Sharp Tools - Images

Contributing to the memeflooding

I know, I know, I'm just being a viral marketing tool.

But I can't help it.

Please, please let this not suck.

Oh please.

So far, so good.

I am seriously jealous of my nephews

...because they got to go Pumpkin Chunkin' this weekend. Better than that, Joe actually got to fire a pumpkin cannon, the lucky kid!

Images for Sherlock Holmes story 'The Dancing Men'

I spent some time over the past couple of days reformatting some of the Sherlock Holmes stories from Project Gutenberg for use on my iPhone (I read in Safari, using the file:// framework addition hack via Cydia). In any case, I was not surprised to find that the Gutenberg version of the Holmes story The Dancing Men, available here as part of the collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes, did not contain the graphics of the 'dancing men' cipher messages that are central to the story. I was, however, surprised to find that I couldn't find a complete set of the messages on the internet (at least, not with 5 or 10 minutes searching - I'm lazy). However, I did get four of the six messages. Since one of the missing ones (message 2) was short, and the last was created using the others, I spent some time creating a full set of graphics for the story using cut and paste.

Since Gutenberg assures me that this tale is out of copyright, I offer this image set of the Dancing Men cipher images for anyone that might find it useful.

Here they are displayed separately:

Message 1:

Message 2:

Message 3:

Message 4:

Message 5:

Message 6:

E / N / V / R:

(Thanks to shodor.org for the originals I used!)

Quiet time

Apparently some large butterfly types enjoy kipping for the night on stone steps, like the ones in the park near my house. And also, apparently, iPhone cameras are completely useless in the dark, maybe even to Holga values of useless.

There is hope for the future.

It comes in two flavors and both are WIN.

Return what you have *stolen* from me

Me with one of my favorite recent acquisitions - a printed-on-canvas version, lovingly and meticulously reconstructed, of the Map from Time Bandits. Woohoo! Now I need to get it framed. Which is odd, really, since I have all my framed items in boxes two years after moving in because hanging things on the (rented, plaster, concrete-backed) wall of my apartment is...um...non-trivial.

The story behind the map and how to get one can be found on BoingBoing.

BUNNIEZ IN ACTION

...at my desk.

It's that kind of day...

I think I gotta call for it!

Marketing done right

I pretty much never say "Hey, I wish I'd been there to get hit with this marketing ploy," but...um...I have to say it now. Mad props and jealously, especially for anyone who actually got to play the cabinet version of Space Paranoids.

Flynn's ftw.

zOMG

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!!!!1!

IT'S COMING!!!!

cannotwaitcannotwaitcannotwait

It worked for Star Wars, frak it

So it worked for a fatally bad Lucas movie. I think it'd work for Battlestar Galactica too. I dunno about you, but Ron Moore's sudden "oh it's all the Divine and unknowable" turn, after four years of a good science fiction show with hard explanations, fair on made me sick. So if I wasn't so goddamn lazy, I'd either try it myself or set up a website appealing to those with skills.

SOMEBODY RECUT THE GALACTICA FINALE!

I mean, seriously. You've got four years of footage. The first hour or so of the finale can probably stand fine on its own if you cut out a lot of the flashback crap-ola. The second hour? Yeah, well, here's your chance to show us you're not the white-flag-waving type, and try to actually give us some satisfaction. Pick some stuff Moore and co. didn't explain, and explain it. Personally I like the singularity->time travel option, a la B5's War Without End, but what do I know.

Seriously. Somebody. Save this series from sticking in my craw as the most ever let down by its ending piece of really awesome television in history. Please. I'm begging you.

Battlestar Galactica: The Real Frakkin' Finale would do fine.

New York Subways are a great convenience for all.

Even pigeons, who wait for trains in the tunnels like everybody else.

Envy and Poverty

Good lord. Blade Runner looks unbelievable on a 65-inch HDTV in Blu-Ray. I predict I will be poorer next year, because I'm going to have to have one of these things (and this Blu-Ray disc set).

Today

...more sneaux.

Today

...sneaux.

This is too cool not to 'me too' link

Tilt-shift photography is cool. Tilt-shift video is cooler. Tilt-shift video of a monster truck arena is just...well...awesome.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Quantum of Solace

Well, it's a Bond movie. That's what I can say for it. Also, Dame Judi is as awesome as ever. As for the rest of it...damn it, we need to get Q back. Pronto. The only things that come remotely close to being a Bond gadget in this film are the Aston Martin DBS we see only in the opening sequence, which is (as a friend noted leaving the film) "not so much bulletproof as bullet-absorbent" and a Sony-Ericsson cell phone with omniscient capabilities.

But that's it.

Honestly, if we wanted to see someone dealing damage and practicing escape & evade with a completely wooden face, we could just make another Bourne movie. Where's the snark? Where's the moments of trademark humor to lighten the fare? Where's Q? Where, in fact, is anything resembling a plot?

Not here.

Sigh.

And not even a trailer for Watchmen. We had to sit through the fucking awful shilling for both The Day the Earth Stood Still (WHY, GOD?!) and the Tom Cruise vehicle Valkyrie. To say I could care less about either would be a lie. Ah well, the new Star Trek trailer was good ;)

I love black humor.

From a Minuteman II LCC (Launch Control Center), via Jim Kirk's excellent page on Ellsworth AFB:

I'd always wondered how new subway cars got into the system.

Answer: On a really big truck.

For you subwayphiles, this is standing on the corner of 215th st and 10th avenue, under the elevated 1 train. The truck is (slowly and carefully) heading east into the 207th Street Yard of the MTA. The number (I think it's 9048, but I was using a cell camera in low-light with bright light sources, which is why it's all blurry - sorry) would indicate that this is an R160B car, intended for service on the N, Q and W lines - but the pictures of the endcap of the R160B on that page differ slightly. The center end door is different; there's no offside end window on the one in the reference picture, etc. However, the car shape looks right, and the numbering indicates this is one of the 260 Kawasaki 'B' (non-motorman?) cars from 'Option I' of the order, the first additional run of the cars - so it might look different. Also, it's likely that this end of the car is an intercar join end, with no motorman's cab, which is why the one in the reference pic looks different.

I love the New York Subway.

I knew I was just another in a crowd...

...and the crowds' versions are better:

Frak me

They're right:

My Hero.

Mo. Mo? MO.

Hellboy II - The Golden Army

Hellboy was a great deal of fun, and cast extremely well. I went to see the sequel with high hopes.

They weren't rewarded. I think I enjoyed this movie more than my compatriots with me did, but it wasn't a great movie, and barely failed to be a good one. If I had to pick the single factor that hurt this movie the most vis-a-vis the first, it would simply be the loss of Professor Broom (which happened in the first movie, so don't scream SPOILER at me).

John Hurt, as Broom, brought a central anchor to the constructive madness that was the BPRD and crew. His father figure counterbalanced all of the inanity; or at least, each inane component of the movie seemed to lean away from him in a separate direction, making a circle of nuttiness. At the center, though, counterbalanced by all of it, he stood in benevolent control.

Not so in this one.

Tom Manning, Jeffrey Tambor's annoying but basically worthy FBI front man, had enjoyed a vindication of sorts in the prior movie. He and Hellboy, initially completely adversarial, had bonded by the end in a satisfying close to the movie's relationship plots. In this one, however, he's back to being ineffectual and almost contemptible, and there's no explanation as to why. It feels all wrong.

On the plus side, Ron Perlman is doing his usual excellent job as Red. Selma Blair is back as Liz, and despite getting a bit of a second-tier role, she's working hard at it and pulls it off. Abe Sapien is now both acted and voiced by Doug Jones, and it's better than the David Hyde Pierce voice-over from the first due to the better coordination. The monsters (trust Guillermo del Toro) are excellent.

The problem is the plot is not handled well (the plot itself is well built and could have provided all the requisite chases, escapes, successes, failures and dramatic tension required) as its timing seems off. The BPRD, rather than being a team chasing down a resolution, is more a chaotic soap opera worrying about its own self and only incidentally giving a crap about the whole saving the world schtick.

Anyway, that's as far as I'll go. I don't think I wasted my money, but Iron Man, The Hulk and WALL•E were all better than this movie.

Hancock

First things first: this is not a movie you need to see on a big screen. Period.

Having said that...

I enjoyed it because Will Smith is doing his usual good job. I just wish they hadn't handed him such a crappy movie to do it in. The upshot is that Hancock is divided into thirds. The first third is the 'drunken superhero bum' third, completely foretold by the trailer. The second third is the 'cliched redemption story' which the trailer also gives us the basics of. The final third? That's where everything comes apart. Completely.

I'll just say this: I enjoyed the first two thirds of the movie enough to not feel like I wasted my money, but honestly...the final third feels like it was pulled wholesale out of someone (not a writer)'s fundament during a panicky eleventh-hour rewrite. It's that incoherently bad.

I'll try to do this without spoilers. Basically, either adroitly avoid a backstory for a character like Hancock, or give us a consistent one - i.e. one we can believe in within the context of the movie. Don't just...Jesus, I don't know how to put it...wave your hands around weakly and mumble buzzwords that make no sense even if we extrapolate.

How about having villains that are within the context? As it stands, the final villains are too weak to be thrilling or scary, too grim to be funny, and have too little screen time for me to give half a shit. This is exemplary of the movie - where some movies are an 'action comedy' or 'dramatic comedy' or even an 'action drama' and pull it off by sprinkling scenes of both types throughout, Hancock tries something...different. Namely, the first third is 'comedy,' the second third is 'action,' and the final third is 'drama.' Er, well, the second and final thirds are a bit mixed. But there's complete ham-handedness when it comes to switching gears here; we can usually tell from the framing shot if a scene will be (check one, please) Drama, Comedy or Action. And just determining where we are in the runtime will be usually enough of a shortcut.

The characters? Well, other than the aforementioned villain problem, they all make sense for what they are - with one ENORMOUS exception, which I won't tell you but will be so obvious you'll retch. Ask yourself: what is this person's motivation? For anything they do? If you can figure it out, tell me - I want to know. I honestly couldn't figure out why they do anything they do, *or* why I'm supposed to be sympathetic.

Anyway.

Will Smith is funny.

WALL•E

zOMG. That was quite probably the best movie I've seen all year. Including Iron Man. I can't begin to explain how much fun that flick was. I strongly recommend that you borrow kids to take with you, or to see it during the day when kids are there - not because you need them, but because the only thing that could have been better would have been to see kids laughing and responding to it rather than the smattering of adults in the theatre late on a weekday night.

I caught the following tropes/references on the first time through, and this is just a smattering of the total I'm sure (some minor spoilers):

• Cockroaches and Twinkies will survive us.
• Macintosh II boot chord.
• Almost all of 2001, including:
  • Red-lit camera lens on:
  • Potentially hostile ship control computer
  • Also Sprach Zarathustra all over da place
  • Secret Orders to the computer
  • Open the Pod Bay Doors, Hal
• Possibly a Silent Running homage
• All kinds of Apple references besides the boot chime (an iPod, Macintalk, etc.)
• Galaxy Quest (hint: ship's computer)
• Classic Star Wars scene (hint: I had everything under control until...)
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home reference (hint: "Computer...?")

...and these, as I said, are but a few.

Wow. Just...wow. And the short beforehand? As close to a Looney Toon as anything I've seen since the originals.

That was a good night at the movies.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - SPOILERS

Finally saw the new Indy movie. If I had to sum it up in one sentence, it would be the following: It was a perfectly good Indiana Jones movie that someone had slowed down to between 60% and 80% normal speed. Honestly, there's nothing wrong with it that a fan-based cut, a la The Phantom Edit, couldn't cure.

I give Ford full marks, because he's doing Indy just fine, with just enough of a nod to aging to be funny, and not so much that he's explaining his slowness or hamming for the cameras. All the 'slow bits' of the movie are between Indy's antics. Sequences go on too long (mine carts in Temple of Doom-style); jokes that are obvious are spun out explicitly to their detriment; and...there's these silences. I mean, seriously - there are whole seconds of the movie, sometimes up to fifteen in a stretch, where there's no musical score or explosions. I mean, Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Shia was just annoying enough to make sense, and not too annoying (to me, at least). It was great to see Marion. The Indy/Marion reunion fight was expected, but damn, I would have preferred if she'd hit him again. I have no idea what the 'Mack' character was supposed to be - crap, I understand Denholm Elliott's gone to the Last Crusade in the sky, but surely they could have gotten John Rhys-Davies? Or maybe him plus Marion would be too much to swallow?

Wait. This is Indiana Jones. And I just swallowed that whole movie.

So, in the end, I had fun - but it sure would have been an awesome movie if it had had all the same sequences and been 25 minutes shorter.

We won't even go into the actual main plot.

Okay, okay, I will. See, the first movie made sense there was a race between Good Guys (outnumbered and plucky) and Bad Guys (goosestepping and monolithic) to find an artifact of great and obvious power. One side wants to exploit it; the other wants to preserve it. Perfect. It changes hands several times, there are hijinks, and Indy and Marion work really well together. Nice:

The second movie...ugh, let's skip that for now. Suffice it to say that Crystal Skull, as another reviewer described it, is the third-best of four IJ movies.

The third movie - great! Another artifact of great importance and purity, and this time it's a race to find it - with the Good Guys still being chased by Bad Guys. The bad guys look like they have the upper hand - but the artifact itself is more powerful than both, and since the Good Guys have purer motives, they escape unscathed and unenriched. Great!

This movie? This is confusing. There's an artifact, except that it really points the way to a bigger set of artifacts. The Spaniards took it, then Ox took it, and now it needs to go home - where? Um, sorta hard to tell. Then the Rooskies are after it - why? Because it means 'power.' But without the easily-contextualized 'vulnerability' of the Ark or the Grail - i.e. powerful symbols of light, threatened by darkness - the tension just isn't there. We have no idea what we're looking for in this movie; we just have faith that Indy'll tell us. Even Indy seems at sea, relying on mystic brainwaves and the mumblings of his mad buddy to figure out what to do next. Wait, what? This is Henry Jones Jr., damn it, while he may make it up as he goes along, he ALWAYS knows what's up with the artifacts!

And then...ugh...the ending. I had such trouble with it. Here's why. First of all, if the Crystal Skull People (CSP hereafter) had been waiting all this time for the skull to be returned, why is their first act to destructively vamoose? They spent thousands of years teaching the inhabitants, and then somehow became separate Crystal skeletons sitting on chairs? What? And when the Spaniards showed up, they let them grab one of their heads? But when the head comes back (where it was originally) suddenly they're bad-ass and incomprehensible?

Um, makes no sense whatsoever. I didn't even understand what the KGB chick was looking for. If she doesn't know how to use one skull, what good will the others do her?

Yeah. The Roswell/aliens thing would have been an awesome Indiana Jones side-joke, wink wink, but it would have been more Indy if the 'real explanation' was something both more terrestrial and more mysterious. If the CSP had been caught up in the same quest we go on in the movie, and been beaten out by the obstacles - perfect. But no, there's a big fat McGuffin which was even sillier than the end of Fight the Future - and that movie won no prizes for making any sense at all, even in its own milieu.

Ah well.

The Chichester Macbeth

A week ago last Wednesday evening I took a trip to Brooklyn and left my world. A friend and I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Paul Harvey Theater and saw the Chichester Festival Theatre's production of Macbeth.

Just to get this out of the way: that was one of the (and possibly the) best production(s) of Shakespeare I have ever seen. I just know that I'm still openmouthed, days later, when I spend any time thinking about the show.

The Production

I have some small background from long ago in technical theater. As a result, probably the first thing I see is the set and lighting design. I never worked in sound, so although I'll notice extremely good, very interesting or abysmally bad sound work, I won't really register good, solid production work. One of the first things you can analyze about a Shakespeare production is the choice of sets. The original stagings at The Globe Theatre were, if history is to be believed, minimally built and propped, eschewing realism for production flexibility. As Shakespeare migrated to film, however, increasingly realistic (or even location) sets came into use as the technology made this possible. Modern theater productions, with their access to advanced staging technology, have a dizzying choice of styles. Some shows remain minimalist; others make clever use of a limited number of detailed sets, and some become interpretive - using scenery and props deliberately different from those which Shakespeare and his troupe would have had.

There are a few reasons a show might go the interpretive route. One is that the adaptation of the show to a 'new' or 'non-period' production is, in itself, one of the dimensions in which modern productions of Shakespeare can differentiate themselves without changing the actual text of the play. Sets and costumes can be used to evoke particular sets of imagery and ideas in the audience; in fact, mere hints, when done skillfully, can serve as 'shorthand' for entire realms of transposition.

This is the path that Rupert Goold appears to have taken. When you file into the theater to be seated, the set is visible, with no curtains. The Paul Harvey theater has a low stage, with seating rising from the stage and the front seats on a level with the performer's floor. For this show, a single room has been constructed on the stage. But even before that is clear, I have to talk about the lights.

The entire height of the stage area, reaching all the way to the arch of the proscenium, is bared. The walls of the room at the bottom extend upwards to infinity, painted matte black to deaden them out of view, but no curtains or drops are used. As a result, the room that the stage contains would normally soar upwards, an open cathedral-like space.

Instead, hanging down to almost head height by cables, are a dozen or so shaded lamps, reminiscent of 1940s hanging lights. The theme, indeed, is one of the early middle 20th century, with grimy white tiled walls and, at the back of the stage, a doorway barred by sliding gates in the style of an early elevator. An industrial looking refrigerator looms against the back wall, a primitive-looking television set atop it, a call button for the elevator bracketed to the wall next to it. Across the stage, around the corner of the wall and past the doorway, there is a large metal work table (almost a counter) and an old-fashioned steam radiator sits against the tiled wall nearly at the stage left border. The walls end both stage left and stage right in a blank space where doors would quite conceivably be in this notional room. The lights, though - the lights take this soaring space, and by hanging the illumniation down to such a low level, coupled with the height of the tiled walls, manage to instantly convert this airy room into a basement. It's definitely a basement.

it might be a basement kitchen, or even bathroom, but it's a service room. At the front of the stage, displaced to the left, is a sink. It is a period sink, porcelain, deep, with two faucets; it rests on a spindly metal frame. The important thing to note about the sink, however, is that the back of it (which faces the audience) is unfinished; the edges are rough, and we can see the plumbing passing through it to the faucets. By this simple and subtle touch, the entire swath of air between the audience and the actors is transformed from open space into a definite wall - albeit one which is invisible to us. You can see the mirror half of the room which isn't there, just because the sink is so obviously mounted to this nonexistent barrier - the roughness of its back shows that.

And with that simple shortcut, a huge open space is transformed into a tiled basement.

Not just any tiled basement, though. There are all manner of cues, from the size and style of the tiles to the radiator, that evoke all the movies we've seen of World War II Britain or even buildings in the Eastern Bloc from the 1950s to 1960s. The fact that we know that Macbeth is set in Scotland pulls up the file of associations with the U.K. and wartime, however.

The opening of the show is violent, loud, and begins with warfare - and warfare involving artillery, with no doubt. The television lights to show us uniformed figures dodging through ruins - and Macbeth and Banquo come through the elevator entrance onto stage, wearing BDUs, carrying heavy packs, and with slung AK-47s.

What?

Yep. Definitely AK-47s.

Oh-kay then.

Over the rest of the show, this space will become a kitchen, a torture chamber, a villa, a piano bar, a morgue, a hospital, a formal dining room, and even a train - all without making any change to the space itself other than the presence and dressing of two wheeled tables, themselves transformed from dining surface to kitchen counter to gurney. Brilliant.

The Cast and Acting

The first person onto the stage is perhaps the most well-known; Macbeth, in this production, is played by Patrick Stewart, with all his considerable skill. I have to say, though, that my two favorite moments of the show were both made so by acting, not tech - and neither involves Mr. Stewart. The assassination of Banquo is done on a train - and the train is created by the cast sitting in lines, at an angle opposite that which the tables are always placed (to emphasize the difference) and all in unison swaying as lights and sound are used to bring the train to life. It's a simple scene, but it's done amazingly well. The second, and one of the best single pieces of a performance, is when Ross arrives in England to meet Macduff and Malcolm - there to tell Macduff that his family has been murdered by Macbeth. The few minutes of this scene were absolutely exquisitely done. Michael Feast (Macduff) shone.

I'm not a huge theater fan, but I loves me some Shakespeare. Always have. I have an informal gradient in my head for judging what 'level' of Shakespeare I'm watching, and it goes like this.

At the lowest end of the spectrum, there's the 'reading' Shakespeare, where no matter what tech magic or staging and blocking wizardry, the show feels like two or more people reciting their lines in predetermined order, around a table. If there is any emotional content, it is individual; there is no emotional interaction.

One step up is (pardon my own purely descriptive labeling) is the amateur level. In a production of this quality, the actors are, in fact, reacting to each other in a comprehensible (if not necessarily believable) fashion. Usually, this means they have at the least managed to work in plausible stage motion, and are able to work on their stance, blocking and body language while also delivering lines. Moving up again, there is a 'professional' production. In this, all the elements finally appear and are interactive - line delivery, stance and motion, and technical elements. I should be convinced that I'm looking at a group of people, all working together; and I should have at least a notion of the scene they're trying to convey to me, as separate from the actual people and props on the stage. I might not buy it totally, but I should be able to get a picture of it, and it shouldn't have any noticeably dissonant elements.

After this, there are two ways that the production can attempt to lift the whole thing up a level. One is to appropriate a particular time and/or place in which to set the production; this might be the original setting of the play, or it might be some other time period and venue. If it is using the original setting of the play, then the technical production (sets, costume) and the secondary acting (language, accents if necessary) will matter a great deal. The process of 'transporting me' into the scene will depend heavily on how well these are done, because I don't have a 'picture' of Shakespeare's Scotland in my head. The original play is more notional than representative. If a production has exceptional work in these 'convincing' areas, then it will rise to the level of 'excellent Shakespeare.' It will transport me successfully.

There is another way to lift the production further, and that is to give it a unique flavor. This is even more difficult; in addition to just convincing me that I'm watching a scene in a known setting, a production may attempt to make a point by creating its own particular flavor. This is extremely hard to do; the actors are now tasked with not only making me believe that they are real people talking to each other about real things, but they have to convince me that they are in fact part of a self-consistent world that I have no direct cues for. The best fiction creates a believable world; the best and more ambitious fiction creates believable but unreal worlds, managing to make believability trump realism.

This production made a specific choice, as far as I can tell, to set the production in an unreal but describable alternate Scotland. It is Scotland; but it has some modern technology (vis. assault rifles and pistols, televisions and EKG machines and refrigerators). It is not our Scotland, though; and the ways it differs are what are fascinating. There is a flavor of fascism, not a specific regime, but fascism as it is known by the modern news viewer. The AK-47, weapon of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc]. The 'wartime' set, applicable to either wartime Scotland or Cold War Eastern Bloc, again. The costumes involve uniforms, and there are three major types - and what they are is informative.

In the initial scene, where Macbeth is returning from fighting an external invader (a 'legitimate war') - he and Banquo are wearing outfits which (other than their weapons) are very close representations of U.S. World War Two gear. immediately, when they return to their homes, they change into formal uniforms. The serving soldiers remain in a formal but gray/green outfit, reminiscent of the Soviet Army; the nobles however (especially the royals) change into a jet-black uniform strongly evocative of the Gestapo. At one point in the show, there is dance; the initial dance is a very German almost-polka, but some of the participants break into Cossack kick-dance. Again, 'Nazi' and 'Stalin' come to the fore.

What truly lifts this Macbeth, for me, though, is that in almost every case where I was most strongly pulled in I was pulled in by the actors, and by their interaction.

Completely pulled in.

I learned things about Macbeth (the play) that i hadn't known. At least five or six times I had to smother an 'Ohhhh.....' watching them. This show hit a level I have only seen once or twice - exquisite acting not just rising above the technical hinting, but incorporating it and making it absolutely integral to the end product.

Fun Bits

Food is all over this production. Mr. Stewart, showing his chops, delivers his 'briefing' to his assassins while making a sandwich late at night in the kitchen. He builds us up to wondering is he going to actually eat that? How will he do it without interrupting flow? Then, because he can, he does eat the sandwich, and he does actually finish a critical line while talking with his mouth full. Just to show us that he knew what he was doing, and yes, it would be funny. But he does it without losing the character of Macbeth - who is a man going mad (not driven mad) but going mad, poisoned by ambition. ,p> In the middle of the play, at the interval, we see Act III scene IV, which ends with the ghost of Banquo appearing to Macbeth at dinner. Macbeth cringes from the ghost, causing consternation among his guests; just prior to the ghost's appearance, he sees three of his serving girls move past him with daggers clutched behind their backs.

Immediately following the interval, that scene is redone, with Macbeth's whispered asides to his assassin completely replayed by the actors, but at twice the speed - and in silence. And this time, although Macbeth returns to the table, the girls have no daggers, and the ghost does not appear to us the audience - but he flinches, this replay showing us the scene from his guests' point of view. It's very, very well done.

During the assassination of Banquo on the train, as soon as the deed is done, all the various other passengers huddling in their seats rise and remove overcoats - and are revealed as the main cast, moving into set for their next scene. It's a simple trick to save time and cast members, here deliberately shown us, and again, it hammers home the elegance with which the play is being staged.

Damn, it was good.

Noooooo!

My secret guilty pleasure...dead and gone? NOOOOOOOOoooooooo....

Stranger Than Fiction

I don't expect anyone of the four people who read this blog to care about what I think about this movie.

Because it's my blog, I'm gonna write it up anyway.

I ended up crying at the end. Noting that I was sitting alone in my apartment watching the movie on a Macintosh screen, wearing headphones, slightly too cold because I hadn't reset the thermostat and surrounded by junk from my ongoing attempt to move to another city, my first thought was "This frigging movie made me cry, and considering that I'm single, it's a fucking waste."

Stranger than Fiction is a metaliterary film. Note how I slipped that pseudointellectual term in there? Good, because it's a metaphor. No wait; it's a pun. The film is both, in fact, metaliterary and pseudointellectual. It's so damn pseudointellectual that Dustin Hoffman plays a professor of English literature whilst Emma Thompson plays an author of significant works thereof. The movie is about writing, and about living, and what to do when doing both when you have too much or not enough information about what you're supposed to be doing.

Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell, is (at the outset of the film) the most routinized and boring individual ever seen, at least in this movie's world. True to form, he's an IRS auditor. Everything is going along fine as the narrator explains to us, over the movie's beginning minutes, what Harold's life is like over the course of one of his boring and identical weekdays.

The next day, Harold starts to hear the narrator too.

Not all the time. Just when he (as we the viewers know) is 'on script.' When he starts looking around for the voice's owner, talking back, or trying not to do things the voice is explaining that he's doing, it disappears, only to resume with a slight air of edgy impatience when he finally goes back to toeing the storyline.

This would be a run of the mill man-hears-voices story, save for two things. The quality of the cast (which, to my amazement at my own words, does include Will Ferrell) and the (ha!) writing. You see, Harold's in trouble. At one point, the narrator used the phrase 'imminent death.' While Harold (with the assistance of professor Jules Hilbert (Hoffman), to whom he was referred by a most bemused Linda Hunt, tries to figure out whether he's in a tragedy or a comedy and what he should do, the story - with the assistance of a pissed-off and meddlesome wristwatch - starts to loop about somewhat gleefully.

I won't say this is on par with or even in the same league as If On A Winter's Night a Traveller for metafiction; however, this is a movie. It's operating under a severe handicap of both form and time. Within that handicap's constraints, I must say, it does a really really nice job. The parallels between the ending of the story in the movie and the story of the movie made me smile while sniffling.

See, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), the author of this ongoing story/book/narrative, starts to have thoughts about what it means to live, as she thinks about what it means to write - and she starts to think about the characters that she's written and how they lived.

And it all changes.

I recommend this film for a good date movie. If you're a secret sentimentalist like me and weep buckets at a good Merchant/Ivory production, rent it with a bowl of popcorn and a good bottle of wine. Or whisky, which I can recommend from personal experience. Don't expect much that's important to come out of this. But as the film ends, think about what I just said in the previous sentence.

EPIC WIN

Go to this url and watch the 'World of Warcraft Commercials.' They have Flash viewing or download.

"I'm William Shatner, and I'm a shaman."

WIN.

Nature has her say

Via Defense Tech:

LOLfest

So the Fest locale has suffered a bit of an infestation. As it were.

...note that this isn't even all of them.

The Bourne Ultimatum

"Somebody made me what I am. I'm going to find them."

The Bourne Ultimatum is the third installment of the highly popular series of summer action/adventure movies starring Matt Damon, loosely (very, very loosely) based on the books of the same name by Robert Ludlum. It was released August 3, 2007 in the U.S. market after a relatively short (for today's film industry) publicity campaign, relying mostly on the interest garnered by the first two movies to pull in audiences. The strategy seems to be working so far, most of the way through the first weekend of release; the movie is way up the box office charts.

It's difficult to review the third film in a series of three without offering spoilers, if not for the film itself then at least for the prior two. I hereby punt the attempt at retaining secrecy over the first two films; I have to assume (if you continue reading this review) that you've seen the first two and are interested in how this one compares to them. I will, however, attempt to be very clear about when the spoilers (for the first two) start showing up, and offer a bold face warning. Oh, yeah - be warned, there appear to be a lot of scenes in the trailer on the internet that don't actually show up in the movie. Not big plot-laden scenes, but it sure looks like there are some stunt/special effects scenes they decided not to use; and there are some voiceover scenes which are either lines from prior movies or are just plain not there.

There are, of course, things I can talk about prior to getting into how well the movie fits at the end of the trifecta (I really don't want to say trilogy because that term is so loaded, these days). For example, the filming, from a technical standpoint.

The Action

There's lots. Lots and lots and lots. Hoo boy. This film is essentially a 1:51 chase scene, with varying levels of plotline and ancillary violence thrown in along the way. Somehow, it manages to retain a PG-13 rating - I don't know how. Probably because there's no sex or bad words in it, just unending amounts of violence and property damage. If you think James Bond is a dab hand with a vehicle chase, that may be true, but if you think he's a whiz at vehicular mayhem, give over, Jason Bourne has it all over 007.

"Sir? Sir, he just drove off the rooftop..."

...stop whining, that was in the trailer. Anyway, if action is what you crave, then that's what you'll receive. Chases on foot, on scooters, in cars, you name it.

Lots of people get the bejeebus beaten out of them by Mr. Bourne during this movie in ways which are deliberately ambiguous as to their survival chances. If that was reality, no, they'd most likely be dead. In the movie? We don't know. We don't have time to wait and see, places to go, cars to steal, people to threaten, information to jack, countries to hop. The film starts in Russia, then shows us Italy, jumps to the U.K., then it's Spain, Morocco, etcetera, etcetera, faster than you can figure out what airport/ferry port/railway station you're looking at. Good thing The Hunt For Red October started the trend of that particular "THERE IS A COMPUTER PRINTOUT HAPPENING IN THE LOWER RIGHT SO READ IT NOW YOU DOLT" sound effect. You know the one, in military type use, when it's printing letter by letter? Yeah, that one. They use it. A lot. Because they have to tell you where we are.

The Filming

The filming is probably this movie's weakest part. There's one simple reason for this, and I will hereby sum it up in one mostly-made up word: The Unsteadicam. The Steadicam is a wonderful invention (see the node for more details). The problem is that someone, in recent times, discovered that a sense of extreme tension and urgency could be 'heightened' by having a camera jerk around as if the camera holder was themselves running and/or zooming in and out frantically. Probably it was one of those wankers responsible for The Blair Witch Project. For that alone, we need to hunt them down. But ever since then, movies with DRAMATIC TENSION have been giving in to the temptation to jiggle the POV like movies in the '50s and '60s used to go ga-ga for vaseline on the lenses when the female lead showed up and wanted a smooch. It's really getting out of hand.

No, really. I was almost motion sick during The Bourne Ultimatum. Twice. This has never, ever happened to me before during a movie. Except once. I'll give you one guess.

Other than that horrendous problem, the filming is fairly workaday. Good pans, some inspired work on rooftops in Tangier, and some so-so work during New York crowd scenes. There were a couple of scenes, one early in the movie especially where Bourne is trying to lead another person around via instructions in a cell phone, where although the gist of it came through fine - no small feat given the number of players in the scene - the technical challenge was such that there was really nothing left over to show me the surroundings. I could follow the action, but had no sense of where they were or what their surroundings were, or even felt like.

That, of course, may be deliberate. The edgy, technology overlaid over emphasized cultural cues scenery may be the movie's way of picturing 'the grid' which the principals have been talking about since episode one - if you show up on the surveillance systems of the U.S. and allied intelligence agencies, you're on 'the grid.' Every location on 'the grid' has an almost European style and look to it, a cool leather and metal design that would be perfectly at home in a very high end shopping center - but the architecture on which it is hung gives you the only clue as to where you are.

The Story - SPOILER ALERT (Not big ones, though)

Okay, skip here if you haven't seen the first two.

There is one very well done bit - remember the scene from the end of The Bourne Supremacy where Bourne calls Pam Landy at her desk in New York? Well, that scene is in The Bourne Ultimatum - and let's just say that context is everything. I don't know if they knew, precisely, how they were going to use that scene in the third movie when they filmed it for the second, or if some extremely clever writing went on to make it fit - but it worked quite well, let's just leave it at that.

The story is a bit of a problem, for me. It's as if they took the first two movies and smashed them together. There's a great deal of 'more of the same' down to the people we see (you'll know what I mean - at one point, I groaned and said "no, what is that person doing here? Come on.") Some of it is deliberate - Jason finds himself on the other side of some of the scenes he's been in in the first two, line-wise at least, and that's...interesting, I suppose.

There is a nod to current events in the plotline. It's not subtle. It's not even all that well handled. I thought it was completely unworthy of David Strathairn, who is a far better actor than the role he was handed here - but ah well. There aren't many complex roles in Bourne movies. There are cutouts, placed carefully on a lethal and fast-moving obstacle course which Matt Damon/Jason Bourne navigates with superhuman persistance, skill, lethality, and (I couldn't help muttering) healing power. I mean, damn, this guy gets beat the hell up.

There is closure of a sort. It's a Bourne movie, though, so despite Damon going on record and saying he personally is done with the franchise, he also notes that another actor could take it up (sorry, I don't have a reference. Google it, you'll find it.)

In sum? Exhausting, fun, a bit repetitive, but a great way to spend some quality time in air conditioning on an August weekend.

Thanks imdb!

Anyone can cook!

Ratatouille. I have become a slave to Pixar's brand of humor, sanitized though it may be, because somewhere inside their compound of runaway mad supercomputer/desktop mules and LSD-derivative spatial visualizers there are indeed those who are slaves to the pretty.

Ratatouille is pretty. In the stolen words of Eddie Murphy, "It's prettah! It's SO-O-O prettah." Damn right. It doesn't try to push the limits of human modeling and tumble into the uncanny valley; it picks a style taken straight from recognizable caricature and drags it into modern 3D. Anyone who has read one of the Madeleine books will recognize the facial structures, which is appropriate since the thing is set in Paris.

We won't ask why the rats have American accents. Hey, at least most of the non-evil humans do too.

Eh?

Never mind.

The plot is just long enough (not complex, long) to keep me exactly the right amount of interested in what's-gonna-happen. The imagery - unbelievable. I saw this movie the day after seeing Transformers, and it's like being served the two ends of the spectrum of modern effects and animation. Two entirely different but completely believable (believable as in visually consistent and convincing) worlds that pull you in. Personally, I think Ratatouille had it somewhat harder, because (as the cute sigil said at the end of the credits) it was 100% animated; no motion capture, no live action. They had to make all that not just funny but buyable strictly using what was in their noggins, and get it down onto film via electrons with rendering times in the hours-per-frame for the final product.

Damn, I'm glad that our economy, fucked as it is, presently supports that sort of activity.

I won't tell you what it's about, save to confirm that yes, it's entirely kid-friendly. There's some teensy violence (some people get tied up, albeit entirely offscreen in true cartoon fashion) and there's some scary-ride type stuff. Threatening gestures? Sure, from silly-looking people, but mostly...chases. Good ol' fashioned cartoon chases. Looney Tunes are way more violent than this.

And good God, they got Peter O'Toole to voice the food critic. SALUD!

Two paws up.

(The usual Pixar short beforehand, 'Lifted', was hilarious.)

Paprika

Wrote this review of Paprika for my other lack of life:

Paprika is an anime film, original title Papurika in its home market of Japan where it was released in 2006. It was made by Satoshi Kon from a story originally drawn from a 1993 novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui of the same name. Released by Madhouse Pictures, the film draws on well-known vocal talent, including voice actors from the Cowboy Bebop series and the iconic Ghost in the Shell films. It doesn't really resemble them, however.

Paprika is a story about...is a story concerning...no, that won't work.

In this movie, a team of psychiatrists has invented a device called the DC Mini. This much we learn almost immediately. The function of the device is to allow one person to intrude into another's dreams, observe, and record the events therein on computers for later study and analysis. Did you ever see the Dennis Quaid vehicle Dreamscape? Well, sort of like that.

But not really.

See, someone's stolen some of these things. The DC Minis, I mean. And there's this underground dream therapist, named Paprika, who is helping people using a DC Mini - but she doesn't really exist. Maybe. And then the stolen DC Minis start to invade people's waking psyches, causing damage-

...and then it gets really confusing.

But the beauty of it is that it only gets confusing for the characters. All the chaos and insanity (literal insanity, we're dealing with psychiatric patients here) that the makers of this film stretch and employ every last trick of anime to depict, as well as invent a few, is something that we the viewer never quite lose track of. The characters spend a great deal of time trying to figure out just what the hell is going on at any particular moment, and while we the viewers may spend a lot of time in the early part of the movie doing the same thing, once we are given enough information, we never feel like we've been left behind the characters. We're with them. The levels of confusion, as it were, bind us tightly together; we feel their dizziness and their struggles to comprehend, and it brings us into the action, behind the fourth wall.

There are some points in the movie where that fourth wall is metasyntactically shattered. Does that sound like a jumble of terminology? Don't worry, you'll know precisely what I'm talking about as soon as it happens. The whole film is like this. I was forcibly reminded (in a good way) of If On a Winter's Night a Traveler at some points.

And did I mention it's unbelievably gorgeous? While the animation is not as smooth as Ghost in the Shell or some of the more recent Hayao Miyazaki creations, the imagery is luscious. Coupled with music that runs the gamut from scene-relevant and absorbing to absolutely soaring1, the movie begs - cries out - to be seen on the biggest screen it can, with the best sound system possible.

There are some disturbing bits in it, which is only natural as it is a film which plumbs the deepest depths (literally) of its characters' psyches and drags them kicking and screaming into the outer world. Inner demons meet traditional Japanese apocalyptic scenes, here, and unlike movies which try for the complete mind game but don't pull it off (*cough*Total Recall*cough*The Usual Suspects*cough*) this one manages it not just once, but multiple times. And unlike Akira, it isn't a mind-numbingly exhausting cycle of endless destruction, but 90 minutes of thoughtful metaphor and explosive beauty.

Worth seeing.

p.s. the music from the film was composed by Susumu Hirasawa, and he has made a couple of tracks from the film (including the closing credits theme and outtakes from the track which helped make the preview so memorable) available for free on the internet. You can get them here.

If anyone other than me buys the soundtrack, do me a favor and listen to 'Mediational Field' which is what it sounds like 'Runner' is outtakes from. Is it me, or is one of the melody sequences incredibly evocative of Nik Kershaw's 'Wouldn't it be Good'? Heh.

Nobody does dystopia like the British.

Finally saw Children of Men. Nobody does dystopias like the British. I wonder if it has to do with watching an Empire recede across the sands. If so, I wonder if the U.S. will get as good at it in the coming years.

Fuck, I'm a depressing wanker.

It's not my fault.

Well, okay, it is, but I was led astray by bad example.

FRAK!

Frakking frak mrmtrmbl sunuva frakkin' frakker Battlestar Galactica cliffhanger son of a...

Sigh.

No, wait...

I like this one. shit...

GENIUS!!!!

No, really. I shit you not.

It's a QT movie. Deal.

From here.