This clip (original) is pretty surreal. A Fox news host is quizzing Disney’s president about the new Disney computer for kids, and he takes a sudden right turn into attacking him for sponsoring Gay Days (original) at the theme parks. That’s what I call good clean utterly insane fun.
Shaolin Soccer is playing this weekend at the Brattle — anyone interested in a Saturday showing, say 7:30? (Friday at 9:30 would also work for me.) They’ve also got Last Life in the Universe coming up, which won Best Overall Film (Jury Prize), Best Asian Film (Jury Prize), and the AQCC Award at FantAsia (original). Gotta make sure I get out to see that.
OK, here’s the deal with the Enter… Zombie King! DVD. The film has been sold to a distributor and will be out on DVD in October; the DVDs will be available on the Tijuana Bibles site and High Spots. It’s also going to air on TV in winter/spring 2005. (Whoa!) Straight from the horse’s mouth (original).
I really enjoy Eric McErlain’s Off Wing Opinion. It’s a great sports blog, very well written, with a lot of hockey coverage that I’d otherwise not get. Eric’s a Republican, and from time to time he makes political posts. So what? For that matter, Jim Pinto is pretty conservative, and it doesn’t stop me from reading Baseball Musings. Again, why would it? If I had to agree politically with everyone I talked to, there are a lot of good people who I’d never see again. ...
Wow, that was a lot of movies I just saw there. I’m still a little dazed. But while the cinematic extravaganza is fresh, I will provide a nifty capsule guide to everything I saw. First, though, some notes. The samurai movie “I badly want to see, but which I did not catch the name of, so all I know is that there’s a young woman who apparently trains to be a samurai when her… brother? is killed…” is Azumi by Ryuhei Kitamura, who also directed Versus. This makes me want to see it all the more. ...
It’s probably not the case that all Thai movies are deliriously loopy; my sample size of three is far too small. However, The Bodyguard is deliriously loopy. It’s like a goofy 80s Hong Kong cop movie, except much more so. I wanted to see this one because it stars Petchtai Wongkamlao, aka Mum Jokmok, who was in the incredibly cool Ong Bak. Phanom Yeerum, the lead from Ong Bak, has a cameo appearance as well. Alas, his cameo is the only serious martial arts moment in the movie — the Riverdance sequence later on doesn’t really count — and The Bodyguard is emphatically more of a comedy than an action movie. Think Chris Rock, but without Jackie Chan around to provide butt-kicking. ...
I figured Into The Mirror was going to be just another postmillenial Asian horror film. (How quickly we become jaded!) Turns out it’s a cop movie about the redemption of a man who got his partner killed and now labors as a security guard. His story just happens to take place in the context of a clever slasher movie with Asian horror elements to it. The lead, Ji-tae Yu, was the antagonist in Oldboy, and while I didn’t like Oldboy that much, I remember thinking he was good. I’m coming perilously close to having enough of a handle on Korean cinema to go out hunting obscure DVDs. Gotta keep a handle on that tendency. ...
That was kind of like finding a string quartet in the middle of a Metallica album. (Yes, I know.) After two days of gleeful carnage, sudden action, and low humor, Robot Stories came along and provided two hours of gently humanistic science fiction. There’s science fiction as the literature of ideas, in which the driving force is the concept; then there’s science fiction that uses the tropes of science fiction to tell stories that couldn’t exist in the world in which we live. Greg Pak’s movie is the latter. The best of the four independent segments is the last, “Clay,” which tells the story of a dying sculptor grappling with the possibility of uploading himself and finding immortality. It’s a common enough science fictional concept, but the segment is not about the implications of uploading — although Pak clearly understands them — it’s about the implications of the human decision to upload or not upload. ...
Toolbox Murders starts out as a simple slasher flick, then takes a sharp right turn into semi-Masonic horror. But the slasher element never gets too far away. Basic plot: nice young couple moves into creepy apartment building with alchemical symbols on the floor. People die. Wife discovers something she will regret discovering, and explores it. That last bit is the sharp right turn, and if you’re the kind of person who really liked the house in The Blair Witch Project and that cave in Jeepers Creepers, you’d really like the places this movie goes. ...
The biggest obstacle in the path of machinima is the lack of expressiveness in 3D game engines. Of course, Malice@Doll’s characters were completely without expression, so maybe it’s not such a big barrier after all. Red Vs. Blue gets around the problem by using characters in powered armor. This works out just fine. Burnie Burns, the director and creator, has enough of a handle on what he’s doing to pull off double-takes, both in the character animations and with the camera, which is more than I can say for some traditional directors. He’s got the chops to make machinima believable as cinema. He also knows how to protect his weaknesses: for example, shaky voice acting is fixed up by filtering everyone through radio static, which makes perfect sense in the powered armor context. ...