- "Dunnnnn. DUNNnnnn. DUNNNNNnnnnnn.....DUN DUN! (Boom Boom, Boom Boom, Boom Boom) 2002-04-13 08:57:38 Sorry, just clicked back and saw I got to 2001 posts.
- "...an explosion on the far side of the moon" 2002-04-13 08:37:41 Just made 1999 hits. Thought I should mark the occasion.
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"...here I am / back in the middle with you..."
2002-04-13 08:36:44
Gahhhhhhh! Adding a couple of points to the "negative" column on Metropolis. Sorry all, I was tired last night.
First, there were a handful, not too many, but a handful of points in the movie that felt rather preachy. As an example, there's a little digression one of the characters makes on the similarity of the Ziggurat to the tower of Babylon (which, it is stated, was also a ziggurat). Had they just stated the similarity in a line or two, that would've been fine, but they go on about this for six lines about the anger of the Gods (? Monotheism, people!) striking down the affront of the tower. We would have gotten the point with much less. Very little else in the film is spoon-fed to us, they shouldn't have done so with this point. Much of the ending events also had a "look this way for the moral" feel about them as well. What can I say, I dislike being preached at by acetate and paint.
Finally, a major technical problem. I haven't seen a lot of anime on the big screen, but these were by far the worst-looking subtitles I've encountered outside of the 6th-gen yellow subtitles in fan-subbed CCS (CCS has a LOT of yellow on occasion). The white subtitles would pixelate and boil with interference whenever a bright color (frequently) got behind them, rendering them plainly ugly and amatureish, although only occasionally illegible. I would not have expected such shoddy work when the rest of the film was so spectacular. - 2002-04-12 22:54:55 Forgot spellcheck. Sorry all.
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IDCLIP
2002-04-12 22:50:21
I am so ashamed.
I just finished Final Doom.
I had to cheat.
Truly, I am not the gamer I once was. On the other hand, this may be a sign that I've got more of a life now then back when I was obsessed with getting through Doom II without using any cheats.
Of course, I didn't give up easy. Oh no, don't let anyone tell you that. I actually tried to face off against that giant skull-faced wall panel, but this time around there were just too many. For those of you who've played Doom II to the end, imagine entering into the final arena, and having it ALL READY filled with revnants, arachnotrons, mancubuses, and, as a crowning treat, there's a Cyberdaemon (the one with the rocket-launcher) standing directly between you and the firing platform. On top of all that, the final boss is spitting out his little summoning cubes at about three times the original rate.
AND THE PLATFORM STILL ISN'T IN THE RIGHT POSITION! Once again, you've gotta pull that crap with firing the rocket just as you fall off the front of the platform THREE TIMES! Oh, but it's worse this time. There's a little button you push that raises the platform about a foot too far, but you don't know that until your first attempt. Till then you think "oh please tell me that button fixed it so I can fire straight... Even cleaning out the entire level courtesy of IDKFA and IDDQD, I had to stop every second try or so to clear it again with the BFG 9000 or get knocked off the platform while trying to line up the shot.
Of course, then there's the bonus levels. One is actually mildly fair. Just five Cyberdaemons one after another, a fully invisible arch-vile, and then an absolute swarm (uhhh...30? 40?) of revnants behind a FAKE EXIT PANEL! Doom has to be the only game where players don't just cry foul and quit after a stunt like that. The second extra level was just absurd. Purposely made to be the hardest level ever, mowing down the constant waves of attackers required constant IDKFAing. Imagine clearing an arena, walking over and picking up a key, at which point the ENTIRE OUTER WALL drops and more enemies than you can count....you get the idea. Empty the entire BFG into the horde and the just keep coming.
I am officially burned out. May do a full review later if the fancy strikes me.
AbsoluteDestiny: You make a lot of good points with regard to the attitude towards DBZ videos, but one thing that you may not have considered is the factor that the disgruntled fan artist only has to experience a drawing he sincerely doesn't like for a second or two. By comparison, someone who honestly wants to give a video a chance is stuck there for three minutes of (in their opinion) torture. This is only amplified by contest viewings. In order to be fair, all the videos should be shown, and repeated themes grate the nerves.
Note I'm just saying that this explains the attitudes, not excuses them.
Re: Social structures in middle school.
Mmmm. Middle school. The era of "knowing your place" in the social food chain and staying the hell away from anyone judged more likeable than you. Thank God I was a nerd in a BIG school. Once you have enough people to form your own clique (even when certain members annoyed the hell out of you) you were set for four years. 'Course, the first year before you find enough social rejects to join, you're just screwed.
OK, on another subject, I normally wouldn't bother commenting on something this stupidly preachy, but this idiot woman doesn't even know what she's talking about.
www.nytimes.com/2002/04/10/opinion/10DOWD.html
I'll save you the trouble of reading all the way through it with a quick summary of the necessicary background. Basically it's a long string of bitching about how men are never attracted to strong or intelligent women, and it's because ALL men are frightened of women they might consider equals. Let's see, some choice bits here....
"Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women."
"As soon as you say Harvard Business School . . . that's the end of the conversation," Ani Vartanian said. "As soon as the guys say, 'Oh, I go to Harvard Business School,' all the girls start falling into them."
(I'm sorry....was that being critical of the men...or the women?)
"The problem here is not only that women are procrastinating too long; it is that men veer away from "challenging" women because they have an atavistic desire to be the superior force in a relationship.
In the immortal words of Cher: Snap out of it, guys."
"Male logic on dating down is bollixed up: Women who seem in awe of you in the beginning won't stay in awe once they get to know you. Women who don't have demanding jobs are not less demanding in relationships; indeed, they may be more demanding. They're saving up all that competitive energy and critical faculty to lavish on you when you get home"
(To quote Tony Blair, someone find Maureen a date. Quick.)
Anyway, the bit that pissed me off is as follows:
"If men would only give up their silly desire for world dominance, the world would be a much finer place.
Look at the Taliban. Look at the Vatican. Now, look at the bonobo.
Bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, live in the equatorial rain forests of Congo, and have an extraordinarily happy existence.
And why? Because in bonobo society, the females are dominant. Just light dominance, so that it is more like a co-dominance, or equality between the sexes.
"They are less obsessed with power and status than their chimpanzee cousins, and more consumed with Eros," The Times's Natalie Angier has written. "Bonobos use sex to appease, to bond, to make up after a fight, to ease tensions, to cement alliances. . . . Humans generally wait until after a nice meal to make love; bonobos do it beforehand."
The males were happy to give up a little dominance once they realized the deal they were being offered: all those aggressive female primates, after a busy day of dominating their jungle, were primed for sex, not for the withholding of it."
(There's so many things wrong with the associatin implicit in this statment, I don't even know where to begin.)
OK, this just reveals simple ignorance. In attempting to make her point sound feasable, she's brought something into it that she hasn't researched fully or she never would have brought it up in the first place.
You know what separates bonobos from chimpanzees? A river. There's a fairly large river that runs right through a corner of chimpanzee country and has for thousands of years. The river is swift and wide enough to have prevented travel from one side to the other. Anthropologists have been studying this situation as a prime example of divergent evolution. The population on either side of the river (it is believed) was the same, an ancestor of both the chimpanzee and the bonobo. When one population was cut off from the main one by a change in the course of the river, the two populations evolved independant of one another, but under identical conditions. Both came up with random evolutionary developments to adapt to their identical enviroments, and in both cases they worked, so the species survived. The proto-bonobos developed a matriarchial society and the proto-chimpanzees developed a patriarchial society.
There's just one interesting little addendum to all of this that casts Dowd's little rant in a different light. The proto-chimpanzees, through travel and redistribution, eventually evolved into us. The bonobos never really went anywhere. There was a subsequent offshoot of primates, similarly motivated by divergent evolution, that bears some resemblence to this instance. They were large, fairly intelligent vegitarians called Neanderthals. They were also an evolutionary dead-end and unable to adequately compete with the other developing hominids and thus disappeared into extinction. I could bring up the death of the Isis cult culture here, but frankly that would be misleading, as the forces involved were much more complicated.
Now, from all of this, I'm going to come to the conclusion that, judging from past evolutionary battles, the only intelligent societal orientation is patriarchial, right? Wrong.
You see, if I make that argument, based on the behavior of our distant relations in the animal kingdom, I'd also have to concede that crapping in your hand and throwing it at someone is a legitimate method for winning an argument. (Well....you may win the argument, but no one will ever want to discuss anything with you again.) The problem with attempting to model our behavior after Chimpanzees is that WE'RE NOT CHIMPANZEES! The difficulties that a human encounters on a daily basis bear no resemblance to those of a Chimpanzee. (I hope.) The same goes for Bonobos. Therefore, Maureen, your opinion is crap. (Splat.)
Other News...Happened across a brief newsblurb a day or so ago on Bush's anti-cloning stance. Apparently he wasn't in favor of certian kinds of research as it would (quoting from memory) "create an international market for human eggs which rouge scientists could then use to clone humans." Setting aside the absurdity of worrying about such things, the phrase "rouge scientist" struck me as hilarious. "In other news today, a local scientist went rouge and broke out of the restraining pen in his lab, trampling three handlers to death in the process. The man was captured soon afterwards and put down in accordance with NIH standards."
One final bit....anyone here watch "The Family Guy?" It's like the Simpsons, only more scathing and severe in their humor. ("Come on Peter, that joke was lamer than FDR's legs. What? Too Early?" and my personal favorite from last night: "Cigarrettes are evil! They killed my father! And raped my mother!") I swear I didn't think you could say some of these things on TV.
Lotta crap to dig through this time, hunh? Sorry about that. Handful of things I wanted to rant/rave about that no one I know would even know what I was talking about.
Anyway, snuck out of my responsibilities for two hours on tuesday and ran off to see "Metropolis" at the local independant movie-house the "Tara." It was only showing for two more days, and having missed the showing at AWA I wasn't about to let it slip by me again. No, it wasn't Fritz Lang's movie, it was Rin Taro's version of Fritz Lang's movie. Except it wasn't Rin Taro's version, it was Rin Taro's version of Osamu Tezuka's version of Fritz Lang's movie. Except it wasn't Osamu Tezuka's movie, it was his comic of Fritz Lang's movie. Except it was really only a comic INSPIRED by Fritz Lang's movie. Except Osamu Tezuka never actually saw the movie, and all of his inspiration came from this:
http://www.blarg.net/~dr_z/Movie/Posters/Reproductions/Metropolis_Rep.html
The movie poster of Fritz Lang's movie.
Thus (gasp) this movie was Rin Taro's version of Osamu Tezuka's classic comic inspired by the classic movie poster for Fritz Lang's classic movie. Screenplay by Katsushiro Otomo. Short version? This'll be a classic.
I should warn you that this review may be a bit more scattered than usual. With movies I own on DVD I usually just run them in the background while I write this review and the scenes remind me of stuff to comment on. (Was rather painful last time.) Since I've only seen this once, my memory may desert me, and I had no intention of taking notes while watching in the theater. Except, of course, that I ended up doing it anyway with a scrap of paper in my pocket. Except, of course, that it was far too dark to write clearly, and now I can't read my notes, leaving me back where I started again. (Convoluted tonight, no?)
Beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful. The visuals in this movie are absolutely stunning. From an animation perspective, this film hearkened back to films as highly visually detailed as Akira. Sharply dileneated, if overly simplistic and almost childishly-idealized (visually) characters populate a city so richly drawn and detailed that I found myself wishing the movie had been dubbed so that I wouldn't have to tear my eyes away from some nuance in the furthest corner of the screen just to read the subtitles and keep up with the plot. Almost seamless blending of CGI and (what I presume is) computer-painted traditional cell drawings creates a fictitious world of such vivid and characteristic images that I kept feeling like I'd encountered them all before...literally. Having seen the ads for this film some time ago, I caught a hint of familiarity, although I couldn't for the life of me put my finger on where I'd seen it before. I still don't know. All the way through this film it kept bugging me. The simplicity and touch of cartoonish-ness charicature (especially in the uncle and investigator robot) of the character design (imitating precisely the style of Osamu Tezuka, although I don't know how they compare with the exact characters from the comic) makes me feel as though Herge's TinTin got loose in one of Moebius's worlds. However the story, and the tragic, sorrowful depiction of violence and death remind me more of Future Boy Conan. (As well as the habit of drugging the main character.) The enigmatically stoic, yet fiercly determined and eventually tragic "bad guy" furthered this impression, as did the morally ambiguous stance towards science and technology. (Ambiguous you say? Well, I always thought FBC had an ambiguous stance in that respect, condemmning only the use of science for war, as is mirrored in this movie.) All-in-all, the animation style and construction felt very non-sterotypical for an Anime film. I'd even go so far as to say it had a definite eastern or northern european feel, but that refers only to their style of filmmaking, not a similarity to their animation style (which I'm unfamiliar with).
Oh, and the SOUNDTRACK. Filled with classic Jazz from (so I'm told) the '30's through the '60's. Doesn't sound like it'd fit a story about a futuristic megacity? All I can say is that it works. It works really, really well. Even the supremely weird bit when all hell breaks loose literally to the tune of Ray Charle's "I can't stop loving you"? (OK, to be honest that bit still strikes me as really weird.)
So the story. Warning, many spoilers. If you plan on watching the film, don't read the next two paragraphs. We begin with a brilliant bit of animation directly reminiscient of the Metropolis poster link above (if you watch carefully, you'll notice an enormous statue of the Maria robot from the poster) wherein a grainy black and white figure exalts the culmination of all scientific thought, the "ziggurat", an enormous technological marvel of a tower, jutting spaceward hundreds of stories above the tallest buildings. A time of celebration is declared, but is almost immediately disturbed as a lone figure staggers from one of the spotlights and is immediately shot to pieces. The figure is a robot. Apparently, much of the city's (there are hints that this city is the only one of it's kind, although it is never explicitly stated) advancement, as well as much of its poverty has been caused by the introduction of robots for all manner of menial labor. Each robot is strictly assigned a work area, and those who stray outside are hunted down and shot apart by the "Marduks" (named for a Babylonian God/Hero central to their creation myths) a "political party" resembling nothing so much as the socialist brownshirts in Nazi Germany. The head Marduk is the stolid "Rock" (who, God help me, looks exactly like Megaman) who also happens to be the adopted son of the man responsible for the Ziggurat, "Duke Red," whose enormous hook nose (see: Giant Robo) and flared hair give him the distinct appearance of a parrot. Duke Red is deeply engrossed in two related projects. One involves the employment of a rouge scientist (*snerk*) to create a robot replica of his lost daughter, Tima, and the second is the operation of an enormous war weapon concealed within the ziggurat. This weapon accellerates beyond mere nuclear warheads to GIANT ROBO SCALES of destructive capability. In order to eliminate your opponent, it SHOOTS THE SUN! causing it to BATHE THE EARTH WITH RADIATION! Good Lord! Now this is just destructive capacity for the hell of it! Tima is somehow the key to controlling this and all the other technological achievements of the tower.
Complicating matters is the introduction of the main characters, Kenichi and his Uncle, who are Japanese detectives come to the Metropolis looking for the rouge scientist. They empoly a robot detective (Whom they name "pero") to help them navigate the city, and just happen to be around when the scientist's laboratory burns to the ground. Kenichi encounters Tima as she struggles from the wreckage, and then the pair of them slip and fall far into the depths of the city, several "layers" below the surface. The story takes innumerable twists and turns as Kenichi, thinking Tima is an amnesiac human, struggles with her back to the upper levels, Rock, with his own agenda, tries to head them off, a coup de ta and two red rebellions swarm the city, Tima struggles to sort out her head, and Kenichi's uncle attempts to puzzle out what the hell is going on.
The structure of the film also impressed me. I don't believe it is specified where the Metropolis is supposedly built, but there is a scene of gunplay and death on the snow-covered steps of an official-looking building that just screamed "western Russia" to me. A great scene. I really can't back the location up with anything else, though, as I didn't think about it until afterwards.
Although the film is evidently not a retelling of Fritz Lang's story, it is remarkable how many themes they share just through the inspiration from that lobby poster. The communist rebellion simmering many levels below the street. The robot passing for human. The innocent love story. The unthinking attitude of the "upper levels" for those below. In many ways, this film is a very communist film, though the themes are so unfamiliar to us today that we barely recognize them.
Unfortunately, there are some bits of the film that I did not like. Plotwise, the ending was badly coordinated. The plot builds up these elaborate intertwined stories of conflict, emotion, and politics, and then just shears them all down as a single action takes over all the themes with the literal speed of a bullet. It doesn't cheese out and give us a happy ending (really) but we do start getting more of the typical Anime events. "Main-character friend turned enemy at end of penultimate episode tries mechanically to kill friend." I sighed when I started to see this coming. In addition, the animation at that point, I felt, was taking a half-step down. Tima becomes a bit...uh...exposed, and the sight beneath her covering was sorta spastically drawn. I did like the rather ambiguous ending, both in the events and in the apparent morals taught. Again, on the negative side, there's the weirdness with the music I mentioned earlier. There's also one character that I really didn't like. For a while in the film, and occasionally thereafter, a trash-collecting robot named "Fifi" follows Kenichi and Tima around. It sort of whistles and looks generally like it was made up by an artist in the last five minutes before deadline. The design is just BAD, but only on that robot. Hmm.
In summary, when (not if) I buy this film on DVD, it'll go on my shelf next to the Gilbli works. Not sure if I have higher praise for animation composition than that.
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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