Year-end marathons

I know I recently wrote about The Twilight Zone because of their great Christmas-themed episode, Night of the Meek.  But I really started to get into The Twilight Zone because of the SciFi Channel and their Twilight Zone marathons.  You get two marathons from SciFi a year, one for 4th of July, and one for New Year's.  This blog today is more about prompting you to check out a couple episodes of my favorite show that has ever been on television, The Twilight Zone.  Tune into SciFi at any time today or tomorrow and watch a few.  Some of my favorites you can be on the lookout for are, "One For the Angels"; "Time Enough At Last"; "The Howling Man"; "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?"; "Five Characters in Search of an Exit"; "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", starring William Shatner; and a personal favorite, "Whispers in the Dark", starring Robert Redford.

Also, as a side note so you don't all think I'm losing my edge, I watched a couple interesting films last night:  Blood Freak and El Mariachi.  El Mariachi is Robert Rodriguez's first film, which he later made a sequel/remake of in the form of Desperado.  El Mariachi has pretty much the same plot, but feels more organic in a good way.  What can I say?  It still holds true that the originals are much better than the remakes...even if you're doing the remakes yourself.  The biggest difference in El Mariachi from Desperado is that there are two guys walking around with guitar cases:  the musician with his guitar, and the assassin with his guitar case full of weapons.  The two inevitably mix up their cases forcing the musician to take up arms against his confused attackers.  It was an interesting twist in Desperado to have Antonio Banderas' guitar case hold weapons, but also have a guitar-top facade for concealment purposes, but in the end, I thought having the two different guys get confused worked better.

Blood Freak was on TCM Underground, Turner Classic Movies' Friday late-night cult movie show.  They always air a couple interesting flicks, some more watchable than others, and none of them ever edited.  Blood Freak is about a drifter who takes up work on a poultry farm and helps the scientists there by being a guinea pig for their experiments.  He also uses some pretty harsh pot, man, and for his trouble winds up with a giant, fanged turkey head and a lust for drinking blood.  I can tell you that the site of someone wandering around in a giant paper-mache turkey head with teeth would give anyone the creeps.  It's painfully obvious that while they were filming, the titular blood freak had no way of seeing what he was doing in that mask. It's all hilarious and severely budgeted.  

How budgeted was it?  Well I'll tell you.  The filmmakers loop the same scream two dozen times and use the same shot of the turkey-headed guy walking slowly towards the camera at least five times.   Also there's a guy who comes on the screen every now and then throughout the movie to dispense wisdom and advice about drug culture and the state of this guy and his life's troubles.  (As if we needed help figuring out that this guy has trouble.  He's got a fucking turkey head!)  The hippie-sage-advice-spouting-old-man looks like a cross between Eddie Bunker and Slim Pickens.  Sometimes we joke about how high a person would have to have been to make a movie, but I have never actually thought it was true about any film until now. The people who made Blood Freak were all definitely stoned out of their gourds the entire time, from pre-production through the editing process.  Blood Freak is a good movie to drink to.  I wish I'd thought of that earlier instead of watching the whole thing sober.

Hot For Words

Trying to find a way to get the most out of the two best assets of the internet, sex and knowledge? Try You Tube channel, HotForWords. In Hot For Words, Marina Orlova takes submission requests from her fans and explores word origins, derivatives, etc on her show 5-7 times a week. According to her bio on her website, hotforwords.com, Marina has two degrees in Russian and English philology and has taught high school level English. She finally decided that her best assets, (like the internet), would best be used in conjunction, and so we finally have Hot For Words.

If you think that the sight of a scantily clad woman is degrading and wrong, then just stop reading this blog because we don't agree on much. Marina is never nude, never vulgar and always pleasant and educational. Not only have I learned a lot this morning watching five episodes in succession, but I also found out that Marina plays GTA IV! That's pretty cool, although, in a situation brimming with politically incorrect with irony, she cannot get her character to successfully throw a molotov cocktail at his enemies. That's like a guy from a hunting show who can't play a game of Duck Hunt. Pitiful, sad, hilarious.

Here is Marina teaching us about how the "molotov cocktail" came to be called just that. If you like words, and want a fun and enthusiastic Russian hottie to teach you more about them, check out HotForWords on You Tube.

Richer, Finer, Truer

So, in case you hadn't heard, Christmas is basically here.  I could write about Black Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Christmas Evil, Gremlins; any holiday-themed horror.  But I won't.  I will instead write about something that's too amazing not to be seen, and is very accessible to all of you. (Even the Scarlet Lily...who normally wouldn't go near any of the subjects of my blog with a ten foot pole.)

Last night I watched one of my favorite holiday shows: The Twilight Zone, "Night of the Meek".  The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite shows of all time.  I own the complete collection, and though I don't watch it as much as I'd like ideally, I am pretty familiar with most of the episodes.  "Night of the Meek" concerns an alcoholic man who plays Santa in a department store.  He comes into work drunk and falls off his chair, and gets fired.  All he wants is to be a real Santa, and he's very downtrodden by his alcoholism and failure in life.  He hears some bells jingling, and looks down to find a bag in an alleyway full of toys and gifts.  He runs around town giving gifts to everyone he sees.  

The man assumes that it's just his wish that has come true for one night, but can't explain the bag to the cops or anyone else. When the toys run out, he feels a certain joy, but is sad at the same time.  Walking home he sees a sleigh, with reindeer attached, in the same alleyway where he found the bag.  An elf pops out from behind some boxes and tells him that everyone's waiting for him at the North Pole and he needs to get going.  The guy gets in the sleigh and rides off into the night as Santa Clause.

It's the sappiest Twilight Zone episode other than "The Bewitchin' Pool", yet it still makes me feel pretty warm inside.  Not that the episode doesn't have its own sense of melancholy...thinking about the ending a different way, it's possible that the alcoholic had just let his depression and disease overcome him.  Many people succumb to death around the holidays.  It's the end of the year, there isn't a lot of light anymore, everyone else is so happy, etc, etc.  Maybe, in a delirious state brought on by the tremens, this man hallucinates his last minutes on earth.  That doesn't necessarily make this tale sad instead of happy though.  A drunk with nothing to live for, and who only wants to be able to bring joy to people instead of disgust, has a waking dream wherein he is Santa Clause and can bring that joy to others, finishing off the night with a sleigh ride back to the North Pole to do it all again next year. 

It's a grand thing to get one's most yearned-for wish.  And it's a tender thought to think that for some of us, being able to give and spread happiness is the only thing that we want.  The guy in the show could've just asked for more booze, or he could have wished for his alcoholism to leave him outright.  Instead, caught up as he was in the season of giving, he forgot about his disease as he went about his time playing Santa.  The more he fell into the role of joy-bringer, the more completely his affliction left him.  That makes for a pretty merry Christmas thought to me.

Why so serious?

I finally (after an excruciating day of waiting) got around to watching The Dark Knight. It was the second time I'd seen the film, the first since its theatrical run. The Dark Knight may be coming back out into theaters sometime in early 2009 though. The producers want to give it a chance to break the 600 million dollar mark. Right now, The Dark Knight has taken in about 530 million...70 shy of the mark, 70 shy of tying Titanic for biggest box office of all time. At the same time that people behind The Dark Knight are trying to make even more money from it, the folks at the Oscars are thinking about getting The Dark Knight out front and putting it up for a few awards, one of which is potentially Best Picture.

It makes me happy to see a movie like The Dark Knight getting appropriate recognition. I was watching the special features on our disc at home with the GF and I was amazed at how much functionality exists in the props for that movie. The "Tumbler", Batman's car, the "Bat-Pod", his motorcycle, and his body armor are all functional. That's an amazing amount of work to put into something that might draw enough crowds. It's risky to put that much money and prep time into a movie that, while it has its built-in comic-fan audience, isn't really the most popular version of the Batman story. Kids want to see Batman. Parents want to take their kids to see Batman. Parents might have been able to get away with taking an 8-10 year old to see Batman Begins, but there is no place for children in the world in which the The Dark Knight exists.

Looking for someone to blame for transforming Batman's world into a viscerally evil cesspool of crime and degeneracy? You can blame the Joker. Health Ledger's Joker is one of only a handful of times that I can recall witnessing an actor putting literally their all into a role which could turn said actor inside out. Charlize Theron did a great job of it in Monster, Christian Bale did his own agonizing transformation for The Machinist, and but they pale in comparison to what Ledger did to get his version of the Joker up on the screen. There are a lot of words to describe his performance, but there isn't just one word to do it justice.

My favorite scene of the Joker is right after he's busted out of jail, thanks to the cell phone bomb sewn up inside his fellow prisoner's belly. Gordon (Gary Oldman) is talking about the breakout and then the film cuts to a shot of several cop cars, lights blazing, swerving and speeding down the street. The Joker's head and shoulders are out the window and the wind is blowing in his forever-greasy green hair. He closes his eyes and opens his mouth, flicks his tongue over his red, rough-edged scars and revels in what he's just done. He's happy to have escaped, and it's nice to taste the sweet air of freedom, but he knew he'd get out. That expression of pleasure and near ecstasy is slapped onto his face because he can now fully bask in the glory of all the damage, pain and destruction he's just orchestrated.

I've seen a lot of movies, and if I know you, then you heard me say this before, but here it is again: I know what a PG-13 movie is, and I know what can happen in a PG-13 -rated movie, but every time the Joker came on screen I thought anything could happen. I was not put at ease by the limit of the rating given to The Dark Knight. The presence of the Joker is palpable and disgusting and it truly makes you feel uneasy. At the same time, it is awesome to watch. If you haven't seen it, you must see it. It's gritty movie-making at it's finest, and transcends its comic book origins. If you want a powerful movie with the baddest villain you've seen since Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb, you must see The Dark Knight.

For a good time call your bank manager

boingboing.net reported today that a well-known German financial magazine, MaxPlanckForshung Journal, ran an ad for a Chinese whore-house on the cover of their publication. Apparently they needed Chinese characters to grace the cover of their mag, and thought they were printing a lovely Chinese poem.

The Independent reported that a German Chinese translator was used, and since there are many words in the Chinese language that mean different things depending on how you say them, it was nearly impossible for a non-native speaker to know what the text was actually saying. The article then goes on to describe a few instances wherein drunken Americans have received tattoos in Chinese that mean completely different things than what they think.

Here's the original article in The Independent.
Here's the posting from boingboing.net.

The lesson: If you don't know what it says, make damn sure that you trust the translator completely, or you might end up with a tattoo that says "prostitute."

A Gorey Xmas

Back in 1980, a show started a long run on PBS. This show was called "Mystery!" "Mystery!" is responsible for bringing to the small screen the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, as well as Miss Marple, Inspecteor Morse and Cadfael. I never watched much of "Mystery!", but my parents were regulars, and never missed an episode. I only needed to see the opening credits, and then my interest waned. Edward Gorey designed the title sequence, which was animated in his style which is very striking and impressionable to anyone who sees it.


It certainly made an impression on me; it draws you in wherever you see it. I always take a longer look at a book cover if Edward Gorey has illustrated it. I'm guilty of buying several books that I may never read, just because Gorey did their jackets. Gorey's books, meaning books of his cartoons and stories, are fantastically dark, sinister and hilarious in turns. He has a great command of the French language, having majored in French Lit. in school, and reading his stuff makes you feel like you're reading long lost stories from Europe. In fact, Edward Gorey was an American through and through, and he never even went abroad. He wasn't interested in visiting Europe at all.

Edward Gorey, who passed away in 2000, made a couple holiday books too. His two books, which are companion pieces, are entitled: "The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas" and "The Headless Bust: A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium". Both tales star the Bahhumbug and follow him on a series of probing visits to local folk during the holiday season and during the switch from the year 1999 to 2000. These stories are great, and while not my favorites of Gorey by any means, he certainly ended a career with two successes.

I remember going to the Border's book store in Ann Arbor with my folks sometime in the mid 90's, and seeing one of Edward Gorey's books on the shelf. It became the first book of his that I ever owned and it was "The Gashleycrumb Tinies".

The book is a macabre alphabet wherein each of 26 children, all listed alphabetically by first name, meet their demises in unique ways. The words alone are lots of fun, but combined with the drawings, the book becomes even more entertaining.

Look at the expressions on the kids' faces. No emotion at all. No inclination that they are about to die, nor indication that they feel any fear at all either. I'm not trying to make a point about anything except that effect that those expressionless faces have on the work as a whole. "The Gashleycrumb Tinies" becomes about the humor in those awkward situations, and the fun of making the rhymes with all those kids and their alphabetical names.

Gorey's style is wide in its range. For me I can get into the Halloween spirit or the Christmas spirit by looking at his images. There's a simplicity to it that really makes me feel comfortable. Gorey is good for any season, and even though his work won't make your heart grow three sizes larger, it will give you a hard-to-define feeling of pleasure and interest.

Xmas horrors

So you think Christmas is all smiles and happiness and light? There are more than a few horrors to be had at Christmas time, as long as you know where to look. I'm not talking about desecrating the holiday, I'm just saying that Christmas has something for everyone, even me. Last night the GF and I watched the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol (1984). It's a great version that accurately portrays the ghostly visitors and the actual drama and terror in the Dickens' story.

Sure, everyone remembers Scrooge saying "Bah, humbug!", then being visited by three ghosts, learning how great Christmas is and why he should be good, and then Tiny Tim gets well and walks again. Fantastic. Not as many people remember the details: Scrooge was always reviled by his father because Scrooge's mother died giving birth to him; The first spirit exists merely to torment Scrooge with visions of his past, and it's quite obvious, in the 1984 version, that she loves every minute of his pain; When Marley comes into the room, he first has to untie the cloth that holds his jaw shut, and when he does undo the knot, his mouth hangs open with his tongue out. I can't tell you how many nightmares that gave me when I was a kid. In short, it's a scary ghost story, just as valid for the horrors it evokes as for it's message of discovering the meaning of Christmas.



While George C. Scott does a good Scrooge, I really prefer the Alastair Sim version of Ebeneezer. It doesn't hurt that this 1951 version of the story, Scrooge, is in black and white, which adds to the "olde tyme" feel of the tale, and I really love that. Scrooge also has a great Marley scene, and here it is!




Of course, Scrooged, starring Bill Murray, also has a fine Marley-figure. This one also bothered for me for a while after seeing it. (I couldn't find the Marley scene itself, so here's the trailer.)



And, last but certainly not least...my favorite version of Marley...Statler and Waldorf in A Muppet Christmas Carol.

We should've gone to the beach!

Sorry for the double-postings today, but this is great and I wanted everyone to share in the fun I had while watching this trailer for Dead Snow. In Dead Snow a groups of young folks go on a skiing trip and end up fending off a horde of angry Nazi zombies.

Names and Faces

When I was a kid, around 10-12 years of age, a buddy and I would often wander the video store shelves looking thoroughly at all the videos we weren't allowed to rent. We hoped for a glimpse of nudity or gore so we could pretend we had some knowledge of the movie in question, even if we would never be able to see it. Sometimes the boxes themselves were all the scariness and violence I needed. I've since seen many of the movies I'd once thought were "soooo scary", and my feelings on most of them are "meh". They're not scary, and as an adult I realize that there wasn't any possible way for these films to live up to the expectations my 10-year old mind had invented for itself. Some of the titles were awesome though. I am still fooled by great titles and great movie posters, (and great book covers). Some movie titles just speak of awesome stories of terror and absurdly depraved depths of violence. I have some of the following titles on my Netflix queue, but I don't know if I really want to watch them. They seem so special and cool now, and I would hate to ruin that.

Dario Argento is known for making loose trilogies with his films. His latest movie, The Mother of Tears, is his last in the "Three Mothers trilogy". (Inferno, Suspiria, Mother of Tears.) The Mother movies span 30 years...so Argento gets around to finishing his projects eventually. His movies are great, and I've seen many of them. One of his films, and an entry in Argento's "animal trilogy", is not on DVD anywhere in the world. It's too hard to find a VHS copy of this film, and if you did find one it would be edited and have terrible tracking issues anyway. I'm talking about Four Flies on Gray Velvet. Talk about your descriptive, cool titles! Giallos from the 1970's tend to have great titles, and this is no exception. The flies make me think of death and decay, and the gray could be anything, decomposing skin, exposed brain tissue, the pillowcase of a strangulation victim. And then there's the velvet. It contrasts the other nouns in the title, and that contrast sprouts interest. I also want to see this film because it doesn't exist, and there's a feeling of completion that arises. I've seen all of Argento's other work, so this one's turn is up. Argento's titles could fill up the entirety of this post, so I'll leave you with one more, possibly my favorite because of its mixing of organic softness, and sharp killing objects: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

The Italian giallo's have so many great names, and the movies are so much fun too. The names are always darker than the content of the films themselves though, and they leave a bigger impression. All the Colors of the Dark is a fantastic title. It reminds me of a line from the Ray Bradbury story The Halloween Tree. The kids are riding their bikes through a ravine, and the line goes: "The ravine was filled with varieties of darkness." Description at its finest. Another favorite title of mine, and it's a doozy, is Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. As you may expect, there's a ton of sex and nudity in this film, which is based on "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allen Poe. What Have You Done to Solange? is another good title that tells its own story. Something dreadful has been done, (to someone with a really unique name). It implies that, even after the discovery that something has occurred, the nature of the event is still unclear. The motive of the killer is unknown and, as we all know from Lovecraft, the unknown is the most terrifying thing of all.

And then there are those films that have names that are too ridiculous. You have to laugh, and then realize that you want to see that movie! The one that comes to mind most prominently is Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. Who wouldn't want to see that? The title speaks of crazy ridiculousness that can't possibly be as crazy as the things going through your heads right now. Couple that film along with, Hell Comes to Frogtown, and you've got a double feature that'll draw its own crowd. With movie titles like these, the content becomes superfluous. You'll just be waiting on edge all day to use these titles in a sentence. Here are some more great titles that could probably inspire you to write your own horror story:

The Town that Dreaded Sundown -- (Apparently the movie does not do the video cover justice, but it is a terrifying poster.)
Incident On and Off a Mountain Road
Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll
The Loreley's Grasp
Countess Dracula's Orgy of Blood
Killer Klowns from Outer Space
Seven Blood-Stained Orchids
What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer's Body? (Sounds like it's probably a full line of dialogue.)
Five Dolls for an August Moon
The Conqueror Worm -- (Not nearly as gruesome as it seems from this poster, and has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poe, except the title is the same as his poem.)

Feeling adventurous or bored? Check some of these out. They're not all duds, but maybe you'd have a better time writing title-inspired fan fiction instead.

Believe!

Alright, boys and girls, I've got a surprise for you today. Partly because I'm lazy, partly because I caved, here's a guest post from the GF! If you are reading this and you know who I am, then you know who she is, and you can probably guess what this is going to be about. (That is not a reason to pass up this blog post however!) So without further ado, here is it, in the spirit of believing, and in the spirit of Christmas, (sorry Jewish friends), Dino Diva's guest blogging debut:

Those of you who know us know that we had an awesome trip to NYC this weekend. The entire trip was planned because of one reason: the Macy’s Birthday (a.k.a Thanksgiving Day) Parade.

Let me fill you in on the back-story…I grew up as an only child for most of my life. My mother raised me as a single mom (the best ever!) and we lived with my maternal grandparents for the first 7 or so years of my life. I am my mother’s only child and my grandparent’s first grandchild (for all three sets of grandparents). Saying that I was (am) spoiled would be an understatement. I needed/wanted/loved attention all the time and being an only child I got a lot of it. But when I couldn’t have everyone’s attention I could be a bit difficult to deal with. So Thanksgiving mornings at my grandparent’s house were hectic as my mom and grandma cooked and prepared for all my aunts and uncles to come over and celebrate. What to do with a little girl who wants to be involved with everything but really just gets in the way? Well being that my birthday is always right around Thanksgiving they decided they would plop me down in front of the TV and put the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV for me to watch. Only they didn’t call it the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. They called it my Birthday Parade. And I was naïve and spoiled enough to really believe that there was a parade on TV for my birthday. Eventually I learned to read and figured out that the parade was actually for Thanksgiving, but my family continued to call it the birthday parade and I always watch it on TV every year. In our house the parade was always followed with Thanksgiving dinner, and then once everyone entered a turkey and stuffing coma we would sit and watch It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34^th Street. Its tradition and I love traditions, especially ones like this that give you the warm fuzzy feeling on the inside.

So as much as I have loved watching my birthday parade on TV I have dreamed of being there and watching the parade. And this year my dream came true. I have been bugging this blog’s author to take me to the parade this year because this time, in 2008, my birthday fell on Thanksgiving Day, and therefore, on the day of parade. Since we just live a few hours away, I could not think of a single reason why we should not go. So we have been planning for months and this past we actually watched the parade, street-side, up close and personal.

I really have always wanted to go the Macy’s parade and I had big dreams about this parade. Before we went everyone was trying to prepare me (in a nice way) for what the parade would really be like. I had hyped it up a lot and had high expectations. And last Thursday at 9am all my expectations were blown away by the most spectacular and amazing day of my life. I have never been so happy and I don’t think I ever will be again. We stood at 62^nd St and Central Park West on a clear, sunny 40 degree day with 2.5 million people and watched the best parade I have ever seen. Every float looked perfect. Every balloon soared graciously through the sky. Every clown waved and threw confetti on us. There were even people dressed as birthday cake and presents in the parade that came over and sang happy birthday to me. It was perfect. I expected at any minute to see Maureen O’Hara (as Doris Walker) strolling alongside of the parade. Everything I had seen in movies and on TV was coming true. I felt like I was in a movie.

And it was all because I believed.


The part of me that is still a child will always think of the Macy’s parade as my Birthday Parade. I will always watch it and be so excited to see the balloons and the clowns. And it’s because I believe in the magic of that parade.

This holiday season, Believe! Believe in a parade, believe in Santa Claus, believe in true love, believe in change, believe in hope, believe in the spirit of Christmas. Just believe.

To help you get in the believing spirit, watch some of my favorite movies that always fill me with warm fuzzies and holiday delight:

Miracle on 34^th Street

It’s a Wonderful Life

The Bells of St. Mary’s

The Santa Clause

The Shop Around the Corner

Love Actually

Holiday Inn

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

Babes in Toyland (the 1961 Annette Funicello version)

White Christmas

Scrooged

How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

XOXO

DinoDiva, aka the GF

Seeing is believeing...unfortunately

When you watch a movie, your brain doesn't really have to do a whole lot of work in terms of interpreting what you are seeing. But the movie is playing a trick on you. Film is composed of tiny little pictures, or frames, moving by the screen very fast, kind of like a flip book. A movie is watched at 24 frames per second, or fps. So the first trick is that your brain thinks you're seeing smooth movement when you're really seeing 24 pictures flying by per second. (Slow motion photography is shot with many more frames a second. If you were to shoot a rattlesnake striking at a mouse at 24 fps, you'd miss the strike. You need to shoot a rattlesnake at 300 fps to catch the strike. Then you can slow it down and play it back at 24 fps so it appears to be going slower.) So already, at its most basic, film is making jumps and your brain is filling the gaps on its own.



When a movie tells you about something, your brain invents the rest itself. The movie hasn't actually shown you anything, but you assume you've already seen it and that you know how it went down. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, there is a scene wherein Judge Doom "kills" a 'toon shoe by slowly dipping it into The Dip. It's not shown on screen, but given the onlookers' facial expressions and the sound effects, it's pretty obvious that what happened wasn't pretty and was most likely painful to the 'toon shoe. You have this picture in your head of some awful and horrible death of this shoe. It's far worse in your head than it could ever be on-screen. Of course, you get to find out the difference between where your mind took that scene and the filmmakers' reality of the situation at the end of the film when you watch Judge Doom die-by-Dip. It is not impressive or scary. I had envisioned something like the deterioration of Quentin Tarantino's character in Planet Terror.

Which brings us to the fundamental difference. In Planet Terror, everything is shown. You get to see the bodies melt and ooze all over. It's goddamned disgusting...and awesome...and nothing is left to the imagination. However, Planet Terror does use a trick in this vein with Naveen Andrews' character, Abby. Abby has a testicle collection. He keeps it in a jar. You never see him go collecting, but you see the ridiculous weapon he uses and you see the jar full of balls. This is all you need to get a clear mental picture of how Abby gets the testicle for the jar. You don't need to see him cut anyone's balls off, you're already seeing it. And what's going on in your mind is far far worse than what anyone could show you on film. The best way to get the point across is to let the viewer play with the elements on their own and be grossed out on their own.

A recent personal experience in this vein happened with Eli Roth's Cabin Fever. Cabin Fever is "famous" for a scene in which Cerina Vincent is shaving her legs in the bathroom and her skin is coming off with every stroke. Yes it's gross, but it's a whole lot more gross in your mind right now than it is on film. Roth used CGI to film this effect, so the gouges that Cerina makes aren't really that realistic. They look like decals on her legs, with little depth. When I heard about this scene I thought we were going to see the skin peeling and building up behind the razor. I expected blood to come out and I expected bits of skin to be caught between the blades. I had built up a lot of fear of watching this scene. It turns out I didn't need to worry about it.

Takashi Miike did it much better with Imprint when he filmed the scenes with the needles being inserted under the girl's fingernails. He used fake fingers filled with blood, and slightly transparent with a light behind them. That way you saw the needle going in and you could still make it out even after if was underneath the nail. Miike's style is different, and he likes to show you all sorts of things, but he makes them really hard to watch, so he doesn't let you down. It is always as bad as it seems like it's going to be.

I bring this up because people tend to vilify movies for things that don't actually happen. in Se7en, the example I mentioned yesterday, there is a man who is forced to fuck a prostitute with a strap-on knife. You don't see anything. You don't even see her body afterwards. You see the guy talking about the ordeal to the cops, and you see a brief picture of the knife in question. Boy, is that all you need! I put that pic into my blog yesterday, and I'm sure not everyone enjoyed it. That knife, along with the mention of its use, could have pushed that movie into an R-rating without any help from the other violence. On the other side of the spectrum, a movie that is thought the be one of the bloodiest and violent movies of all time, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, actually has almost no blood at all. People always think back to that movie and remember all this blood, but really they only saw the chainsaw, heard the motor and saw people about to get ripped apart. No one actually gets killed in a graphic manner on screen. It's all implied. Sometimes it's better to have it implied, but it really works your fears overtime. For squeamish people, it's really better to just watch it. Hearing about can just mess you up.

It's not all bad

Violence in movies/video games/TV is consuming advocacy groups and parents and others who feel like protesting things is a good idea - it has been for a long while. I feel that most of the time the people doing the protests are more worried about being heard than by saying accurate things. Problems are pointed out, but not solved and blame is inaccurately placed.

Recently there was a coup in the world of too-much-violence-in-the-media. Many of you know that there are ratings on video games, (E - Everyone, T - Teen, M - Mature, AO - Adults Only, RP - Rating Pending), but far less of you may know that there is a body of people who rate game ratings for parents. This organization is called The National Institute on Media and the Family and they have been giving out report cards for the video game industry for the last ten years. They keep an eye on what types of games are being released, how the developers advertise, how stores sell and keep tabs on mature games, and how parents treat their kids' video game habits. I usually hate groups like these because they devolve into ridiculous satires of themselves. (Give this group time and maybe I'll be proven wrong.) But seeing things like this year's report card gives me hope that this group won't fall victim to radical bashing and unwarranted fear mongering.

This year's report card was very interesting and it proves that these people are really thinking and trying to get their goals achieved in positive ways. Here's a rundown:

ESRB ratings: A (how well the ratings reflect in-game content)
ESRB rating education: A (how well the public is educated on the ratings system)
Retailer ratings enforcement: B+ (do retailers refrain from selling M-rated games to kids)
Game console manufacturers: A (how good are the parental controls built into consoles)
Parental involvement: Incomplete (do parents check out what their kids are playing)

Read it for yourself.

The group also gives it's top ten games to avoid, but it also gives suggestions for parents on what to buy for their kids of different age groups. This is heartening because it proves that the site isn't just focusing on the bad in video games, but recognizes that video games are perfectly great entertainment, as long as you pay attention to what age groups are being exposed to what games...just like with movies.

Also, it's nice to see that these folks know that it's not Microsoft or Sony's fault that ten-year olds play Grand Theft Auto. The blame is falling on the parents for failing to parent! Careless parents, the same ones that think that anything animated is for kids, are just letting their children play video games without a care in the world. The same parents that think that because South Park: The Movie is animated, it's alright for kids, are the same parents who think that because it's a video game, that it's for children.

What exactly am I getting at? I'll tell you. When I was 15, I saw a little movie called Se7en. It's a great thriller with good acting and it's scary. It is grimy and has awesome atmosphere and is directed by one of my favorites, David Fincher, (Fight Club, Panic Room, Alien 3, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Now, apart from making me even more interested in great movies by David Fincher, I also started reading the classics. I read Dante's Inferno, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (in Old English, thank you very much) and The Merchant of Venice as a direct result of watching Se7en. Now I realize that most teenagers wouldn't watch a movie like Se7en and then rush out to Border's to buy Penguin Classics, but I'll tell you, there was more creative violence in those books than in most of the movies I've seen, and if you know me, you know I've seen a shit-ton of violent movies. I wanted to expand the experience of the movie and see where all this sick shit came from. I was not disappointed.

Sure, in Se7en, there's a guy who fucks a prostitute with a knife, but they mention that it happened, you don't see any of it. (That's actually worse, but maybe I'll write about why it's worse tomorrow.) However, in Dante's Inferno, a guy gnaws through another guy's skull and eats his brain. I play Grand Theft Auto IV, and I do a lot of horrible violent things in that game. But I also have spent a lot of time walking and driving around a fairly accurate facsimile of New York City, and during my recent trip there, I shit you not, my knowledge of Liberty Cities' subway system helped me grasp the way NYC's subway works.

These are little examples, and they probably don't apply to a large number of people, but I took some positive things away from sources that are looked down upon for their complete lack of anything beneficial. I'm not advocating that kids should be playing GTA IV...after all I'd hate to have them think that the best way to get your money back from a prostitute it to run her over with your car, there are some things you should just discover for yourself when the time is right. We want our children, and the populace in general, to be interested in art and classic literature and culture, so who's to complain when the route that brings us to that destination isn't ideal?

Just a quickie today...

So, over the Thanksgiving weekend, the GF and I were in NYC doing it up "Warriors"-style, getting in fights and roaming the streets expanding our turf. What we really did was get kinda dressed up and go see "Equus" on Friday night. "Equus" starred Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) and Richard Griffiths (Uncle Dursley). It was quite a show, and really great. I went in expecting to see a show starring Harry Potter, but went out having seen a great performance by Daniel Radcliffe. (To answer your questions: Yes, he gets naked. Yes, I feel privileged.) I'm sure many many people had the same feeling. However, I then watched the new Harry Potter 6 trailer, and remembered who Daniel Radcliffe really is: Harry fucking Potter.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/harrypotterandthehalfbloodprince/
More later, but I just wanted to get the word out about the new HP trailer, since I didn't know it existed until I stumbled upon it by accident.

PS: Jim Broadbent will rock the house as Horace Slughorn.

SOC

Today I became informed a new digital threat on the horizon: Selectable Output Control. In previous posts I have noted my disdain for DRM (digital rights management), DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), HDCP (high-bandwidth content protection) and the like. These terms are in effect in various forms in our media today. SOC is new to the game, and hasn't been put into effect yet, but if it gains ground and gets rolling, the way we view media and purchase media-viewing devices could change drastically.

Selectable Output Control is a creation of the FCC wherein the broadcast signals put out by cable companies would only be viewable through pre-approved video equipment - SOC-compliant TV's, DVD players, DVD recorders, home theater speakers and receivers, etc. This means that if you bought a brand new HDTV today, and SOC came into being in 6 months, it's very likely that you'd have to buy a completely new and different HDTV. SOC could give a cable channel the right to refuse your viewing rights if you had a DVD recorder hooked up to your TV, even if you weren't using it to record.

It's sounds like a scary "Big Brother" type concept, but this isn't the first time that big media corporations have tried to tell us what we can and can't do with broadcast media in out homes. Universal Studios and Disney sued Sony in 1976 when Sony tried to bring Betamax to the US. Betamax was going to allow people to record from their televisions at their leisure, and that was seen as profit-reducing in the eyes of Disney and Universal. (Disney made $100 million dollars in home video profits alone in 1986. Guess it wasn't such a bad idea.)

Betamax ended up losing the format war to VHS, just as HD has recently lost the digital format war to Blu-ray. There are many reasons as to why these wars were won and lost, and that's fodder for another post. Right now companies, such as Disney, are trying to make sure that we have limited access to that which as been paid for legally and fully. When I buy a DVD I should be able to do whatever I want with it, just like when I buy a CD or bought a VHS tape. I should be able to make a backup, I should be able to make a copy. If I have a timeshare in Florida, maybe I want a copy of my DVD collection down there so everyone can use it. I could have done that with VHS. (If I'd had the time, but that's not the point.)

SOC is just the newest blip on the regulatory radar. Buying a DVD makes that your property, for use as you see fit within fair use guidelines. Companies these days are not interested in fair use, and aren't learning from the past. The harder you hang on to something, the less control you really have. People who download the most illegal MP3's are also the ones who buy the most CDs, LPs and concert tickets. (Yes, I said LPs!)

SOC will potentially also control the type of electronic devices we buy, and if that happens, there are two outcomes: We lapse into consumer laziness and buy whatever we have to buy to watch TV; People get together and start manufacturing their own electronic devices that fall outside the realm of media conglomerates. Ubuntu is an example of the latter outcome: an open-source OS made by its users and contributed to by its users without any DRM whatsoever. Let's just hope that the people in charge realize that the more they let people experience their goods and services, the more people will want to buy said goods and services.

Articles of note:
- "Selectable Output Control", Cory Doctorow, Make Magazine
- "FAQ: Betamax - tech's favorite ruling", John Borland, cnet.com
- "50 years of the Video Cassette Recorder", Sylvie Castonguay, WIPO Magazine

Thanksgiving

Since we will be out of town over this coming holiday, we had a great dinner last night courtesy of the GF herself. Halloween may be my favorite holiday in all of its aspects, but Thanksgiving is a great one too. Firstly, you don't have to spend ridiculous amounts of money buying gifts, nor do you have to spend any time wondering what you want for yourself. The holiday is completely stress-less and delicious to boot! Christmas is great, but I like the atmosphere surrounding that holiday more than the actual holiday itself. Sometime next month I'll write about the things I like that put me into a Christmas mood, but right now here are some of the bonuses of the November holiday season."Garfield's Thanksgiving":
Holiday specials don't really exist for Thanksgiving, but Garfield has a built-in character trait perfect for this particular holiday: gluttony. In this special, Jon, Garfield and Odie's owner, successfully invites the vet, Liz, over to the house for Thanksgiving dinner. She has recently put Garfield on a diet so he can't have any of the traditional Thanksgiving foods. In retaliation, Garfield ruins everything Jon makes, although Jon doesn't need too much help. Shortly thereafter, Liz takes Garfield off the diet in the "spirit of the season" I suppose, and Garfield than has to face the dinner that he ruined. But Jon's grandmother comes to the rescue and makes a full, perfect Thanksgiving dinner anyway, and everything is fine, until next month when Garfield sabotages Odie's Christmas gifts.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles:
It's hard to forget that this story takes place over the subtle tones of Thanksgiving. Most people associate it with Christmas, if they associate it with a holiday at all. Someone in the business, when asked about comedy writing, said that he writes the story first, and then adds the jokes in later, because without a good story, no movie is worth while. Planes, Trains and Automobiles is really funny, but has a good heart too. There isn't a better turn-around of a character than Steve Martin's Neil Page, when he figures out that John Candy's Del Griffith is homeless and not as stoic as he lets on. So Neil takes Del home with him and it's assumed that they become good friends, deep friends, if not daily drinking buddy-type friends. Oh, and there's this great scene at the rental car place with a lot of swearing. If it weren't for this two-minute scene, this movie would be PG and not R. (No one says "cocksucker" like Ian McShane, and no one says "fucking" like Steve Martin.)



Norman Rockwell:
Some people hate his stuff because it hits you over the head with traditional symbols of the holidays, but Norman Rockwell was an amazing painter, and I'll always be touched by his works. For Thanksgiving, Rockwell created the very famous "Thanksgiving", which is the family sitting at the table with the turkey about to be set in front of the patriarch for carving. But I prefer "Cousin Reginald Catches the Thanksgiving Turkey":

South Park episode #61, "Helen Keller, The Musical!":
Once again South Park manages to put me in the mood for the holidays with a musical based on "The Miracle Worker", but with a turkey jumping through a ring of fire. The episode is structurally based around "A Charlie Brown Christmas", as Timmy, the wheelchair-bound child, goes to the turkey farm to pick out a great turkey for the show, only to come back with Gobbles, a retarded turkey who isn't very smart and drags his head everywhere he goes. But it all works out and Gobbles ends up amazing everyone by jumping through the ring of fire anyway, and Timmy turns out to be the hero. There aren't any casualties, except for Kenny and Alinicia, the professional performing turkey who the kids hire when they find out that Timmy picked Gobbles to be in the show.

So there you have it, the things I like about Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving isn't always smiles and light, however. I remember one year when we all sat down to watch the highly anticipated premier of the XFL, Vince McMahon's pro football league. What a fucking waste. I guess it was pretty obvious that it wasn't going to be what people wanted: pro wrestling and football combined. But the cheerleaders were pretty hot, although the concept seemed to be stolen from BASEketball. Oh well.

CGI - the early days

It's hard to imagine that CGI came before AOL instant messenger and before the IBM PS-1, which was my first computer. CGI has been around for a while, since the mid-eighties, and it bears knowing where it came from and how we got from The Professional: Golgo 13 and The Last Starfighter, to The Incredibles and Wall-E. Computers have been used in film from as early as 1971.


In 1971, according to the wikipedia article, Timeline of CGI in Film and Television, a computer was used to render 2-D animation for a short, called "Metadata", by Peter Folds. In 1973 Folds made another short, "The Hunger", wherein a picture of a woman turns into a picture of an ice cream cone. It is the first time a computer was used to estimate the alteration needed to transform one image into another. The next listed instance of CGI was in Westworld, a sci-fi thriller written and directed by Michael Crichton. In Westworld, Yul Brynner stars as an android-cowboy in an amusement park that goes crazy. (Yes, I have this on DVD somewhere. I'll be watching it tonight.) Brynner's POV shots are created with CGI, 2-D wire-frame images depicting his robotic "eyesight". Metamorphosis CGI was also used to great effect in Willow in 1988.CGI comes up again in Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope, (1977). During the scene that the x-wing fighter pilots receive their briefing about how to destroy the Death Star, a 3-D wire-frame schematic is shown, illustrating the Death Star's weak point. The Star Wars series is responsible for many movie magic advancements, and George Lucas started his own effects house, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), to help him achieve all of his wildest drams on camera. (ILM has consequently been at the forefront of many CGI feats in movies, including developing the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park and the T-1000 for Terminator 2: Judgment Day.) My dad, when he was an engineering student at the Univ. of Michigan, worked with a CAD program that had some pre-loaded images on it to illustrate its capabilities. He says that it took the program about an hour to draw a 3-D wire-frame image of a space shuttle. Here's the space shuttle I made in five minutes starting...now!


...and mine's not wire-frame. So, if you didn't know, we've come a long way in regard to CGI and all things computer-generated. It's hard to even notice things like the Death Star schematic, or the navigation monitors from Alien (1979), which were also computer-generated. But in the 1980's, things became a lot more noticeable, and kinda cool looking too.

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan took a giant leap forward in 1982 when ILM created a fractal landscape from a computer for Khan's adopted home planet. This program was called "Genesis Effect" and I think the effect is pretty good, even for today. I don't remember seeing anything fake-looking in that movie, other than creature effects, so I think they pulled off something great. The first time a CGI object was integrated into a movie to replace a real-world object or model was in The Last Starfighter, (1984). The spaceships in the final battle sequence were all rendered in CGI, and while it's painfully obvious that it is CGI, considering where effects were two years prior, this is a monster step in the right direction. No matter how bad you think The Last Starfighter is a a movie, without it we wouldn't have Jurassic Park.


The United States wasn't the only country experimenting with CGI in the early 80's. An anime movie from Japan, The Professional: Golgo 13, which I referenced in my previous post, has s sequence at the end of the film using CGI helicopters shooting out the windows of a huge sky scraper. The CGI is all polygons and gradients, but it's still interesting to see how they worked it in, and it's fully ahead of it's time, since CGI didn't become mainstream within anime for another ten years. (Too bad the sequence itself looks horrible and doesn't even come close to blending in.)



In 1984 Temple of Doom and The Last Starfighter were released into theaters. What a contrast of viewing experiences! That would have been a great double feature: movie effects then and now, followed by movie effects of the future. Seeing the early steps is fun, and reminds of what we take for granted every time we go to the movies.

Off the [well] beaten path

Disney is responsible, in my mind, for making animation a mainstream thing. Adults and children alike have enjoyed Disney films, and will continue to enjoy them as long as they keep coming out. (It doesn't hurt Disney's prospects at all that they fused with Pixar to make the most fantastic animated movies in the world. And on a side note, Pixar started as a computer company selling 3-D graphics-capable software and hardware. In order to demonstrate their products' capabilities, they began making animated shorts, and thus Pixar - and Wall-E and and Toy Story and Monsters Inc and Cars - was born.) So Disney is popular, and will remain so, but some other folks have made successful and great animated features,and they deserve to be recognized, even though you may not have seen them due to Disney's huge status and wide-ranging fame.

Don Bluth was an animator at Walt Disney Studios in the 70's, but left in 1978 after deciding that Disney films had lost their magic. He opened his own studio with a couple other animators who left with him from Disney, and in 1982 they put out a great animated film called The Secret of NIMH. This movie, which I watched probably 20 times when I was a kid, is such a perfect piece of magical storytelling, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It deserves its PG rating, and parents should watch this film with their younger children, but the parents will enjoy it too. It is dark and funny and has more than a few memorable characters. Don Bluth's studios also put out An American Tale in 1986, which is another wonderful non-Disney animated movie.


If you really can't stand children's films, then check out 1976's Once Upon A Girl, an X-rated pornographic animated movie about the characters from Mother Goose romping around and basically fucking one another. It was animated by Disney animators as a sort of "rebellion"...so at least you know the quality is pretty good. My favorite part is the Jack and the Beanstalk segment, wherein Jack goes up and has a fling with the giant's wife, also a giant. The moral of the story is, he fits anywhere!


If that's too hardcore for some of you, as I understand that it might be, check out Heavy Metal, a sci-fi piece of animation with a ton of robot-on-robot violence and futuristic scenery taken directly from the magazine of the same name. It's a fun movie, albeit a little outlandish and often choppy in its storytelling. If you like sci-fi, action and sex, then Heavy Metal is something you should see. The soundtrack is full of good music too: Sammy Hagar, Cheap Trick, Nazareth, Blue Oyster Cult, Stevie Nicks, and many others.

Back to the tepid side of the pool, my GF would kill me if I didn't bring up The Land Before Time, from Universal in 1988. I don't remember liking this movie that much myself, but I haven't seen it since the theaters, and any film that ends up producing 12 sequels must be worth checking out. If you like dinosaurs, (and really, who doesn't?), then this movie is for you, and your kids...and probably your kids' kids too.

So things aren't always so Disney-centric. If you start to feel that all the animation is coming from one place, just search a little harder to find the hidden gems. The movies I've mentioned aren't out of print, nor were they obscure cult films...except that fairy tale porn one...and they can found in any rental outlet. I only bring this up because these days it seems that larger corporations are taking over, and that everything we use and see is from one or two places. This list goes to show that even in the heyday of hand-drawn animation, others were doing their own thing without the help of a distributor power-house like Disney. To close, here's a list of some other wonderful animated films that don't start with an image of the Magic Castle.

All Dogs Go To Heaven (1989)


Akira (1988)


The Professional: Golgo 13 (1983)


The Water Babies (1978)


The Phantom Tollbooth (1970)


The Hobbit (1977)


Fritz the Cat (1972)


Wizards (1977)


Watership Down (1978)


Charlotte's Web (1973)


Project A-ko (1986)