JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)

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  • "Gangster o' love don't eat no fried chicken..." 2004-02-06 11:56:35 Guess who’s back online? Guess who, after getting the snazzy new computer back, suddenly discovered that the system no longer recognized his internet protocols. Guess whose Microsoft word didn’t like this new upgrade and decided that it needed to re-register itself online. Which it couldn’t do, because of the internet protocols. Guess who wasn’t about to start typing in notepad on his brand new computer?

    Yeah. Bleh.

    Anyway, finally got the process to recognize all the snazzy new hardware today, but I spent the last few days playing videogames and watching the extended version of “The Two Towers” that I borrowed from a friend of mine. You know, the extended version of the first film added some nice stuff. Put in more detail, more development, amped up the story nicely. I didn’t much like the new beginning (with Bilbo narrating) but pretty much everything else was good. It added to the movie. The extended Two Towers, though, is practically an entirely different movie. Vastly better, with a lot more character development. Hell, Faramir comes from being an asshole nobody in the film release to being a fully developed sympathetic character in the extended version. Some of Gollum’s best scenes went missing on the way to theaters. Gimli was no longer just the comedic relief, and had a couple of good complimentary scenes. We find out where Aragorn’s horse comes from. Grima Wormtongue actually becomes a significant character after being cast from Theoden’s sight. The only thing I really could’ve done without was Treebeard’s poetry, which is fairly boring and rather difficult to even hear clearly. Especially clever was the revenge of Fangorn Forest, not for what it showed, but for the fact that, in a film this big, with that many effects, and that much invested, they still knew that there are some things more effective when _not_ shown. Really, the extended edition leapfrogs solidly ahead of “Return,” though I think I still like the first film the best, thus far. An absolute rental if not an outright purchase. (I’m waiting for the macro-box-set of deuterium-edition releases. We all know they’re coming, and I don’t have enough spare cash to pick up more than one version of the films.)

    Should be noted, however, that the one thing almost entirely intact were the fight sequences. The things that, truth be told, drove the story much less than the excellent character development that they had to snip out. I don’t blame them, it’s obvious which segments the audience would go wild over, but it is distressing that not even Peter Jackson could fight to keep the character in favor of the thud-and-blunder of yet another orc siege ladder crashing into the huddled masses.

    So….what’ve I been up to? Geh. Not sure I should bother. Lots of stuff going on, but it’s all a horrible muddle that I can’t sort out coherently without boring you all to death. KOR, the local anime group, ended with a “blow out” bash that was something of a bust for lack of a turnout. I’m guessing everyone had alternate plans for Saturdays, and only about half of us felt we could cancel in order to attend this wrap-up. Caught the end of “Azumunga Diaoh” (sp?) and about twenty episodes of “Naruto” before heading for home. Hit the 5 seasons for dinner with Sheryl and co. and ate a truly stupid amount of food. They were hitting a film (and essentially skipping out on the end of KOR) but I turned down the invite, partly because I wanted to see the 6-year-old club off properly, partly because I had to talk with Patrick about DVD submissions for next year, and partly because the absurd amound of food and beer I’d had was threatening to rebel, and I was afraid I’d end up missing most of the film in a panicked run to the restroom. (Yeah, yeah….TMI.)

    Other stuff? Well, someone at work died about a week ago. Not AT work, you understand, but it was someone who worked in my lab wing who I saw about every other day. Really cheerful guy, probably the most-so in the whole lab wing. Positive attitude, wife and two kids. Just went home on Friday night, laid down, and died.

    He was 30.

    I really don’t know any of the details beyond that it’s a mystery to everyone else as well. Apparently they’ll be performing an autopsy, which I imagine wouldn’t be the case had it been suicide, so this really is a case of someone just up and dying from a standing start. The following Wednesday they held a small informal service in the atrium of my work. There’s this great big mural in the atrium that stretches up three stories and is made out of nine or twelve wooden panels (forget exactly) depicting a crouched human figure in negative space reaching upward. The figure is silhouetted and defined by a surrounding shapes of cellular structures. We all sort of gathered around the base of the wall this mural is on, and they had a little framed photograph and a few lit candles there. There was a series of coworkers who came up and spoke about him for a few minutes, and then one young Indian (India-Indian) woman sang a few poems from the Bhagavad-Gita (he was Hindu), the recitation of which is remarkably musical. The whole thing was remarkably heartfelt, especially for a workplace memorial. These things tend to have a colorizing effect on everyone’s opinions as they extol the virtues of the dead and ignore their faults, but it wasn’t much of an exaggeration this time around. He really was well liked, and no one had a word to say against him. Left me feeling a bit out-of-place, as a coincidence of my desk’s placement meant I’d only ever met him five or six times in the three years he’d been there. Made me wish I’d gotten to know him better when he was alive. A card that’d been passed around the day before had the same effect. I mean, I’d like to comfort the family, but what could I really say? Something direct might be wrong, and thus idiotic, and something generic is never heartfelt. Overly-weepy implies a connection that you didn’t have, but being distant would just be crass. I consigned myself to just staying quiet and being near the back. Standoffish, but what else could I do?

    (There is a fucking car alarm going off in the parking lot. This happens every year. The weather gets snitty and cold enough to foul the mechanism, and a couple of brands of car alarm can’t handle it. Since there’s no one around when it starts up, there’s no one to pin the blame on, so it just goes on all night……..wait………it just quit……….everyone cross your fingers……)


    On a pettier level, my CoC gaming group is coming back together from a real dangerous point a couple of weeks ago. We’d taken in another player who was eager enough at the start, but whose very nature presented a handful of problems for my gaming style. He plunged in to every game we happened to be playing with that first day enthusiasm we all used to have. Unfortunately, he’s got pretty bad asthma. So? So, there goes the best gimmick I have for my horror tabletop roleplaying. Candles. The friend’s house where we play at has this massive collection of candles and a room especially set aside for gaming, but the newcomer’s asthma nixed any burning candles in the room pretty quick. (The character sheets from my games are wonderful. The best one had three different colors of wax spilled upon it, stat and hp erasures that nearly went through the page, bent, folded, and spindled, and underneath it all the gradual dropping of SAN all the way down to zero.) After that, the investigation-heavy aspect of my game started to bore him, and his character began one of the most ridiculous patterns of play I’ve ever seen. Unsatisfied with the rate at which plot points were filing out for him to shoot at, he decided he was going to _make_ them happen, by poking at the plot with a ten-foot pole. I humored him before I realized what he was doing, and because some of the attempts were actually rather clever. His character, an attaché to the UN and WWI British war hero, earned himself a reputation as an amateur dabbler in spiritualism and the occult by sponsoring séances and similar events. Got a bunch of contacts that I pretty much had to make up on the fly (woulda been nice if I’d had more than fifteen minutes notice that he’d be “putting the word out through the upper class and international social channels” ….coming up with that many memorable characters on short notice wasn’t easy). However, when the group got a hold of an honest-to-God magical item, a Malay kris knife, his idea of investigating it involved holding a “Malaysian themed party,” inviting all of his “Malaysian contacts” from the UN, and seeing if any of them recognized it.

    *faceplant*

    A week’s worth of organization for a “no, they don’t.” Oh, did I mention that the item was stolen? That, combined with his habit of accosting complete strangers (not even actual NPCs) randomly, thinking he’d eventually find one with the knowledge he was looking for, and he was just pissing me off. He eventually began driving off into truly absurd directions. On one occasion my more sane players were all absent from the table for a few hours (traffic), giving him essentially free reign. The group at the time was considering hiring Nicoli Tesla to work on some alien technology they’d recovered. He brings Tesla into the workshop, shows him a couple of cubic feet worth of bent and warped alien metal, and LITERALLY says “Build me a giant robot.”

    *Nnnnnggghhhh*

    (This was almost as bad as the only other player there, who insisted on going in and pointlessly annoying one of the police detectives for two hours…..IN REAL TIME. God save me from these players.) THEN he started getting bored, and nitpicking what other people were doing, trying to micromanage all of their activity as well. THEN he started falling asleep at the table whenever it wasn’t his turn.

    All this succeeded in doing was massively slowing down the game to the point where a 6-hour session resulted in only a single day’s worth of game time…when the only activities they were performing were all research! Well, finally, last week, he’d had enough. Told me via e-mail that the game wasn’t to his taste, and dropped out. We gleefully got out the candles, set up, and started to play.

    And he showed up. Weird. Didn’t want to play, just to socialize. Which translated to him falling asleep in the back of the room for three hours when it turned out, surprise, that we were all paying attention to the game instead of him. Gahhh. Think he got the message, though.</lj-cut>


    Reviews? Hmmmm…..not yet. First, my own lame attempt at birthing a meme. The thing that really bugs me about the memes that circulate around the web, either in the “answer the following questions about your high school” or “quiz results” manner, is that they’re all essentially facile crap. I mean, a swift series of predictable quizzes where you can guess the listings just from the available answers to the first question, and you end up with an icon that declares “your color is blue!” or “you’ve got Dragon Wings!” or “you’re Sepiroth from FFXXX” is really just a toy with the accuracy of the origami “boyfriend choosers” they used to make in high school (pick a color! Pick a number! Open the flap!). The only reason I ever click through them is that they tend to have pretty good art, and a couple acknowledge their own absurdity with their answers. Just click top choice all the way down, and then hit the “show all” button. I wish people who took the quiz would provide a link not to the quiz itself, but to the “see all results” page. Save me a bit of time.

    The “thirty questions about yourself” ones are a little bit better. Occasionally they’re worded interestingly, or have some clever gimmick or another, but most of the time the real interest comes from the people who give more in their answers than is really necessary….who take the opportunity to bare their souls on some key point and give you real insight into their personality, or something that’s really affected them. It’s like….you could ask someone for their top ten list of films, or you could ask them for their favorite film, and then ask them why. Everyone has some film they feel really passionately about, and they’ll go on for hours about it if you let them. That’s actual insight, actual experience, actual storytelling. Not a list of thirty “were you picked on….did you go to prom……how many times were you in the yearbook” questions that I keep browsing past.

    So, my own attempt:

    What’s your mortal sin?

    Yeah, I know this has been done as a meme in the past. Quiz and questionnaire form. But I’m not talking about the funny, clichéd crap. The sidelong, knowing glances of the crowd that always strives for the “lust” result. The angsty teen who just wants to the world to acknowledge his scrawny frame as one for whom the word “Wrath” is an appropriate moniker. The lawyer who jokingly replies “Avarice.”

    I’m talking about your real mortal sin. You needn’t even bring religion into it, if you’re not Catholic (I’m not). I’m talking about the “sin” or essential fault that keeps fucking up your life. The things that are, unavoidably, your fault, and yet you just keep falling into over and over again. The things you don’t like acknowledging about yourself, but would change if you could. If it helps, you don’t have to settle on just one. I certainly don’t intend to. Participate if you like, I don’t expect a lot of traffic on this one. It may hit a little too close to home for most people. Here we go:

    Wrath (Anger)

    Ah, the inflamed tempers. The red-eyed bull, the cheated man, the death of all reason in the flames of sudden, violent hatred. Vicious and immediate, whether futile or bloodily effective in execution, or the festering ulcer on a person’s soul that nurses some long-past slight into a vindictive inward-turning obsession, likely never to see completion. Hatred and anger drives a lot more both on an individual and a societal basis than I think we really would like to acknowledge.

    Myself? Nah. Might’ve agreed this was a problem of mine at some point in the past. As a geek in HS I felt the weight of societal sneer as much as anyone. Beat my knuckles bloody on a friend’s punching bag after a particularly infuriating bout with a clique, got in a couple of dust-ups in the locker room, knocked into the metal lockers a few times, but I barely remember them at this point. For years I used to hold such events dear to my heart, keeping a list of seven people who, given the chance, I would do my level best to kill (all since long gone with two moves and nearly ten years gone by), but it was little more than a self-ego boost when I was bothered by memories of the school bullies. I’ve long since mastered the art of channeling anger about things I cannot help directly into depression. Saved me many an outburst at my advisor and a couple at my friends. Perhaps not the healthiest response, but one that has yet to get me fired or punched out in a bar. I suppose I get as many of the infuriated flashes of anger as everyone else, the irrational response to someone who just refuses to see the point, or ridicules out of ignorance, but I’ve never acted on them, much as I might like to.


    Lust

    Lust. Sold to us daily on the television. Shoved with popups in every available orifice of the internet. We’re told to measure our worth by it, the reward to every hero, and yet the most dangerous of snares. An obsession for the adolescent, a melancholy nostalgia for the old. Wouldn’t everyone love to have this “problem?”

    Well, no.

    But everyone wants sex, right? Perhaps, but that aside, it’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about lust fucking up your life. Inability to remain faithful. Destroying trust and love between partners finding one-another strangers in their own bed. Pushing past reason and acting without thought of consequence. Spending days or weeks or months wooing that one particular knockout just to experience that one moment of climax that lasts a mere handful of seconds. (OK, for the luckiest of ladies or you tantric practitioners, maybe a minute or two.) And afterwards…..what? Tossed aside, searching once again. At best, nothing but a long look back down a row of interchangeable women or men, a list of meaningless names that gives you nothing.

    Or, even worse, the terminal adolescent. Forever pining, forever imagining, without the character to act and gain a partner. Hormone-addled regard for women (or men, speaking generically about gender-dependant points gets convoluted) that elevate them out of your reach, making you desire them all the more, and festering within you like a necrotic cancer. From this stock come the paedophiles and rapists, though they are admittedly only the most extreme. The rest just wither. Sold on an ephemeral idea (just in time for valentine’s day, huh?) of experience never defined, and thus never reached, it leaves a hollow, wasted life of forced familiarity and false friendships behind.

    Me?

    HAH.

    Moving on….


    Gluttony

    I’ll skip the prosaic points, now that it should be clear how I’m regarding this. (And there’s just very little that can be said prosaically about overeating.) At its most literal interpretation, I have the least trouble with this one. If anything, I usually regard eating as a chore (the rare exception being the restaurant mentioned above). Much like getting up in the morning, it’s merely something that has to be done and gotten over with. I often tell friends that I have a real problem with any food that takes longer to prepare than it does to eat…and I eat damn quick. I get an average of about 1.75 meals a day (skipping out on dinner occasionally), and back in undergrad I literally used to forget to eat for two days at a time. I _can_ bolt it down as well as anyone, but I have no especial talent towards cooking, and no patience to learn. I get bored of any individual food fairly quickly (except vanilla malts…..took three months to get bored of that), and whenever I stock up on food in the fridge, a quarter of it goes bad before I get to it.

    At the more metaphorical level, gluttony is the overconsumption of _anything_. The doing to great excess. Drinking yourself into a coma. Partying every day and rock-and-rolling every night. The penalties for overdoing it are self-evident. On this level…nah. I don’t think I have much of a problem there either. I drink, but my family’s history of alcoholism is always tugging at my elbow, keeping me from ever making a habit of it. I get headaches from long parties or too much TV. The company of even my dearest friends will grate after ten or twelve hours. Any one pursuit I bore of too quickly to overdo it.

    Avarice (Greed)

    Hmmm. I like money, but only for the peace of mind it gives me. I horde a bit, but only against future disaster. I’ve no great taste for the excesses of wealth, but I oscillate regularly between minor splurging on this or that book or DVD when I know I’ll never have the time to pursue them, to digging around in the remaindered bin and deciding that $4 is too much for two hour’s diversion. In theory, my career should eventually lead to a nicely-supported paycheck somewhere down the road, but I wonder sometimes what I’d even _do_ with that kind of cash, subsisting as I do now within a 10’x10’ bedroom attached to an apartment shared with three other roommates, and perfectly happy to do so. It’s a damn good thing I do feel this way, because I understand that the pay for grad students at GaTech is _pathetic_ in comparison to the rest of the country.

    Pride (Vanity)

    Ah, the first sin. I’ve always considered this the antithesis of self-doubt, and thus can pretty well write it off too. My assurance in myself slips so readily that a mere differing of opinion between myself and a complete stranger sends me into paroxysms of doubt. What if he’s right? What if “Moulin Rouge” _is_ a good film? (It’s not.) Does this mean I have terrible taste? But how does this reflect on everything else that I like? Oh God! Does this mean I’ve made a fool out of myself by extolling the virtues of movie X? Have I been missing out on real great works? Oh! My tastes must be crass and low-born! My opinions on art wholly unmerited! My prose needlessly wordy! All my ideas and likes are just demonstrating that I _am_ the lowest common denominator and worthy of the contempt of all thinking people! A real artist would be out at coffee houses discussing elaborate minutia of brushwork in French! (And if you think something as insignificant as that causes me this much of a headache, you can just imagine how I feel on matters of the body politic. It’s a daily re-affirmation of going through the logical fallacies, inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and downright lies I encounter on the topics just to reassert the opinion I held the day before. All have to be reproven on a daily basis.)

    Fuck all that noise. One of the reasons I like to write in lj is that it locks down my opinions on something. Can’t back away from it now, it’s carved immutably in electrons as a sequence of ones and zeros. These are my opinions and they’re just as legitimate as everyone else’s. So nahhhyyyaaa.

    For the more superficial interpretation….again, nearly the opposite problem. I spent a lot of my formative years looking really, really generic, which resulted in me being ignored. It’s taken me this long to advance from “shrinks out of sight in a crowd” to learning to not particularly care how foolish I might look or sound, worrying about what some other stranger might think of my appearance or opinion. It takes too much effort to worry how the world perceives me anymore. I’ll just act how I fell comfortable.




    Sloth
    Envy

    …….you know, I’ve sat here for an hour now trying to get started on these, my actual problems, and I can’t seem to produce anything. Perhaps this _does_ strike a bit too close to home for me as well. I’ll give it another shot next entry, and we’ll see how well I’m able to enumerate my own basic faults then.



    Reviews! Got a regular boatload here, so many that I may have to give a blanket pardon to some of them rather than bore us both with overly-lengthy missives. With the computer gone, I took the opportunity to plough through a good portion of mount DVD. Then I borrowed the Extended Two-Towers, and that’s tied up my film-watching time for at least another week. Nevertheless, got through a good number of flicks, and I’ve been using that moleskein notebook to keep my thoughts on each one jotted down. (Real life-saver, that.)

    In addition to the contributions from the mount, I made it out to the theaters to catch a film which’d caught my eye, and whose word-of-mouth was so massively conflicted that I just had to find out what could make one group love it so dearly and others hate with such venom. I’m talking, of course, about Tim Burton’s “Big Fish.”

    Short story is, I liked it. It’s not in my top ten, or even my top twenty, but I did enjoy it for the most part, and just like the big girl I am at films like this, it squeezed a tear or two out of me at the ending. That said, I can certainly understand why it was that some people didn’t like it. What I can’t understand is why anyone would HATE it with such energy. It’s not like it was greatly offensive in subject matter or execution. It’s almost like the hatred is engendered not by the film itself, but by the reputation that the film’s acquired. If you end up not liking a film that is trumpeted up and down as the greatest thing since sliced bread, your moderate dislike may get warped into downright venom from having to hear over and over again that you’ve got the “wrong” taste. (Like my dislike for Moulin Rouge.)

    I’m more than willing to hear the case for the prosecution, if someone wants to pipe up and tell me what the film did to earn your hatred. (Looking in your direction, Kusoyaro…)

    I’ll give a summary of sorts here with a few spoilerish leanings, but not giving away the ending or all of the clever turns, so casual reader beware.

    “Big Fish” is essentially an expanded and textually explored “fish” story. You know, the tales that fishermen tell about the “one who got away” to justify the weekend spent getting drunk out on the lake with nothing to show for it. Not really a “tall tale” like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, but an unbelievable story of slightly smaller stature, steeped in local tradition and familiar landmarks. The structure is deceptively simple. Will Bloom (played by Billy Crudup….nice young man to rise above a last name like that) is the son of Ed Bloom, a retired traveling salesman. Will never saw much of his father growing up, as Ed’s work kept him from home for long spans of time, but when he was at home Ed would entertain Will with long, elaborate “fish stories” about the places he’d been and the things he’d done. Like the time he’d been an accessory to a bank robbery. Or how he’d gone through his entire growth spurt during one morning at church. Or when he parachuted in over Japan during WWII, and landed atop an outdoor theater entertaining the Japanese officers.

    Will grew up with just these brief glimpses of his father, and when he’d finally realized how impossible the stories were, felt betrayed. Why, precisely, is difficult to state simply, and, I wouldn’t doubt, is a central point of contention in attitudes toward the film. What I think the movie tried to have us see, was that Will thought Ed’s made up stories were a cop-out. Instead of actually being with his family and with the son who saw him so rarely, Will thought of Ed as off enjoying his life. Staying away from his home because he found them boring or tiresome. The stories were an elaborate excuse, a stand-in for the kind of relationship the boy thought he and his father should’ve had. Lies told as a placation to a little boy that Ed never really wanted. This is the big problem with the flick, because this idea never really gets across. We can see the resentment boiling in Will, but we just can’t get inside his head to see Ed in that way. Ed’s played as such a fun-loving, enjoyable old man that we can’t understand the resentment directed towards him, a central concept isn’t even really told to us until very late in the game, at which point we’re pretty solidly on Ed’s side.

    The film itself really begins at the end of this interaction. Just a few minutes in from the start, Will is grown up, married, with a child of his own on the way. He’s been estranged from his father for years now in that kind of passive, silent manner that I’ll always associate with the black sheep from my own extended family. No one speaks of it, but it’s plainly there for anyone who cares to look. Then Will gets word that Ed is dying of cancer. A grudge is one thing, but a deathbed is something else altogether. Will goes down to see his father, and brings his wife with him. While he’s there, we intercut elaborately between “Ed’s life story, according to Ed” and Will going through his father’s affairs, trying to put straight everything that Ed has told him over the years, winnowing out the fact from the fiction. It’s important in his mind to “put his father together” to resolve his own doubts and worries about impending parenthood, lest he make the same grievous mistakes that his own father made. What he discovers is that there’s far more fact in those old tales than the disillusioned thirteen-year-old boy in him ever suspected.

    The stories? Something of a mixed bag. They’re told in chronological order, according to Ed’s accounting of his own life. Most important for all the stories, Ed is granted a vision of how he will die while he is still a young boy (in a method truly evocative of the campfire stories of a pre-teen). We’re never told what it was he saw, but this vision gives Ed an important edge. Knowing how it was that he was going to die, that meant he knew he’d be surviving everything else that he might come up against. From that point forward, he approaches life with the headstrong determination of a fool who refuses to believe that something just can’t be done. When a giant comes to town and devours entire acres of crop and flocks of sheep, Ed sees an opportunity to move out of the one-horse town, and volunteers to go speak to the monster. In true “fish story” but short of “tall tale” territory, the “giant” is about fifteen feet tall and has taken up residence in a cave outside of town. (Played by Matthew McGrory…who, naturally, is only half that tall, possesses the Guiness World Record for largest feet in the world, and unfortunately shows signs of what I think are the more degenerative aspects of gigantism. His head and shoulders have a rather profound tilt to one side that it doesn’t look like he can correct, and he limps rather badly. I checked out his imdb entry thinking he was the (slightly taller) guy in that Billy Crystal excrement “My Giant,” and found out instead that his previous resume included “The Dead Hate the Living” and “House of 1000 corpses.” W. T. F. )

    Anyway, Ed convinces the Giant (Karl) to leave with him for the big city, gets a grand old send-off from his homestead for doing so, and sets off on a series of similarly entertainingly ludicrous adventures. The giant and he get jobs at a circus. He finds his true love, and does his damndest to romance her away from her fiancée. They marry, but he goes off to conduct highly sensitive work as a spy and soldier in Japan during WWII.

    Ya know, this really isn’t working. I’ll give you one complete story from the film for some of the flavor so you have an idea how the rest of the film is conducted. Early in his travels, Ed decides on a whim to take an old unpaved road out of town, saying he’ll meet up with Karl on the other side where the roads meet. He wanders deeper and deeper into the cobwebby mulch, but suddenly emerges into a picturesque town named “Specter”. The place is almost creepily placid, and there’s a wire strung out of reach over the town entrance with a whole row of shoes, tied at the laces, slung up on it. The people of the town all come out barefoot to greet Ed, and seem creepily happy to see him. In fact, it seems they’d been expecting him, since his name was listed in the mayor’s roster, although they profess surprise to see him, as he wasn’t scheduled to be there for several more years. They try through wile and general pleasantness to convince him to stay with them….for ever…and ever….and ever. The obvious conclusion (never stated directly, but I’ll say it for those who can’t keep up) is that this is either some shortcut into heaven or a literal ghost-town. The shoes are an especially nice touch, as Ed’s are snatched from him and slung up, and everyone seems to regard this as sealing the deal. This smacks of a rural traditional version of the old “never eat food or drink in the court of the fairy king or you will never be able to leave” and I appreciated it very much in that context. The other stories insert this kind of rural traditional fantasy element into each fish story, to varying degrees of effectiveness.

    The end I won’t give away….because it gets pretty far into it’s own logic in a way that’s difficult to follow without a much longer description than this….but Will ends up forced, not entirely unwillingly, into taking up his father’s storytelling duties while his father lays dying. The moment is rather touching, but is only truly effective for me if you take it out of context of the direct plotline, and view it in a wider context on the tradition of storytelling.

    God, that didn’t work either, did it? Hmmm….

    See, I think the strength of the film doesn’t lie in its actual story, which is a fairly plain, weepy version of a “chick movie for guys.” ie. Father and son reconciled on deathbed, not a dry eye in the house, etc. More than that, I think the story is actually _about_ storytelling itself, and more importantly, the genesis of “story.” As Will discovers more and more about his father, and starts seeing surprisingly direct connections between the fiction and the fact of his father’s life, we start seeing how Ed constructed his life through these stories. Of course, he never actually re-seeded the entire Auburn campus with daffodils to woo his love. His old boss wasn’t actually a werewolf. And the “Siamese-twins” turned out to be just…..wellll….Siamese twins. But this was how his world was _seen_ through his eyes. The field of flowers he would’ve loved to plant for her is how he saw his love for his wife-to-be. The “werewolf” affliction was his boss’s inapproachability, self-imposed exile, and perhaps a metaphor to an unbreakable thirst for the bottle. (I’ve my suspicions about the twins…) The key here is the transformation of the events of an “unremarkable” life into a recognition of the truly _remarkable_ events that surround _every_ life. Far too frequently these days we regard “stories” as those great adventures that always happen to someone else somewhere far away from here. Our own lives are regarded with a blasé apathy of resigned acceptance. We count ourselves unlucky to have never experienced the great happenstances of life that seem to grace everyone else, without realizing that it takes only a slight tint of the lens to bring out the truly remarkable nature of those stories everyone has at least a couple of. To take the message to heart, I could relate my own tale….the story of the Werewolf I caught and collared that night in the streets of Saltzburg….how a moment’s carelessness got me bitten, and how she eventually romanced me into letting her go…..but y’all don’t want to hear about that. You’ve got your own stories to tell.

    Faults of the film? Yeah, quite a few. The earliest segments, with a young Ed, display dialogue more stilted, and with a worse affected southern accent than I’d have thought you’d encounter in a professionally directed film these days. There’s the aforementioned problem with just getting the central points across, which really could detract from the film badly, and there’s a really, really forced bit of narration at the ending that tries to spell out the more saccharine of morals to be taken from the film, (done to a lesser extent elsewhere) and even _that_ was unclear enough that the three women behind me decided that it meant “It doesn’t matter what you do in life, but what you leave behind.” (IDIOTS. Dammit, they didn’t shut up for almost the entire movie. I was overjoyed when the weepy bit at the end came in and they were too busy sniffling to make FUCKING OBVIOUS comments anymore. “Oh, they were just twins.” Sheesh.)

    All in all, this film is further confirming a rather uncomfortable conclusion I’ve been mulling over for a while. I’m not sure that Tim Burton is really that good of a director. He’s wonderfully inventive and has a great grip of the fantastical with a constant thirst for new and interesting material, but I’m starting to think that he’s really not terribly skilled at the simple basics of connecting with the audience. A lot of people like the off-kilter nature of most of his films, and it worked to good effect in flicks like “Batman” that focused surreptitiously on the skewed psyche of its hero, or “Mars Attacks” wherein weirdness was the soup-‘o-the-day, and lent a wonderful atmosphere to “Sleepy Hollow” (gotta remember to pick up a copy), but here, where he’s honestly trying to connect with the audience on a personal level, it succeeds in spite of some fumbling on his part, not because of it. It’s almost like he knows how to spot really good, really odd and inventive scripts, but doesn’t add a great deal to them himself. Ah well, this is really only an idea at the formative stages, I’m not sure how much weight I’d actually put behind it. I really love almost all his films, this is just something that’s always nagged at me that I’ve never been able to explain.

    Next up….horror! Oh, what horror, what horror! Browsing through the aisles at Half-Price a year ago, I came upon a title that just barely piqued my interest. “The Surgeon”. Hmm….stars Peter Boyle and Malcom McDowell. Tagline “First Jason….then Freddy…..finally, a professional.” Heh…clever. Oh, what the hell, there’s a picture on the back of a skull fright-mask peering out from surgical scrubs….how bad could it be?

    Shouldn’t’ve asked.

    Short story, the flick is good, but not on the “wow, that’s scary” or “wow, that’s clever” or even “wow that’s gruesome/gory/vicious” level, but, to borrow a line from “Family Guy” it’s on the Sci-Fi channel “God bless ‘em, they’re trying” level. I mean, what is it with Malcom McDowell? The guy achieved practically legendary status right out the gate with his starring role in “A Clockwork Orange,” and he’s gotten nothing but crap and near-crap ever since. Other than his role in “Tank Girl” and his takeover as the host in the new “Fantasy Island” series, I don’t see anything he’s been in that even I would consider “good.” It’s like he went from light speed to stop in two films. (Well…..there is that infamous “Caligula” movie, but I’ve never seen it, and wouldn’t know how to tell from here whether its’ blatant shock-porn or quality fringe cult flick.)

    Anyway, the film has two scenes that are really pretty good, original, artsy, and evocative even, and they come right at the start. We begin with a flashback to sometime in the era before the world got colorized. A car in a driving rainstorm pulls up outside of a country doctor’s clinic and a panicked couple get out, carting an unconscious child. Another boy straggles out behind them and follows them into the clinic. While the brother sits idly in the living room/waiting room of the elderly physician’s office, that old (and presumably public-domain) novelty tune “lollipop” comes on the radio. Prompted by the song, the boy snitches a lollipop from the doctor’s desk while his parents wait worriedly in the lobby. Creeping quietly up to the surgery/examination room, the brother watches the examination through barely open sliding doors. It’s not really exactly clear what’s wrong, but the boy is unconscious, and the doctor moves to get a scalpel. At a guess, he’s preparing for an emergency tracheotomy, because the boy is choking on something. Unfortunately, the boy regains consciousness just as the doctor is about to begin, and in a sudden jerk, impales and gouges his throat really nastily on the scalpel. Blood, probably Hershey’s brand, goes everywhere, and the boy bleeds to death as his brother watches.

    Wow. That’s a good setup. Tragedy, nebulous motivation, and a nice artsy flair on that old peculiar aesthetic.

    Next we’re somewhere in the presumed present and on to the next good scene of the film. Our main character, Dr. McCann (Isabel Glasser) is having a bad day of petty annoyances, like the loss of a muffler, broken heel, and dropped briefcase of papers. Fortunately, she’s on her way to a much less cliché’d scene, a procedure demonstration and lecture at the hospital’s operating theater, held by Dr. Malcom McDowell. The study is actually pretty interesting; an artificial organ designed to remove toxins in cases of kidney failure. It’s an abdominal implant about which we’re given practically no details, but they’re essentially right about some of the benefits of this (assuming it worked) in comparison to a transplanted kidney.

    The demonstration has moved up to the animal test stage, and the presentation is conducted with an apparent test subject, a baboon. There’s a few logistic difficulties with this both in the context of the film, and in the context of film. Primate models are extremely expensive to consider, and thus experiments would normally be moved to that model only after extensive testing on smaller animals like mice, rabbits, or dogs, and it’s hinted that there have been profound difficulties with the device that would have had to be settled in those animals before considering the primate model. In the context of the film, however, I was really stunned to see that they’d gotten an actual trained baboon for these scenes. I’d always thought that they were notoriously difficult to train, and are some of the most vicious and violent of the primates, temperamental and easily capable of mauling someone with those inch-and-a-half long fangs of theirs. At any rate, our heroine starts asking Dr. McDowell some tough questions about the procedure (hinting to the aforementioned difficulties) and basically questioning the ethics of moving the work along so quickly. In response, the baboon panics, begins bounding around the operating theater, knocking over instruments, smearing blood on the walls, springing off of extras (again, my surprise at using a live animal) and experiences a complete blowout of the device, otherwise known as “catastrophic failure.” This was another really good scene, hinting at something terrible to come.

    Unfortunately, what with the cleverness in the first scene and the frantic, frightening, interesting action in the second, the movie kinda blew its wad and never delivers on the wonderful promise of these two scenes.

    The early film dynamic rotates around Dr. McCann butting heads with Dr. McDowell over the abdominal implant. McCann discovers that McDowell is going ahead with patient implants in spite of the incident with the baboon, and interferes with one of his patients when the patient appears to go into renal shock, moving her down the hall to dialysis. It’s then that a mysterious stranger dressed in hospital scrubs and mask comes in to check up on the patient. After demonstrating a terrible bedside manner, he administers something to her IV line that she reacts so strongly to that her VEINS BURST OUT THROUGH HER SKIN and begin dripping on the bedclothes. I don’t think you’d get that kind of response if you injected BLEACH into someone. It was at this point that I suspected I’d been tricked into buying a mediocre thriller instead of a horror flick….no fright mask. Turns out the cover was just being artsy.

    Everyone comes running and tries really hard to pretend like they’re on ER, generating the standard patter and trying to revive the girl despite the fact that she does everything but dissolve into a puddle of goo while they’re watching. (Also, really weird gratuitous scene where every inch of the patient, excepting her breasts, are covered with cotton absorbent swabs.)

    McCann catches the blame for the girl’s death, since it was OBVIOUSLY her having the patient put on dialysis that caused the reaction, and McCann is put on leave pending an investigation. She, not being one to let this lie, prods a particularly callous intern she’s been tutoring into helping her investigate. McCann is sure that McDowell is hiding something, and needs someone who has an actual excuse to be at the hospital to help sneak her in. Together they sneak down to the basement mortuary room to sneak a peak at McDowell while he performs an autopsy on the dialysis patient. While doing so, the pair are lured into a side lab where they discover the regular mortuary attendant tied up in a locker. They rush back to confront McDowell, only to find him hanging from a chain in the ceiling.

    Whoops. Guess he’s no longer a suspect. You know, McDowell only had three scenes in this film, the last of which was as a hanging corpse, and he still outshone every other actor in this flick.

    You’ll never guess what happens next.

    They catch him. There’s a brief run through the x-ray lightbox room (wherein we discover that some idiot strung all the viewing lights in a series circuit), at the end of which the villain in the scrubs gets conked on the head and knocked out.

    Not only do they catch him, they identify him and cart him off to prison. If that’s not enough for you, he tries to run off at one point and they hit him with a car. He’s Dr. Julian Battar, a fairly straightforward “mad scientist” fired from the hospital for doing unauthorized research. Naturally, he was also a flame of Dr. McCann’s younger days (perhaps understandable in light of his slight resemblance to Antonio Banderas), but when he revealed his work to her, she had to turn him in, and he replied eloquently by jumping out a third story window, falling through an ambulance, and shattering his spine. His work, apparently, was on regenerative tissue therapies. Yes, these two points are obviously linked. (The title of his thesis was “Exquisite Tenderness” a medical term for the point at which pain reaches its most extreme, and the alternate title for the flick. Probably a better descriptor of the film, really, as it converts into a rather formulaic “thriller” from this point on.)

    We split the story into two here. Dr. Battar wakes up in prison and effects an escape by shattering his wrist out of the cuffs, killing the doctor checking up on him, and switching places. Naturally, he goes back to the hospital, and proceeds to kill off every likeable patient that the plot bothered to introduce. There’s the obese black woman constantly worried that the doctors are gonna slip in and steal her organs to sell to rich patients. (She gets a truly classic old-movie moment where everyone jumps at a blind flipping up.) There’s the gratuitous sex scene with the unhappy ending between the cute young rocker in traction (broken leg) and her visiting boyfriend. (Most amusing is the ridiculously cramped fight between Battar and the boyfriend in the 5’x6’ hospital bathroom. The action climaxes when the boyfriend is punched through the plate glass…shower stall door and then gets off’d by being stabbed in the stomach with a syringe. The girlfriend gets off’d for some strange reason by being suffocated with a dose of "pirate" gas.) Why’s he doing all this? Well, it turns out that his research was successful, but he needs a very specific component…..”pineal extract”. Yeah…do I even have to say how much bullshit this is? Apparently he gets the stuff by killing people and sticking a big ol’ 12-gauge needle up their noses, and sucking out more liquid than could possibly be IN the pineal gland. Then he does a bit of work in the lab downstairs, hooks himself up to an oscilloscope, and injects it into the wound point. Twenty minutes later bones are unbroken, tissue unscarred. Ah well, we make allowances for crappy horror flicks. All of this is being done at Battar’s old hospital, of course, so he can exact revenge on those who….uh…..upset him badly enough to jump out of a third story window.

    So where’re our heroes? Really far away, on a date. The film intercuts weirdly between each of the killings and their rather placid date at the local aquarium, ending with another gratuitous nudity-and-sex scene in McCain’s pool. All this nudity and sex is about the only thing that’s marking it as more than the standard made-for-TV horror that Sci-Fi channel has been churning out of late. Not entirely crap, with a reasonable budget, but rather unambitious and rambling. It’s got one or two good ideas to expand on, a few well written bits (Battar gets a couple of good lines….on the Hippocratic oath he says “The AMA revoked my license….I’m really more of a mad scientist now…”), and a star or two, so they ride it for all they’re worth without aiming higher than a 90-minute diversion from reruns of “Dark Shadows” or “Lost in Space.”

    Anyway, Battar exacts the first part of his revenge when he knocks out the head doctor of the hospital by throwing a corpse at him. Then, weirdly, he goes for the elaborate “torment the dying” plot device by sewing the doctor’s lips shut, anesthetizing him into immobility, hooking up the blood-draining embalming pump to his neck, and placing the off switch within reach of his insensate hand. The whole scene is basically just done so Battar can have an extended monologue about revenge and explain the basic plot points to anyone who wasn’t paying attention. Out of place, and rather needlessly severe.

    Meanwhile, the other bodies have been discovered, the breakout detected, and the whole place is swarming with cops. Realizing that McCann is the last target of revenge, they decide to set a trap for Battar. In classic Scooby fashion, it goes terribly awry, there’s a rather neatly artsy scene that starts with blood drops in a glass of water and ends with an injury to the eye. She goes charging off stupidly to confront Battar on her own, with predictable results. Battar accomplishes his own undoing by tying her up NEXT TO THE DEFIBRILLATOR in the operating theater (bad guy sense malfunctioning), and, after an amazingly prolonged scene of talking, the cops arrive to hit him with a two-minute hail of gunfire. He dies instantly. Or DOES he? Of course not! Naturally his corpse re-animates in the morgue, he kills off hero/boyfriend/intern at McCann’s apartment, and he’s ultimately undone by tripping over her classy glass coffee table and impaling himself on one of its legs.

    Wow. From a real promising beginning to a fairly limp-wristed attempt at aping all the hundreds of second-tier thriller/suspense flicks that have gone before. It’s really not that the work is complete crap, despite my attitude. The actors aren’t really _terrible_, (believe me, I know from bad actors) it’s just that there’s barely anything here to recommend it. It’s got the Sci-Fi channel’s regard for bullshit science and take-for-granted horror monster creation, sort-of grafting a moral dilemma onto an essentially brainless production, really nice expensive-looking sets, a couple of actual “name” actors (who are listed in second billing on the cover despite having bit parts while the monster and the boyfriend are in tiny print on the back), and a handful of gratuitous nudity scenes in a desperate grab at trying to gloss over the film’s faults.

    One of the real problems of the flick is built in, though. Hospitals just aren’t that good a setting for horror flicks. They’re built to be reassuringly open and well lit. Emphasize cleanliness and calming color schemes. Really, they’ve only got potential when deserted (as any large building does), and then it only works in the hands of real masters, like in the execution of Halloween II, Exorcist III, or the often-overlooked masterpiece “Nightwatch” (find it, watch it, spread the word. Absolutely excellent.) I know that a lot of people find hospitals frightening, but it’s not due to the structure itself. If you’re not going to get in and explore the surgical terrors, involve the exposure of the repulsive organic nature of human life, or look at the slow descent towards death that takes place there daily (all of which would require either excellent dramatists or enormous budgets), and you just use it as a generic “place where people are” set for a slasher flick, then you’ve really got your work cut out for you. Plus, this hospital in particular was literally swarming with people for most of the film. Even after evacuation, the place was filled with cops.

    All in all, a piece only worth the time of the late-night insomniac. Watch it for the first two scenes, and run through on fast-forward for everything else. Watch for the drop of blood in the water glass, and the last gratuitous nudity scene, as, other than the first two scenes, they’re the only ones with real art direction. Oh….and “lollipop”? Nearly forgot, and so did the film. Battar leaves lollipops at his victim’s side because…ever since he saw his brother die….he’s never been able to get that song out of his head.

    Lame.

    Next up, a bit of animation! This time, a sort of partial departure. I’ll be reviewing….

    Fred Perry’s “Gold Digger: The Animation.”

    OK, so I was curious. That’s the motiviation behind a lot of the stuff I pick up here and there. Disney is rarely a surprise any more, Pixar just can’t stop making excellent productions, and Warner Brothers keeps pushing the stylistic edge. All the while, though, there are independent projects like these coming out. A lot of them are just puerile crap like the latter sequels of Disney’s blockbusters or the thirty-second sequel to “Land Before Time”, but occasionally you’ll find a few gems in the rough.

    Gold Digger, though. Hmmm. I had to think long and hard before deciding to take a chance on it. $25 is a really ludicrous amount to spend on a single 20-minute episode, especially, as I found out later, when it’s only the first part of a trilogy of similar length.

    So why’d I pick it up? Well, to be honest, because I follow the comic.

    *cringe*

    To those who don’t know, Gold Digger was one of the first “Amerimanga” productions from the second-to-most-recent wave of anime fanaticism to hit the US. Basically “Amerimanga” is a small-print-run comic made by an American and done in the style of Japanese comics. Over the years, there’s been enough “Amerimanga” produced that it developed its own distinct style and feel. The “crappy” style. Vacuous plots, sketchily-produced art (with only a passing regard for skill), spastic humor, and a “my God, I’ve gotta fill twenty pages this month and I’ve only got six lines of plot” penchant for white space and fight choreography. There are exceptions, but they're really few and far between.

    I ran into Gold Digger first during my “uberfan” stage of development, where I thought I would watch every anime, read every manga, follow up on every little piece of related ephemera that ever reared its head in the US. Fortunately, I was cured of that pretty quick after hitting Ben Dunn’s “Ninja High School,” and was permanently buried long before Pokemon reared its brightly colored head. However, I picked up the first couple of collected volumes of GD, and was pretty quickly hooked. The plots were…..welll….. inventive but stupid, and the art was all black and white cheesecake-shots (never got remotely close to hentai-level) of the enormously endowed cartoon women who populated the GD universe. So why did I like it? (Get your head outta the gutter.) The HUMOR. The books were HILARIOUS, and accomplished their funny by the utter and total abandonment of the author to his own geekitude. In one of the first issues the two sisters are out digging through a tomb and they come across THE SWORD OF OMENS! She even activates its magical powers by recitation of the old Thundercat’s invocation! That, combined with a real gift for timing, pacing, and dialogue meant that GD was the only piece of Amerimanga that I didn’t drop like a rotten tomato when the “uberfan” phase finally wore off. As for why I still follow it….welll……the characters really start to grow on you if you follow them for a while. They’re silly and funny, and several of them become interchangeable after a bit, but the world Fred Perry created for them, while being pretty damn scatterbrained (a world where hyper-technology AND magic AND martial-arts “chi” get in a three way tussle pretty frequently), keeps having a new aspect or facet come to the fore to keep things interesting. He has an insanely large cast to keep track of, all with disparate but carefully detailed motivations and continuing stories, and the technobabble and geekery just keep flowing. (Two issues ago a djinn showed up that was the spitting image of JoJo Jotaro from “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure." For heaven’s sake they used to have a time-travelling nemesis that was obviously an evil version of Sherman and Mr. Peabody!)

    That said, though, it often has the mindset of a horny adolescent. You know the descent of “Image” comics several years ago to the point where they were releasing “swimsuit editions” of their characters? GD does that every damn year. There’s no getting around the fact that GD does have characters who “stack up” with even the most over-endowed of anime characters. (If it’s any consolation, there’s a reason. I found out from the director commentary track, much to my amusement, that the original character designs for the GD cast were drawn up by Fred Perry when he was in the army in Desert Storm. As they weren’t allowed to bring any girlie mags in country for fear of offending the locals, his entire unit kept making demands of his designs.) The cheesecakery is really overwhelming and gratuitous. Even beyond that, the story occasionally degenerates into straight fan-service with “the girls go swimsuit shopping” issues (I wish I was kidding), the girls were originally extremely boy-crazy, and the series even began with a *cringe* “wedgie war” between two of the main protagonists. Now I could put on airs at this point and declare how sexist and exploitive this is, but you know what? Eh. I’ve seen worse. All in all, Fred Perry strikes me as a more amature-ish Phil Foglio, a guy who still gets flack for the over-endowment of the women in his comics, but everyone forgives him because he’s so damn funny. (See “Girl Genius”) As far as I’m concerned, this comic is my guilty pleasure.

    So, the cast. This should give you a feeling of how the comic is going in twenty different directions at once. The titular character is “Gina Diggers,” a bespectacled female take on Indiana Jones, all the way down to his hat. She’s something of a prodigy archaeologist and adventurer, as well as being a technological inventor on a truly staggering scale. Constant McGuyvering, pulling things out of “hyperspace storage,” slapping together particle cannons and other sci-fi fodder with chewing gum and bailing wire... if a plot calls for some technological device to intervene you can bet she’s got it stored away somewhere. Her adoptive sister, and constant adventuring companion, is Brittany, a were-cheetah. Technically, she has three complete forms, a big-cat form that really looks more like a tiger than a cheetah, her shrimpy, short human form, but she spends most of her time at the intermediate Amazon-proportioned half-cheetah state. In this state she stands about 7’ tall, white skin with black markings, and cheetah-spotted hair. She’s also possessed of Hulk-level strength, and speed and reflexes on par with the Flash. She was found as an orphaned child by Gina’s father when she was barely a few days old, and was adopted into the family. A bit later in the series they accidentally manifest a third sister when a curse from one of their plunderings backfires weirdly, creating a sister with Gina’s intellect and Brittany’s strengths. They name her “Brianna” and invite her into the family.

    Their parents? Well Gina’s dad is one of the foremost arch-mages of the dimension (think Dr. Strange, but with less detail), and Gina’s mom is a retired acrobat/thief/swordswoman/master martial artist from a neighboring D&D-style world. As the series continued, it struck out in far too many directions to detail, encountering daemons, magicians, people who flunked out of “Cobra,” aliens, rebelling computers, dimensional jumpers, manifest curses, leprechauns, a bevy of other were-creatures, dragons, ancient buried civilizations, and competition in the archeological field.

    That should be enough for a taste or two of the world.

    The story that the animation is covering is apparently the very VERY first GD story that Fred ever made…so early and rough that it wasn’t even included in the first collected volume, so I’ve never encountered it before. Gina and Brittany are off on another archeological treasure-hunting expedition, this time looking for Merlin’s “Time Raft,” an ill-defined time-traveling device stashed somewhere for the hundreds of years since the wizard’s death. Gina, naturally, plans to go cruising for boys with it. (Yeah, I know.) They find the entrance to the cave and venture inside, only to be attacked by mysterious rock-beasts that seem to guard the way. Gina whips out a blaster and clicks on her personal shield. Brittany goes hyper. Between the two of them, they make short work of the threat. What they don’t know, however, is that they’re being observed. A dragon peers casually at them through a crystal ball and considers the two explorers while introducing himself via monologue. Deciding to have the two captured, he turns and instructs his two elven servants to intercept Gina and Brittany.

    And that’s it. Episode one over.

    Wow. I must feel gypped, right? Cost more than a dollar a minute.

    Ehhhh. Kinda. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. A lot of the slack time was made up with a lengthy and animation-lite dialogue between Gina and Brittany at the start that’s actually a little endearing. There’s another stretch during the credits sequence at the end (which I think is a direct homage to the credit sequence at the end of “Dirty Pair: Project Eden”...come to think of it, the girls do have a kind of Dirty Pair dynamic going….) that just cycles the animation while moving in and out with a computerized perspective change. I spotted a lot of “cheat” techniques to minimize effort on the part of the animators, like having their back to the camera so lip-synch wasn’t an issue, or pulling background pieces around to keep the screen active. The video quality was actually fairly bad as well, with one scene having INTERLACE ISSUES and the opening menu has an aliasing glitch. And the SOUND. WOW. UTTER CRAP. Not the voice actors, which were winning no prizes either, but the actual sound processing was awful. Ye gods, how unprofessional can you get?

    Well, that’s kinda the point. See, while it’s been released professionally, this isn’t exactly a big production. You know how many people were really responsible for putting this together? SIX. Three voice actors, one person to do the music, one person to do the sound effects, and ONE PERSON to do the ANIMATION.

    FRED PERRY DREW THE WHOLE FUCKING THING. Every frame of it. Backgrounds, foregrounds, colors, all of it.

    Look, Shakespear it ain’t. Hell, it’s not even Hanna Barberra. But if your friend from down the street put this whole thing together by himself, you’d think it was the coolest thing on earth. That’s sorta the way I’d like to regard this. And not just because I got gypped out of $25 worth of pocket money, but because I always wanted to see these characters animated and it gives hope to all the hobbyists out there.

    And even that aside, the whole thing isn’t crap. The fight scenes had a few good moves in them, and Fred actually _animated_ motion of the characters when they moved. None of the cheaper-flavored anime where someone jumps around a bunch and their hair remains rigidly attached to their head. Fred actually tries to get smooth motion in there with properly-jointed walking, swaying bangs, little things like that. It’s primitive, and it comes off as only a step or two better than “Strongbad” animation, but it’s an honest attempt. Also the detail level is pretty damn high in places, considering it’s only one guy doing this.

    Actually, this is even better seen in the extras. “Extras?” you say? On a 20-minute piece of animation? Yup. Turns out that before actually tackling a three-part story, Fred created a “primer”….kinda like a “series intro segment” about a minute long. Little action sequence with the two girls on a treasure hunt, fall into a hidden temple, activate and destroy the stone guardian, and uncover the treasure. Actually a really nice sequence. Cool moves, funny expressions, and the way Fred animated Brittany’s speed is both fairly original and really cool.

    Then there’s all the _other_ extras. Four whole commentaries on the animation, and another one on the primer. Fred’s commentary was fairly interesting and solidly confirmed that he had, in fact, drawn every last frame of the animation. Ben Dunn, who didn’t do anything but was effectively Fred’s sponsoring artist at the start of the series took the opportunity to puff himself up a bit and plug his own books (Ninja High School, etc.). Bill Yarnell did the background music (ranging from annoying to abysmal), and in a rather clever effect, his commentary track only has a bit of him talking, but has all the other vocal tracks and sound effects turned way down so you can listen to the music he wrote for the show.

    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 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 immediatel 
  • "Is it just me, or is rap music just getting lazy?" 2004-01-23 12:36:40 Last night: Five Guinness, microwave popcorn (burned), and an entire tin of altoids.

    My tongue feels necrotic today...

    Just a quick update, as I realized I never posted the picture I promised. My computer is still in the shop, but word is that I'll be getting it back sometime this weekend. We'll see if I have anything constructive to say at that point...

    Anyway, here's the links to the picture:

    http://loewnauphotography.com/images/New_Years_2004/image086.htm

    That's me in the middle. :) 
  • "...the silence of of ice in a glass, of vodka and blood..." 2004-01-18 21:27:49 Credit where credit is due... http://www.livejournal.com/users/smoken_mirrors/132701.html

    Well, just a short note to declare the lack of updates for a bit. I'd planned to put off the major work on my computer until after the holiday so I would have the opportunity to write and browse from my room, but the issue was forced. I contracted the single most annoyingly pervasive little shithead of a spyware program. Something called "virtual bouncer" that installed itself on my computer, made itself a little icon, and then, at boot-up, told me in a very stern voice that "your internet security settings are too low, would you like us to raise them?"

    Recognizing that as the complete bullshit it was, and being unable to close the window any other way, I told it no. It immediately did it again, with the question rephrased so I had to answer "yes" (clever....asking "are you sure?") Again, I told it to go blow.

    Then

    suddenly

    popups started opening.

    This is not all that unusual. What was unusual was that I didn't even have AN ACTIVE INTERNET CONNECTION AT THE TIME. This fucking piece of spyware actually got on the net _for me_ and started flinging popups onto my empty desktop.

    So I close those popups and open my internet browser. Where I discover that it's reset my homepage to 'popup.net'.

    God damn it.

    and more popups start opening.

    So we run Norton. It finds and quarrentines two files. Which is great, but doesn't stop the problem.

    So we run my spyware killer. And it finds Virtual Bouncer! And kills it!

    Which, it turns out, only pisses it off.

    Now, on startup, in addition to everything else, I get the little flashlight icon that hunts for five minutes to find the missing virutal bouncer.....and then come the internet security warnings ANYWAY.

    But that's not the worst. Yeah, this program proceeds to open 1D6 popups about every eight minutes or so, whether or not I've got an open browser. Yeah, if I unplug it from the wall, instead I get a version with a little warning box (do you wish to work offline?) that refreshes every eight minutes instead. For that I can just boot up the popup killer that zaps them as fast as they open.

    No, the worst is that this little fucker PULLS ME OUT OF A VIDEO GAME to show me popups. There I am, mowing down night elves, the screen flickers, I'm tossed back to the desktop, and someone tries to sell me viagra.

    That is officially an unworkable situation. Computer unplugged and carted off to someone who can nuke the little bastard back down to individual bits.

    So, the short of it is, no real entries until I get my computer back, sometime next week.

    (Oh, all this was posted from work computer.)

    This would happen just as I'd managed to get everyone's attention pointed back toward me and a regular explosion in the comments section.

    *sigh*
     
  • "Oh my God....THAT’S NOT A KITTEN!!!" 2004-01-16 09:47:24 Well, as I’ve had more than a couple new people “friend” me from my impromptu whoring out on Ferret’s lj, I figure I should post a little more about myself for their benefit, lest my posts become too lousy with inside references for someone who doesn’t know me personally to puzzle out. Anyone who’s been reading a while can probably skip this bit.

    1) I’ll list this first, as it’s the only point actually likely to loose me some readers. I was and am in favor of the current military action in Iraq on humanitarian grounds. The reasons (though a bit outdated) are given here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ersatzinsomnia/4523.html#cutid2 I know this is a major sticking point for many people, and if you want to “unfriend” me because I hold this viewpoint, I won’t feel insulted. It’s your prerogative to pre-filter the journals you read, and not many people really want to be confronted with major political debates in their own friends list.

    That said, I don’t speak on politics very frequently, and this is far from the central issue in my life. Topics that do sneak in are selected pretty randomly.

    2) Speaking generally, my political stance is probably called “moderate conservative” by those who disagree with me, and simply “moderate” by those who agree, but I tend to take every issue stand-alone, regardless of whatever party line happens to be. If an answer is demanded and I’ve nothing to go on, I usually err towards the libertarian end.

    3) So, what do I do? I’m a graduate student in Chemical Engineering at Georgia Tech, but my work has kinda slid sideways into bioengineering, where I’m currently working on bimolecular studies to improve treatment for Sickle Cell Anemia. This means that I work in a room with both a radiation and biohazard sign on the door.

    4) I am rather devoutly religious, being brought up Lutheran, but other religions and belief structures fascinate me, and I’ve assembled a rather spastic collection of occult and pagan knowledge, both real and fictional. I’ve had friends that range from Atheistic to Zoroastrian, so don’t worry about offending my sensibilities on this topic. Don’t worry about me trying to convert you. That would be dumb.

    5) Much of the humor I use in these posts is self-disparaging. I’m not actually that whiny and self-centered, it just happens to be the style I mastered. Similarly, I’ll speak with overpoweringly assertive confidence on some topics. That doesn’t mean my mind can’t be changed, just that I don’t bother attaching disclaimers. Correct me on matters of fact if you spot them.

    6) I am an AMVer. This stands for “Anime Music Videos” and is a hobby that has become shockingly widespread throughout conventions and anime fandom in general. It’s as simple as it sounds, with people using home computers (or even 2 VCRs) to assemble clips of Japanese animated films to music. The legality of the hobby is questionable at best, but we hunt down and beat to death anyone who attempts to make a profit off the matter, and hope the RIAA has richer fish to fry. Through devious machinations I managed to inherit the directorship of the largest AMV contest in the world, the one taking place at AWA (www.awa-con.com), but have largely slacked off on my own productions as of late. If you’re interested in the hobby, you’ll want to check the universal index and database at www.animemusicvideos.org . As with everything, though, Sturgeon’s Law applies. Lotta Linkin Park and DragonBall Z in there. If you want me to point you towards some of the best editing, synching, and composition structure you’ll ever find, just ask and I can point you to stuff that’ll make you cry, sing, swear, and laugh.

    7) I’m in two RPG games at the moment. A 3rd ed. D&D game that I tolerate for the sake of the friends playing it, and I run a “Call of Cthulhu” (CoC) game that has some small acclaim among my friends.

    8) The niggling details. 6’, 180 lbs. (rather scrawny), long brown hair, brown eyes, glasses. A permanent 5-O’clock shadow. I’d post a picture, but I’m not all that photogenic, and one of the few pics of me that I like has been relocated, and I’m not sure where. (Shelly? When you get a chance...)

    9) And, finally, regarding going through the archives. LJ pulled a really nasty fucking stunt on me a while back. I regularly broke wordlimits on the entries and had to double over into second posts. However, sometime in the last few months, lj shortened the wordlimit retroactively, and ended up lopping the bottom off a lot of my older posts. Fortunately, I’ve always double-posted my entries to the journal function on www.animemusicvideos.org . Unfortunately, you have to sign up to get in (free, but a hassle), and a shifting journal reference.


    Whoops, segway tipped over. Back to our regularly scheduled ramblings.

    So, it’s 8:30, and Angel’s (possibly a new one) on at 9:00, and I really need to write up some elaborate background (“Blessed of Mordiggidan”) for the game on Friday. Let’s see how much of an entry I can actually get through. On your mark...get set.....

    So, the very day I get that new little moleskine booklet, I stop down the street at “The Tin Drum”, a little noodle house that I’ve heard good things about. The place is crowded, every table and all the “waiting for takeout” stools are occupied, so I get an order to go. My food takes an extraordinarily long time to come, so the owner of the place, apparently out of some misplaced feeling that he should make our wait an enjoyable one, comes out and strikes up a few brief conversations in heavily accented English. (Well, not so much “accented” as strangely paced with odd vocabulary choices.) Eventually I’m the last one left and he makes it down the row to me.

    Awkward small talk is exchanged, and he ends up asking me where I work.

    “Oh, I’m a grad student.”
    “Ah. What’s your...uh...subject?”
    “Chemical Engineering”
    “So...what....does that mean you....your...”
    “My research? It’s more bioengineering, but I study Sickle Cell Anemia”
    “Where does that take you?”
    “You mean, eventually? My job after I get outta here? Sorta depends...artificial organs and the like, maybe.”
    “Oh....unravel the mystery.....of God’s secrets, huh? Figure out how it all works in the lab?”

    (Okay.......what? That’s pretty heavy stuff to toss at me sidelong while I’m waiting for my lunch.... )

    “Uh.....yeah.”
    “Let me ask you something.....” (here it comes...) “We always spend so much time and money trying to stick around here...this place...”
    “You mean, alive?”
    “Yeah. Why do that?”

    *throb*
    Th’ Hell?

    You know, I’m more willing than most to engage in any matter of philosophical discussion with someone at the drop of a hat. My old messageboard debates on morality and existence are fairly legendary. But the idea that this guy thought it was appropriate to call upon me to justify my work in the remaining two minutes before my lunch came up....from HIS KITCHEN...and thought the topic of “why do we bother to try and extend our lives” could be even glancingly be touched upon in that time was just patently absurd. To be honest, I thought I saw it coming after the “God’s secrets” snark, as I’d noticed a prominent Birkenstock sensibility about the place (three dollar ginseng tea? Check, soy milk? Check. Random colored shapes on the walls by way of interior decorating? Check.), but accosting one of your guests and laying upon them the need to justify the entire medical field of research on a philosophical level is not my definition of being a good host. (There’s a guy who runs my favorite deli out at N.Dekalb Mall who I chat with a lot. We talk about movies, not the point of existence.) But still, this would not warrant comment if it wasn’t for one fact.

    This was the second time in a month someone had asked me this question, and demanded that I justify all the scientific efforts to extend life in recent years. Admittedly, the other time was at a mixer and copious amounts of C2H5OH was involved, so the question was more appropriate and had further time to explore, but was even more unexpected, as you don’t expect it to be coming from someone in a department dedicated to that same discipline.

    It’s just so weird. I mean, I realize that philosophically it’s an interesting question, practically it’s a large economic debate, and individually it’s something some people feel they have to answer every morning before dragging themselves to work. But I don’t go up to my artist friends and say “how do you justify your concentration on creating images of fictional events and places...when the only effect they have on the world is to serve as a pleasant diversions from the matters of reality and to occupy minds on a simpler, less involved level, in order to distract from the ultimate meaninglessness of life contrasted with the terror of non-existance?” It’s not that it’s impolite, it’s just not _appropriate_ until at least one of those involved is drunk.

    Besides, is this a new trend in pop philosophy that somehow bypassed me? People won’t typically accost you with ideas like this unless they’ve got a lot of support in fringe literature in order to back up the apparent profundity of vast simplifications. The other guy who accosted me had a whole bunch of random statistics to throw at me. “90% of hospital costs come in the last nine years of life.” Well duh.

    (Crap....Angel’s on........whoa “YoYoDyne Corporation”...a Buckaroo Banzai reference!)

    When people with chronic diseases like cancer or severe diabetes die, the vast majority of their costs tend to come at the end. Because they’re DYING. All the really bad stuff happens near the end. I suppose the whole philosophy of “I’ll die when I die” could be seen as noble, but I have trouble seeing it as anything other than a shallow dismissal of topics as a back-door-out for people to take a moral high road on trickier issues like drug costs, medicare, or animal trials. (Doesn’t work, of course, unless you wanna say that 18-month old Tay-Sachs patients should just die ‘cause they’re supposed to, or five year old Sickle Cell patients shouldn’t be putting up that much of a fuss over their strokes.)

    “Die when you die” is just so relative. Six hundred years ago, “when you die” was considered lucky to reach your fourties. Now, just the influence of more varied diets, the advent of penicillin, and simple preventative measures has upped the natural lifespan to around 75 years. Where do you draw the line? I personally know four people who would be dead today if it wasn’t for modern medicine. (Congential heart defects and born with collapsed lungs.) The disease I’m studying, if untreated, cuts down life expectancy to a third of everyone else’s.

    “But modern medicine has reached the point of diminishing returns. It’s too much cost for too little return.” Tell that to the Sickle Cell patients whose life expectancy has doubled in the last forty years. How much is too little? Who gets to decide, you? The other guy who accosted me with this question actually allowed the words to pass from his lips “most people beyond a certain age won’t have anything to contribute.”

    These are not lines I like to hear from a professional researcher. Especially from one in the field.

    Bottom line, dying is the easiest thing in the world. No one’s stopping you. Human life is an enormous Rube-Goldbergian mechanism with a billion different ways to break it. But what kind of pride is it that would insist the rest of the world follow your example?

    Eh. Trying to cure sick people used to be enough to justify my job. Guess that’s not good enough anymore.


    Sorry, trifling matter that just annoyed me. I never got a chance to reply to the guy’s question at length, since my food showed up shortly thereafter. But apparently we’re going to “continue this discussion the next time I come by.”

    Oh goodie.


    Sooo....other topics of interest. Hmmm.



    Lifeforce.

    Wow. Just wow.

    Over a month ago one of my regular games was cancelled, and my friends asked me to haul over a selection of flicks from mount DVD and have a movie night. I got in late ‘cause I had to submit to the familial piety and I showed up when they’d already gotten most of the way through “Jeepers Creepers” (which I’d already seen: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ersatzinsomnia/10533.html#cutid6 ). When that was finished, I offered up the selection from my unwatched pile. “Killer Rats,” “The Surgeon,” “Bones,” and “Lifeforce.” They picked Lifeforce.

    This is one of those movies that you can hardly believe you’re seeing while you’re watching it. It has a legendary, but rather odd cult status in the annals of schlock history...like “Battlefield Earth” only really, really entertaining. I’d heard about it here and there in the past, but it always struck me as more of a sci-fi flick, and thus not entirely down my alley. (Hey, there’s a LOT of bad horror out there to see....)

    This film should have been good. Hell, it should have been great. Looking at just the bare bones of the people involved is like looking into a producer’s wet dream. Five years after “Alien”, the celebrated Dan O’Bannon (writer for Alien) provided the screenplay for this film based on a novel by Colin Wilson (Max Headroom inventor) called “The Space Vampires.” It was directed by Tobe Hooper of Chainsaw and Poltergeist fame. The flippin’ SCORE was written by HENRI MANCINI. They got the SFX guy who won an oscar for STAR WARS in to work on this film. PATRICK STEWART is in there. It had a budget. A BIG one.

    AND it features an enormous number of full-frontal shots of the female lead walking around nude.

    How, exactly, do you screw all that up?

    Well....maybe I’m being a bit too harsh. Everyone who has actually seen it is of the “you have GOT to see this flick!” attitude. But really, they’re not telling you that because it’s a good movie. It’s bad. But it’s bad on such a magnificent SCALE.

    Where to start.

    How about ......goingsixhundredmilesanhour? The flick takes off with no notice and no brakes. We’re in space! On the HMS Churchill (“the first spacecraft equipped with the ‘NERVA’ engine...that does a bunch of stuff with technobabble that allows us to cut corners and not have to worry about the lack of weightlessness in the shuttle scenes”) spacecraft that’s been sent to study Haley’s Comet. And they find something! A spacecraft a hundred and fifty miles long! Traveling in the head of the comet! And they go into it! And they find dessicated bat-like aliens that crumble at a touch! And three nude humans preserved in glass! And the ship activates, unfolding like an umbrella! And they take the humans and one of the bats back to the ship! And it’s thirty days later! And Earth control can't get the ship to respond! And they send the Columbia up after it! (Ouch....irony....) And the inside of the ship is burnt out! And everyone’s dead! Except for the nude aliens!

    All of this....in the first fifteen minutes. (Not counting the titles.) I’ve never seen a film that took off at such a pace before. It’s like being shot out of a plot cannon. Suddenly, we hit a wall and richochet off in a different direction. We’re on the ground in London with the nude aliens. Specifically the girl (naturally) who’s kept in a glass observation room (a COLD observation room...) watched over by a guard wearing the silliest looking biohazard precautions I’ve ever seen. Naturally, she wakes up.....and just as naturally assaults her guard with a bit of face-suck. Apparently they don’t train against this particular judo-sex school in the british police agency, as he’s totally helpless to resist her, especially when all the LIGHTNING starts shooting out between them... The ONE GUY assigned to watch the security monitors wakes up, sees what’s going on, and runs out to join in. Unfortunately he has to go downstairs and through two dozen swinging glass doors before he can get to the room, so by the time he gets there, she’s done, and the guard is “drained” down to a dry, shrunken skeleton. The newcomer apparently rebuffs her offer to “Use my body” (I swear to God, we were cracking up), and the nude girl goes wandering around MI5 strangely unopposed. Oh, and this is a European production, so the cameras aren’t staying at a discreet chest-level.

    OK, I have to describe this scene in detail. The officials are all running around in a panic to find the girl. She pulls a few Darth-Vader-esqe stunts to spook the guards, and then with a wave of her hand, blows out all the floor-level patio windows on the first floor, and walks out into the night. The officials get to the lobby......and WATCH her wander off. Down the road. In the dark. Nude. And they just stand there.

    Exactly how hard is their job? SHE’S RIGHT THERE GUYS....right there on the edge of the parking lot.

    Guess it was a jurisdiction problem. :P

    An SAS official and a thanatologist show up looking for answers, and the two male aliens wake up. (Sorry ladies, discreetly placed cameras all the way for these two.) They have a bit more of a pyrotechnic entrance, but at least destroy that sequence of six doors in the process, and are apparently gunned down into tiny pieces by the two (someone’s learning) guards watching them.

    Next we get to see where the budget went. They commence to examine the corpse of the first victim, the guy “drained” down to a dessicated, skin-and-bones figure. It’s actually pretty cool when he gets up, and, although the animatronics are primitive, they’re fairly impressive. The skin and bones guy sucks all the lightning outta one of the autopsy doctors, inflating himself at the expense of the doctor.

    See...see....they’re VAMPIRES....’cause they suck the LIFE outta people....and it’s passed ON....sooo....

    Things, as one might expect, spiral downward from there. Another body is found, a woman victim of their meandering nudist, who apparently chose her for her similar dress size. Then the guard who re-inflated himself deflates once again while we watch and crumbles to dessicated powder. The doctor is similarly bad off and charges the bars of his cell, only to explode into powder. Similarly the new victim. The bodies really are top-notch jobs. The budget of the film really shines through here in the detail. Actually, all told, this isn’t really that bad of a film at this point, if you can excuse the rampant nudity and lurch in pacing.

    Speaking of which, the plot gun fires another round.

    There was an escape pod on the Churchill! And it ejected! And Colonel Tom Carlsen is in it! (And his actor’s name is Steve Railsback? What kind of a name is that? It sounds like an MST3K parody name. “ Hank Slapjaw! Beef Wellington! Big McLargeHuge! Steve Ralisback!”) And he comes to London! And there’s a flashback! A long one! Railsback set the fire that destroyed the Churchill! Because everyone else had died of that life-sucking-ness! And then escaped into space!

    Apparently, in space, there’s nothing to stop your plot acceleration.

    Then, the plot goes crazy.

    Railsback has a really intense red-lit wet dream about our wandering nymphomaniac, which means......that he’s got a psychic link to her! Why, of course! What else could it be? Then they decide to hypnotize Railsback and use him as a divining rod.

    From this point on, Railsback is used as a plot device to narrate what the hell is going on. He shouts out random stuff, explaining scenes and sequences that would make no sense otherwise. Like why the girl is being played by a different actress. Or, why she’s dressing in Glad trashbag-scheik. Frankly, the whole thing wanders so damn fast, that most of the time is taken up by exposition between our SAS official and the thanatologist, as they explain all the random events and scenes that will make you really embarrassed to watch with your girlfriend. Traditional vampire stuff comes into it. And the spaceship starts orbiting earth. And the male vampires show up again, having impersonated the guards who “killed” them.

    The girl gets tracked to Patrick Stewart’s insane asylum where she’s got another...psychic...link to a nurse there....where Railsback furthers the plot crazy and comes up with the most absurd excuse I’ve ever seen to abuse and make out with the nurse in front of the SAS official. Apparently Railsback now has the ability to detect career masochists within twenty feet. I’m not kidding. It’s like it’s part porn movie with WAY too much invested in the plot, and no actual sex. From this.....uh.....session, they determine where the girl is hiding!

    In Patrick Stewart.

    What follows are scenes that convinced me that the purpose of this film was to humiliate all the actors involved. And screaming. Lots of screaming. Patrick Stewart begins to speak with the seductive voice of a nude, superimposed space-vamp. (That’s where the AUDIENCE screaming comes in....) Railsback, calling Patrick Stewart a “bitch”, gets back only suggestive, sexual come-ons in response. And more plot exposition...explaining how Patrick Stewart became Railsback’s most ultimate feminine image, and eventually plants an unwilling kiss on him.

    (AAAHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHH! AHHH! *Cough* *cough* ....ahem..... AHHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHH!) (And thank you SO MUCH BrotherRiparius for pointing out that Stewart’s scene at the end of X-Men2 is a reprise of this sequence. That will scar my mind forever.)

    Naturally, the space-vamp escapes. Her body, and thus mortality, is hidden elsewhere.

    Then! Patrick Stewart spits up a whole bunch of blood! Another flashback to the shuttle! With more nudity and face-suck! Then London’s on fire! And there’s these big balls of light soaring around like when the containment blew in Ghosbusters! And the undead are running rampant in the streets! And the Prime Minister is a soul-sucking vampire! (Yeah...yeah...) And England is placed under ......NATO’s auspices? Okayyyyy.....

    More exposition....lots more exposition...more stuff... Really, the complete randomness of everything that’s going on is mind-boggling. Chases. Quarrentine. Stolen military vehicles. Enormous crowd scenes of slaughter. Plot points are tossed around like breadcrumbs. We suddenly get a glimpse of the budget again. Railsback uses his supreme psychic powers to track the girl to a point under a PILLAR OF LIGHT THAT STRETCHES UP INTO SPACE. (You needed a psychic to spot that?) See, the whole point of everything is that the space vamps have been sucking up lifeforce to gas up their space-winnebageo, and are now channeling it all into the gas tank. (She’s gone from suck....to blow!)

    Railsback confronts the girl space-vamp (who is dressed, finally, but only in an extremely....pointy....nightgown), and there’s even MORE confusing exposition. The SAS guy kills the other male vamp, (who emits a scream like a balloon deflating) and arrives on the main scene to find Railsback and girly-vamp getting’ jiggy w’ it. Things are said. Events happen, and we find ourselves having watched one of the few films in history to end _triumphantly_ with a nude male and female figure pressed against one another, and PINNED there by a pike-head through their midrifts.

    Which, in the end, apparently did nothing. In the final ten seconds, the vampire ship powers up, and sails off. No lengthy denouement for this plot bullet....

    Holy crap. What just happened?

    About a dozen careers just nearly spiraled the drain, that’s what happened. This film was like being hit by an act of God. Like being caught in a movie tornado.

    This thing is a phenomenon. SO MUCH STUFF. The things I didn’t touch on could fill a book. There’s the random spiritualist text slid in when no one was looking. There’s that clever little reference to exiting the womb by one of the astronauts. (“I almost have a feeling that I’ve been here before” while traveling along an organic corridor in the alien spacecraft.) Stuff like this is scattered everywhere throughout the film. A great underlying point? NO! They never return to this...just let the statement hang there. It’s filled up with weird glancing sidelong debates, like the nature of life after death...

    And the dialogue. Oh man.... Our hero is introduced with the line “What’s a hundred and fifty miles long?”.....a joke setup that NO ONE takes advantage of. The unknown irony when one of the astronauts says “I hope you can appreciate the scale of this in the video...” Trying so damn hard to humiliate its actors. (“Tell me again how the girl overpowered you?” “She....was the most overwhelmingly feminine presence I’ve ever encountered.” “Was it sexual” “Yeesss.....overwhelmingly so...and horrible. I experienced a...loss of control.”) In fact, it’s easier to spot the well written line. Yes, that’s singular. After snitching a car and heading back into London, the SAS official is stopped at the borderline. “Colonel Cane, SAS, I’m crossing the river. “You don’t want to go in there sir.” “I know I don’t.”


    Massive budget that ran out at some weird undefined point in the middle. Sex and nudity-obsessed plotline without ever actually devolving into porn. (OK, a word or two on the wandering nymphomaniac. As silly as this film is, I’ll be first to admit they picked a stunning body for the female vamp. She’s a French actress whose resume I really can’t translate. The LINES they gave her, though....) Giant spaceship that vaguely resembles a neuron. Shattering dust vampires. Souls as spaceship food. A whole bunch of really famous people talked into a real dog of a film.

    In the end, I’ve got to echo the sentiment....you have GOT to see this. It’s just such a phenomenon....a great freakshow of acting and dialogue and nonsensical plot twists. But only when you already know what you’re in for. After watching the flick with my friends, James accosted me. “How much did you pay for this?” “One dollar.” “Oh......OK, I guess that’s about right.”
     
  • &#8220;Hey everyone, look! A bus, a country built on highways, and a suitcase full of drugs!&#8221; 2004-01-12 17:05:32 You want “wrong?” You want “WRONG?” You couldn’t handle it! The sheer quantity of wrongness would wash over you like a tidal wave! Just you try to withstand.......THIS!

    (Uh....not work safe? I think?) http://www.zombiepinups.com/girlz/kitty.html



    Well, the story thing was a bit of a bust, wasn’t it? I’d hoped for some manner of feedback, more along the “instructive” than the “pandering,” but I was prepared to take whatever I could get. Which turned out to be nothing. *sigh* Ah well. I suppose I’ll just pretend y’all were awed into silence instead of accepting that either no one wanted to deflate my ego by telling me it was crap, or no one reads this anymore. Bleh.

    I really hate doing that, but hell, it’s my journal, right? Posting my opinions, however malnourished, is sorta the point. I don’t have that interesting of a social calendar that I feel the media should be alerted to the trifilings of my life, so, on occasion, stuff will go up here that will be of interest only to me. (Like the stories.) I shouldn’t feel the need to apologize when some harmless words either spill from my fingertips or come sprinkling into my comments. That’s one of those things that I’ve yet to figure out about interactions online. I mean, we all know how quickly flamewars start up online, right? That warrants a certain degree of caution, granted. When we’re dealing with complete strangers, the incautious jokester finds himself the potential victim of sharpened tongues and poisoned pens.

    But when you’re communicating with people you know fairly well, that doesn’t apply. Your friends, the people you see on a weekly basis, you shouldn’t feel obliged to tack little addendums to the end of comments to make it clear you’re joking. Sarcasm should be evident from context of the person who wrote it. Yet, every once in a while I see this weird-ass explosion in some corner of the web between two people who really should know better. Even moreso, I’ve had friends go into elaborate apologies, horribly worried that I might take offense to something they said online. Relax. Even in the worst-case scenario, people should understand that what goes in journals on the spur of the moment may not signify major crap unless it’s explicitly _stated_ so. Things written in the heat of the moment should be taken as such, even when read long after the fact.

    Of course, I’ve just committed one of the more annoying additional attributes of posting on the web, that of blatantly fishing for notice. I’ve done it a few times before when looking for confirmation that I wasn’t just talking to an empty galley here, and I’m gonna try to stop doing that. There is, of course, no requisite to comment, but I do wonder why the general post/response rate is dropping off. I suspect that it’s one of five things. A) readers drifting off without “unfriending” or becoming overwhelmed with posts because they’ve acquired 70+ friends over the months, and now are in no mood to slog through a twenty-page post on some esoteric piece of horror or animation cinema. B) I’ve gotten really bad and am driving them off in droves. (or, alternately, the “eager puppy” manner I have in trying to reply to every comment in my section is creeping people out.......or entries like this are too taxing on people to figure out how to respond that they just don’t bother to respond at all) C) Much like the AMV.org journals, the “new” of lj is rapidly rubbing off, and people are less content to spend that much time reading other plebians’ mediocre thoughts. D) People resent my sparse update style and lack of response in other people’s journals E) I’m just so f***ing brilliant, that all are far too awed to place their own prose adjacent, lest theirs be dimmed by comparison.

    Somehow, I rather doubt that last one...

    And, of course, that paragraph is yet another example of committing again the same “fishing for notice” habit that I realize is so annoying. Rendering me immobile in my own hypocrisy. Again. Moving on....

    So, subsequent to the car “crash” of last week, I’d been expecting to develop a great impressive bruise all over one side of my face, thus making me the center of attention and pity for at least a couple of days. It seems, however, that either I caught the blow in a lucky area that just doesn’t bruise very badly, or I wasn’t hit nearly as hard as I expected, because the bruise only got a few shades darker, and then converted to that ugly yellow-green color that looks like you’ve attacked yourself with a highlighter. A sudden cold-snap down here tuned my complexion a little ruddier than normal, and effectively dimmed the bruise so thoroughly that no one at work even noticed (or at least remarked on) it. The car, fortunately, is back in tip-top condition now after its extended conversation with a tree. Something about a broken coil falling down inside the distributor. Turns out it wasn’t the fault of the tune-up guys, so I don’t even get that money back. Dad snuck in and paid for the new repairs when I wasn’t looking (it’s only eight blocks to the repair place we trust, and I had no way of getting there to intervene) but I’m gonna see if I can’t slip him the cash back while distracting him with a computer problem. (Trying hard to sidle away from their surreptitious support of me, which, barring sudden expenditures like these, amounts to about $150 a month. I’d do an end-run around that, but I think it would depress my dad.)

    I’ve just finished adding a couple more friends to my “watched friends” list on lj. They were plucked kinda randomly from browsing around the system. I really should do a more thorough “add everyone I know” run, but I’ve discovered that the LEAST common thing on the web is for you to put your actual NAME or any kind of identifying information into your info page, meaning I have to guess if I know this person or not from the general text in a random assortment of their entries. Which is frustrating as hell. I guess people are wanting their anonyminity, but, being as dense as I am, I need a poke or two to figure out what seems to be obvious to everyone else.

    Picked up a “moleskein” notebook. Man this thing is neat. It’s a little leather (or stippled imitation leather/plastic) notebook about 5 by three inches. It’s got an elastic strap that flips over to keep the book closed, and a little cloth bookmark just thick enough that the book will fall open to the marked page, but not thick enough that it’ll distort the binding. It’s really well bound with remarkably stiff covers and tightly-fitted binding that makes it easy to write in even when there’s no solid surface available. The covers have a weird texture that makes it easy to grab and hold onto. Though it’s brand new, it feels wonderfully aged. I mostly picked it up because Neil Gamian mentioned it in his lj as the “Gamian approved” pocket notebook for story ideas, and I happened across a full display in the GaTech bookstore. I’ve decided to start carrying it around with me everywhere (it fits nicely into a pocket) and see if the result is less stress at trying to remember stuff. Thus far, it’s working out nicely, since I tend to accumulate little scraps of paper like you wouldn’t believe. (Between movie reviews, notes to self, and clever turns of phrases, there’s a couple 365-day calendars worth of paper scattered around in here.) Having one place to put it all is helping out already, but we’ll see if it actually results in more and better productivity. One immediate problem is that I no longer have enough pockets. Soon enough I may have to choose between “Ug have knife” (pocketknife, back left pocket) or “Ug make fire” (inside coat pocket) or “Ug pay bills” (front left).

    On an entirely different tract, (referring to moleskein) I went through a number of convolutions last week in _other_ people’s journals. Debates were glanced across that would likely explode into multiple entries here were I to devote the appropriate amount of attention to them (political issues of the day....we all know how long it would take me to dissect one of those.....so I’ll resist....despite the fact I REALLY want to expand upon the points there), but in the discourse a specific incident came up which caught my eye. It struck me as off-kilter in its presentation. So I started googling around. A couple of hunts revealed that the presentation I was being given was absurdly one-sided. Quotes were altered to exclude reasons given for the actions taken by one side, whereas multiple quotes were taken from sympathetic individuals on the other side. Hunting further, I was able to put the incident in context, which only made the main assertion of the article more absurd. Hunting further, I found the source of the altered quote had been a police spokesperson. A final google, and I had her office number.

    Now, I didn’t call the number, but the point is that I very easily could’ve, and could’ve gotten the full story for myself firsthand from a person very close to the issue.

    We’re constantly being told that in today’s modern world, the average person is hopelessly adrift. There’s so much stuff out there on the web and in our everyday lives that we’re figuratively drowning in information, leading to an infant-like helplessness or a tunnel-vision conviction.

    Well, my little example proves something different.

    You only drown in a sea of information if you refuse to swim.

    The average joe with an internet connection has, at his fingertips, access to miracles of information undreamt of fifty years ago. All it requires is conviction, a little practice, and caution (lest he stumble upon a conspiracy theory with shaky regard for facts) and he can become a greater authority on any subject than anyone who gets their news pre-digested for them in the paper or on the nightly news.

    This also makes me all the more justified in my intolerance for the willfully ignorant. Willful ignorance (“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know”) is the most frustrating thing on the planet, and there is less excuse for it with every passing day. (Actual ignorance, “oh, I didn’t know that” is, naturally excusable. Refusing to learn something isn’t.)

    The other most common disparaging comment we get about the internet is “...we already have a million monkeys...and the internet is nothing like Shakespear.”

    WRONG.

    The original point was that, with a million monkeys on a million typewriters for a million years, random chance dictated that _one_ monkey would accidentally produce all those great works. The rest all produced crap. There _are_ Shakespears out there on the web. You just have to dig to find them. Perhaps we should propose a hunt to raise their profile. Anyone know of a blossoming Shakespear out there on the web? Someone with brilliant prose that’s getting lost among all the dreck?

    One final anecdote. I’ve got two new roommates in, and it looks like I’ve got an empty room this time around (late withdrawl). Both French again, but these seem to be quieter than the last bunch, so it’s all good. Anyway, when my Colombian roommate moved out, he left a bunch of stuff behind, as he hadn’t gotten a job nearby and didn’t want to weather the shipping costs. He left behind an antiquated computer with all the associated little pieces, and a baseball bat.

    Well, he showed up two days ago. Turns out he HAD gotten a local job (late callback) and thus could keep the stuff since he didn’t have to ship them anywhere. I help him carry all the stuff out to his car....but the keyboard, mouse, and bat had all gone missing.

    The next day I run into my old Spanish roommate (switched rooms as the other was moving out) and find out what happened to them. Seems that when Daniel (Colombian) offered up the stuff for whoever wanted it, my Spanish roommate took those three pieces, and generously applied the latter to the former. Something about the stress at Tech. Whoops. Muy embarrasimo if he’d had to admit that to Daniel.

    (Hmmm....moleskein problem...way too much to write about now....)

    (Whoa.....”Grim Adventures of Mandy and Billy” just did a Dragonball Z parody cartoon. Best line? “Your mother has a job and is a respected member of the community!” “No one talks about my mother that way!”)

    Reviews!

    Hell, I could post some reviews....but it would take another night to get them all down, and this would languish in my wordprocessor. Besides, might be disassembling the computer shortly, which will profoundly limit updates for a while, and there’s no certainty that I’d get through the reviews in time before the hard drive was all over the floor.
     
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