
-
“I live in the weak…..and the wounded….”
2004-03-03 23:03:39
(Yeah, OK, Fred’s officially more than leather Willow ever would be. DAYMN. Goddammit, I was resigned to the end of Angel before this. This new character is more interesting than Fred ever was, and she’s only been present for an episode and two minutes. To be perfectly honest, I could see all the steam running out of Angel for a while now. They were scrabbling vainly in an attempt to finally turn Gunn into a watchable, interesting character instead of the hopeless dried-out-ends-of-the-ham mish-mash of randomly assembled character traits he was. “Oh! I’m the muscle! Who is now thoroughly outclassed! Who got smart! And got lawyer-powers! But is easily tempted! And communicates in that great Deus ex Machina of the white room! And yet somehow is the Aquaman of the group, always needing some weird excuse to be pulled into the plotline!” They’d resolved to an equilibrium the pair of Angel and Spike that was amusing to watch but essentially un-disruptable because how many times had they pulled THAT stunt last season. There’s Wesley, whose character development was perhaps the most honestly-felt and well acted of the group, but wherein every step was moving him further and further away from working with the team. And Mr. Green, whom, while fun, no one can really seem to justify his lofty position in the character hierarchy. The whole group was poised for an implosion under the weight of their lack-of-direction. Then, all at once, we get the return of wolf-girl (YES!), and, for the first time ever, Fred’s suddenly interesting, and her actress displays chops we never knew she had. And the series is over. Dammit.)
So, it’s Kerry, is it? Ol’ coppertop Kerry. (If you don’t get the joke, tell me. Believe me, it’s eerie.)
*Sigh*
Well, I’d like to thank the registered Democrats out there for casting their votes such that we’ll now have a presidential race between someone who will vote along dictated party lines and turn away from any law allowing full recognition of gay marriages……and George Bush. A candidate who refuses to release his wartime service records….and George Bush.
Hey, all the “Anyone but Bush” proponents out there? Congratulations.
You got “anyone.”
I have a prediction. If George Bush wins the next election it will be because of his actions concerning the Iraqi war. A lot of people, after a lot of thought, may decide to hold their noses on other issues and cast their vote according to that one.
If George Bush looses the next election, it will be because of a handful of actual legitimate issues and problems. And a truckload of batshit insane conspiracy theories that would make PETA proud.
Notice how the actual identity of the Democratic contender doesn’t enter into it?
*Sigh*
I really don’t know how I want this election to go. Forget myself, I don’t know how I want _other_ people to vote.
There’s so much going on here, I’m not even sure where the top of the pile is.
Gay marriage. On the one hand we’ve got Bush. I think the defense of marriage amendment is idiotic. Policy itself aside, I see no reason for such a thing to go into the constitution. Policy in the way, I hate the policy, though it’s not quite as severe as people seem to think (basically it seems to be a reiteration of the Clinton-era “Defense of Marriage Act” that says states don’t have to recognize marriages which don’t follow the laws of their own state). However, I also don’t think the amendment has a chance in hell of actually getting into the Constitution. Then again, I didn’t think the related bill had a chance in the Georgia legislature, so it shows you what I know.
On the other side we’ve got Kerry. Who hasn’t been able to give a straight answer as to whether or not he’d vote against a ban on gay marriage, despite being directly asked several times. Which, in and of itself, is answer enough. At best he’d abstain. Why? Because the Democratic party is split down the middle on the issue, and he can’t come down on one side or the other without loosing votes….to Bush on one side, or the independents on the other. At least Bush makes no bones about what he believes and which way he’ll vote. Kerry doesn’t give us that much.
Iraq. There’s a faction who feels that a second term is deserved Bush for the work done in Iraq and Afganistan. Two genocidal despotic regimes ground into the dust with stunning speed, and the countries well on the way back to independent governments. Shockwaves throughout the region have severely damped down terroristic activity throughout the world (ya’ know, Israel and Palestine weren’t the only sites of weekly suicide bombings before the Iraqi war) and cowed several neighboring countries into line. The similar despotism in Iran is now monthly trying to stave off a public uprising to toss out the old guard.
But, of course, that’s not a legitimate reason to give a president a second term. The presidency is never something that’s “earned.” The presidency is granted based on estimation of plans for the future, not actions of the past, so we have to judge based on the long term plans of each candidate for Iraq. Which are, effectively, identical. That is some source of cheer for me, now that we’ve a hard-set date for turnover of the country to the newly-constructed Iraqi government.
Economics. I don’t understand them. You don’t either, really, do you? Any everyday joe who says they do understand them and uses the convoluted policies of either party as a ten-foot-pole with which to poke the opposition, can safely be filed away in the “batshit insane” category.
Science. I hate Bush’s luddite-ism. I know its motivation, and I’ll acknowledge that some of the factors are difficult topics, but I disagree on most of the points. The bioethics committee is rapidly becoming a joke, and I hate the ban on stem cell research.
Does anyone know Kerry’s stance on science? Anyone? Bueller?
Come to think of it, what do we actually know about Kerry? Well, we know he’s enough of an aggrandizing self-promoter that he was ridiculed about it thirty years ago in Doonesbury. We know that he is vociferously criticizing a long list of policies that he voted for. We know that, since the beginning of the year, yesterday marked the first time he’s actually voted on a bill. Oh yes, and he was in Vietnam. Then came home and viciously abused the men he’d fought alongside.
Hey! Mr. John “DoyouknowwhoIam,howdareyouIfoughtinVietnam” Kerry! My father was in Vietnam too. And he’s not voting for you. What does that tell you?
I look at Kerry, and I have no idea what sort of a president he would be if voted into office. He’s talked his way around any controversial topics, latched onto as many of the batshit insane conspiracy theories as is convenient, and generally said whatever it was he thought the crowd wanted to hear. Which is to take the opposite stance from Bush. This is literally coming down to a battle between the devil we know or the devil we don’t.
So I should vote independent? Ha. Why? Green party? To get more antithetical to my own ideals you’d have to travel over to Pat Buchannan. (Kyoto? Please. Anyone who supports that hasn’t actually read it.) They’re practically RUN by the batshit insane conspiracy theorists. Libertarian? Yeah they’re idealists, but they happen to share a lot of my ideals. Unfortunately they have all the practicality of a fursuited lobbyist. And this is from someone who voted Libertarian last election. Besides, the US has this whole built-in checks and balances system. A Libertarian president would be the biggest failure the US has seen since Grant. He’d be blocked at every turn, and would in turn only block a handful of minor issues from either party. The presidency would be rendered into a lame duck.
So why’d I vote Libertarian last time? Why, to send a message. That if the Libertarian party started polling a dozen percent or so, one or the other of the major parties would have to start pandering to the “keep the fuck out of our lives” faction to maintain an edge over the other. But you know what? This time around, the issues at hand don’t really allow for “sending a message” when an actual choice stands to be made. Really, it wasn’t a choice when it was Gore vs. Bush, and there was room to send a message. Now there really isn’t.
So, we vote for Bush. Hold our noses over the issues we hate, and return him to office over the couple we like. Except the Republican party takes it as vindication and reaffirmation on all of the issues. Iraq proceeds apace in reconstruction and return to independence under an elected body. But Bush redoubles his efforts at adding the amendment to the constitution on an idiotic hot-point-of-the-moment issue. Religious justification for luddite policies get written down. And reversed the next time there’s a flip of parties in the White House. And the Republicans and conservatives get a repealed amendment albatross hung around their neck the like of which hasn’t been seen since that whole thing with Democrats fighting to maintain slavery. And we endure another four years of having batshit insane conspiracy theories decry everything done by the president as…..oh God, you pick.
So we vote for Kerry. Set aside our doubts about what we haven’t been told, and hope that nothing will be screwed up too badly by this individual with a history of going back on his commitments. And the batshit insane conspiracy theorists all rejoice once he’s won, as “Bush was the worst leader in history,” and “whatever might be wrong with Kerry, Bush was worse”. And he sits on his hands for the gay marriage issue. And Iraq might or might not continue apace. And the remains of Al Queda and every other two-bit fanatical Muslim faction in the world all have an election-night blowout you wouldn’t _believe_, and start redoubling their plans and efforts to drive the western devil from their lands, now that the Americans have shown themselves to be the cowards they are in the face of Muslim commitment. And the UN graciously accepts the US delegates back after a humbling piece of “kneepad service” to return to the business of doing not a fucking thing and getting all the Security Council members paid off with black market oil. And every action Kerry attempts is justified in its opposition to “the worst president ever,” regardless whether it fucking works…..or even makes sense….or not.
God.
Damned every which way from Sunday.
I seriously don’t know who I’m going to vote for at this point. I don’t blindly hate Bush like so many others seem to. Hell, I don’t hate Bush at all. I can appreciate his conviction but disagree with his conclusions, and I approve of some of his actions, but not all of them. I fuckin’ HATE the plethora of idiotic conspiracy theories that don’t even stand up when taken to their logical ends. They’ve been tossed rapid fire for the last year and a half at rate that ensures your inability to keep track when each is bald-facedly disproven.
I don’t hate Kerry, but I’ve serious doubts about him and his apparent willingness to flip-flop wildly on any number of severely important issues depending on which way the political wind is blowing. The guy is criticizing bills that HE voted into law. He seems to treat the audience as a toddler with ADD, certain he can get away with reversing himself whenever he wants, so long as there’s some completely unrelated hullabaloo for a commercial break in between. He just lets misapprehensions stand without correction whenever they’re in his favor. I mean, of course he’s against unilateralism of the US! We should never have gone into war in Iraq without a signed note from all the UN delegate’s mommies!
Ohhhh! Loook! Shiny!
Now, as I was saying, Bush is being totally irresponsible with Haiti! Why, even without UN support, the US should be sending troops in there! http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/169039p-147637c.html
Gnnnnnnngh.
We return you now to our regularly scheduled unimportant fritterings.
So, Friday…not Thursday, but Friday we get in a blood sample. Which would normally mean that I’d be working in the lab until about 8-10 the next morning, and with my cold-amplified exhaustion would translate into me sleeping until (at a guess) 8:00 Saturday night. Coincidentally, I’d cancelled all my social plans for the weekend already on account of my feelin’ like shit, so this “work at the lab all night when you’re sick, lonely, and tired” plan fit right in with my schedule. However, the blood comes in and it’s….about 550L. Tiny. Less than the drizzle left in the bottom of a coffee cup. Even with a massively scaled-back experiment, I would’ve needed the steadiest hand in the world to wash that amount without just loosing all the hematocrit entirely. Same for Amanda. Fortunately, Lola only needed about that much for her own work, so we let her have it.
So! Free for the weekend, right? What should I do? Sheryl had invited me out for dinner on Saturday. I turned it down when I thought the lab work was swamping me, but I still had to think long and hard about whether I thought it was still a risk of infection to be anywhere near me. Fortunately, the decision was made for me with a plunge out of the “achey head, exhausted, painful breathing” stage of the cold and into the “coughing, hacking, wheezing….blowing your nose until it bleeds” stage. In the span of about eight hours (meaning, yes, it woke me up for a midnight “where’s my medication” fumble) I went from crabby and whiny to a high-phlegm-content physically repulsive individual. So, let the turn-down stand, and resign myself to a lonely weekend in front of the computer. Had much the same decision to make concerning the AWA staff party that had finally rolled around.
God, all the good stuff happens when I’m sick.
On the other hand, it did reduce me to a quivering jelly while my boss was watching, so I had no trouble taking a day and a half off in the middle of the week. So, blessed as I was with free time by the great god of hideous plagues and disease-related unpleasantness, how did I spend my time?
Well, for one, I played video games. In retrospect, a bad idea. Colds make me loose my appetite real quick (stomach fills up with goo), and video games make me forget to eat. Still, I’d been working on this one game for about a week, and I wanted to finish it off.
Which game?
American McGee’s “Alice.”
Oh ho. Just got some of y’all’s attention there, didn’t I?
First of all, it was used. Five bucks for the CD case and a little booklet that turned out NOT to be the instructions. Second of all, as always, I was curious. And third, I _like_ Alice in Wonderland. One of my more prized possessions is a fairly antique copy of “The Annotated Alice” that I thumb through once in a while.
So why do I have to start off in defensive mode? Well, American McGee’s “Alice” is a game that will be remembered for a long time, but entirely due to a completely unrelated third party. See, it got panned. It got panned by the default center of video-game short-attention-span internet crawlers, those jokers over at “Penny Arcade” Tycho and Gabe. I haven’t the energy, or really the interest, to go delving back among their reviews to find exactly what they had to say about “Alice”, but if memory serves, their general points were along the lines of “Oh wow…..crooked doorways. Nothing says “crazy” and “edgy” like crooked doorways. Congradu-fuckin’-lations on pushing that envelope just one inch further down the path, American McGee…” and “How easy is it, exactly, to take _Alice in Wonderland_ and make it “insane”? I mean, the story was basically built to not make any sense in the first place. How are you going to make it any crazier than a giant caterpillar smoking a hooka? People on drug trips GO to Wonderland. You can’t get any crazier without just being dumb.” Rumor at the time also had it that McGee’d set his sights on The Wizard of Oz.
To illustrate their point, the comic accompanying their post satirized another potential target of McGee’s “expertise.” “American McGee’s Strawberry Shortcake.” It….uh…..hell, I’m not gonna describe it. Just google for it. The thing is floating around everywhere, due to it’s….uh…..hell.
Anyway, Penny Arcade really should’a picked themselves a different target. Unlike Alice or Dorothy, Strawberry Shortcake isn’t public domain, and is owned by the “American Greetings” corporation. They got a bit peeved at the use of their copyrighted characters in a lascivious fashion on a fairly high-exposure website. It didn’t help that the image had exploded over the internet and must’ve been the most popular comic the guys had ever done in straight bandwidth. A day and a half after the image goes up, the guys are contacted by AG, asking them to take it down. Apparently they didn’t ask nicely, ‘cause Gabe and Tycho are still steamed over the issue, but the law (or at least sufficient quantities of cash) weren’t on their side, and they had to back down. Nonetheless, the image is still everywhere out there. Everyone I know has an archived copy stashed somewhere. (Everything else aside, it is a brilliant parody.)
So “Alice” is now famous in gamer communities as the game….that Tycho and Gabe were ridiculing……when American Greetings threatened to sue…..over an entirely unrelated property.
But here’s the real question. Do you know anyone who’s actually played the game? Me neither.
So I see the game on sale, used, for like $5, and I think, “how bad could it be?”
The answer? Not really that bad. But probably not worth your time.
The “story” is actually more structured than you’d expect, but operates along similar lines as that old “Return to Oz” movie of the late 80’s. In that, Dorothy starts off back in Kansas being committed to an insane asylum for obsessing all the time about those dreams she had way back when. Here, Alice ends up in an asylum too, but under much less happy circumstances. The absolute best part of the game is the opening animation. Little Alice Pleasance lies asleep in her bed, the book of her story spread out before her. We get a nice artsy pan over those original John Tenniel illustrations with accompanying voices, when, suddenly, fire breaks out. Further stills being burnt up as we watch Alice try to find her parents, but it’s already too late, and she ends up badly injured, lying unconscious outside as her home burns to the ground. The trauma of the event apparently drives Alice into catatonia, and we next see her lying motionless, unblinking, in a bed at the sanitarium. She’s apparently been there for many years, as she seems in her late teens or early twenties, although still dressed in that blue-and-white dress popularized by the Disney production. An unseen nurse drops off a stuffed rabbit doll with a voiceover saying it was found in the remains of the house. Once the nurse leaves, this actually elicits a response. A slight twitch, that eventually makes her arm slowly curl around the doll in a protective manner. Suddenly the doll speaks! “Help us Alice!” The catatonic girl comes out of her reverie, staring and gaping in shock. Suddenly we’re whirling down the rabbit-hole and into the game proper. Alice recovers from her fall just in time to spot the old White Rabbit. “Come along Alice! Don’t dawdle! We haven’t much time!” White Rabbit really hasn’t gone through much of a change in character design, but as he flees down what appears to be a mine shaft, we see a much more altered figure appear. Cheshire Cat, preceded always by his grin, fades in, but he’s a much sleeker and leaner figure this time around. Apparently hairless, his skin has been tattooed in various tribal motifs, and a gold ring earring hangs from one tattered ear.
And he’s about the best re-designed character in the game. That should tell you a lot. Most of it is due to an excellent voice actor, a constantly twitching tail (nice touch, that) and perhaps the only nicely twisted line. (“The hatter’s quick as mercury….and mad from it.”) Alice herself has grown up a bit and adopted a somewhat more waspish figure than her original illustration, but the only real alterations to her design are a little skull-tie for the dress in the small of her back and a couple of greek/faux alchemical symbol designs on the front, with a few little spatters of blood. Really kind of a pathetically unimaginative alteration, although the voice actress is really quite good in the role. (Hey Scott, where did you get that Alice was a brunette? Is it in the text somewhere that I’m missing? I have my copy of “The Annotated Alice” and all of Tenniel’s illustrations show quite clearly that she’s a blond. But the game has her as a brunette. What am I missing?)
At any rate, Cheshire Cat acts as the generic information function in the game, though it hardly needs one, with its linear structure. We’re filled in rather nebulously that Wonderland is in ruins because of the Queen of Hearts, and Alice has been called back as a champion to rescue them all. It’s couched in a few nicely turned phrases that spell out quite clearly that this isn’t the worried, confused little girl who came through last time, but the dialogue disintegrates quickly once you get into the game.
Right off, this doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Alice was hardly a saviour to anyone in Wonderland, and only in a convoluted manner in Looking-Glass World. Hell, the only person who was even mildly friendly towards her in either book was the White Knight, and the game ignores him completely.
Ah well, at least we can wonder through Wonderland and see how McGee’s decided to warp things to make it into a playable game.
First level, Munchkin town.
?
OK, wrong foot forward here. They really do look like munchkins, or possibly gnomes. I’ve no idea where the hell they come from. The people of this “Doomed Village” have been enslaved and will bemoan the fact if you get anywhere near them, spouting stupid platitudes. At the far end of town, you see Rabbit waiting for you, but he then shrinks down and runs through a tiny door in the wall. To follow, you have to locate the town elder. He sends you on a quest to find a key to free his people. Once retrieved, he sends you to a carefully guarded “skool” where enough wandering around assembles a potion for getting small, and you jump through a portal in the observatory to catch up with Rabbit. Villians up to this point are, predictably enough, the cards, almost precisely matching the design from the Disney film. The only alteration is that they get a bit bloody when you kill them. Split in half, head snipped off, etc. There’s also an unexplained flying enemy meandering about whose scream knocks you off battlements and interferes with jumping games. It’s essentially a wraith in heart-festooned raiments, but is otherwise unexplained. Pathetic really, considering there’s an enormous variety of birds to choose from in Wonderland.
At any rate, once you finally catch up with Rabbit…..he runs off again. You find yourself about half an inch high at the pool of tears. Essentially more jumping games, and squaring off against army ants (?) which infest the area. Yeah, rifles, grenades, etc. (Perhaps the only new character I’ve liked so far is also the least important. There are a couple of pebbles scattered around that, when hit, get up and run away. That’s all they do.) Traveling a bit upstream among the leaves and foiliage, you encounter…..the Mock Turtle?
Wrong again. Mock Turtle never got shrunk down in the book, appearing roughly the same size as the Gryphon near the end of Wonderland. He also appears to have grown up some, as his calf’s head has been replaced by a bull’s head. Rendering the pun completely incomprehensible. (The point of the Mock Turtle is that turtle soup was a delicacy in Carroll’s time, and was often imitated with slices of veal. Thus, a turtle body with a calf’s head.) However, he is bawling, which is fully in character. On the other hand, he’s easily the worst voiced character in the game. It seems the Duchess (Oh hell, they get points for this….practically everyone forgets about the Duchess) has stolen his shell. He promises to help Alice find Rabbit if she gets him back his shell. Riding fallen leaves along the stream of tears and dodging thorn-spitting roses and suctioning mushrooms, eventually you get to the Duchess’s place. (Hell, they even got the Duchess’s size approximately right!) After a brief cameo by Bill the lizard (few points of credit there) who sees you in, you finally get to the first boss fight. Weirdly, the Duchess has undergone almost no redesign at all (probably not necessary, as she was based on the ugliest woman in history), and the fight makes a certain iota of sense, with her wielding an enormous pepper grinder, and tossing exploding piglets at you. Do her in, and she finally gets a snootfull of pepper, sneezing hard enough to blow the back of her head off.
After he gets his shell back, the Mock Turtle leads you underwater to where he last saw Rabbit. Catch up with Rabbit and he takes you to Caterpillar. Who also has undergone almost no redesign. Caterpillar tells you….essentially what we already knew. Destroy the Queen of hearts. Bleh. First, though, you have to defeat the Centipede general of the Army Ants (?) since he’s got Caterpillar’s original perch (the toadstool) stashed away in his den. There’s a long chase to get there, and a mysterious, spindly, full-sized character comes along and stomps on the microscopic Rabbit halfway through. No gore, he just gets flattened Wile E. Coyote style. As for the Centipede…he’s amusing enough for a second boss. The trick is to hit him when he rears up, as his underbelly is ulcerated. The design’s a bit better here, but only ‘cause he’s wearing an old WWI German helmet with the point on it, when the original story was composed in 1862, long before that design came along. Hell, the German Empire wasn’t founded until 1871.
Growing up, you find yourself at a crossroads for the next few levels. You find that you’re supposed to be hunting for “The Jabberwock’s Eye Staff” (?) the only weapon capable of defeating the Jabberwock…the Queen of Heart’s guardian.
Yeah. Huh.
Even better, one of the components is one of the Jabberwock’s eyes. How does THAT logic work?
At any rate, a mysterious oracle sends you first off to Mirror-world to enlist the help of the White Chess Pieces. Makes a sort of sense, since Alice was a White Pawn in the second book. There’s a few exceedingly simple chess-related puzzles as you wander around in this black-and-white world, knocking off the Red Chess Pieces when you encounter them, and working through a handful of jumping puzzles or mazes. Unfortunately, you get to the White Castle just in time to see the White Queen captured and dragged out. The White King pleads with you to rescue his Queen, and sends you off to the Red Castle with a miniature pawn for company. (Oh, the chess pieces are all rather predictably designed. The knight is the horsey-piece with a sword and shield, the rooks are brick-patterend strongmen wearing parapets, the bishops are wearing the peaked hats and firing LASERS from the top of their shepherd’s crooks. Only the pawns are amusing, little limbless cyclopean creatures that hop along and try to kick you with their bases.) You arrive halfway through the Red World just in time to see the White Queen guillotined. Whoops, guess she ain’t coming home. Continue along and you face off against the next boss, the Red…..King? Huh. Guess they thought we might confuse the Red Queen with the Queen of Hearts. Singularly uninspired design, but one son of a bitch to kill off, as some of his weapons score automatic hits. Apparently the only real re-design is to make the King a drunkard, as he throws exploding bottles at you. Bleh. Once you beat him you can advance to the final rank. Placing the pawn you brought with you on the final rank, and suddenly you’ve got a new White Queen! (OK, half a point there.) She moves forward to do battle with the assembled Red Army, conveniently distracting you while a mysterious (well….not really that mysterious) figure sneaks up behind you and cracks you on the back of the head.
When you wake up, you find yourself in a weird topsy-turvy insane asylum. Inmates made up of repeated designs from the “skool” populate the area….munchkin/gnomes with the tops of their heads sawed off, faces affixed in a permanent rictus, or pressed in a vise wander about at random, alternately clucking, laughing, or crying. (Amusingly, they’re also indestructible, and don’t respond even if you set off a bomb next to them.) You wander through a mirror maze from which burst unicycled wooden robots with rocket punch and spiked gloves, apparently the attendants. There’s also weird partly-transparent ghostly figures that open up like batwings, revealing a large screaming skull. Chains shoot out and momentarily immobilize you, but don’t actually do any damage. Secret doors are opened by breaking every available clock you can find, and eventually you make your way to the wards, defended by one of the nastier creatures. Kewpie doll heads with little red cross symbols apparently designating them as nurses adorn the walls. Get close enough, and they uncoil themselves into large mechanical spiders. If you get bitten by one, your vision momentarily goes blurry, with a big stylized Cheshire cat smile imprinted right where you really need to be able to see. Break enough clocks and you make it to the next bosses, the head Attendants, Tweedle dee and Tweedle dum. These are probably the best of all the bosses. Not only do you get an absurdly caricatured cockney accent from the two of them and a neat little introduction (“Look, Dum, it’s wot’s ‘er name from th’ neroti’cs ward. Nurse’s favorite little lunatic.” “Shee’l need medi’tsin. Strong medi’tisn.” Actually goes on for quite a bit.), but their re-design is at just about the right level (instead of being identical, one is a shrunken, rotund dwarf, and the other is a hulking grotesque overgrown brute) and they’re actually fun to fight. If you get near to either one of them, they lean back and pull either a billy-club or a sword out of their throats sword-swallower style. At a distance, the shorter one will toss bombs at you, while the larger one sprouts a propeller out of his beanie, and motors up into the air, maneuvering like a zeppelin and trying to land on you. The real fun, though is if you leave them to their own devices, they’ll hop up and split open like a Russian doll, producing slightly smaller versions of themselves. Those will do the same, and start swarming after you with slightly less effective attacks. That said, they’re all horribly slow and easy as hell to kill off even on the hardest setting. When either Dum or Dee dies, they end up split in half, trying desperately to right themselves as they drag their arms across the floor. At this point you’re confronted by the asylum director….the Mad Hatter, of course.
LAME re-design. Mediocre voice actor. Spats, striped pants, white gloves, body wrapped randomly in the remnants of a straight-jacket, enormously tall and spindly (it was he who stomped White Rabbit) with a big awkwardly-designed top hat. For the first time we get a glimpse of what the plot is supposed to be, as the Hatter taunts Alice with memories of the Asylum she was sent to after her parents died. A few cryptic comments, and he runs off.
Following, you get a level of absurdly simple jumping puzzles, all clock-based. About halfway through you get to the only actually gruesome segment. A large machine is shown to be processing the insane, wandering munchkins from the asylum and turning them into the robotic guards you fought earlier. That’s not the gruesome part, though. In a corner of the same room, you encounter the March Hare and the Doormouse, both strapped to operating tables and partially vivisected, their exposed innards replaced with gears and watchsprings. They make a fairly incoherent plea for help, but the machines activate on their own and begin, respectively, dipping them in boiling water or electrocuting them. A little further along, and I got my shock of the game.
The Gryphon! Whoa. Never expected him to show up. No redesign whatsoever, but he’s locked in a cage. You have to defeat the Hatter to free him, and that’s no mean feat. Actually the Hatter’s pretty easy. He’s huge, but largely inaccurate. Get close and he takes a swing with his cane. At a distance, either the top of his hat opens, flinging cup and saucer at you, or he points and the end of his finger opens up, shooting missiles. The hard part is halfway through when he leaves and his robotic servants show up. As you’re fighting on a large watch face, there’s no cover to be found. Anyway, defeat him, and he shorts out, his head blowing off. The Gryphon picks you up and drops you off in the Jabberwocky’s land. Meanwhile, he’ll go off to muster the troops for an assault on the Queen’s palace.
Jabberwocky’s land (despite being described as the “Tulgy Wood” in the book) is a volcanic area, translating to an absurdly difficult jumping puzzle, since one slip into the lava kills you instantly. The land is populated by (I can’t believe this) little horns n’ pitchfork devils (bleh), large bipedal lightning-throwing lizards with enormous mouths (?), and, worst of all, little lava fishes that spit globs of fire at you. Hit by one of those and you catch on fire, which makes it hard enough to navigate that you might as well start over. I spent far too long trying to get through this section, because I was under the impression that saves only worked at the beginning of a level and the start of the boss fights. (I fucked up the save function early, accidentally erasing a game, which gave me this impression. Hey, I was missing the instruction booklet.) Once I realized my mistake, the whole game got a hell of a lot easier.
Halfway through you encounter the oracle again, who turns out to be the Caterpillar. (Duh) He finally spells things out for you. The trauma Alice has been through caused all this destruction to Wonderland, and the scarring of the world is a reflection of her own disturbed psyche. If she is able to fight and usurp the Queen of Hearts, not only will she save all of the Wonderland inhabitants, she’ll save her own sanity as well. Eh. Guessed as much.
You end up climbing to the ruined remains of Alice’s burnt-out home to confront the Jabberwocky. The concept here is pretty good, but the execution is rather dim. The Jabberwocky is supposed to be Alice’s survivor’s guilt, as he taunts her with the horrific death her parents must have suffered. Oh, if only Alice had managed to warn them somehow….seeing as she was so close to the source…. The Jabberwocky itself doesn’t look anything like a Jabberwocky, if we go by Tenniel’s illustration. He’s a pretty straightforward, stripped down dragon, except with a mechanical panel on his front and enormous yellow glowing eyes. On the other hand, he’s probably the most difficult boss in the game. His fire breath is hard to avoid, and he’s got a targeted beam- attack that’ll blow you off the board if you’re not careful. He also pulls one of those lightning-lizards into the fight about every minute or so. If you manage to battle him long enough, Gryphon shows up and intervenes, taking the fight to the skies, and freeing you to continue to the Queen’s castle. He also knocks out one of Jabberwock’s eyes to complete your staff.
There’s a LOT of hedge-maze level to go through that’s actually pretty entertaining because it’s all in confined areas that are to your advantage (more on that later), and there’s a sequence of swimming and jumping puzzles-while-trying-to-gain-elevation to go through. Once you finally reach the gates of “Queensland” (Hah. Hah.) you’re just about to enter when Gryphon, mortally wounded, crashes to the ground. You have to fight Jabberwocky once more, and if anything he’s even more difficult to beat this time. Amusingly, the only strategy that works for avoiding his more powerful attacks is to hide behind the corpse of Gryphon, which will shield you. Finally killing Jabberwocky (no, the vorpal blade is not necessary), it sputters, sparks and explodes. Gryphon gets a final protracted speech, and you continue to the Queen’s castle. Fight your way along the lava moat, through a few unnoticed caverns, up the drawbridge and inside. The most complex jumping puzzles await, as well as the strongest, most annoying cards (and some of the more fun sequences for the Jabberwock’s Eye Staff), and then through a bunch of clockwork (actually fairly neatly planned clockwork pieces here). One final simple but stupidly drawn out puzzle, and you open the door to the Queen’s chamber. The Cheshire Cat appears to advise you and finally offer some straight talk, but just before the “big secret” is revealed a tentacle whips out the cracked doorway and blows his head off.
Dammit, I liked him.
The queen lounges on her throne, but is by far the most thoroughly re-designed character in the game. Her face is a porcelain masque that she tosses aside at the start of the fight. The surface beneath is horned, but otherwise featureless. Her lower torso is a mass of squid-like tentacles. Her arms are handless, and split out into further masses of tentacles. Finally, the throne and dias behind her split apart as a single organic mass rooted somewhere out of sight lifts her up into the air and starts moving her about the room. (Slowly, though, not that hard to hit.) She fires rockets and lasers, but if you take cover she manifests some telekinetic power that grabs hold of you and hauls you into the open or smacks you into the walls. Kill her, and the organic mass retreats into the throne. Suddenly a scarred, mauled head with two menacing eyes looms out of the chasm. The mouth opens wide, and we can see the Hatter’s head within. Hatter’s mouth also opens wide, and reveals the true face of the Queen of Hearts……Alice. Alice’s doppelganger warns Alice not to pursue this course any further, as she rules Wonderland alone. A bunch of rhetoric gets spouted so we can finally interpret that the Queen is Alice’s fear of rejoining the outside world. Fear of being hurt again, fear of leaving the calm, reassurance of her own daydreams and self-involvement. Really rather a shallow final meaning, as it’d been hinted at throughout the game. Following the Queen down the hole, you find yourself fighting on a sequence of floating rocks surrounding the final boss, like any good Final Fantasy game. The Queen is a big corded worm, with the scarred, balding head crowned with flames, a big maul that spits weapons where the stomach would be, and a handful of large tentacles, each offering an alternate attack (one has the Jabberwock’s head, another slams the rock you’re standing on, etc.). Targeted attacks can blow most of the tentacles off, but the Queen still absorbs a good deal of damage before croaking. Her more annoying attacks just knock you off into oblivion or kill you instantly, making me real glad of the save function.
So, you kill her. Lotsa rumbling, start panning over old stages, as they are regrown with new grass, old companions come back to life, back out, and they’re all standing together with Alice. Back out, and we see it’s an illustration in a book. Back out further and we see that Alice is holding the book in question, standing on the doorstep of the Asylum. She claps the book shut, grabs her suitcase, scoops up her cat, and marches out the front gates of the asylum. The end.
Cat?
Oh, sorry, did I forget to mention the only really dark part of the game? The part that’s an actual really sinister re-application of the Alice story? Something that touched on true artistry instead of doodling affectation? Well, it’s understandable that I’d forget it, since I’m not entirely sure that it was intended. Or even noticed. Let me pull out my copy here…..
From page 1 (following the opening poem) of “Through the Looking Glass”
“One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it-it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.”
Yes. Yes it was. The fire that burned down the Pleasance household was started when the little black cat stood and stretched on the bedside table. A little bump, and the hurricane lantern shattered on the floor, pooling lamp oil under the bed and over to the hearth, where a few embers remained. The one piece of real artistry in the game, and I’m not all that sure it was even intentional. Hell, they probably intended us to take that the cat was Dinah….
Anyway, odds and ends. Weapons. The real fun of the game was in a couple of the weapons, so I’ll go through the list of ten here. The system is a little weird, in that each weapon uses precisely the same “ammo” as all the others. You have a single pool, the blue bar on the right of the screen, and each weapon (excepting the first and the last) takes differing amounts of it. It’s refilled by picking up “hearts” of energy left behind by dead enemies. If you’re also injured (red bar on left) the heart will be split evenly between the two bars. Otherwise it fills the empty one only.
1. The vorpal blade. A rather wicked-looking little irregular kitchen knife with bloodstains down the blade. (Yes, I know the real one is a sword.) The weapon that Alice is holding in all of the promo posters. Can either slash with it or toss it. If tossed, regenerates after a few seconds. Amusingly, some of the enemies (especially cards) will be cut to pieces if you finish them off with this.
2. Deck of cards. Flung individually as a weak ranged weapon, or “52 pickup” style if you have trouble hitting things.
3. Flamingo Croquet mallet. Electrified (for some reason). Can either club opponents with the stylized wooden flamingo head, or bat a croquet ball into them from a distance. The balls will richochet around a room for a while if you miss, but the thing is absurdly difficult to aim. You can only bat risers (no sinkers), and thus can’t hit anything with a ball if it’s slightly below you.
4. Jackbombs. Entirely non-cannon, but man these are fun. Especially in crowded hallways when you can persuade an entire group to chase after you. A Jack-in the box that is either a simple bomb, or spends a minute slowly turning about and spraying the surroundings with a flamethrower before exploding. Used right, kills almost anything other than bosses. Enormously fun with bosses too, as you try to lure them through the fiery killing zone. On the down side, they’ll set you on fire too. Surprisingly, they work underwater, and can even set fire to creatures that live in lava. Huh. Easily the most useful of all the weapons.
5. Ice wand. Continuous spray weapon with a short range. Concentrate on an enemy, and when they die they’ll freeze solid. Alternate attack builds a temporary ice wall that deflects all attacks. (Lasers go straight through, but are harmless on the other side.)
6. Jacks. Easily the most fun weapon, with a fairly unique system. Target an enemy and toss out the jacks and the red ball. The jacks will fly up and strike the target, and then fly off in a random direction until they hit another solid surface. Then they’ll turn around and hit the target again. (Alternately, they’ll only go so far straight up before falling back, so fully airborne enemies aren’t injured much.) The little red ball bounces next to you for a set number of bounces, and then the ball and jacks fly back to you. If you get close enough to actually toss the jacks _underneath_ the target, they’re fucked. They’ll get hit three or four times as much as normal, just because the jacks are trapped between them and the floor. Alternately, you can knock targets off ledges with the alternate attack (just a single, forceful throw of all the jacks).
7. Summoning Dice. Bleh. Not sure how the system exactly works, but about half the time you use these, nothing happens. The dice dissolve into smoke and you get your ammo back. The other half, a little portal opens and either a weak little winged daemon comes out and hits opponents with lightning, or (rarely) a serpent-man emerges and hurls fireballs at the opponents. If all the enemies die, they disappear. If there aren’t any enemies around initially, they attack you. Just not useful.
8. Jabberwocky staff. Heee…. Takes a moment to charge up, but fires a purple beam of light with an absurd range. Continuous burning of any target you direct it to. If you let up, a final blast follows the end of the beam and knocks everyone flat. Even more fun is the alternate attack. Charge up for a while and let go. Energy rockets fire off from where you’re standing. Stare fixedly at that cluster of ten guards that haven’t seen you yet, and watch the air-strike come in and blow them to kingdom come. Hilarious. Sets any survivors on fire too. Uses too much ammo, though.
9. Blunderbuss. Only available on a hidden ledge in the final battle, uses your entire ammo store in a single shot, knocking you on your ass in the process. Useful, but boring.
10. Timestop watch. Does what it says, but you have the option of killing stationary enemies while they’re frozen. Tossed jacks look especially neat, as the enemy ends up surrounded by a halo of sparks. Doesn’t use any ammo, but can only be used once per level. The most fun I had was with a big group of cards. Froze time, jumped into them, tossed jacks at the loner on the edge, a flaming jackbomb in the midst of the rest, slashed another with the vorpal blade, replaced the expended jackbomb with another, retreated a short distance, built an ice wall to hide behind, and watched the fun when time started up again. Pandemonium and body parts everywhere.
Modifiers. I don’t have the actual gamebook, so I don’t know what these things were actually called. One was a little red jeweled…..perfume bottle? I dunno. Anyway, you get close and it spritzes you. The game effect is quad damage, but Alice sprouts horns, branches, red skin and eyes, and an enormous taloned hand (that you can’t do anything with). The other actually looks like a crabbit from “The Maxx” and I didn’t happen upon it until the end of the game where I tripped over one (they actually run around the scenery). Imagine my surprise when Alice picked up the squirming creature and drank out of a spigot on its back! Anyway, alice gets bugeyes, green skin, and butterfly wings. Let her jump higher, I think, but it ran out so fast I never figured it out.
The booklet I did get with the game was made up like a psychiatrist’s notebook with all of the studies of Alice. This was either written by someone else entirely, or before basic design on the game was completed, because most of the events described are out of order or make no sense with the internal logic of the game.
Finally, an absurdly brief review.
There is a movie out there called “Session 9”. It’s fairly difficult to find, but there’s a small chance that you’ll run into it.
If you should find a single copy sitting on the racks somewhere, you will buy it immediately. You will then take it home and watch it in it’s entirety in one sitting. You will then call me and thank me for this advice.
You will not, however, watch any of the special features, as they tend to suck the fun out of the film.
This is a horror movie that knows one of the nearly-lost techniques of storytelling. That is, how to play the cards close to your chest. Even fifteen minutes from the end of the film, the movie could be one of at least six different kinds of story, but nothing you’ve been shown hints in the least about which kind it is. It’s not that there’s a surprise twist or usurpation of the plot, it’s that you don’t even know if there’s GOING TO BE a surprise twist. You can’t tell if the story is simple or complicated. Convoluted or linear. Or even resolved.
This is a very good movie. My highest possible recommendation.
The only details I’ll offer you are a tiny touch of background, and some setup that’s on the back case cover.
The film itself was entirely inspired by, and fully filmed in and around the Danvers Mental Hospital of Massachusetts. This is a real, truly enormous building. It is also spooky as hell, having been closed down and abandoned in 1985. But it’s pretty sturdy. See, it was built when they built things to last. When? Well, there’s a bit of debate, but around 1865. (The debate is actually a little spooky to me. No one seems to know when the place was opened. Two different dates ’68 and ’70 are quoted in the movie itself, and two more dates ’65 and ‘72 are given in the attached documentaries. Just weird that such a date can’t be nailed down.)
The characters in the movie are five guys. Asbestos abatement handlers who take on the job of clearing the building before renovations begin to turn it into a government building. And that’s all I’m saying on the plot.
See, the flick knows how to play with you and your expectations. It knows how to subtly visually mis-cue you for upcoming events. Manipulate the audience. Get them to look at the wrong hand when the card trick is accomplished. One example. Early on, they are touring the place and walk through the remains of the kitchen. Big stoves, descended smoke hoods, and a long row of meathooks.
No one ends up on the meathooks. Nor do they ever figure in again.
I’ve said enough. Once again, my highest possible recommendation.
Oh, one last bit. When “Stephen” shows up, the shit is hitting the fan. The title quote for this entry is his.
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Fucking wordlimit....read previous first.
2004-02-06 12:00:11
The Antarctic Press commentary, however, confirmed what I’d suspected about AP for years. They’re basically a bunch of asshole frat guys. I’d suspected this for years, judging on the general quality of the books I saw come out of AP Press, all vacuous, repetitive, and relying entirely on lowbrow humor. (May have changed….I haven’t picked up a book of theirs in years.) GD was always something of the prodigy among their other titles, since it had…you know… a POINT. Anyway, on the commentary, they started by calling the main character a “slut” and proceeded downward from there. There was one guy in the back (furthest from the microphone) who would occasionally try and point something out or compliment some aspect of the animation, but this was immediately followed by the rest of the crew ridiculing him. Fuckers. Oh, and they knew about the interlacing screw-up and still went to press with it.
Now, for anyone else, this would be enough. However, with the same classic style that stuck me with the worst anime ever made (“Angel Cop”) I actually bought the second episode before I watched the first. Money down the drain? Well, it’s for a good cause, supporting an ambitious amateur animator.
Wait a minute….
Holy CRAP!
This is BETTER.!
A LOT better!
The detail on the backgrounds went way up, the animation is a LOT cleaner with a higher framerate…..hell, Fred even lip-synched the DRAGON….something that even professionally-made anime rarely does, opting for that “I guess he’s talkin’ psychically, ‘cause his lips ain’t moving” trick all anime monsters do. The movement is smoother, the characters are a little more carefully nailed in place (less drifting features) the voice actors for Gina and Brittany have been replaced with (slightly) better models, there’s a bunch of really neat camera-tricks pulled off nicely….oh wait, the sound engineer still sucks….oh WOW…this fight kicks ASS! Suplex at top speed, gymnastic roundhouse at a framerate almost counterproductively high (had to slow it down to see what happened), and a pretty cool magical battle what with the walls animating and everything.
Seriously, this is like night and day. We start back at the dragon “Dreadwing” who sends his two elven (Mesha and Tark for the fans out there) servants out to retrieve our girls in the hope that he can trick them into deciphering how to activate the time raft for him. The girls manage to not only fall into the trap laid out for them but actually set it off manually. There follows a truly kickass fight between Brittany and the two elves, that ends with the sisters unconscious. When they regain consciousness, they’re sitting at dinner with the Dragon, who fills one entire end of the subterranean hall while daintily sipping tea. (Brittany’s been magically forced to her shrimpy form, and can’t change back for a day or so.) Convincing the girls that he’s actually the protector of Merlin’s treasures, Dreadwing bribes the girls into helping him determine how best to tend (activate) to the time raft. The bribe, naturally, is a great heaping pile of gold. They feast to seal the deal, and are directed to opulent guest quarters to rest. Once there, they start rethinking the legitimacy of the deal and plan a few backdoors out. We also get a bit of Brittany’s backstory. Meanwhile Mesha and Tark meet secretly to discuss their chances in a rebellion against Dreadwing…..but Dreadwing is watching through is scrying crystal.
End episode two.
Wow….this is literally ten times better than the first episode on just about every respect. Good enough that I plan on hunting down the finale whenever it crops up. There’s no “primer” this time around, but there’s a new episode intro segment featuring a bunch of characters from much later in the series. In design, Brittany’s face is skewed towards the later comic style, a mistake in my opinion, but I seem to be the only one. The action sequences are a joy, if short, with the elves taking the time out to smirk before closing the trap. They even get down the girl’s personalities pretty well, all the way down to the “treasure dance”. The voices and sound are slightly better, but still really grate on your ears. Once again, Fred drew the whole fucking thing himself. I can sspot a good number of animation cheats, but even those are more highly detailed, and the improvement more than makes up for the slower portions.
If Fred continues to improve at this rate, this stuff will be real pro grade by the next episode and catching up to “The Iron Giant” by the one after that. Ah yes, and, on the commentary, Fred admits that he’s planning on animating ALL of Gold Digger.
That’s just crazy. Nice of him to think he can, though. (LONG comic.)
Next time, the last two movies, including the pure insanity that spawned the opening line this time.
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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