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2002-04-05 19:33:32
treeprincess: Great. Now I don't like that song.
Well, not really. This is another problem I have with songs. I've had ear problems since I was very little (blew out one eardrum twice...pain like you never want to experience) and it tends to muddle my interpretation of lyrics. Occasionally I come up with (IMHO) better words than the original. See, "rack" means either a fast-moving mass of broken clouds or "to fly in a high wind." "Wrack" means driven, as if by the sea. Either works. A flag snapping in the wind, outstretched to its furthest extent at the top of a bent flagpole. Constant, unyielding strain against a plainly superior force as it's torn away, thread by thread. By the time you've gotten to "flagpole rag" the fight's over.
Besides (snif) it just sounds more (italics)British(/italics), don't you think? -
"There's a flagpole racked / and the wind won't stop..."
2002-04-04 18:30:02
Ah, what the hell. This marks an experiment on my part. I'm writing in from work during one of those 28 hour days I've been talking about. I'm waiting for the last experiment of the night to finish incubating right now before I run it, and since I've got about 40 minutes or so, I figured I'd go ahead and see how far through a journal entry I could get. Everyone keep that in mind, as I'm likely to post this without checking spelling or grammar as I've done in the past. Anyway....
The quote above is a perfect example of why I've always liked Sting. For the longest time I just couldn't put my finger on it, but it's occurred to me recently that it mostly has to do with his lyrics. His best songs themselves are fairly simple musically (at least to these untrained ears) and the subject matter tends towards the repetitive, but he has a particular talent for picking out single phrases that just contain volumes in their poetic flow. Short, sweet, and with nary a single syllable out of place. Of course, there are the slip-ups here and there, but for pure density of thought he's got some good ones packed in. That is true artistry in the written (or rather, spoken) form, and the one I can't ever seem to reach. This is the sort of poetic meaning that I understand is what haiku artists are always trying for, perfect encapsulation of a moment or scene or idea with only the most carefully chosen words so as to roll effortlessly off the tongue. Frankly, nearly all the haiku I've ever read sounded clunky and forced. Probably the result of translation, as my limited experience with works in translation (Kafka, especially "der ProBess") made complicated and exacting characterization as well as clever turn of phrase sound like children's stories told simply at bedtime. Of course, I don't have to tell that to any of y'all, as experiences with badly translated dubs or subs proved my point years ago. On the other hand, I now tend to regard any subtitled anime as more sternly dramatic in the dramatic moments than if the characters are speaking English just because I assume the presence of some terribly significant or lyrically clever declaration in the original dialogue. Kind of a reverse-association. That must be why it annoys me so much when the dialogue is sprinkled with English words so strangely pronounced. Kind of puts the lie to all the official airs I've imposed upon the scriptwriters. First time I saw Giant Robo it struck me as the most sternly dramatic retro anime I'd ever seen. When I saw it again dubbed (as it was the only version I could find) it was still dramatic, but the humorous overemphasis the English voice actors added made me shrink back a bit on my glowing praise of the series. I like the ludicrous-ly serious impression of the English dubbed characters, but it can never match the dramatic potential of watching those last few raw episodes without ANY translation and not knowing what the hell was going on, just assuming that the speeches being given were terribly significant and not the standard "I cannot forgive you!" of every stereotype anime hero.
Where on earth was I going with that?
Oh well, anyway, I've determined that I spend entirely too much time online. Something must go, but I'm not sure what yet. Don't worry, typing this isn't taking anything away from my productive time, as I am far too tired to accomplish anything significant right now, and the typing is just a repetitive motion to keep me congius with an eye on the clock. I hate to drop the blogs I am starting to visit, but they just take up too much time. Ditto participating in message boards. Ditto (gulp) reading all the journal entries here. Damn, I hope it doesn't come to that. Hell, cut a little more out and I might actually be able to get some work done on my next vid. (All available footage watched, next I will start capturing the random bits I liked.)
(Well, that didn't work. Entry picked up again 14 hours later.)
Hrm. Let's see, other random stuff.
Atlanta has a little free-zine that makes the rounds around here called "Prick." Usually gets set out next to Creative Loafing in the few places you can actually find it. Basically it's a tatoo mag (with a bit of piercing, etc.) that makes it's money back through massive advertising of tatoo parlors around Atlanta and a few farther afield. I pick it up from the local grocery store whenever I notice a new issue 'cause, hey, it's free, and 'cause I'm always interested in the sorts of artwork that people are willing to commit to their SKIN. Hell, I have enough trouble figuring what posters to put up in my little 10' cube of a room, I can't imagine committing something to be plastered to my back for EVER. I mean, what if that band breaks up? (Actually, that's not entirely true. I decided on one particular image if I ever actually got bored enough with my life to let someone take a needle to me, but I don't really have the attitude or skin for such a thing. Ever heard of exema? It's like acne, but it doesn't go away.) Anyway, the mag is mostly just pics of people's tatoos with credit given to the artist etc. etc. I mention it here because I've noticed that a surprising number of the more heavily-decorated individuals have a real thing for classic horror. I've seen one Poe, two or three Bela Lugosis (natural for the goth-trendy crowd), several Boris Karlofs (in his various guises) and nearly a half dozen Peter Lorres (imagine Peter Lorre looking up at you from YOUR OWN ARM! Muuaahhhaaaahhhahhhh). Could be worse, though. I had a couple of friends who got drunk one night and decided to commemorate their friendship by getting matching tatoos. Since they spent most of the time together drinking, they decided to get beer glasses. To make them more unique (wait for it)...one guy got his half full, and the other got his half empty. So my friend (really friend-of-a-friend) now has a 1 ½ inch tall beer glass on his arm with the top half colored in.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Lotsa people have been posting mini-projects recently, and I've somehow
managed to miss them all. Bleh.
EK: (belatedly) WWMMD! Hell yeah!
Gave in to the devil and bought the D20 CoC book today. Mostly just to scour it for good ideas and convert them BACK to the only true system. Still, $39.95 for the frickin' thing? OH! I see. It's got COLOR plates. Couldn't a' left those out. After all they're SO essential to an RPG. Couldn't a cut them out and dropped the cover price by seven bucks, could ya? I may put a full review in here later if I feel it warrants it.
On to the review! Probably a short one this time, as the movie was barely over an hour. Once again we visit that most sluggish of the damned, the zombie flick. Sort of. First of all "King of the Zombies" actually goes a little closer to the original idea of zombies, by making the zombies an occult monster rather than the "revenge from beyond the grave" or "super-science reanimation" shtick of the Living Dead films.
To make things simple, this flick isn't worth your time. Fortunately, I really don't have to warn y'all away from this one, as no one in their right mind would pay more than three bucks for the DVD. (Sigh) Anyone who's been sorting through the bargain bin of DVDs like I suggested has probably come across this film. Bright red jacket with yellow lettering and a profile head on the cover colored in EMERALD GREEN. Ugly as sin and not all that clear for that. Unfortunately this time it doesn't really mean comedy or camp gold. I only picked it up because it kept mocking me from the "under $10" bin, along with nearly a dozen other copies. That, and the price kept dropping. At $5 I figured I could loose that much to check it out.
The flick takes place during WWII (made in 1941) and follows three men on an airplane (if I was up on my airplane history I could tell ya what kind...) looking for an admiral that went down somewhere around the Bahamas (or, as they say in this film, the Ba-HAE-mas) when they loose all radio contact with their beacon and go down on a jungle-choked island. Following one of the most hilarious plane crashes I've ever seen (suspend a fisher-price airplane over a dirt path strewn with plastic miniature trees. Slowly move the plane across and down, twanging the guide-wire and knocking the propellers back and forth. Add on to this a shot of the pilots spazing out from claustrophobia in a TINY [how did they get in there?] cockpit, and you've got a plane crash) the three men, who were somehow thrown OUT of the plane and landed relatively unharmed, or even wet from the rainstorm, encounter an exiled Austrian doctor with a penchant for dramatic lighting in a mansion in the middle of nowhere. The Doctor is full of warnings about the dangers of illness on this island, and no wonder! It seems that not even the dead are safe from the sniffles, as they keep wandering into the kitchen in search of chicken soup. Several encounters with people wandering aimlessly around the mansion lead the three to believe that the dead are getting up to....uh....stuff. At first it looks like the Austrian is a voodoo king who raises the dead to...uh....wait on him and stuff, but one imprisoned air force admiral and a book entitled "Hypnotism" later, and things start looking a lot more mundane.
Not to the REAL main character of the film, though. The three men are dashing Dick Purcell as "James McCartney" (really) the intrepid Apple-pie pilot, John Archer as "Bill Summers" the VERY Irish co-pilot, and Mantan Moreland as "Jeff" Jackson, James's's valet. This is where we run into trouble.
This is a very racist film. The island, besides the Austrian and his family, is populated entirely by "Negroes" (1940's, remember) who run the gamut from incompetently evil, to cute but naive, to cowardly, to undead. During a rather forced Voodoo ceremony, many of the background actors seem plainly embarrassed by the caricatures they play. Moreland plays the type of stereotyped character that my generation never really saw. He's the kind of "cowardly black sidekick" that Eddie Murphy parodies on occasion, the one who's always "a-skeerd o' ghosts, ha'ints, an ZOMBIES!" Pop-eyed, heavyset, lazy, greedy, and easily spooked, tricked, or discounted, he's ironically the most memorable character in the film. I'm not certain, but I think he actually had more screen time than anyone else either. It's also ironic that if the other characters PAID HIM MORE ATTENTION they would have sorted the plot out about 30 minutes earlier.
Moreland really did do the best job of anyone in the film. Everyone else just sort of goes through the motions with minimal character development and little of interest to say. They do an adequate, but unmemorable job in each of their roles. Moreland gets entire scenes filled with nothing but running gags, word-play, and lame jokes which he pulls off with perfect comic timing in spite of his being scripted to speak in an almost-indecipherable "Harlem" dialect. While flirting with the PYT in the kitchen scullery:
Girl: "You ain't so smart. I had me a boy once, and he wasn't no common old valet like you, neither."
Jeff: "Oh is that so?"
Girl: "He was an ex-porter."
Jeff: "An exporter?"
Girl: "Thas' right."
Jeff: "Why, thas' fine! What did he handle?"
Girl: "Baggage. On the Pullman train."
Jeff: "What becom' of him?"
Girl: "He was killed...by a revolving crane."
Jeff: "A revolvin' crane?"
Girl: "Mmm Hmmm."
Jeff: "Hmmm. Y'all shore have some fierce birds around hea'"
2/3ds of the way through the flick, Jeff gets hypnotized into becoming one of the ersatz Zombies. He joins up with the great line "Move over boys, I'm one of the gang now."
The film itself is a fairly bad print, with scratches and bad print edit jumps all over the place. Several of the scenes are also shot in that amazing avant-garde method of denying the mediocrity of standard framing and conducting entire scenes where people communicate only from the nose down, as the top half of their heads are OFF THE TOP OF THE SCREEN. Not really sure if that's a film or a transfer error, but it still looks pretty bad.
The only real good bits from the film are those you have to pick and choose out of all the racism and mediocrity. I rather liked the fact that the story kept the voodoo source when creating it's Zombies, even going so far as to have the PYT break the hypnotism over Jeff by salting his zombie-broth. (The only way to stop a zombie is to form a ring of salt around you or to fill his mouth with salt. Experienced Obediah men (sp?) and Voodoo witches will sew their zombies' mouths shut to prevent their destruction. At that point, they're pretty much unstoppable. The reasoning behind it has to do with the value of salt from ancient times ["salt of the earth"], the nature of its purity when crystalized, and it's apparently magical ability to preserve meat.) I also liked the fact that it reminded me of the term "marble orchard" to refer to graveyards. However, the film also asserted knowledge of Druidic magics involving a PLAINLY African ceremonial mask, and the end of the film resolves practically none of the story except for pushing Germans into a firepit. Nor does the film adequately explain why ANYONE went along with the evil Austrian's plans, or what happens to them after he's a crispy critter.
In conclusion, an old film sporting some rather reprehensible values, not really emphatic enough to be campy, not well crafted enough to be kitchy, not scary enough to be horror, not funny enough to be a comedy, and not good enough to be worth your time.
Next time: When a mommy zombie and a daddy zombie love each other very much..... -
"The Devil breaks / both your hands / takes your stuff / and runs away."
2002-03-29 20:16:12
That malaise and general lack of work ethic that everyone seems to have been suffering has struck here as well. Haven't gotten much done all week. Let's see if I can make up for it here.
Mechaman: Just spotted your comment on my Heavy Metal review. Thanks. As far as the extra bit goes, I should point out that much of what impressed me about the piece was the unique nature of the animation. To accomplish that level of detail continuously throughout the short would have been absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, it's fairly evident that most of the inbetweening wasn't finished, and the jerky, incomplete nature of what's actually there isn't very impressive. I just think it would have been brilliant had it been finished. (Oh...'Fraid I can't get your link to work.)
Mechaman & Bowler: Thanks for the tech points on CG animation. Will have to disagree a bit on the comment Re: our recognition of proper movement in humans. I'm certain that our perceptions do affect this, but I still think that the human's movements in the Ice Age was a step down from the animals. Heck, Sid had more believable realistic movements than the humans. Oh well.
dokidoki: Oh all right. You win. I could make an argument that it was really a different series every time they switched actors for the main character, but that would be petty and dumb. Shoulda thought of it anyway, since I spent most of my formative years watching those movies.
EK: You know, it's funny, but I always associated CCR with MY hometown (Bloomington, IN) despite all the factors to the contrary. Huh. Maybe it's just the feel of small town-ness rather than any particular region. (Although the Fogerty's somewhat mush-mouthed lyrics bear a striking resemblance to an Indiana accent...IMHO.)
Now, due to popular request, a review of one of MY reviews! (As apparently it wasn't clear enough the first time, I'm adding subtitles.) Hopefully everyone involved has cooled down sufficiently at this point. Added comments are in brackets.
"Finally got around to watching the Ushicon documentary that everyone's been talking about. [Everyone being some of my friends and everyone who's been giving it opinions that put it in the top 10 of videos on this site] Let's see, how to put this. [So as to avoid hurt feelings while still giving an honest opinion...guess it didn't work.] I was rather [not very, just somewhat] disappointed in it, truth be told. [As I feel no need to lie in my own journal.] Some of it was just people wandering around the con having fun with (thankfully non-destructive and non-trouble making [comment due to events at AWA6 involving both destructive and trouble-making stunts]) stunts [which I enjoyed and found humorous], but a large section of the middle was devoted to berating some hapless drunk con-goer. [Which I did not enjoy] I doubt that the makers intended it to be particularly cruel, [or cruel at all] but I don't see how the individual in question [the drunk kid] could view it as anything but cruel to have his unhappy shitfaced self recorded for posterity. [His 15 minutes of fame now consist of being remembered as the "can't handle it" guy] [Rest handled below.]"
As far as the "factual error vs. joke" thing, it was obvious that the second part of your pop-up was a joke. The first part was specifically labeled as "FACT," though, so I thought you considered it as such, which made me think that you had simply assumed since Joe competed that he must have "swept the awards" which I found a little annoying. My apologies for the misinterpretation.
"People just don't have a sense of humor. We pick on the drunk people and yet I gave out like a ton of facts about actual alcohols to refrain people from drinking to much."
Doesn't really help the person you prodded with a stick for fifteen minutes though, does it? That was really my only problem with the doc. Kid's probably at his first con, been running around like a hyperactive kid all day, not getting anything to eat, even gets invited to a party, and ends the night by feeling like shit and becoming the center of attention for the whole party by throwing up on the carpet, and not even having a hotel room to go back to. And THEN someone comes along with a video camera and makes sure this moment is broadcast all over the net. I've just known several people who've accomplished very similar stunts and the only thing I feel for them is pity. Maybe it's just my personal hang up that I don't like kicking someone when they're down.
"Man, The UshiCon doc started out great and now its being bashed. If you think it sucks so much go make a better one."
One person expresses one voice of dissent in a four-sentence review, and suddenly it's being "bashed." Where the hell did I say it "sucked?" Besides, comedy is entirely subjective, it's not like you could argue me into thinking something's funny. Really, don't take everything so personally. It certainly wasn't intended that way.
Now that that's out of the way:
No, I didn't get a chance to see Blade II yet. Instead, I'm going to review what may be the single weirdest thing I've ever seen. Coming from me, that's saying something. Tooling around in a comic shop about a month ago, I came across a copy of "The Brothers Quay Collection" and was instantly interested. I had heard of their works on numerous occasions as being key pieces of inspiration for any number of largely disparate works, including much of the thought behind the dream-like constructs and flow in "The Cell" and as the direct inspiration for those magnificently horrific and beautiful music videos made for the industrial group "Tool." (No, The Brothers Quay were not the animators who made those videos. The animator was apparently Fred Stuhr, but the style so closely imitates their style that the mistake is not only understandable, but practically a foregone conclusion. Hell, I've been attributing the work to Brothers Quay for three years now without realizing my mistake.) Anyway, one special order later and I had my own copy for perusal.
I have no idea how to review these pieces.
Fortunately, the DVD came with it's own little review on the inside cover insert. Let's take a look at an excerpt, shall we?
"To watch, indeed to enter the impossible, haunted night of a Quay Brothers film is to become complicit in one of the most perverse and obsessive acts of cinema. We're suspended in our own need to see as random, decaying objects and relationships are fetishized beyond the point of simple imagery and into alchemy. [These selections are]...ferociously hermetic films whose interface with everyday culture is both undeniable and nearly impossible to articulate. Nowhere else has film so leanly and effortlessly rippled the dark subconscious waters ebbing under the surface of our collective experience. Flamboyantly ambiguous, retroactively archaic, obeying only the natural forces of a purely occult consciousness, Quay films are secret individuated knowledge for each and every viewer. To immerse oneself in their cadences, their sacred sense of the hidden lives of dust, shadow, and broken toys, is to glimpse the infinite within the finite, the ghost in the machine..." (Michael Atkinson)
.....
See what I have to deal with? And you thought -I- had an overactive vocabulary.
OK, the basics. This DVD contains 11 films (one more is hidden in the "extras" section of the DVD) by the Brothers Quay, covering, I think, the entire output of these two talented animators outside of their recently released feature film "Institute Benjamenta." The pieces run a wide range between two 21 minute epics, to 2 minute music videos (no, the Tool ones aren't on here! Stop asking!), to a minute long "art-break." The animation is almost entirely stop-motion (there are a very few segments which, for convenience's sake, are full motion puppetry operated from off-camera, in addition to a few live-action segments) of the highest quality (although there is a little bit of a breakdown in technique that is barely noticeable in the very first films). The animated pieces are of the manipulated-woodcut variety, movement around set joints, gears, or seams as opposed to the general form-reform of claymation animation.
The subject.....hrm.....welllll........huh. For those of you who have actually seen the Tool videos which were done in a similar style to these films, the authentic Quay Brothers make those look like the epitome of clear, linear, pedestrian storytelling.
The stories are all very surreal, in the strict definition of the word. (1 : having the intense irrational reality of a dream) Impossible, convoluted, unreal events happen, all in accordance with laws and reason that we, the audience, cannot understand. Intensely artistic visuals with little INHERENT meaning take on a kind of forced symbolism throughout the length of the films. The films are all silent (or effectively silent in the case of the music videos, where the animated characters do not speak and the song is kind of frighteningly nonsensical) and the carved, wooden heads of the puppets or the desiccated, tattered shells of plasticine doll's heads offer no range of expression to the events around them. The only real communication to the audience is through the doll's actions and "body" language. In other words, we're given no real opportunity to UNDERSTAND what the hell is going on. For several of the films, not only couldn't I figure out how I felt about the film, I couldn't even figure out how I was SUPPOSED to feel about the film.
All of this is going to be terribly alien for the casual movie watcher. A lot of people would probably hate a film that gives you nothing in the way of connection to the audience. Personally, I find these absolutely fascinating. What is going on is a kind of metatextual conversation with the viewer, asking them to examine the concept of film and storytelling as well as the dream-like world of the surreal. ( meta- used with the name of a discipline to designate a new but related discipline designed to deal critically with the original one <metamathematics>. In other words, a film devoted to examining the tropes and ideas of storytelling in film, by testing the limits and self-referential capabilities thereof.) While watching these animated shorts, I realized how much we depend on recognizable objects and actions within films (or really ANY art form) for interpretation. Frequently, something odd would happen and I would have to stop the film and back it up because the event was so unforseen that I couldn't tell WHAT the hell it was.
Simultaneously, though, a story of some sort IS being told, but the story is so odd we must pick up the meaning piece by piece from clues gathered through random objects and seemingly unrelated events, forcing us to work at understanding the animation. The stories are completely meaningless on the surface, making sense ONLY on a metaphorical and metatextual level, while still being utterly dream-like in their tangential connection of events, objects, and characters and attempts to represent utterly ephemeral ideas, like "desire without ending" with broken down toys, dancing pins, squirming screws, and watches made out of meat. The only other films I've seen that even approach this level of weirdness are David Lynch's subdued masterpiece "Eraserhead," and Salvadore Dali's only film "Un chien andalou (The Anadaluvian Dog)" while the stylings look something like Geiger's more simplistic paintings.
Enough of all the high-fallutin' film school crap. Let's see if I can give you some examples to explain what I'm talking about. Probably the best of the bunch, and one of the two long pieces (21 min) is "Street of Crocodiles." In the beginning, a man (live action) enters a small auditorium and gets up on the stage where he begins examining a device something like a penny "peepshow" from turn of the century arcade. He examines it for a minute or two with the aid of blueprints, and then hocks a lugie and spits down the top of the machine...which naturally starts it working (stop motion begins). What the machine is DOING is never shown, but it appears to involve pulling wires over an elaborate train of decrepit pulleys, all leading SOMEWHERE. The protagonist, a small wooden doll with articulated eyes but an immobile face, breaks free from one of these wires while standing in a doorway, and the proceeds to start skulking around the inside of the machine, eventually discovering a hidden world of darkened alleys and incomprehensible figures within. Telling you all of the various weirdness he encounters would take longer than the film itself, but the supplied critique had this to say:
"...the ubiquitous decrepitude and proto-totalitarian menace, the Schulzian characterization of Poland as a moth-eaten stage for existentialist dread, the rusty, perambulating screws and gears, the muti-planed images and bottomless shadow, the amber-mud hues, the pointless contraptions performing rote activities on the verge of entropic breakdown, the spindly, shabbily suited protagonist stalking through the soft machinery of a psychic warehouse in a startled state of paranoid anxiety."
Aren't you glad I'm doing this review instead? :) In all seriousness, these films don't have the pretension and "artistically superior through their absence of meaning" attitude that one would expect from the phrases above. No snotty "arti'ests" they. From my understanding, the brothers are from Prague, which makes a sort of ironic sense as their storytelling style strongly reminds me of another Prague inhabitant, Kafka. That same sort of winding, inevitable despair and angst that one finds in Kafka's darker works is present here. (Angst, given such a maudlin reputation by crappy goth poetry, translates literally as "fear" but in English refers to "existential angst," the feeling of being caught between the dread of the pointlessness of life and the fear of the non-existence of one's self in death.) In the (disappointingly short) interview on the disc, the Brothers Quay do cite Kafka's diaries as a source of inspiration. Further, where phrases and words are present in the films, they possess that same strangely "off" feel of the translated Kafka, as though the central point of the translation was somehow missed. ("Above all at night, beneath a wire, one foot wedged between the steel points, the air to be stung furiously." To quote Lisa Simpson "I know what those words mean, but that sentence makes no sense!")
Here's a different angle to give you the right impression. Pretend you're having a dream that you're in a natural history museum, when all the stuffed animals behind the glass boxes come to a kind of "stuffed" life. The utter weirdness of whatever follows is a good approximation of these films.
The films range widely in subject. Briefly, there's two music videos('91,'93), an "art break" commissioned by MTV back in '88, a PBS-style instructional piece on anamorphosis (pictures with images that can only be viewed at an angle), a film on the path of a bullet, the devil tries to steal an egg, on a night tram, telling the story of a lazy mid-day dream state, the epic of Gilgamesh, a parody of Prague's golem legend and the cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and an inspirational wart.
Yeah, weird.
From a technical perspective, the films are absolutely amazing. Effects are achieved that, not only didn't I know they could be done with stop motion, I didn't know even that they existed. Detached hands flutter in a blurred, spastic manner becoming streaks of color. Iron filings are made to walk end over end onto the set. Fired bullets meander frantically across the screen.
The sound of the films are, frankly, rather annoying. It tends towards excessive use of slightly mis-tuned strings, with occasional contributions of percussion and organ music. Constantly repetitive, it amplifies the effect of the films, but to a grating degree. This is especially true in the music videos as the music is from the esoteric (at least to me) British band "His Name is Alive" which sings strange children's-dirge-like music, sample lyrics of which are in my title line.
In the end, the Brothers Quay are more famous for what they've inspired than for what they've actually done, as a standard audience will find the lack of linearity and confusing imagery almost unwatchable. This doesn't make them bad, however. They bear more than a passing resemblance to segments of "Alice in Wonderland" whose weirdness we've all become accustomed to accepting though the attenuation during our childhood.
The films will be appreciated by animation nuts, art school students, and Tool fans. Everyone else will be bored out of their minds.
-
"Some people can't take a joke?"
2002-03-26 22:36:58
Mechaman: Whoa. Gonna take me a bit to plough through all that. Thanks for the detail, though. I've been trying to find the time to work on my own CG project for nearly a year now with no luck.
Machine: Carlos, since you detailed what a shitty day you'd already had previously in your journal, I'm gonna do us both a favor and wait a while before responding to the comments you directed toward me.
-
IDKFA
2002-03-26 19:56:56
Guess what game I'M playing?
Yeah, kickin' it real old-school with motherfuckin' DOOM! (heh, how's this for geek sign, KZ?) Picked up the "collector's edition" this last weekend for $20. Before the flood of responses come in asking why I would bother paying actual money for a game so widely pirated it was practically an institution, let me just say that I know that. I never really got around to playing the third installment (final DOOM) as, by the time it made it to all the casual software pirates I knew, the Quake engine was consuming their lives, so I was intrigued by the idea of playing one of my all time favorite games entirely new. Also, I spent nearly two years in undergrad as a DOOM II deathmatch competitor (undisputed champion for a while) after-hours at the Emory computer lab (a pirate copy available on every PC computer) where we would run back-to-back "races to 300 frags" on the first level for HOURS. After having so much fun for so very long without ever actually BUYING the game, I figured I owed the company at least a $20 for it. Been playing it for a few days, and let me tell you, it's just as INCREDIBLY hard to compete as I remember. I'm only playing on the "hurt me plenty" level, and it's taking me multiple HOURS to get through each level on Doom III (Quu is squirming right about now...). No, I'm not using the cheat codes. Of course, some of that time is due to the utterly screwed up controls. Man, I'd forgotten how hard it was to reflexively hit the controllers when you get jumped at. This was the game that led to the creation of the "mantis," "right handed squirrel," and "wandering fist" styles of play. Just trying to remember that the thumb is "fire" is hard enough. The real thrill is the fact that I originally learned how to play and became deathmatch champ without ever knowing how to strafe. My manner of dodging screwed up everyone's aim and made me harder to hit, but now I REALLY need to integrate strafing into my play.
Lessee, lotsa stuff happened this past week, including a marathon speed-data entry session for five hours that left me with shooting pains in my wrists and forearms, so I decided to avoid making entries for a few days. DOOM hasn't helped much, but it's faded enough that I can complete what's likely to be a really long-ass entry here.
Finally got around to watching the Ushicon documentary that everyone's been talking about. Let's see, how to put this. I was rather disappointed in it, truth be told. Some of it was just people wandering around the con having fun with (thankfully non-destructive and non-trouble making) a few stunts, but a large section of the middle was devoted to berating some hapless drunk con-goer. I doubt that the makers intended it to be particularly cruel, but I don't see how the individual in question could view it as anything but cruel to have his unhappy shitfaced self recorded for posterity. Oh, and one factual error. If any of the makers are reading this, Joe did NOT sweep the awards at AWA this year. Joe won the Master's contest (where only one award is given) and the "Best Comedy" award for one of his Pro entries. If anyone swept anything, it was Lee Thompson, who won FOUR awards in Pro (Best Vid, Best Action, Best Romance, and Best Various) and a Talent award.
Bowler: Thanks for backing me up on the animation details of the humans in Ice Age. I could tell something was wrong, but I'm not familiar enough with rendering technique to know what it was. So that's what keyframe animation looks like, huh? Is it the cause of their unnatural smoothness of motion? I'm surprised they'd use such a different technique on some characters, but not on the animals. In case it didn't get across, I did, in fact, like the film. I just really hate being preached to by my entertainment, and I felt the flick got a little heavy-handed on the morality. Oh well.
Took part in my very first "poker night" for actual physical money last Friday. A friend at work organized it and pulled in a bunch of people from the wing and even a few delinquents over at Emory. Lotsa fun, and since we were only playing for nickels and dimes, no one really lost much. I ended up losing about two-fifty in pennies. Real winner was a girl who joined in without ever having played before and proceeded to pull out the only royal flush in five-card draw I've ever seen.
And, for my very own brush with the really surreal of the day, I was walking on the way to class today when I passed three students playing jump-rope with pig intestines. I'm not making this up, it's too damn odd to make up. I think it was a couple of bio students on a dare, since there was a fourth student with a camera.
And on that particular piece of grotesquerie, on to the film review! Evil's in da HOOOOUUUUUSSSE! Yeah, yeah, I finally got out to see Resident Evil, and man did I have fun. First, and foremost, the best and most important part of horror movies. The PREVIEWS! Normally, I wouldn't bother with them, but they had a preview for "Jason X." What is "Jason X?" Well it's Friday the 13th.....part TEN! Damn! Name any other non-porn, non DBZ franchise that's been running for TEN FILMS! Looks to be a great one too. It's Jason IN SPACE! Isn't that great? Some friends and I were discussing the fact that all long-running horror franchises eventually have to go either into space or go hopping around in time. Puppetmaster went back in time. Leprechaun went into space (and then, somehow, to the "hood"). Hellraiser went back in time AND into space IN THE SAME FILM! Freddy got all existential, which is sorta an acceptable substitute. Anyway, apparently Jason is dug up at some far flung time in the future and brought up to a space station for study (believed to be a frozen specimen.) The predictable happens. Someday I'm gonna have to go through and review some of the Friday the 13th flicks. Taken altogether, it makes for a rather odd situation since Jason has risen up to a classic archetype status that's greater than the actual figure in any of the films. Let's take an index here: Friday the 13th
I: Wasn't even Jason! (As anyone who watched "Scream" knows.)
II: Jason was there, but with a sack over his head?
III: Hey! The Hockey Mask!
IV: Hey Tommy boy...
V: What the, it ain't Jason AGAIN? He too good to show up in his own MOVIE?
VI: Damn, the things that lightning to a headstone will do...
VII: Versus a PSYCHIC? WHAT?
VIII: Melted by Manhattan's sewage!?! WHAT?
IX: He's a DAEMON? WHAT?
X: In SPACE!
Anyway, on to the review proper!
You know, I'm not sure that the horror genre has ever recovered from the popularity of "Aliens." This is not necessarily a bad thing. I love that movie, and most of the carry-overs from it. The (by now) horror staple of taking an entirely cock-sure military troupe and then watching them disintegrate into terror, paranoia, and panic as even the most competent members are cut down by the simple misfortune of standing in the wrong place at the wrong time serves as an excellent vehicle for delivering terror unto the audience. (Game over, man!) It does, however, tend to lend itself to predictability. We can all be pretty sure that, whatever it is they face, they're not really prepared for it, and most if not all of them are not going to make it out alive.
Resident Evil is one such film. This flick is based on a couple of video games of the same name that came out in the 90's. The engine was fairly unique, derived originally (I think...not really my area) from the engine for "Alone in the Dark," a Lovecraftian horror game involving an English gentleman wandering around a house festering with unseen horrors. The engine used a kind of movie-camera perspective that watched your character wandering around until you got killed. (A lot of people found this really annoying 'cause the directional keys switched with every camera angle.) Having played the first AitD and both Resident Evil games, I was prepared for disappointment when I went to the theater, as the similarity to the Tomb Raider game-movie conversion boded ill. Fortunately I was proven wrong. The movie is fun, scary (got me to jump a good half dozen times), and mostly well composed.
Fortunately, the movie chose not to follow any of the game's plotlines, and opted for a (mostly) simpler, more direct plot rather than the game's convoluted obsession with level bosses and the like. (Liked the game, but wouldn't have translated directly very well.) "The Hive" is a massive underground research facility staffed by five hundred devoted employees of the sinister "Umbrella Company" (No...not the Travelers..), and situated directly beneath the infamous Raccoon City. (Site of the games.) Most of the research is done on such "forbidden" and illegal subjects as "genetic" and "viral." (Yeah, that's how they describe them. Funny, I always thought retrovirus research would be the eventual key for the delineation of the genetic defects causing cancer. Oh well, so much for that.) Due to the sensitive nature of the material in the labs, there are only two entrances to the facility, via a 1/4 mile elevator shaft and via an emergency freight train running to a hidden entrance in a mansion. The story begins as someone cracks open an obviously dangerous vial in one of the viral labs. This causes the security AI (the "Red Queen") to do something rather odd. It gasses all of the workers into unconsciousness with a neurotoxin, locks all the doors, and begins killing them all via sprinklers and falling elevators. No one gets out.
Enter the crew from Aliens. Oh, wait. First enter Mila Jovovitch as Alice (Player option #1), dressed in a stylish torn shower curtain. See, she's the undercover agent stationed at the mansion to cover the emergency exit, and got gassed while she was in the shower. (If you think that's silly, wait until the end of the film where she's dressed in two sheets of paper. And you thought ORDINARY hospital gowns were embarrassing.) Fortunately for the plot, the gas gave her amnesia, letting her wander around for a bit (after getting dressed), doing a reprisal of her Leeloo role from "The Fifth Element." (SHIZUMA!) Matt, the small-town cop (Player option #2) shows up two minutes later, thrown through the mansion window, reprising his inscrutable job from "The Crow: Redemption." NOW enter the crew from Aliens. Or rather, Vasquez, the tough Latino bitch who eats nails. Other than Bishop or the "Game Over" guy, she's the one space-marine we really remembered. The role's reprisal is really well done, but suffers from the predictability that comes with the archetype. We're pretty sure she'll make it near the end. We're also pretty sure she won't make it all the way.
Naturally, the space marines are here to find out what the hell happened in "The Hive," and they work in a businesslike manner to sort it out. A lot of wonderful tension is built up as they delve deeper and deeper into The Hive, encountering another amnesiac, a lot of bodies, and a lot of locked doors. Despite all the music cues, nothing jumps out at them. On the bottommost level, after a little trouble with the Red Queen's security system (and a sizable plot hole...where do all the pieces go afterwards?) they succeed in shutting down the Red Queen. Which unlocks all the computer controlled doors. Uh Oh.
The rest of the movie is a running fight against the liberated ex-employees of Umbrella, a search for more ammo, a couple of puppies that really need to be put down (no, they're not skinless, that's just massive lacerative damage), and.....a level boss. (*sigh* pretty well rendered though.) Tied into all of that is another storyline of politics and corruption that gets revealed as the amnesiacs slowly regain their memory, interference from the rebooted Red Queen, and some ingratiating anti-corporation claptrap. ("Corporations like Umbrella think they're above the law. But they're not." Oh thank you for that little gem.)
The film ain't flawless. And it wasn't helped by the fact that the theater attendants never TURNED DOWN THE HOUSE LIGHTS ALL THE WAY! Dammit. But most of the flaws were either minor enough (you can pick an electronic cardlock with a syringe needle? What kind of a cargo hatch is that?) or silly enough (now that it has fed on fresh DNA.....zuh?) to easily ignore. The anti-corp preaching got on my nerves and the very, VERY ending was just outright BAD (again in the zuh? fashion), but all the parts that make a good horror flick were there in spades. Although I understand that Romero was pulled off the flick partway in, the zombies have that unmistakable trait that speaks of his directorial influence, especially the first couple members of those late-night labworkers. (Oh, and watch the faces in the crowd for the head biker-mutant from "Weird Science." Glad to see he's still getting work.) That one bit of hop-saki you all saw in the trailers is about all there is in the flick. Most of the rest of her moves were much more Judo and thigh-centric. Honestly, Vasquez (Rain [Michelle Rodriguez]) was my favorite character of the flick, especially considering the, frankly, silly outfits Mila was wandering around in.
Oh, my "rules for dealing with zombies" held up, too. Let me add a couple of generic ones here.
1) If you encounter a random individual wandering around your horror set, be sure to bring him with you into the very depths of danger, as he's more likely to make it out than you are, and you can just follow him. In gaming, this is called "looking for the PC glow."
2) If you ever have to deal with something like a bank vault door, bring a length of railroad tie along and PROP THE DOOR OPEN with it. Believe me, you'll thank me later.
As a reward to whoever read all that, take yourself over to the AWA message board for the almost-complete AWA AMV rules. Just waiting on TJ's rules for his Dance Challenge, which should be up very soon.
http://www.awa-con.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000093.html
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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