More Video Game Commercials

Haven't written in a long time, but I had to share this with you:

I think this trailer for Dead Island is amazingly innovative. I love the way it unfolds and watching the blood "unspurt" into that bell boy's neck is awesome.

Slugs!

It's October, so I'm watching horror movies, and nothing but horror movies...with the few exceptions being Halloween-themed stuff. I'll do another post about favorites, but this post is all about the movie Slugs. I just got it from Netflix, and watched it the same day. It's sort of a precious memory from my youth that I finally caught up to. I know I wrote something about being too scared to watch something as a child only to watch it as an adult and be disappointed. This was sort of toeing the line of that idea. I was disappointed, by the lack of exposed breasts, and it wasn't scary at all, but it was also a really good time. Camp to the extreme.

What was my favorite part? It might be the fact that verisimilitude was achieved by intercutting footage of real slugs along with the footage of the fake "stage slugs". The stage slugs tended to look at a lot like feces. So when the terror on screen hits you, it's not scary. You're just looking at a person covered in fake blood and glued on pieces of poop. But I think my favorite part was that the movie tried very hard to paint the portrait of a small town being besieged by killer slugs, yet the savior and go-to know-it-all was a British scientist who works at the high school. The high school. And he has a fully stocked lab that would be better suited to a college campus. But he's British, so you don't question him because he sounds smarter than you.

On top of all that, the film was a Spanish production. Everyone in the crew was Spanish. Half of the cast were American, while the supporting cast was Spanish. Everyone was dubbed. If you want to make sure that the crappy horror movie that you're planning to watch will be fun, make sure a foreign crew is trying to make their production look like it takes place in small town America. (East coast is the best because then things really feel out of place.) Another good example of foreigners making a movie that takes place in small town east coast America is Pieces. Tagline: You don't have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw massacre. But back to Slugs, which takes place in upstate New York.

A fun thing that sometimes happens when watching a movie is that the opening credits tell you shit you could never have begun to imagine or believed was true. For instance, regarding the movie Slugs, some really terrible movies are actually based on books. Slugs was a fucking book before it was a movie. It was written by Shaun Hutson. After writing Slugs, he also wrote the genre head-turners Relics, Spawn, Victims, Hybrid and a few other novels you see in airports. Someone had to borrow the idea for this movie from a book because they were stuck and had movie-makers block. Then they actually went to the bank and took out a loan so they could buy the rights to the book Slugs. (Here are some other movies based on books that don't seem like they'd be based on books: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, based on Who Censored Roger Rabbit; Dangerous Minds, based on My Posse Don't Do Homework; Die Hard, based on Nothing Lasts Forever; Bryanna Loves Jenna, based on the entire run of Hustler Magazine which is based on the idea of guys loving it when two naked girls get crazy together. Unfortunately, this did not happen in Slugs.)

So the American book, Slugs was bought by some Spanish filmmakers and they made a movie with a British scientist in it. We all know that British people have the world monopoly on legitimizing anything they say, and we also know that anyone foreign also speaks English with a British accent. (i.e. every Nazi in the history of cinema.) Therefore, by the virtue of having a British scientist in the film, Slugs is a great movie filled with scientific facts, one scene of fucking, lots of fake blood with too much red food coloring, and five inch long pieces of poo terrorizing the city of Merton.

And speaking of Merton. Merton has got to be the dorkiest name of a fake town in the history of fake towns. Merton. If Merton was a classmate of yours you'd have given him a dozen wedgies, taped him to his locker and broken his glasses. To illustrate my point of how anticlimactic a town named Merton is, here is the tagline of the book that was created to give your nerves a jangling and make you want to read every page of this fast-paced thriller!

"One female slug can lay one and a half million eggs a year - a fact which holds terrifying consequences for the people of Merton."

Everything about that sentence is fine, and it makes you curious I suppose, until you get t the word Merton. "Wow", you think, "one and a half million eggs a year...creepy". "Terrifying consequences! Sounds exciting!" "Merton?! What the fuck is a Merton?" Then you could care less. "The people of Merton." sounds like the most boring people ever to exist. I don't want to visit Merton's famous twenty year old flea market, or come to town for the annual parade of Mr. Merton who settled it in the late 1800's because no one wanted him to live with them in the nearby settlement of Somewhere Cooler Than Merton.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, please see Slugs. It's really funny and there are boobs in it. Next on the Netflix queue: Mountain of the Cannibal God. Is it a quality production? probably not. Does it involve cannibals who have an unhealthy sexual fixation on star Ursula Andress? Why yes, yes it does.

District 9

It's hard for me to write about movies like this because the obvious allegory that is provided by this film is easy to comment about. Everyone wants to say something about how this movie is apartheid for aliens. (It is apartheid for aliens.) But when I was watching it I still felt that there was something more to District 9 than it's obvious surface metaphor. Technically speaking it's a triumph. Story-wise I thought it was very solid and compelling.

We'll start with the easy praise: the special effects. I can only think of one word to describe them: seamless. The CGI recalled for me the images created not long ago of a looming Death Star above San Francisco's bay area. The news footage could have been culled directly from some networks' stock footage rolls. The images of the huge alien spaceship hanging above Johanesberg were amazingly realisticl. The integration of new footage-type shots looked authentic. I know we live in an age of very ultra-real movie effects but there's a difference between something seeming to be real and something actually looking like it exists in the world. What this movie lacked was the subconscious sheen that most CGI has. I can almost always tell if something is CGI because there are subtle lighting hints. The CGI is too dark or too light or too shiny or too dull. It's the difference between Jabba the Hutt in Episode I and Jabba the Hutt in Episode VI. One of them is a rubber puppet existing on the set, and the other is a fully CGI creation amidst a sea of CGI creations. Even though the CGI Jabba moves more fluidly, the lethargic puppet seems more realistic because it "feels" visually like a real thing.

I never felt that the CGI in District 9 was CGI. (I mean I knew, but it never took me out of the story.) At one point I actually had to ask myself if there was some puppetry going on that I couldn't discern. [**mini spoiler**] At one point the main character, Wikus, ingests a fluid that starts to turn his body into an alien. It's hard to see a difference between the prosthetic arm that he wears and the CGI arms of the CGI aliens populating the movie. [**end mini spoiler**].

Here's a short synopsis of the story: An alien spaceship appears over the city of Johanesberg, South Africa and there are a lot of malnourished, injured aliens on board. People bring them down to earth and set up a ghetto of sorts for the million+ aliens to live in. Twenty years go by and no one has any idea what these aliens are doing here or why they can't go home. They're just living on earth and growing in numbers. People become hostile towards the aliens and want them gone. A relocation camp is set up for the aliens and a group of people go about getting the aliens to move to the new location. That's about it for basic premise. The head relocation chief, Wikus, ends up in the middle of the alien - human dispute and learns the hard way how the aliens are living and what the humans' views towards them really are. (The aliens have weaponry that is DNA-enabled, so humans can't use it, but they're constantly trying to figure out a way.)

What makes this story work and what makes the allegory work is that when you see the aliens living in these decrepit conditions you think to yourself, "Whatever, they are just creatures and I'm not moved by this imagery". I remember watching a scene of news footage with aliens rooting around in the garbage for scraps of edible material, fighting with each other for bits and pieces of trash, and I realized that what I was watching was no different than what a lot of people on this planet go through daily. I wasn't watching someone's idea of poverty, I was watching an example of reality. Maybe that means I'm slower than most, but it impressed me and disturbed me to figure out that if I had no problem seeing the aliens in these conditions then I had no problem seeing the "others" in the world in these conditions. Also, when I became bothered by seeing the aliens in those drab environments fighting for trash, I was also being bothered that this exact same thing was occurring on my planet.

[**SPOILER**]

The part of this movie that worked most for me was the very end, and I'm going to give it away right now. The protagonist, Wikus, fully turns into an alien. Visually he becomes no different than any other alien in the film. From that standpoint no human can distinguish him from the race of creatures they find despicable. Mentally, he is the same person that he was before, albeit without his innocence. He still yearns for his wife and his life the way it used to be. It proves a point: I can never know what someone in that position is thinking. They don't look like me, but we could be very much alike. I'll always be hung up on our differences, therefore neglecting to focus on our similarities. It seems obvious to say it, but since a story like this has never been told with the help of extra terrestrials as the device, it seems fresh and new to me.

[**END SPOILER**]

I also loved this movie because it was visceral and gritty. The special effects were seamless, as I've said, but they were also gory. I enjoyed the horror aspects to the story - laser guns that explode people's heads, mutating alien arms growing out of people, etc. District 9 was a great film from a sci-fi and from a political viewpoint. I feel I learned a lot about the politics of the South African region and about apartheid specifically. I was also treated to a great story with a vague ending that I can think about and determine for myself in any way I choose. The story is left open. You don't know if promises made will become promises kept, and the future of some characters is uncertain, but that's how it is right now in our lives with people in refugee camps and with the battles that are raging in these war-torn regions of the world. Their stories haven't ended yet, so it's fitting that the story in District 9 is left unfinished as well.

Freaky Robotic Hand

This is video of a robot hand made by researchers in Japan. This hand can do many things, very fast, and very accurately. The hand can dribble a ball on the table, pick up a grain of rice with tweezers, throw a ball, twirl a pen and toss something to itself and catch it. The video is about 3 minutes long, but really interesting. At least I know that when the zombie apocalypse happens, we'll be safe with robot-defense.

FAIL!

I just discovered a site, thanks to a friends' Facebook posting, about a site called Fail Blog. It's in the same vein as Awkward Family Photos in that it's a bunch of ridiculous stuff. If you've ever heard of the phrase "Epic Fail", it's an MMO video game term, then you know what this site will be about. The categories for the posts are limitless, but in every post someone has failed at something. For instance, the man with the clear plastic shopping bag over his head that he uses to stand in for safety goggles is labelled "Eye Safety Fail". Get it? Anyhow, here's a link to the site:

Fail Blog

And here are a few choice entries that have made me laugh out loud this morning.

Bus Ride Fail

Parenting Fail

Grocery Outlet Fail

Cardinal Fail

Disneyland Photo Fail

Haunted Mansion!

Disney's Haunted Mansion is 40 years old today, so to commemorate this, here are a couple fantastic YouTube videos about the my favorite ride in Disney World. (I am really bummed that I missed out on the Nightmare Before Christmas integration for the holiday season.)

Video Game Advertising

There is a current trend in video game TV advertising that gives a whole new meaning to the word "juxtaposition". Lately we've been getting a lot of violent material in our video games (which I love, but some don't) and the commercials for these games have been set to music that is the complete thematic antithesis of the video game content. Below are some examples. The best and most recent one is the final clip advertising Left 4 Dead. (Left 4 Dead is the most fun and most exhilarating zombie-fighting experience out there.)

Mercenaries 2

Batman Arkham Asylum

Gears of War

Gears of War 2

Fallout 3

Left 4 Dead 2

Halo 3

The music completely downplays what's going on visually and plays with your head a lot. If you didn't realize how important the balance of visuals and sound play when you watch a movie or TV show, now you know. The sound can transform what you're seeing in interesting ways. I love this style of advertising and I hope they continue to keep it up for a while.

Rob Zombie is like golf

Most of the time Rob Zombie makes some decent stuff, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, he hits one out of the park. Just like me and golf. About 90% of the time I'm playing poorly enough to want to give up, but then I hit some great drive, and that one shot keeps me going.

This interview with Rob Zombie about the upcoming Halloween 2 is good. He mirrors my feelings about Halloween itself and why it didn't work. I will see Halloween 2 and I will go with optimism in my heart. Of course, I still don't feel he's going to wow me the way he did with The Devil's Rejects, but one can hope.

Here's the interview over at Aint It Cool News.

Two Things I'm Enamored with Today

Here are two items from the web, both referenced to me by my favorite site for crazy awesome stuff: boingboing.net.

The first is a four minute-long video of the Hubble telescope's Ultra Deep Field. Apparently, in 2004, the guys running the Hubble telescope pointed it out into a black piece of space about the size of a grain of sand, and opened the aperture up for eleven days to take in some light and see if anything could be captured on the CCD. They ended up with the light of thousands of galaxies. It's an intense video that does a great job of illustrating how large the universe is and why we are such a tiny tiny part of it. Hard evidence like this is why people wonder what else is out there.



This next piece is from Bazaar magazine. They did a spread this month of supermodels without makeup. It's a great piece, and it makes me wonder, as I always have, why everyone cakes on the makeup anyway? People look great without it.

Bazaar: Keep It Real

Adaptation, for better or worse

A comment by a friend of mine in the Harry Potter post I did several days ago made a comment about Shell Cottage, the home of the Bill and Fleur and how the filmmakers had better not leave it out of HP7! So much happens there that I won't spoil for anyone, but Bill and Fleur have to get married first right? Well that part is at the beginning of book 7. But they get married at the Burrow...and there was a huge fire at the Burrow at the beginning of the 6th movie. That fire, along with the whole scene of Ginny and Harry being led out into the middle of nowhere, was fabricated for the movie and did not appear in the book.

Why make up a scene like that with the point being that the bad guys burned down the Burrow? maybe it's because the filmmakers aren't planning on putting the wedding into the seventh movie. Bill and Fleur weren't even in the sixth movie, so chances are they won't be in the seventh movie either. Why would the filmmakers do that? One word: Streamlining.

A movie works very differently than a book. In a book you can take detours and build character relationship in a much more intimate and intricate way than in a movie. It takes hours to read a book, and two hours (roughly) to watch a movie. You cannot possibly put everything from a book into its movie adaptation. It blows because some of the best parts of books are never in the films. Here are some examples:

- Fight Club: Ed Norton's character meets Tyler Durden on a plane in the movie. In the book he meets Tyler when Tyler is making a sun dial in the sand with sticks on a beach while Norton's character is on vacation. Why didn't this appear in the movie? To impress upon the viewers of the film that Ed Norton's character is high strung and in a bad place professionally and psychologically, you can't have him go on vacation to try and unwind. A movie-going audience won't accept his issues is he's on vacation. Plus you can't break u a gritty city movie like Fight Club with some scenes of a lovely beach in the bright sunlight with cool blue water.

- Lord of the Rings: There are two huge issues in this epic, and many more small ones. I'm going to bring up Tom Bombadil and the romance between Aragorn and Arwen. Tom Bombadil is a much loved character from Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo and Sam meet him on their way out of the Shire. Tom is very much a man of the [middle] earth. He is so in touch with nature that he is immune to the One Ring's effects. Therefore he can't be in a movie about how dark and powerful the ring is. In order for the audience to believe that the ring is this terrible thing that is the scourge of Middle Earth and must be destroyed, a character like Tom Bombadil can't exist in the film. If Tom exists, then why not give him the ring?

As to the romance bits, Aragorn does indeed love Arwen in the book and they do get married. However, Arwen's character barely exists in the book. She certainly doesn't do any fighting, nor does she have visions of the future. But a movie has to appeal to as many people as possible. In order to do that you have to give women a reason to go see a movie that is basically about fighting. It may sound sexist, but it's true. So the filmmakers trumped up the romance in order for the film to have a wider appeal.

- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: I assume that Bill and Fleur will not exist in this movie for much the same reason as Ludo Bagman never existed in the fourth movie and because Winkie was never a character in previous movies either" Streamlining. The filmmakers have already set up their omission of the wedding, and they can have Dobby do his thing in the seventh book anywhere they want. Because of this they don't need to hire actors to play Bill and Fleur nor do they need to ad one more location. I could be wrong, but I think the wedding won't be there. If it is, I don't think they'll make Bill and Fleur big characters.

Of course the seventh book is being made into two films, so they will have about five hours to tell the story instead of just two and a half. We will see.

In closing, adaptation sucks, but is necessary. You have to move things around and create the illusion of cohesion for a film. I've said it before and I'll say it again: A movie is an illusion from start to finish. Everything about a movie is fake. In order to sell the story visually, you must make sure that the audience buys into certain plot points and ideas. To do that some things must be sacrificed or moved around.

In case you were curious...

The website Mr. Skin, which is an inventory of nude scenes in movies, is 10 years old today and so they have prepared a list of the 100 best nude scenes ever.

It's not a complete list, and of course, they've left out a few favorites, but it's a pretty comprehensive gathering of celebrity T & A. If you wanna take a look, then go ahead. There isn't any nudity at all. You have to pay extra for that at Mr. Skin.

Mr. Skin's Top 100 Nude Scenes

John Hughes

You may have heard the term "universal" when applied to some movies. It seems like a cheap term derived mostly to market certain movies to as many people as possible, but there is a director who has made movies that I feel are universal. John Hughes' work is a part of me. It's a part of everyone born between 1965 and 1990. Hughes made movies with such funny plots, such endearing and honest characters, and such overall personality that it's hard to think of anyone whose oevre has more reality instilled in it.

John Hughes directed only eight movies. Six of them I could watch anytime, anywhere, as could most people. Of the eight movies Hughes directed, here are my top five: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Weird Science, Planes, Trains and Automobiles. (Uncle Buck is just slightly less impressive to me than these five, but I still love it.) Is there anyone who can't put themselves into one of these films? There is someone's high school lifestyle approximately personified in at least one of these movies, probably more than one.

More astounding still is that Hughes has done great films from both the female and male perspective. He's captured geeks and jocks, popular girls and nobodies. I don't care how cool you were in high school, you can still identify with Wyatt and Gary in Weird Science. I don't care how popular you were, there is some of you in either Breakfast Club-Molly Ringwald or Sixten Candles-Molly Ringwald. (And speaking of, how perfect is she in these movies? A-plus amazing.)

The only thing that separates these movies from being timeless is their obvious '80's accessories. The cars, clothes and hair all serve to remind us that these stories are actually taking place in a world without cell phones, iPods, ABS brakes or Abercrombie and Fitch. I am put perfectly at ease by a Hughes movie. Going back to the world of the fictional Shermer, Illinois is a comforting thing. (It doesn't always work out for everyone though. See Jay and Silent Bob's issues with Hughes and Shermer in Dogma.)

Some might say these films aren't great because they are full of crude humor, drinking/drug abuse and sex. My answer to those people is that these things are what matter to teens. They are what make up the fabric of teen lives. For better or worse, a teenager's life revolves around sex and drugs and a lot of crude humor. Weird Science is the movie that I like best. I love the ultra-sexy Kelly LeBrock and I really enjoy watching the guys try to impress everyone and be popular. So many kids pine for popularity. The point of a lot of these movies, and I've found this to be true in my life as well, is that outside of school, outside of the cliques, the kids are all very eager to meet on common ground. I remember, just as many of you do, being cool with someone all summer, but losing that friendship when school started. Or being able to say "hello" to someone only if no one else was around them.

John Hughes was an amazing personality. I don't know him personally of course, and maybe he was just existing in the past and trying to make sense of his youth as a jock or geek. In any event he made movies that have lives of their own. He created characters who make you laugh and cry. His characters were ones you empathized with. You don't just watch a John Hughes movie, you part of it is in you and there will always be a draw to his films for that reason.

Not to leave anything out, but John Hughes also wrote a lot of great films. In addition to all the movie he directed, Hughes also wrote The Great Outdoors, Home Alone (1-4), the first three Lampoon Vacation films and Mr. Mom. (They're all worth checking out...except Home alone 3 and 4.)

The only film that has come out lately that reminds me of the magic of a John hughes movie is Can't hardly Wait. The people that made that movie did their hughes homework and I really enjoy the movie. It's like an updated version of Sixteen Candles from the opposite side of the gender divide. Go watch a John Hughes movie ASAP. (I watched Sixteen Candles this afternoon.)

I'm officially weirded out

Over at boingboing.net they've posted a link to a blurb about a 3,000 year old Egyptian statue that just happens to look EXACTLY like Michael Jackson. I can't add anything to this.

3,000 year old Jackson bust

Harry Potter and the lack of a real plot

I know I've taken a lot of time off, and I'm really sorry. But since no one's been reading my blog anyway, I think it's safe to say, no one needs this apology.

I am now living in beautiful and (sometimes) sunny Colorado. Things here are great, except for the whole no job thing and the whole no money because of no job thing. It still beats Ithaca. Sorry, Ithacans.

Being unemployed means a couple things: sleeping in, watching moves, not really being able to fully enjoy either. Sure I've got a lot of free time, but when you're just waiting for word on a job, you can't really relax to the fullest, and therefore, all the great things that you'd be enjoying on a regular day off are eclipsed by your longing to not actually have a day off.

But this blog is about movies, right? Well I've watched a few recently, so here we go with some brief comments about one of them.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was really dark...perfect tone for this one. They cut out all my favorite parts though so that upset me a bit. And really, when you take a huge long book and reduce it down to its bare necessities, you get to see what purpose it serves in the greater scheme of the fictional universe it resides in. Half-Blood Prince doesn't really have a lot of content. Sure, some stuff happens, but it's mostly business as usual. The really dark horrors of the Wizarding world aren't going to come to light until the final (next) book, and the Order has already been set up, so really this book is just a really really long way to tell the reader about Dumbledore's death. There's aren't any big plot revelations. Snape being the Half-Blood Prince doesn't give us any information or progress towards a resolution with the whole Voldemort taking over the world thing. Harry, Ron and Hermione don't gel any more, they don't make any huge revelations or grow much during this installment either.

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it, but a movie has to have more to it than that. A movie has to be engaging all the way through and basically serve a purpose. While the book became a Voldemort historical guide, the movie omitted all that and we were left with nothing really. Nothing that couldn't have been told in the first two chapters of Deathly Hallows. What did we learn in this book/movie? Horcruxes. That's it. Not really substantial enough if you ask me, which you haven't, but you're reading this anyway.

The book can have all these great asides and give us some more minute character depth, etc, but a movie is forced to cut that out and therefore it feels more empty. Good movie, great way to get a preview of what's coming as far as tone and mood, but other than that, not fulfilling enough.

And just so we're clear, the parts they cut out that I was really excited to see were all the pensieve visits to the Marvolo residence. I would have been happy to see a movie just about Morphin and Marope and Marvolo. That movie would've been rated PG-13, but so much the better. Order of the Phoenix was rated PG-13, and I bet it didn't hurt ticket sales one iota. And why should the Wizarding world become a darker place while the movies get rated lighter? Half-Blood Prince was only PG. I'm not saying that a movie can't really be good if it's PG because Prisoner of Azkabahn, my favorite movie, is only PG. But man does that movie have substance and depth. I guess we can't all be Alfonso Cuaron.

I just wonder how the next two movies will be rated. Right in the first pages of Deathly Hallows is a scene with Voldemort and his followers sitting around the table in Lucious Malfoy's hall watching and talking about a naked woman suspended in mid air upside down being tortured and then killed. Make that PG...I dare you.

They will be able to though. Tomorrow I'll tell you why.

For all you literature fans out there

Here's a rare treat for you folks who enjoy rare treats, or literature in general: James Joyce reading from Finnegan's Wake. Ever wondered, as I have, how it's supposed to sound? Wonder no longer!

James Joyce reading from Finnegan's Wake.

Since I love weird design

Threadless.com, the t-shirt company, does design competitions and the winner gets his or her design made into a shirt.

A friend of mine from Toronto submitted his design, so you should check it out and then go to threadless.com/submissions and vote for him. The other designs are ones I voted for that I thought were cool. My friend's design is the first one.

David Carradine

David Carradine started his acting career in 1963, and according to imdb.com has acted in 221 shows/movies/whatever. But after going through that entire list, I found out that there have only been three movies in which I've seen Carradine perform. It's a testament to his greatness that even though I've only seen him in three movies, I still know what a legend he was. (Yes that's right, I've never seen an episode of "Kung Fu", which is what he's most famous for.)

Having only seen three of his 221 various on screen performances makes writing this article about him a lot easier. The three movies I know David Carradine from are: Kill Bill (1 and 2), Circle of Iron and Death Race 2000 (1975). All of those movies are a lot of fun, especially if you're a geeky movie dork like myself. Death Race 2000 is a Roger Corman film from the height of the Corman era of film making, so it's campy and a riot. In Death Race 2000 Carradine co-stars with Sylvester Stallone (before Rocky), and the guy who plays the evil sensei from the Cobra Kai dojo in The Karate Kid. (Oh alright, his name is Martin Kove.)

In Death Race 2000, Carradine plays Frankenstein, the winningest racer on the circuit. The film takes place in the future where everyone in America loves to watch Death Race in which racers drive from point A to point B and try to run over everyone in their path as well as kill the other racers. The more infirm or young the victims along the way, the more points are earned. Frankenstein is the biggest baddest racer ever, but in a nice twist he has gotten tired of the race and what it stands for politically, so he plots to use his fame and success to kill the president of the united states. I'll only say that the movie has a happy ending, whatever that means. If you like a nice solid B movie with some T & A and violence thrown together with some dark comedic elements, you should rent Death Race 2000 right away.



Here's what Carradine had to say to The A.V. Club about Death Race 2000:
"I had just walked off Kung Fu. Kung Fu was never cancelled; I just left. I decided I had enough of it, and I thought I should do a movie right away, because I think when you leave a television series, it's important that you establish the fact that you're a movie actor really quickly, or you might never get that chance. So this Death Race 2000 thing came up, and the other thing I wanted to do was get rid of the image of the character I play on Kung Fu. And this character Frankenstein, who runs over people, would definitely do that. So I took the movie, and we shot it in three weeks. I had a lot of trouble with Paul Bartel, the director—I almost got fired off the picture at one point before we actually started shooting. We had a very difficult time choosing who was going to play my navigator, and we finally got Simone Griffeth, who was the most perfectly constructed human being I have ever had the opportunity to hang out with naked. That was kind of interesting. And we shot it in three weeks. The whole picture was shot in the hills of Los Angeles, even though it's supposed to be a cross-country race. And we shot the whole picture for $350,000. It was raining all the time, which you actually can't see, but it was always drizzling, which made some of the turns in our racecars a little scary with the wet roads. I had 9.3 percent of the producer's gross after break-even, which I didn't think would be worth anything on a little movie made in three weeks, but I made probably close to a million dollars. And I think I've got a lot more coming."

The next film from Carradine that I've seen is Circle of Iron. I really like the philosophy of this movie and the lessons its trying to teach. It goes parallel with "Kung Fu" because both the show "Kung Fu" and the movie Circle of Iron were products of Bruce Lee's imagination. (The original title of the movie as created by Bruce Lee was The Silent Flute.) Originally Bruce Lee was to star in "Kung Fu", as it was his show, but producers didn't think that American audiences would root for and endear to an Asian leading man, so they cast Carradine instead into Lee's vision. The same thing happened with Circle of Iron.

In Circle of Iron there was always supposed to be one man who played four roles, and it was originally intended to be made in 1969. Bruce Lee was supposed to play The Blind Man, The Monkeyman, Death and Changsha, and the protagonist, Cord, was to be played by Steve McQueen. McQueen didn't want to make Lee a star so he offered the four roles to James Colburn. The movie never made it to the light of day. later on, after Bruce Lee's tragic death in 1975, David Carradine acquired the rights to Circle of Iron, cast a friend of his in the lead of Cord and himself played the Blind Man, Monkeyman, Changsha and Death roles. Eli Wallach also co-starred as did Christopher Lee.

Here is the synopsis from imdb.com:
"A young martial artist, Cord the Seeker, competes for and loses the right to go on a quest for the Book of All Knowlege held by a wizard named Zetan, but he goes along the path to seek Zetan anyway. Along the way, he meets strange tests and challenges by enemies and allies - often having difficulty determining which is which."

This could easily become an article about Bruce Lee, but you can't talk about Carradine and not talk a little about Bruce Lee because they had such similar philosophical interests in addition to their martial arts backgrounds. A lot of Lee's ideas are still present in Circle of Iron and although on the surface it looks like a throw-away movie about a guy who fights a lot of people and talks to an almost cliche character of the wandering prescient blind man, there are many great idea to be found at the movie's core. Plus the hair on the guy who plays Cord is a must-see...

Here's what Carradine had to say about playing the different roles in Circle of Iron:
"It helped when they were changing my looks and everything, but really, what's the difference between Changsha, the guy in the desert who never wears a shirt, and The Blind Master? They're both just me. I'm doing a funny little accent as the guy in the desert, and my blowfish routine, where I'm able to expand my chest and look like I've got muscles. And then The Blind Master, you look at this guy and he's just skin and bones, right? He's just as soft as he can be, while the guy in the desert is rippling with muscles. And sometimes I'd play those two characters in a single day. It 's a question of posture, really."

Which brings me to my, as yet, final viewing experience with David Carradine, Kill Bill. Carradine plays Bill, a role originally intended for Warren Beatty. Kill Bill was intended to be one complete movie, but with it's length, the Weinstein's decided to cut it up into two films instead. Carradine isn't even shown in the first segment, he only appears as Bill in the second part. And he's amazing in Vol. 2. What's great about Quentin Tarantino and a film like Kill Bill with a character like Bill played by a guy like Carradine, is that the role of Bill feels almost like a culmination of all the major cult roles Carradine had played beforehand. Bill is a fighter, a philosopher and an all-around awesome badass guy. You want to pound shots of tequila with him or spar or go for a walk and talk about random meaningless shit. And yet he's the main villain at the same time that he's being so magnetic.

Bill could be Caine from "Kung Fu", he could be a reincarnation of the Blind Man from Circle of Iron, (plus he plays theflute he uses if Circle of Iron too), but he's as hard and tough as both of them put together along with Cole Younger from The Long Riders. It's a brilliant role. There's not much more to say about it. As a bit of trivia however, the yellow jumpsuit that Uma Thurman wears in Vol. 1 is the same as the one Bruce Lee wore in Game of Death, the film he died shooting. I told you Lee and Carradine go together.



Here are Carradine's thoughts on Kill Bill:
"Kill Bill was, what can I say, just an incredible experience. Quentin [Tarantino] is more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Actually, he is a barrel of monkeys. And he's just a great filmmaker, there's no doubt about that. He's a huge party guy, but making the movie, it's strictly business. Very serious about what he does. And he knows more about movies than anybody I've ever met. It was just an incredible joy working with him, and with Uma Thurman. Most of my stuff, I worked with Uma and Michael Madsen and that was about it, but I hung out with everybody, and we trained together for three months. Five days a week, eight hours a day for three months. I think that's more than you'd do for the Olympics. Can you imagine? We're talking about Uma Thurman, Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu, I think a couple other ladies, and they're all in sweats or trunks or something, working out, and I get to do that with them. Eight hours a day, five days a week, for three months. That was almost better than making the movie."

How to waste time when you're forced to sit in front of a computer

I learn a lot of stuff during a day at work. I have a select core of websites that I visit every day to get the "important" stuff, and then if I really honestly have no work to do, I dick around on the internet. Speaking of dicking around on the internet, here's a great site:

superdickery.com

Go there and click on GALLERIES and start perusing all the myriad comic book covers that have Superman or Batman being a complete dick to someone else for no good reason. You will be laughing out loud shortly.

And, because I know you care about my habits, here are the sites I visit daily upon sitting down in front of my computer:

Yahoo mail
Gmail
bloody-disgusting.com
horror-movies.ca
aintitcool.com
slashfilm.com
twitchfilm.net
boingboing.net
avclub.com
seriouswheels.com
gamespot.com
mobygames.com
comics.com
menagea3.net (really fantastic web comic...hilarious but sometimes NSFW)
licd.com

Then I can begin my day. (Facebook is also in there somewhere...as well as this blog.)

When I hit up all those sites and there's still nothing else to do, I try to find things to watch. Here are some great places to watch cool stuff:

boreme.com
hulu.com
fearnet.com
youtube.com (obviously)

Free movies are great, and free movies that aren't censored are even better.

I recommend going to fearnet.com to watch one of their free horror movies! I highly recommend making your choice, 976-Evil 2...the sequel to the movie that really didn't need a sequel, 976-Evil. (I'm pretty sure you don't need to see the original in order to follow the uber-twisty plot of the sequel.) Here's the fantastic plot summary used to draw you in to watching this shit-fest:

"A hot co-ed learns that her dean is a rotting ghost who uses astral projection to kill people."

Happy time-wasting!

Oh, if you want to watch an actual good horror movie, check out Night of the Creeps, also on fearnet.com.

Robbie the Rabbit

One of my favorite horror video games of all time is Silent Hill 2. I like Silent Hill 2 because it is the only one I've actually played. Thankfully, I've read a lot of articles online saying that #2 is the best game of the series anyway, so I feel pretty good about that. (I own a copy of Silent Hill 5 but I've not had the chance to play it yet.)

The enemies/villains in the Silent Hill series are creepy and grotesque and really creative and fucked up. My favorite, many people's favorite, is Pyramid Head, or The Red Pyramid. Here is his picture:

He is really cool, and in the movie they make him awesome. This picture is him from the movie. in the games, as far as I know, he never carries around a dead body. He does represent a sexual id of the protagonist though, so he is often doing some really strange, apparently sexual things when you see him. But I digress.

In Silent Hill 3 you go to the abandoned amusement park and you see Robbie the Rabbit, the mascot, sitting slumped on a park bench. He has blood all over his mouth and he's probably dead. From what we know about amusement park mascots we can infer that there is a guy in the costume. Why the blood on the mouth? No idea!

In Silent Hill 4 you are in a room in an apartment building for most of the game. There is a hole in the wall that allows you to see into the room next to you and you can often look in there and check on the woman who lives there. She has a Robbie the Rabbit stuffed animal on her bed. Seems fine, but after you look in her room more than 10-12 times, you see Robbie the Rabbit staring and pointing at you!

But to add some humor as well as increase the creepiness of Robbie, here's a mash-up video of his many appearances in Silent Hill. (Most of the appearances are in Silent Hill: Arcade which is only available in Japan.)

UPDATE: The video I've posted above of Robbie the Rabbit is apparently part of a bunch of clips called The Art of Silent Hill that are on the DVD of Silent Hill the movie...I pakced my DVD so I can't prove this yet, but that's the story.

Interview Project

David Lynch has completed a project of interviews of random every-day folks. He is posting these interviews on the website, interviewproject.davidlynch.com. You may know David Lynch from some of his movies, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive, Dune, Blue Velvet; or you may know him from his television show, Twin Peaks. He's a weird guy, but he's got very interesting ideas and can implement them well.

Yesterday marked the first day of the project, and I intend to watch it through to its completion. I usggest you check it out too because it's interesting and you might enjoy it.

interviewproject.davidlynch.com