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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. ...

OMG Cutie Honey OMG. How sad I am that I would not have seen this epic were it not for the cancellation of Porco Rosso. OMG. I am fairly certain that, during the making of this film, not once did anyone say “We shouldn’t do that because it’d look goofier in live action than on the comic book page.” I think that there was no restraint involved in the making of this movie. Restraints, perhaps, but not restraint. ...

Was that another day? I think so. I lost track of reality around the time I walked out of Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace, which drew so heavily on action movies and the vocabulary of action established by Hong Kong kung fu movies, and walked into Executioners From Shaolin. When I woke up this morning, I expected the television to speak to me in Japanese. I’ve seen movies in four languages and trailers in a couple more, and I’m not even talking about the cinematic vocabularies I seem to be obsessing on in other posts. ...

Malice@Doll. Uh. Fetishistic 3D CGI adult anime set in a future without people. Malice is a sex doll who encounters some sort of monster that changes her into a human and gives her the ability to do the same to other machines. There are tenticular penises involved, sometimes, but not always. Things do not go as well as the newly human Malice had hoped. I think it was some kind of allegory for the danger of letting women and robots get uppity, although Malice does get to transcend at the end. Everyone else goes back to normal, though. A fair number of people walked out during the movie, and Hillside Strangler has been displaced as the worst movie I’ve seen so far.

Nothing like seeing a pristine copy of a Shaw Brothers film on the big screen. I think the colors were a little less saturated and the picture was a little more crisp than those on the DVDs I have; I expect the digitization process accounts for both of those. I wouldn’t really say I prefer either. Either way, I’m getting the superb kung fu and the dramatic period pieces and all. ...

Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace is an example of a semi-pro film that sort of works, unlike Hillside Strangler. The acting is kind of painful and the script is too full of action movie in-jokes that go on too long, but the tongue is in the cheek and the totality is fairly enjoyable. Besides, “Smells like fish — tastes like pain” is a great line, so that’s all good. ...

A while back Jere commented that he thought the best way to handle gay marriage civil disobedience was to stop giving out marriage licenses — you still make the point about equal treatment, but you don’t give out licenses which are unlikely to remain valid. Benton County, Oregon, agrees. (original)

After fifteen minutes of Saving Private Tootsie, I realized that I was watching something for which I had very few if any cultural touchpoints. So, um, yeah — it’s a bold statement about the acceptability of Thai queer culture framed by a Steven Spielberg pastiche and beyond that I am not competent to say. I liked it, I think, but it was a strong reminder that our understanding of film relies on a shared vocabulary. ...

I’m in Montreal! This is written post-first movie, of which more anon; there’s a coffee shop with wireless across from the theater but I don’t want to lose my place in line. I’ll upload entries as I find time. The trip up was pretty painless. The high point was the New York Italian-themed restaurant at a highway exit in the middle of Quebec farmland. Our hotel is small but charming, and it’s an easy walk to Concordia University, where the festival takes place. It was a little disturbing seeing a “For Sale” sign on the hotel facade, but it hasn’t been sold as of this weekend, thankfully. ...

What I’m doing during the interminable classic rock segments is cranking up Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and pretending that’s the DNC soundtrack. It works particularly well when CSPAN goes to a flag waving shot: the combination of flags and dance music has that edgy mechanical appeal that Madeline L’Engle ascribes to IT on Camazotz. The people dancing are a little out of sync with the music, but you can ascribe that to a failure of the controlling intelligence.