- 2002-02-17 19:27:20 "your" meaning "ya'll's." I really wish English would get a seperate plural "you" tense.
-
"They may have split up or they may have capsized/ she may have broke deep and took water..."
2002-02-17 19:20:37
I am 1337. According to my counter. Yup, more than a full order of magnitude behind the most popular of writers here, but considering how infrequently I write, and how long my entries are when I do, I suppose that's fair.
Bowler: Yes... but for three days I was your King..... -
"It looks like one of our thermal pods....but it's a very bad design..."
2002-02-17 15:45:58
(Written Friday night....first chance to post it.)
OK, I've had my little joke (although it went on a LOT longer than I anticipated, due to a nap that ran until 1:30 in the morning and yet another spate of downtime on amv.org). The "two young ladies" are coworkers of mine in the lab, and the "experimenting" that went on all night was, alternately, the running of my blood-flow experiments into the wee hours of the morning (approx. 4:10) and then helping the second young lady set up her elaborate flow chamber system (which will hereafter be referred to as "the monstrosity") until about 7:50. No, my Valentine's Day wasn't anything special, I just felt like getting ya'll feeling like Matt:
http://www.machall.com/index.php?strip_id=35
I didn't even get a chance to call home on Valentine's, a point that I'm certian I will be hearing more about later. Bleh. (In truth, I did try to call during one of my few free moments, but the line was busy.) I then managed to stumble through class the following morning, complete a few of my obligations, then come back home and severely crash after I shot off my little joke. My alarm then proceeded to NOT go off at 8:00 pm, and I slept through until 1:30 this morning, just in time to catch the last few minutes of the only show I still watch regularly (Lexx) and then beat the hell out of Unreal.
All in all, Unreal was something of a disappointment. It only took five or six tries to kill the final boss, and none of the level designs were especially clever (although wandering around in the Nali castle was rather fun). The much-touted AI control of the critters wasn't that hard to puzzle out, although it did make some of the critters much more difficult to squash. Perhaps the most startling thing about the entire game was the way it DIDN'T screw you over. It stuck a modicum of guards in predictable spots around important points, but there weren't any hiding in ludicrous positions just because the designers were certian you wouldn't look there. Still, the fact that the game gave you two different weapons (razor jack and sniper rifle) capable of decapitating any opponent other than level bosses went a long way towards easing you through the mechanics. I played the game at one level below hardest, and normally I'd go back through the entire game on hardest level just for the challenge, but I don't think I'll be bothering this time. It just wasn't nearly as fun as, say, "Serious Sam" where the carnage was truly awe-inspiring and the level design was fun as hell, especially on "Serious" difficulty where the enemies were so dense you couldn't throw a rocket without pissing something off. (Beating the "Serious" level unlocks ANOTHER difficulty level where every enemy phases in and out. That's just ludicrous.) You know you're in a seriously hard game when you're firing your pistols at the level boss because you HAVEN'T GOT ANY OTHER AMMO LEFT.
Of course, nothing compares with the grand-daddy of them all, Doom II. I'm not sure I COULD get through that game any more.
Bowler: Yeah, it was intentional, just not truthful. I've also kept up with Lone Wolf and Cub, but it would take a full review to comment on it, so I'll hold off on it for a while.
EK: I wish.
Finishing up the AWA submission rules. Expect them posted all over the place within the next day or two, including here and on the message board. There are a few changes to the rules this year, the biggest one being a specific form for the Pro contest with an age restriction.
Yeah, an age restriction. Gotta be over 18 or have your parent's permission.
No, this isn't in response to any complaints we've recieved, but the specific format of the judging has necessitated the permission form's use. Picture this: nice little Bobby Terwilliger, age 13, makes his Pokemon video to a pop tune and sends it off to the contest. William Ramone makes up his nice little video of all the death scenes from his collection to Rob Zombie. Bobby gets back the judging tape with William's entry, and watches it with his parents. We get sued.
NOT GONNA' HAPPEN.
Anyway, shouldn't be much of a bother if you're over 18. It's just a form with all the info we need on your group and the video and a box to check if you're over 18.
Review o' the day. I get the feeling that my last few entries may have been a bit much for the casual reader, so this time I'll review something a little tamer. The movie that got me into picking up crappy old horror flicks on DVD in the first place. The "Lincon's daughter's baby's dog" of all horror films, "Phantasm."
I suppose I should explain the little moniker I gave up there. "Lincon's daughter's baby's dog" is a rather antiquated marketing term used back when no one really had an idea how to go about advertising products. Everyone had worked out that people liked looking at dogs, and babies, and young women, and noble historical figures. Therefore, if you really wanted your product to sell better than anyone else's, obviously the best tactic would be to shove everything that people like into a single advertisement or a single product. This worked about as well as it sounds like it did, and resulted in the classification of "Lincon's baby's daughter's dog" as a basic advertizing gaff. I don't know if the term is used anymore, but I rather suspect it's been replaced by "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles".
Anyway, I refer to Phantasm by that rather long-ass moniker because there's just so much STUFF in this film. There's enough original cheesy horror material in this film to make three or four films EASY. Let's see, there's a woman who lures men out to the cemetary to kill them, a ghastly rail-thin giant of a mortuary attendant with monsterous strength and telekinesis, a half-wit "igor" assistant, an ancient mute backwoods psychic, a hungry box, a race of undead homicidal dwarves, a hearse that drives itself, disembodied fingers moving around of their own accord, a giant killer fly, a portal to another dimension, an ice-cream man with bodies in his freezer, and the mascot of the film itself: a shining metal sphere sporting blades and drills and prodigious skill at flying.
And, of course, there's the hair. All the guys in the film are sporting "Big 80's" hair a couple of years early (1979) and the guy who "gets it" in the opening scene is sporting muttonchops.
So, the story. Hm. Well.....hmmm. OK, the simple version is that two orphan brothers (aged about 25 and 15) loose a friend under mysterious circumstances (stabbed to death in a cemetary). While attending his funeral at Morningside cemetary, the younger of the two brothers sees something very strange. After everyone has left the graveside, the mortuary attendant wraps his arms around the entire coffin, hoists it easily (if awquardly) into the air, and slides it back into the hearse. If you've ever been a pall-bearer, you realize how spooky this scene actually is. From there, the brothers begin investigating and the events get ludicrously convoluted and elaborate but lead to a single-sentence summary that would ruin the film if I told you about it. The summary is so absurdly ridiculous that, when the main characters figure it out, it feels like the characters must have taken a glance at the plot summary when the staff weren't looking.
The feel of this film is just weird. The best way to describe it is that it looks like this film was put on in someone's barn. Not bad, exactly, but with that "community theater" feel. The actors (with one exception) are all obviously amature, as their delivery of lines is a bit off, timing going weird as someone QUICK SAYS THEIR LINE (slightly before their mark) before they forget it, or pause just long enough to make a scene overly melodramatic. Apparently this is a result of the director's (and writer's) influence, Don Coscarelli. This was something of a labor of love for him, and much of the movie was made by recruiting his friends and family into the production. (Many of whom were brought repeatedly back on board for the sequals.) While I don't know for certian, the town scenes really feel like they were shot in and around the director's home town, and I kept feeling like I should be looking for product placement of "Joe's Ice Cream Parlor" or "Bob's Barber Shop" or other small-town businesses that might have contributed money to get the film finished.
Then we get to Angus Scrimm. Angus Scrimm plays "The Tall Man" mentioned in the scene above, and it won't give anything away to mention that he's the primary "monster" of the film, supplanting even the shining sphere 'o death. The scenes around him are all shot at angles which make him look 8.5 feet tall and thin as a rail. He dominates every scene he's in, looming with a perpetual scowl upon his face...and in the entire film he's got only five lines consisting of twenty-eight words total. I'm never really certian how to treat Angus Scrimm. He's become something of a horror movie icon on the strength of his performance in the Phantasm movies, but he never really achieved the stature of a Robert Englund or a Wes Craven. All the other films he's been in have been third-and-fourth tier horror flicks, and I sense (from the interview material on the disc) that he's a little sad that all he'll be rememberd for is his performance in a series of tiny little low-budget cult classic films. Before film he was a classically-trained actor on the stage, and Phantasm (as films tend to) entirely overshadowed his past, becoming something to live down rather than up to. Typcasting woes. (Most of this is pure speculation and my own conclusions.)
"Thanks for the history lesson MC, but is it a good movie?" Well...I love it. It's just so utterly mish-mashed together with a barely comprehensible plot, bad, small-town, early 80's actors, a handful of genuinely clever special effects that worked better than anyone would have expected, and a couple of hilariously strange scenes exceeded, perhaps, only by the rocket-mansion at the end of Rocky Horror. (Which I don't like, but that's a review for another day.)
Hmm. Perhaps some examples. The flight of the shining sphere, by far the most impressive special effect in the film, was accomplished by throwing the ball down a hallway and reversing the film (meaning it accelerated toward the camera). The effect is like being chased by a cannonball.
Strange scenes: At one point when the younger brother is peeping on his older sibling's "progress" with a woman by the cemetary, he's spooked and runs through the clearing with a scream that sounds exactly like an enormous terrified bumblebee. At one point Angus gets his hand caught in a steel door and we watch his fingers flap about for a couple of seconds. The attack of the giant fly from the waste disposal was just weird. For the first time EVER a younger sibling is able to convince his brother of supernatural activity ON THE FIRST TRY, just 'cause he remembered to bring crawling evidence home in a box. Oh, and everyone bleeds mustard. One review I read of this film points out that Phantasm started some of the more surreal trends in horror flicks, leading directly to the "Freddy Franchise" and the more dream-logic horror films of the mid to late 80's. (The monster always gets there first, etc...) Perhaps one of the reasons I like this film is that the dream logic makes the film UTTERLY unpredictable. I had NO idea who was gonna survive this flick or what was going to happen next, or even what was going on at any given moment. It's rare today that horror flics don't devolve to the predictable coding of their characters.
This is also one of those movies with the odd distinction (along with "Mad Max" and "The Evil Dead") of more people having seen the sequals than ever saw the original film. I, personally, haven't managed to see anything more than a few minutes of any of the others, but I'm betting the first one doesn't get much exposure because the latter are merely high-budget versions of the former. (Shades of Evil Dead I and II.)
For the DVD fan, the extras on the disc deserve special mention. There is an ABSURD amount of material on this disc. Four PAGES worth of index give you access to the audio commentary, lots of deleted scenes (including an out-of-place food fight in an ice cream shop), behind the scenes "home movies" and commentary, a theatrical trailer ("If this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead"), three television spots, four gallerys of still material, three radio spots, the full, awful song sung for three seconds in the film, an austrailian TV commercal, a Fangoria magazine promotional, footage of Angus speaking at a con, and the DISCO VERSION OF THE THEME! THE DISCO VERSION!! ORIGINALLY OFFERED ON "BLOODSTAINED YELLOW VINYL"! WHY? I HAVE NO IDEA! (In truth, the theme is almost as important to the mood of this film as was the theme to "Halloween." If you don't know how important that one was, ask Rob Zombie.) At this point, you shouldn't be asking yourself if you should get the DVD, but rather how you lived without it up till now.
Oh, one point of advice. NEVER try the trick the younger brother did with the hammer and the shotgun shell. He's lucky he didn't blow his hand off.
Next time; Hmmm, maybe the bit I negelected from last time. -
"Oh what a night..."
2002-02-15 14:16:33
May or may not come back with a legitimate full entry tonight. For now, though, I'm gonna crash. Two lovely young ladies and I spent the entire Valentines day night "experimenting" and I haven't gotten any sleep yet.
TTFN -
"...And some new-mown chaperone was standin' in the corner, watchin' the young girls dance..."
2002-02-14 09:36:12
Happy international "single people suck!" day!
You know the best thing about being into a genre that most people consider absolute crap? If you can't afford to pick up a movie when you first see it, you can be pretty sure that it'll be there when you get back. That, and the genre tends to be priced a bit more reasonably than mainstream fare. I never really went into Borders bookstore looking for DVDs before, but I was out buying an aquarium pump for our lab (long story) and I decided to loaf for a bit in the Borders next door. I'm holding something of a long-term grudge against both Borders and Barnes and Noble because they placed stores in immediate proximity to my all-time favorite bookstore, Oxford Books. It can only have been a calculated attempt to drive out the only independent bookseller, considering that they each placed a bookstore within three blocks of Oxford and always aimed to underprice them. Further, there've been a handful of marginally legal practices in the book selling business in recent years that smack of constructed monopolies. One of the nastier tricks is for major booksellers to buy up the ENTIRE PRINT RUN of first release books by the "big names" in the business (John Gresham, etc.) with no intention of selling them all, just to ensure that the independent bookstores (who are further down the publisher's supply priority list than the national chains) won't be able to get copies in for months. Later, they return the unsold segments of the shipments saying "whoops, we over-ordered." The bookstore business has gotten really vicious, and only national chains can survive lately. This was a real shame in Oxford's case, since it was this great sprawling bookstore (-stores, later), especially the second store that occupied an enormous old car-showroom building, with in-store coffee shops (new, then) and shelving arrangements that you could literally get lost in. A darkened cement hallway took you to a nook of a comic shop (an independent company that survived Oxford's collapse and is doing fine) with RPG's and a section of glass shelves filled with anime tapes. (Horribly overpriced, but typical for the time.) Plus an in-store movie rental and an additional store of used books. Absolutely loved the place. A crew of my friends and I went there regularly, including after graduation and one year in the middle of freaknik. (We'd forgotten.) Turned out to be just badly enough run for the pressure of the national chains to make it go belly-up though. I still go to the Oxford comic shop out of loyalty.
Anyway, I'd no intention of doing anything more than browse, but I kept running into DVDs of crappy horror flicks for $7 and ancient cartoons for $4 or so, so I succumbed and picked up a cartoon collection for the short of "Toonerville trolly", "Beyond the Mind's Eye" (CG animation collection from when this was still AMAZING!) mostly for the Thomas Dolby song and the Fish/Bird animation bit that they used to show on widescreen TVs in store windows to draw in customers, and groaned over having to put down "Werewolf" (probably cheap horror gold), "Jacob's Ladder" (EXCELLENT film I will pick up eventually), and "The Wicker Man" (Christopher Lee flick I've heard a lot about, but know nothing of, except what a "wicker man" is...) in favor of "Ginger Snaps," a movie I've heard a few positive reviews of. May review it if I get a chance to watch it.
EK: What on earth is a Didarabotchi?
Nightowl: I understand your frustration, but I do think you should take into consideration the fact that the only politics you think you are seeing in the AMV community are from the vocal minority who seem to think that is the proper way to "rise in the ranks." Many of the rest of us who have been around since the start of the AMV list saw the brief flare of politics or ego clashes from the very beginning when people only knew each other from reputation and works. We learned quick and shut up after the first flare when it became perfectly evident how silly these ego clashes were. For every person contributing to these "politics" there's a half dozen that see it, roll their eyes, and moves on. Commenting will only make it flare up more. It'll burn out on it's own, to be replaced by politics from the newest generation of makers. Any "politics" going on among the earliest AMVers is just friends talking to friends, not actual politics.
Well, I guess other comments will have to wait. Apparently amv.org has just crashed while I've been typing here. I'll just transfer the text to a word file and transfer back when the site's up again. Bleh.
Oh, go here:
www.madblast.com/oska/humor_pong.swf
You thought they couldn't make it, but it is......PONG, THE MOVIE!
Movie review! Yaaaayyyy! This week, as promised, a fetishist's wet dream. You know, this movie get's a bit weirder the more I look into it. The movie in question was Jennifer Lopez's "break into film" film, "The Cell." (2000) The movie got a name for itself by being highly recommended by Roger Ebert and yet being really bad. Wait, let me explain this fully. There are really two stories in this film. One is played out between Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D'Onofrio, and the other one is played out between a bunch of people we didn't come to the theater to see. Everything hangs on a single plot hook, and that plot hook is really dumb...as in obviously contrived.
I'm gonna get a bit explicit here, so the bashful may want to hang back.
Vincent D'Onfrio plays a ruthless (The 13th floor) psycho (Full Metal Jacket as "Gomer Pyle") killer (Men in Black). Carl Stargher's essentially about as fucked-up an individual as you can get before you start chasing people down the street with a hatchet. He kidnaps young women with the aid of an elaborate ruse and a well-trained albino husky, sticks them in a watertight cube for about 48 hours, and slowly drowns them while videotaping the whole thing. Then he bleaches their bodies white, hauls himself naked into the rafters above them, and jacks off to the videotape of their struggling deaths.
Think that's fucked up? We're only getting started.
You see, he screwed up, and the cops are coming to get him. He doesn't know this, but he still manages to succumb to a disease he's had his ENTIRE LIFE, but only hits him LITERALLY three minutes before the swat team bursts in. See, he's got something called "Whalan's Infraction" a form of schizophrenia caused by an actual brain condition that knocks a person straight into a coma for the rest of their lives. No one would care if he hadn't just stuck another girl into the cube, and no one knows where it is. Enter Jennifer Lopez as Catherine Deane, a pioneer in a new method of working with the deep schizophrenics through CG animation. With her tight-bodysuit suspension device she can mentally enter into the world of schizophrenics and work with their hiding minds. I think you can guess where this goes. Once we get into his head, we literally enter a fetishist's wet dream.
The problem with this story is that when you take a step back and look closely at just the elements of the plot, they are badly contrived and, well, dumb. The net result of all the wandering around Lopez does in D'Onofrio's head is to lure the detective in as well, where he comes to the incredible revelation that maybe if he'd DONE HIS FUCKING JOB IN THE FIRST PLACE they wouldn't have had to go through this dog and pony show. (Seriously, you want to know where the victim is, the FIRST thing you would check is where he got that weird-ass industrial device in the basement, and the SECOND thing you would check would be his EMPLOYMENT RECORDS. "What? The government hired Stargher to close down a machining factory out in the middle of nowhere? Think we should check that out?") This is the main story of the film.
The second story is about the revelation that Stargher isn't really a bad guy. Or it isn't his fault that he's this way because he was abused as a child. Or he deserves to die. Or it's all just a cry for love. Or Jennifer Lopez is the Madonna. Or something. Frankly, everything about the PURPOSE of the secondary plotline is rather muddled and blurred. It's all about Stargher's redemption, but still...
But the visuals. Oh my God, the visuals.
This film was directed by a music video director (nudge, nudge, everyone) and once we're inside...well ANYONE'S head, the reason for making this film becomes evident. Everything is shot so gorgeously in the psychotic-sequences it's like watching about 45 minutes of fetishized pornographic music videos without the music. (Well, THAT's going to take some explaning.)
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these sequences is that they made it into the theaters with an "R" rating. This says to me that either the censors had no idea what they were looking at, or the tropes and symbolism of fetish culture get through censorship by the loophole of not, technically, having anything to do with sex. Once we wander into Carl Stargher's world, we run headfirst into a catalog of some of the more obscure and (for most people) disturbing fetishes all intertwined into a cohesive mechanism as inscrutable as the house in "13 Ghosts." There's suspension, piercing, insertion, medical, latex, leather, ponygirl, weight lifters, suffocation, body painting, bars, collars, domination, submission, sadism and masochism (natch), restraint, bleaching, dolls, necrophilia, and one where your intestines are pulled out by a music box. (Not sure if that last one counts. Maybe should just be filed under "torture.") Frankly, I'm rather astonished that Lopez agreed to do this film in the first place, knowing the positions it would put her in. This film was not exactly a safe bet in maintaining her image. Either she was incredibly desperate (not likely), incredibly brave with her public image (most likely), or didn't understand what she was agreeing to. The scene in which she is "collared", especially considering the way in which it is shot, amounts to a symbolic event WORSE than being raped on-screen. (Shades of Perfect Blue...)
The nature of the fetishism in this film is made all the more severe by the fact that they DON'T fuck it up, as is common in popular presentation of fetishistically-charged material. (Janet, if you're supposed to be a dom, you don't wear the collar with the ring...) Strangely, though, some of the staff seem to be attempting to dismiss the significance of this. Most profoundly, in the commentary on the initial suspension bit (Stargher suspends himself over the corpse of his victim by way of a dozen high-gauge metal rings implanted in the skin on his back and the backs of his arms and legs.) the director comments that "it's an old Indian rite." I happen to be familiar with that rite, though I can't remember which tribes used to do this. The rite in question involves inserting enormous meathooks under the pectoral muscles of the chest and being hoisted into a tree. The resulting weightless sensation, the off-balance nature of canting backwards towards the sky, the results of exposure, and, probably, the incredible PAIN involved induces a psychedelic state employed similar to sweat lodges for the purposes of spiritual visions. (OK, who was the FIRST person to be talked into this?) This essentially hangs you vertically, canted slightly backwards, and has no sexual connotations whatsoever. The position used in the film is a common one in fetishistic subcultures, although harnesses are used since shifting wrong would tear the rings sequentially out of your back and incur massive dermal trauma, since the rings aren't going under any musculature. It's obvious where most of the imagery for this film comes from, but they barely mention it. Hmm....maybe that IS how they got it past the censors...
Not everything in this film is designed to make nuns faint. Every section of the dream sequences is lovingly shot, and several sections need especial mention. The scene with the sectioned horse was marvelously done, and caught me completely by surprise. Similar to "The House on Haunted Hill" (remake) it's based on actual veterinary museum pieces where a thoroughly shellacked (preserved) horse has been sliced vertically into thin sheets for veterinary classes. A similar version for humans is in a French medical museum. The interaction segment between Lopez and the first child (and Mukluk) is also very well done, although they explain the child more thoroughly in the director commentary and the "deleted scenes" segment, and spoil some of the mystery around him. The "device" Lopez sets in motion before she meets Stargher is markedly perversely conceived, as is Stargher's "throne room" when they do meet. One of the few bits that just does not work in the film is a "hummingbird" theme worked into the background. Unfortunately, it just becomes muddled in the cases of its few appearances, and the theme is entirely unnoticed when it becomes significant. (Director commentary pointed it out...)
Also, in one scene Lopez is watching an animated film on TV and I had to suppress my nerd instinct when I saw this film in the theaters, because the film she's watching is "Fantastic Planet," an exceedingly weird 1972 film from a French and Czechoslovokian production house whose style most closely resembles....well...."Yellow Submarine" although that is really pushing it. (I almost went "Hey! I know that film!" in the middle of the theater...gahhh.)
The DVD's loaded up with extras, too many to really cover, although all the coolest effects were computer generated, so "behind the scenes" segments on those just aren't as interesting as they should have been.
In summary, a film comprised of beautiful cinematography and excellent direction....of people being tortured and killed for the gratification of a serial killer. Beautiful sadistic imagery in the service of a really dumb plot.
Next time, either a poltergeist with a sense of rhythm, or the "Lincoln's baby's daughter's dog" of all horror films.
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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