GalacticMu

I won’t wax too poetic about my enduring hatred for torture-porn director Eli Roth (okay, just a little - this turd actually tried to blame the box office mediocrity of his last film on movie pirating, for god’s sake), but now the maggot is crawling into my territory. Says Reuters:

Roth told reporters on Wednesday he is two weeks away from finishing a script for a science-fiction action film inspired by the mainstream hits “Cloverfield” and “Transformers.”

Here’s a douche-to-English translation for you:

Roth told reporters on Wednesday that he is two weeks away from finishing a script for a science-fiction action film inspired by the epic money-making achieved by mainstream hits such as “Cloverfield” and “Transformers.” “I don’t really care what genre I work in,” says Roth, “I’d just like to masturbate into a pile of hundred dollar bills every day and not worry about the cost of it.”

Eli Roth is going PG-13 via Seriously? OMG! WTF? (warning: almost unbearable photo of aforementioned douchebag might send you into berserker rage)

You’re at an upscale restaurant. You’ve ordered an appetizer of steamed mussels in fennel and new timothy hay shoots. It seems to be taking an exceptionally long time to arrive, but your waiter is attentive, refills your water glasses and gets you another free basket of warm, fresh bread. When the mussels finally appear he sincerely apologizes for how long it took. That’s okay, you gush, because the mussels smell like heaven and you drank your wine too fast and on an empty stomach. It’s turning out to be a nice evening.

Around this time, you notice that the couple recently seated next to you is looking grumpy. They’re older, stiff, and barely speaking to each other. You feel a surge of appreciation for your partner - at least the two of you can make an entire conversation out of the merits of generic Froot Loops. But you’re distracted by the older couple, their overt wealth paired with their obvious disgruntlement. The man says something rude about the kind waiter and you feel a prickly thrill of indignancy. You’re still a little drunk, now from the second glass of wine, and you fall into a temporary fantasy where you are going to say something scathing to the man.

The waiter returns with a gratinéed oyster platter for the couple much faster than youd received your mussels. Before the couple has a chance to say anything, the waiter insists that the oysters are on the house, and can he get them anything else graits? A bottle of champagne, perhaps? The couple sullenly agrees to a bottle of champagne.

Wait a fucking minute! You sit upright. Wait a goddamn fucking minute - is that how this works? Your understanding and tolerance goes unrewarded? Your lack of hideous diamond Rolexes? The waiter is instantly transformed from a harried but capable food intermediary to a pandering, greedy and despicable shit. From that point on your meal is tainted. Part of you is embarrassed at your own reaction and dreads and hopes in equal parts that the waiter is going to make it up to you in a quieter, more bonding way later, but by the time the interminable meal is over you aren’t even making eye contact with him anymore and he drops the check to the table without a word. You go over the check and find that you’ve been overcharged for the wine. Miserably, rather than spend another minute feeling terrible and watching the hideous monster couple next to you wordlessly shovel crème brûlée into their gobs, you pay the bill and leave. But not before guiltily making sure the tip was slightly less than 15%.

Okay! Now you’re in the mood to understand what I’m about to tell you!

This may or may not feel like a spoiler to you. Continue reading at your own peril.

In 2007 a Spanish zombie movie called [●REC] was made, filmed “reality” style (think Cloverfield). A television reporter and her cameraman accompany an emergency services crew on the night shift as a part of a planned and ostensibly normal feature. They answer a call regarding an elderly woman trapped in an apartment building, only to find the building dark and other tenants apparently gone. Zombies! Hooray!

When the crew tries to leave the building they find they are trapped inside by a government quarantine, at which point they argue the possibilities of escape. So. What could be bad, right?

Well, in a apparently never-before done move, the movie [●REC] was optioned simultaneously for what some people are calling a “remake,” a term I find misleading and inaccurate. Simultaneous filming? Doppel-filmed? While technically a remake since the Spanish [●REC] was made and released first, certain elements keep me from committing. For starters, the American version of the film, Quarantine, is an almost word-for-word, shot-for-shot redo. The American actress wears the same outfit and screams in the same parts. Jaume Balagueró wrote and directed both films. Much of the crew was the same.

Then there is the subject of availability and intention. From what I am reading, there is no North American release of a subtitled [●REC] scheduled yet. This doesn’t mean it won’t be released, but confirms that there was a clear, intentional split between the two films: one is intended for Spain and Europe, and the other is intended for America. Americans will be able to get copies of the Spanish DVD, but there may never be an American release. For those that are new to this dimension: DVDs are released in regions. Read all about it, if you’re bored.

What does this all have to do with a fancy dinner, you ask? Calm, my dumplings. Calm.

The rumor is that Quarantine is the ugly stepchild. The filming is sloppier, the screams louder, the camera shaking more pronounced, the costs higher - in other words, a big fat American horror film. Somehow Americans - who are horror connoisseurs in that adolescent way in that we’ll watch anything no matter how awful - are getting stuck with a kindly, special-made piece of crap. Is it because our standards are lower? Most certainly. We’d be dragged to a zombie movie kicking and screaming if it meant having to read fucking subtitles. But make a shittier version in God’s English? HELL YES.

Here’s your dinner film. You’d paid full price for the exact same thing done better elsewhere. Enjoy.

Slated for release in October of 2008, the upside is that Quarantine stars a favorite young actress of mine, Jennifer Carpenter, who stole the show as a demonic/terrified teen in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

Spanish trailer for [●REC]

English trailer for [●REC]

Trailer for Quarantine (allow page to sit for 10 seconds and trailer will automatically start)

Video artist Kara Hearn re-enacts a boohoo worthy scene from E.T. for Learning to Love You More (assignment #47), Battlegate slobbers on self laughing.

Look, I’m not imagining it: they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

There will be spoilers in this post, but you’ll survive.

Case in point: Solarbabies. The year is 1986. Jami Gertz weighs 90 pounds. Jason Patric doesn’t yet have the white-fro of The Lost Boys. Most importantly, no one is afraid of making bad guys wear padded dusty blue Naugahyde uniforms.

Madam, Mr. Nagel is on the line, shall I ask him to hold?

The movie itself has massive, buffoony flaws, but nothing that detracts from the adolescent charm of it. There awkward cuts, some embarrassing dialog, a scene of profoundly distracting hairsprayed bangs and questionable physics. But these are all secondary to the fact that there is torture, fascism, murder, bigotry against owls, and non-stop suggestions to defy authority. I hadn’t seen it in 20 years, but I suddenly think I might have a culprit for early encouragement to my apocalypse obsession. Solarbabies starts out a smidge on the ghetto side, as far as visuals go (”How are we going to decorate half a dozen rollerskating outfits with just this sack of spray paint?” “With half-heartedness, that’s how!”), but ramps up slowly until the climax of a tire-smelting bordertown followed by a battle where guards are knocked out by being struck lightly on their helmets with hockey sticks. Also: dogs with flashlights strapped to their heads.

(Curiously, I had just watched Top Gun for the first time in about 10 years only to realize that I recognized one of the actors from Solarbabies. And nagging memory and IMDB led me to recognize him as Nathan Petrelli from Heroes.)

Nevertheless! The movie is widely reviled, at least among the more vocal of the internets. But I ask you: would you rather be watching Hanna Montana and her merry band of microphone-fellating Lolitas? No amount of crucifix wearing will make up for rouge on a child, I tell you what. Meanwhile Solarbabies gets the boo and the hiss just because everyone is somehow able to rollerskate in the desert without hitting small pebbles and then breaking both their wrists? C’mon, it’s the future! I am just thankful the movie was made during a time when no one cared that the kids weren’t wearing helmets and kneepads. The director was all, “C’mon, jump that ramp! You’ll be fine! Have a cigarette break.”

Look, do you think a person could walk into Hollywood these days and say, “I want to make Mad Max - for kids!” and have studio execs respond, “Okay, but we can only give you seven and a half million dollars.” No. Case closed.

Subspace:  I’m kind of excited about the G.I. Joe movie they’re making.

Hal:  What, a cartoon?

Subspace:  No, it’s real.

Hal:  But… who is going to be the Cobra Commander?

Subspace:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the guy from Brick.

Hal:   He’s twelve years old!

Subspace:  He’s a man now.   Anyway, they released photos of what the good ninja, Snake Eyes looks like.

Hal:  Oh yeah?

Subspace:  Yeah, he looks cool.  But they didn’t show the bad ninja.  I can’t remember what he’s called.

Hal:   Snake Butt.

Subspace:  Yes, right, Snake Butt: where is he?  You can’t find him.  He’s like a snake’s butt.

Hal:  Are you even sure you’ve found him when you do?

The Hollywood brain trust is planning to release another Incredible Hulk Movie.

There is only one rational response to this: why, for the love of all that is green, go there?

Maybe because the previous incarnation, directed by Ang Lee, was roundly despised. Much of the criticism centered around the cartoonish CGI. I asked my good friend Captain Obvious of the good ship O’rlly what he thought.

H: Do you think the hulk was too cartoonish?
CO: The hulk was a cartoon.

The hulk originally appeared in Marvel Comics (1962), in a story penned by Stan Lee and drawn/plotted by Jack Kirby. Here’s the gist of the plot, for you Rigelians and trans-dimensional entities with your soundlessly gibbering mouths: a meek and mild-mannered scientist is exposed to deadly gamma radiation, barely survives, and thereafter is prone to fits of “hulking out”: turning gray, getting big and muscle-y, gaining an unquenchable desire to smash things, and losing any interest in sustained silent reading.

It’s a modern retelling of Dr Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde. A scientist made to suffer for the excess of science. Id vs. Super-ego, made visible. The essential conflict is man vs. self.

Ang Lee’s hulk (2003) strayed from the essential conflict by introducing a “bad-guy” secondary character (played well by Nick Nolte). However! The theme (the price of scientific excess) remained, since Nolte’s character was the epitome of a morally bankrupt scientist.

Nolte rounded out a stellar ensemble cast (notably featuring Sam Elliot and Jennifer Connelly) and a remarkably nuanced performance from a mis-cast Eric Bana as the hulk. Character motivations are believable and subtly played. The military man (Elliot) rightly recognizes the Hulk as a threat and moves to subdue and destroy it. Bana enjoys and fears the Hulk persona. Connelly is caught between. The movie is well-edited and uses some split-screen cuts to enjoyable campy effect.

Not this time! The new Hulk will stow that thinky crap by introducing a troglodytic arch-nemesis (Abomination), made using the Hulk’s blood. No complex moral quandaries will vex this Dr. Banner (Edward Norton): he wants to destroy the Hulk, but is bound by a sense of duty to kick the bad guy’s assssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

He wishes it didn’t have to be this way, but hey, Support our Hulk.

The new movie will not admit to being campy. It is grim as death. So it trades cartoonish CGI for ghoulishly overdrawn bodybuilder CGI (all the better for the extended musclebound-monsters-punching-on-each-other sequences). Because this is serious business, people. The fate of the world hangs in the balance or something.

That level of seriousness, about a movie, about a giant green monster-man movie, reveals a dangerous pathology on the part of the film-makers.

Listen up, filmy people: the Hulk isn’t a monster, out there, in the world. It’s a monster inside you. You need to learn to laugh at the Hulk. You need to hug the Hulk and teach the Hulk to love itself. Only when the smashing stops can the healing begin.

Always here to help,
Halcyon
Psych Officer
GalacticMu

BattleGate pointed me toward this clip of the leaked “alternate ending” of the recent theatrical release I Am Legend. It will be on the DVD soon, which is why I guess none of the clips have been taken down or anything.

Here are my highly spoilery thoughts on it.

It is no secret that I’m an atheist, though other members of GalacticMu vary. And this shouldn’t matter, except when I am doing something like watching this astonishing clip of a title sequence of a movie called 3:19 (and no, not the western, like I also briefly, sleepily, thought - 3:10, 3:19, what does nine minutes matter?).

I was sent into a fugue state watching the first half of the animation, enjoying it for one of those moments where, because I expect nothing at all, I am startled to my very core. And then I started to notice the religious implications. Oh, that 3:19, as in Genesis (no, I didn’t read the sidebar for the link until afterwards). God’s great mechanism, I get it. Everything of infinite and divine plan. Yawn.

From what I’ve read the movie itself is not religious as much as “faithy”. It sounds unappealing to me on a lot of levels, but largely because it apparently succumbs to the neo-dramatic mechanism of having everything connect, making for lumbering, interconnected failures such as Crash and Babel. I’d like to watch a movie about how nothing happens for a reason, about how no one action any of us takes affects the lives of anyone else around us. I’d like to see how the poor black girl working at the White Castle does not affect a affluent Swiss banker whose father was shot in the street by a cop who mistakenly identified him. That’d be a good movie.

Via Dark Roasted Blend

I am predictably obsessed with Pixar cartoons. An art-student Seattleite once said to Halcyon and myself after we’d just been to see Cars, “Isn’t that a children’s movie?” Yes, and mostly no. I asked her not to make my latte too hot.

Children, as you may know, are underdeveloped human beings. They have an underdeveloped stature, an underdeveloped taste in beer and an underdeveloped sense of what constitutes as entertainment. Through what I can only assume is torturous experimentation, Pixar is one of the few production companies ever to exist who have managed to make compelling, artful and genuinely touching movies that children manage to enjoy anyway. And while the subject matter has been only marginally of interest to me as of yet (though the recent Ratatouille veered the closest ), the up-coming WALL•E makes me tear up, and these are just the trailers. I have a bad feeling about the fate of my mascara when I get around to seeing the entire film.

As an aside, a true story: I went to see The Iron Giant in the theater, and I cried so hard I scared the children in front of me. Truth.

This is by no means breaking news, but it’s good enough to keep sharing: Pixar has made an absolutely GORGEOUS fake website for the fictional company that produces the eponymous WALL•E.

Called ‘Buy n Large’, the website is more a masterpiece of social commentary than a background for an upcoming movie. A children’s movie, if you recall. Aside from being visually flawless, the site is deep: every link goes somewhere, and almost every page has something worth reading on it. If you know what is good for you, you’ll read the tiny link to the Privacy Policy at the bottom of each page. Even if you are someone that has ever had to work on corporate websites or use stock photography of “perfect” employees, something about Buy n Large will make you want to simultaneously applaud for Pixar and shoot horse tranquilizers directly into your heart. Because the comedy? Very, very close to reality.

Dear Sunshine,

Hi. We’ve never met, but I’ve seen you around. Actually, I’ve seen you around a few times. I hope it’s not creepy or anything, but… I just can’t stop watching you. You don’t have to say anything, but, I think I love you.

spoilers ahoy!