It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Not that I’ve got a bootleg copy of Good vs. Evil or anything, but if I did it’d be medium quality video recorded from the Sci-Fi Channel with the Sci-Fi logo in the upper right hand corner and all. But it’d be the whole schmear on three DVDs, both the first season on USA and the second season on Sci-Fi. So it’d be totally worth it.
There might be an email address — dvd@timlarock.com — on the amateurish menu screen. Or this might all be a complex sting operation on my part. I dunno.
NBC bought the new Sorkin show. They paid a hunka hunka burning money, it’s a show about a live comedy show (c.f. SNL), and that’s most of the informational content of the article I just linked to.
Anticipatory.
Creep is pretty much your standard nouveau horror flick (see also Cabin Fever, Cube, etc.). Franka Potente is trapped in the London Underground late at night, and must flee a scary homicidal creature who kills and eats for reasons never exactly explained. It’s pared down, tense throughout, self-aware, and so forth. I left feeling sort of apathetic, though.
I was scared — Christopher Smith is a dab hand with the jump scare. He’s also really good at using the well-lit Underground in contrast with dank side tunnels for effect; light is not a significator for “safe” in this movie. Perhaps in accordance with this, the monster is fully revealed about two thirds of the way through — no shadows. That worked fairly well, I thought. It means the movie was working without a net, however.
Tension-wise, that was fine. Smith got tension even when we knew exactly what the thing looked like. On the other hand, he veered into Grand Guignol territory with at least one scene that I found gratuitous; it didn’t raise the tension, it didn’t make the monster scarier, it didn’t raise the threat level for the protagonist, and it didn’t reveal a whole lot about the backstory.
What you had, I think, is a bad script. (Smith both directed and wrote.) This shows in a few places. The mythology of the monster is somewhat muddled. There’s a nice bit where the monster’s presence is signified by the arrival of rats, but there’s no reason why that would happen — he’s probably not a supernatural evil — and the rats are more or less dropped after a couple of scenes.
Further, and probably the most damning, Potente’s character is not sympathetic. She’s kinda shallow, she’s distinctly bitchy, and she’s too dumb for words. Yeah, dumber than your usual slasher movie hero. The first time she failed to do the smart thing, I lived with it. The second time I got a little grumpy. The third time I considered rooting for the monster. She wasn’t just dumb, she was obtrusively dumb. Also not sympathetic. In fact, she was kind of wimpy.
So about middle of the road, all in all. The directing was really good; Smith probably just needs to not direct his own scripts. And Potente was excellent, unsurprisingly.
OK, so, now, Izo…
I got nothing. I walked out of the theater completely baffled. I can’t say good, I can’t say bad. Izo, who was a real historical figure, is executed in the 1800s and returns to cut his way through everything that stands between him and… something. The Emperor? He’s the irrational, we’re told, expelled by a perfect rational system. His karma is so horrible that he’s made to suffer in this way. There’s a folk singer who shows up from time to time to advance those themes. He dies, he comes back, he kills more people. He is the embodiment of rage. Towards the end, he meets up with a woman who says she’s part of his spirit, and that she was supposed to meet him but hasn’t. She’s the compassionate part. The mysterious council of rulers explain that they’ve created an illusion in order to maintain perfect control. (They do wind up dying, yes.) Izo reaches the Emperor, worn out from his struggles — kills the guards, one of whom then transmutes into a caterpillar — and…
Is blown over by a single breath from the Emperor. Then, over the credits, the folk singer explains that “You are free to go anywhere.”
I got nothing. Maybe it’s about rejecting control, but Izo loses, so who knows? The historical Izo was an assassin who killed supporters of the Shogunate. Seriously, I got nothing, and I can usually engage with Miike movies. Or Lynch movies. But this was beyond me.
The Boston Fantastic Film Festival schedule is out. It’s what you might call slightly heavy on the horror; they’re also showing The Muppet Movie. Intriguing contrast — since they showed Five Children and It last year, I’m assuming there’s a tradition of having a children’s movie.
Hm. Thursday night looks good, with Creep and the inevitable Miike. Friday, likewise, for Marebito and R-Point. More the latter. I could miss Friday night without shedding too many tears.
Saturday has nothing I’m dying to see but Dark Hours, although I quite wanna see that. Reeker? Maybe. And then Sunday… I keep going back and forth on Three: Extremes. I was chatting about it with my sweetie, and the truth is, I just don’t dig Chan-wook Park that much. I dunno. If Miike expands his segment (Fruit Park expanded his), I’d see that.
It’s a pity we’re not getting more non-horror this year, but it hasn’t been a great year for that. Night Watch would be nice, as would some Hong Kong action, but the BFFF hasn’t ever been oriented towards Asian action flicks so I can’t fault them there. And this is a nice festival all in all.
Suck news of the day: the Brattle Theater is in trouble. Compared to Katrina? This is a pretty trivial deal. But it’s still significant enough for me to care.
The Brattle has film programming as good as anything I’ve seen anywhere, including the Castro Theater out in San Francisco. Ned Hinkle, who does the programming, has an exhaustive knowledge of film and he has the contacts and know-how necessary to program festivals ranging from a complete Wong Kar Wai retrospective to a classic film noir series. They also run the Boston Fantastic Film Festival, which is small potatoes compared to Fantasia or Sitges, but which does not in the least suck to have around.
Long story short: they’re a treasure, and if you care about film in Boston — which you may not, it’s just my obsession — it’s worth donating.
The answer to the question “how does filmed entertainment reach the eyes of the viewer” continues to change, as per this article on direct to video movies. This isn’t anything new, of course; Disney has been doing this for years and years. Just ask any parent. Still and all, it’s significant that the direct to video market in the US is gaining… aha. Legitimacy is the word. Direct to video Disney releases is one thing; a direct to video sequel to Carlito’s Way is more interesting.
Huh, that movie had a great cast, didn’t it? Sean Penn, Al Pacino, John Leguizamo, Luis Guzman, and Viggo Mortensen. There’s some acting chops for you. Anyhow.
The sales figures quoted at the beginning of the article are probably misleading. Sure, only 35% of DVD revenue may come from new feature films, but the implication that the other 65% is direct to video stuff is wrong. Warner Brothers clearly finds their line of classic movies profitable, and DVD releases of TV series are huge. (Which is in itself a signal about how entertainment habits are changing.)
Bubble comes out soon. I’ll be really curious about the sales figures.
The Complete New Yorker is pretty cool. Kind of easy to describe, too: it’s every single New Yorker scanned and archived on 8 DVDs. You can get a tour of the interface here.
Yep, I bought it more or less instantly. Come on — $65 on Amazon (or Barnes and Noble)? Sure thing.
It’s cool. The interface is a tad clunky on the Mac, but it’s easy to flip through an issue and it’s very very readable. The search is slowish. I’m not sure how well it’s indexed; a search on Red Sox for the last five years or so returned nothing. On the other hand, a search on Cronenberg was quite successful. I imagine each article is tagged with key words.
For Rob: yes, you can search on department and author so all the Anthony Lane movie reviews are at your fingertips. This is awesome.
I’m curious as to the copyright issues. I don’t know what kinds of contracts the New Yorker signed with its writers; right of first publication? Rights in perpetuity? This came up as an issue when Dragon did their compilation on CD, and I seem to recall an unrelated court decision that opened the door for this sort of thing regardless of the original contract terms. If anyone knows what I’m talking about, speak up and I’ll write more on it when I have some real facts.
Either way, this is a way cool product. Mmm, history.
I should be checking the eTree live music archive more often.
Cowboy Junkies, 94 shows. Drive-By Truckers, 138 shows. Hayseed Dixie, 13. Mike Doughty, 42. Three Decemberists shows. Warren Zevon, 53 shows.
Mmm, tasty.
The ways in which this is not perfect are very few, very few indeed. P’raps my favorite thing is the comment back in the original post.
“When I was really into Buffy I remember thinking everything in The Waste Land secretly applied — it’s good to know it can shift fandoms so well.”
“Well, I was thinking that, more to the point, the poem doesn’t apply — the essence of the parody is in mapping possibly the most influential poem of the 20th century, with its World War themes and excessive literary references and multiple phrases in foreign languages, onto a children’s book series written by a woman who can’t even conjugate her pseudo-Latin…”
Yes.
TiVo will be providing video on demand soon. That’s cool; it’s another step in the process that leads to the question, “Why do we care about scheduled TV programs at all?” Doesn’t look like it’ll cost more than the usual subscription. That probably won’t last, though; the free stuff is from IFC, which needs to promote its programs. Someone like (say) HBO doesn’t need the same publicity — we already all know about The Sopranos.
Interesting note for me: IFC is owned by Rainbow Media, which has a few networks, and which in turn is owned by Cablevision. Not at all the biggest player in the cable market but not entirely insignificant. They’re definitely looking forward when it comes to final mile solutions.