shallow be my name

Tagged...

2006-02-06T20:24:00.000+01:00

Playing along to not incur the wrath of the Bnerd.

4 Jobs I did:
Bank temp, Medic, Webcoder, IT-Consultant (and yes, I'm very, very sorry about that)

4 films I can't get enough of:
The Princess Bride, Bubba Ho-Tep, Mononoke-hime, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

4 places I've lived:
Here and nowhere else. Sad.

4 TV series I like:
Arrested Development, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spaced, Babylon 5

4 places I've been to on vacation:
London, Prague, Berlin, Rhodes

4 of my favourite foods:
Can't decide. I'm an omnivore.

4 Pages I hit daily:
sinfest.net, penny-arcade.com, derstandard.at, en.wikipedia.org

John Carpenter's They Live (1988)

2006-01-12T15:25:00.000+01:00

Following my TV endorsment with a post about a movie. Clever, huh?

But what the hell, there's always time for a little Carpenter love. And They Live is one of his best efforts in my book (which not many people are going to sign, unfortunately). Spoilers follow, of course.

Our nameless hero (pro wrestler Roddie Piper who hopefully wrestles better than he acts) walks into Los Angeles in time of deepest recession. The yuppies have taken over America and their grip is tightening, so work is short and money is even shorter. He finds work at a construction site and stays at a homeless shelter over night.

A group of freedom fighters have set up a pirate broadcasting station in a nearby church. They have found out that society has been subverted by evil yuppies from outer space, out to mine earth for what it's worth. But nobody listens to them, the space yuppies are keeping the people docile by permanently bombarding them with subconcious messages on billboards, tv and magazines. The freedom fighters have managed to create sunglasses which expose the alien messages and the aliens themselves, who are walking among us.

While the church and the homless shelter are raided, our hero gets his hands on a pair of these sunglasses. He soon realizes what's going on and starts to kick some serious ass. Some plot twists later he gets shot on top of the alien's headquarters but manages to destroy the broadcasting station that hides the alien's true appearance as a last act of defiance. As our hero dies with a "Fuck you!" on his lips, the people of earth finally see the truth.

I absolutely adore this movie. The acting is bad and over the top, Piper's lines are cheesy ("It's time to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubble gum", even hommaged by computer-game hero Duke Nukem). The story isn't all that logical (I mean, one unprotected satellite dish is everything he has to destroy to unmask the aliens? Come on...) but has some nice moments to it, especially when our hero first sees the fnords. The effects are ok at best, the criticism of capitalism is a little too overt, but somehow the whole thing just totally clicks for me.

TV > Movies?

2006-01-11T17:02:00.000+01:00

The L.A. Daily News thinks so. And they are right. TV-Shows like Deadwood, Arrested Development, The Shield, Lost, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, hell even Gilmore Girls blow your average movie out of the water.

Why? It really comes down to the characters. TV just gives them more room to develop. I'd be hard pressed to name a character from any recent movie that was as compelling as Deadwood's Al Swearengen or Arrested Development's Michael Bluth.

There's also more room for plot development (which can be a problem, if there is no more plot. Jumping the shark is still one of the bigger problems of American TV shows these days). Nevertheless I take a good episode of any of the aforementioned shows over most anything hollywood has offered me in the last year.

John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

2006-01-10T13:55:00.000+01:00

Sometimes the most positive aspect of a remake is that the original movie gets a DVD release in the wake of the remake. Assault on Precinct 13 is horror director John Carpenter's second feature film and has been remade in 2005. I've no real interest in the remake (which is purportedly one of the better efforts as far as remakes go), but the original has been on my to-watch list for quite some time.

Carpenter wanted to do a western but didn't have the budget, so he took the basic story of Rio Bravo and transposed it to 70ies Los Angeles. A police precinct about to be shut down is besieged by a street gang because a guy who killed one of the gang leaders (who previously shot down the guy's little daughter in cold blood, a scene that was rather controversial back in the day) took shelter in the precinct.

Inside are the few people overseeing the shutdown as well as a few prisoners who made station at the precinct while being transported from one prison to another. Getting to the actual siege takes quite some time. Carpenter himself apologises for the slowness of the movie quite often on the commentary track. When the siege is actually underway finally, the movie becomes quite night-of-the-living-deadish. The gang members don't talk, they are just out for blood and the people inside the station are constantly fighting for their lives. The whole thing is accompanied by a typical Carpenter synthesizer soundtrack that started to annoy me quite soon. But maybe that was the intention.

There's some good chemistry between the lead actors (Austin Stoker as cop Ethan Bishop and Darwin Joston as prisoner Napoleon Wilson as well as Laurie Zimmer as Leigh), I especially liked the bit on the end when Wilson just follows Bishop out of the cellar after they've been rescued. No escape attempt, no pleading, no help from Bishop. Overall nicely done, if a bit slow for today's tastes.

Geekology

2006-01-09T11:07:00.000+01:00

The original Geek test revisited, as by Bnerd's command.

32.34714 %

Disappointing. I'm losing touch with my inner geek.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

2006-01-06T17:49:00.000+01:00

It was only € 4.99. That's pretty much the only positive thing to say about this one. There's one or two funny scenes in there (the War of the Newsteams and probably some of Steve Carell's scenes as Brick), but overall this is pretty much unfunny crap. Avoid.

Demo [Comic]

2006-01-06T13:59:00.000+01:00

AiT/PlanetLar was so kind as to collect the 12 issues of Brian Wood's and Becky Cloonan's Demo in a single volume. Not having read the singles, I ordered the collection based on some good reviews and generally liking what Wood had done before with AiT (The Couriers and Couscous Express, I think).

The stories revolve around (mostly) young people with some kind of power who experience life-changing events. Except for this common theme, the single stories are not related. Some of them read like riffs on Stephen King novels (for instance "What you wished for", the one with the Asian kid and the dog, or "Emmy", the story with the girl who commands with her voice), others are quiet mood pieces like "Girl You Want", the story of the girl whose appearance changes to whatever the person looking at her imagines her to be or "Stand Strong", the story of a superstrong blue collar worker renouncing easy money from burglary for a simple but good life like his father and grandfather had.

Becky Cloonan's art is very versatile, she can do straight and superheroic (a bit remeniscent of John Romita, Jr.) as well as dark and moody or manga inspired.

Overall, the quality of the stories ranges from mediocre to excellent, but taken as a whole the collection is definitely worth looking at.

A Feast For Crows [A Song Of Ice And Fire]

2006-01-05T10:21:00.000+01:00

I had promised myself to stay clear of sprawling high fantasy epics after Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series proved to be such a monumental disappointment (does this thing still drag on, btw?)

George R. R. Martin convinced me otherwise, though. A Song Of Ice And Fire saga is epic, sprawling and high fantasy (although very low key on the magic use), nevertheless the thing is actually very, very good. Martin doesn't shy from killing main characters (sometimes he seems to revel in it, actually), his characters are actual characters and not the black-and-white cyphers so common in heroic fantasy and his plots are anything but straightforward.

The latest installment in the series - A Feast Of Crows - has disappointed some fans because the stories of main characters like Jon Snow or Daenerys Thargaryen aren't continued but set aside for developments on the Lannister-related characters. Especially twins Cersei and Jaime Lannister get their place in the spotlight in A Feast For Crows. And since the notion of "main characters" isn't really appropriate for Martin's epic, seeing how many presumed main characters already bit the dust during the first three books, I'm rather content with the developments in A Feast For Crows.

My only gripe with the book is, that it leaves us with a few tantalizing cliffhangers, especially regarding Cersei's fate. I really do hope Martin doesn't take another five years for the next installment, "A Dance With Dragons".

When I die, it won't be because of caffeine

2005-12-13T07:29:00.000+01:00

After 123.38 shots of Espresso, you'd be pushing up daisies

(from http://www.energyfiend.com/death-by-caffeine/)

I'm down to two a day at the moment. So no danger here. Lucky me.

The Chronicles Of Narnia (2005)

2005-12-09T08:00:00.000+01:00

So that wasn't as bad as expected, really. I've heard some pretty mixed reviews so far, but having read the book not too long ago, I knew what to expect. The movie follows the book almost literally, so the story offers no surprises (and is chock-full of crypto-christianity, as expected). That's the main problem of Narnia in my opinion, the book just isn't that good and the movie can't rise above the book's limitations, storywise.

Another weak point is the use of CGI. While the individual figures are animated well, they somehow don't really seem to fit. I never forgot that Aslan is a CG effect, something that frequently happened with, say, Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. The creatures in Narnia always seem to be pasted into the world, not live in it.

The acting was ok for the most part, with the children being every bit as annoying as in the book. Only Tilda Swinton as the White Witch was a serious miscast, in my opinion, she's never able to bring across the sheer coldness and evil the witch should radiate.

This is also a Disney movie, so strange phenomenons like Peter's sword being pristine after cutting down dozens of foes and Aslan or Edmund not bleeding when stabbed are little annoying reminders that old Disney conventions die hard.

Overall, the source is a children's book (and not a very good one, in my opinion), so there's no surprise that the movie isn't the next Lord of the Rings. As it stands, Narnia isn't really horrible, but it isn't good either. A so-so movie that won't save the year for the industry (at least judging from the half empty auditorium on premiere day).

Berlin, Finally

2005-12-08T09:15:00.000+01:00

Just to get it out of my system, some Berlin photos.

The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche

Brandenburger Tor

Forgotten what that is, liked the reflection

Crane-Ballett near the Bundestag

A Rally of the German Green Party (this was a day or two before the elections)

Church with TV Tower

Reflection of the Dome on the old Palace of the Republic. I was told this photo is obligatory for any Berlin tourist, so I took it.

Siegessäule vs. the sun

Brandenburger Tor vs. the sun

Pragmatic street naming ("Behind the catholic church")

Sanssouci, Potsdam

Gardens of Sanssouci, close up

Potsdam, dutch part

Potsdam, park. Half of Potsdam (at least) seems to be parks. Very green there.

Egypt Museum, Nofretete

Dome with TV Tower

Kiki's Delivery Service

2005-12-07T09:47:00.000+01:00

Finally the older Miyazaki Studio Ghibli movies start to appear here. After Nausicaä (of which I had already bought the RC1 version earlier), the second one to come out was Kiki's Delivery Service. My Ghibli knowledge is limited to the newer movies, starting with Mononoke, plus the aforementioned Nausicaä. All of those are set in heavily fictionalized worlds and mostly have a decidedly surreal feel to them.

Kiki isn't like that for the most part. It's a pretty much straightforwardly told coming-of-age tale, set in a world that closely mirrors our own. The only fantasy element is the lead, Kiki, herself, who is a witch - flying broom and talking black cat included. The story revolves around Kiki having to leave her home at the age of 13 to live a year on her own, so she can become a real witch. The animation is of usual high Ghibli standards, the story is charming but less involving than Mononoke or Nausicaä. Worth watching, but still the worst Ghibli movie I've seen so far (although this is a close match between Kiki and Howl's Moving Castle, which also didn't really grab me).

Praise the Ubuntu!

2005-12-05T00:34:00.000+01:00

Sorry for missing updates, my two faithful readers. Life got in the way. Someday I'll get around to post some Berlin photos, but not today.

Writing this from my freshly-setup Notebook, a three year old IBM ThinkPad A31p, where I just replaced the old Gentoo System with a brand new Ubuntu Breezy Badger. And damn, Desktop Linux has come a long way indeed. The hardware detection is flawless. It set up my graphics device by itself (which is a pretty unusual setup of a Radeon Mobility 7800 and a 1600x1200 display), USB, Sound, wireless networking, everything just works, the system even seems to recognize the bluetooth thingy (at least it writes log messages indicating such), but for lack of a bluetooth device I wasn't able to test that one. Ubuntu even supports hibernating the damn thing out of the box, something I couldn't get to work after days of fiddling with Gentoo two years back.

Nice one, indeed. Let's see if the daily work with the system proves to be as painless as the install was.

The Dreaded Moment

2005-09-27T19:25:00.000+02:00

Finally this blog has arrived at the point where no blog should ever venture: Holiday photos. If you don't know me, this will be absolutely boring. If you do know me, it most probably will be too.

Day 1

Started by going to Vienna by train on Friday Morning. The flight to Berlin went from Vienna at 8:00 on Saturday, so we had a day to kill in Vienna. We went to the Upper Belvedere where we saw "Das Neue Österreich" , an exhibition about post-WWII Austria on the occasion of the 50 year jubilee of the Austrian state treaty.

No photos from the actual exhibition, thanks to photographing being prohibited. Suffice to say it was quite interesting, if a bit skewed towards "oh woe is us, who were poor victims of the Nazi regime" (which does accurately reflect the sentiment held by Austrian officials until the late 1980ies, so the exhibition just shows things as they were).

Then we strolled through the historical centre of Vienna and visited the Naschmarkt.

Impressions from the Naschmarkt
Vienna Secession
Stephansdom
Haas Haus with crane

Not having had enough history for a day we also visited the National Library where we watched another exhibition about post-war Austria, "Die Junge Republik".

Having to kill some more time we also visited the Museum of Natural History. Yes, that's me, having a bad hair month.

Some more strolling around vienna (yes, I like clouds and photographing against light sources. You'll see much more of that later), then night broke.

As luck would have it, we were in Vienna just when "Rund um die Burg" happened, a 24 hour reading marathon with Austrian writers reading from their works. This is where we spend the wee hours till we caught our bus to the airport and flew to Berlin.

Actual Berlin photos to follow...

Holidays Are Fun

2005-09-27T18:23:00.000+02:00

Went to Berlin for a week. Nice city, rather many trees and parks, absolutely worth a visit. Pictures to follow, when I've got the time to sort through them.

Books read there:

Larry Niven - Ringworld
Niven is one of the best known authors in Science Fiction, having won a plethora of Hugo and Nebula Awards. His ideas are usually grand, and he excels at the depiction of alien life (see The Mote In God's Eye for one of the best depictions of an alien race ever). Ringworld is no different here, the idea of a inhabitable Ring circling a sun (basically a slice of a Dyson Sphere) is impressive and the Pierson's Puppeteers as well as the Kzin are great alien races which aren't just disguised humans. The story lacks a bit in character development, but makes up for it in scope and vision. Good read.

Brian Aldiss - Non Stop
This one was a bit of a mixed bag. While the basic idea - a spaceship crewed by primitive savages who are the many generations removed descendends of the original crew - is great, the execution lacks a bit for me, because it is pretty clear what's going on early on. The twist at the end didn't come all that suprising for me, I pretty much expected what turned out to be the truth. Good bits are the Freud and Jung based pseudo-religion of the tribes on the ship and the personal growth of Roy Complaint, the main protagonist. Readable, but not a must read.

Now reading:

Neal Stephenson - The System Of The World
Halfway through the final part of The Baroque Cycle and glued to my seat, reading. Stephenson has always been a nerd's writer, but The Baroque Cycle is an absolute nerdgasm, especially if you happen to be interested in history. Pure brilliance. (note: This is NOT Science Fiction. It's different from Stephenson's previous body of work. Deal with it.)

Forever, My Dear!

2005-09-08T10:24:00.000+02:00

Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is Science Fiction. It tackles themes that were relevant at the time of writing (in this case, the Vietnam War) and transposes them to the far future (of 1996, but don't let that take from your enjoyment of the story). Haldeman shows the alienation soldiers feel after coming back home from a long war by taking it to the extreme. His soldiers fight in space, and, thanks to time dilation, come back many years after they went, having aged only little. But the world they come back to has changed completely in the meantime and they have a very hard time fitting in.

Haldeman's future earth is mostly a bleak place, food riots having resulted in a despoctic UN world government with a inpenetrable calorie based currency system and rampant corruption. People over 70 are assigned a medical status based on their contribution to society and only get help if they are deemed important.

Alienation from society and the people is the main theme that runs through the book. It also is quite anti-war, the whole war is caused by human's tendency to shoot first ask questions later and can only be rectified when humanity evolves to be on par mentally with the aliens they fight.

The Forever War has been praised as its generation Catch 22 by critics, which I don't really see. Catch 22 is satire, while Haldeman's book takes itself seriously most of the time. Nevertheless a good read, although the space battles do tend to get a bit drawn out, especially in the latter half.

The Eschaton Is Here

2005-08-12T08:10:00.000+02:00

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross is a science-fiction book about a universe where a technological singularity (The Eschaton, aptly named after the End Of Everything) happened and spread humanity to the stars, while giving them cornucopia machines, basically nanotechnology capable of producing almost everything from cold air. The book is set in the Republic, one of the colonies the Eschaton created, which gets "attacked" by the Festival, an infovore civilization trying to assimilate as much information as possible, wrecking havoc on the political structure of the Republic in the process.

The book tells basically a straight-forward spy story, pitting an agent of the Eschaton and a UN weapons inspector, both trying to keep the Republic from violating causality by travelling back in time and arriving at the hot spot of the conflict before the Festival did. The Eschaton isn't very keen on causality violations, because that's the only way it's creation could be undone.

Singularity Sky is an interesting read, but flawed insofar as the Singularity it is named for takes a back seat to rather conventional space battles and spy/counter-spy games. I'd rather had some more information about post-singularity earth and the ramifications of a god-like structure that really does meddle in human affairs instead of lengthy descriptions of space battles (which are, at least, physically plausible and not the usual space-opera tripe) and the protagonist's problems escaping the Republic's secret police. Another problem of the book is Stross' tendency to use scientific and technological terms and abbreviations without defining or explaining any. Can be a little jarring if you have to look up a term (like "gray goo", for example) to understand what's happening.

The Giggle Loop

2005-08-11T09:02:00.000+02:00

Keeping up the religious theme.

I like Coupling. It's funny. But I never even remotely believed the abstruse Situations Jeff likes to describe, could be true. Enter: the Giggle Loop.

My girlfriend's grandmother died on Saturday. She was well over 80 and had suffered a stroke a couple of weeks before and hadn't really recovered, so it was only a question of time. The family took it quite well, my girlfriend's grandfather was struck hardest. My girfriend's grandparents were the last real catholics in the family, from her parents down they don't care much for the church at all or are as atheistic as I am. But a catholic funeral is tradition, and you don't mess with tradition in a small village where religion equals catholicism.

I understand the point of funerals, of wakes. Say goodbye to the departed, come to terms with the loss. Perfectly understandable, perfectly ok. But, here in the catholic heartland, we have something called "Beten". Simply translates to "praying", and that's basically it. People close to the departed come together a day or so before the funeral and pray for his or her admission to heaven. Sounds silly? You don't know half of it.

The community prays a "painful rosary" (and painful it is), which consists of 50 Hail Marys and 5 "Our Father ...", intersped with begging saints to tell god to let the departed into heaven. Some rather obscure things are asked to "pray for her", for example ivory towers, heavenly gates and immaculately concepting virgins.

Now, during this litany I look at my girlfriend, she looks back, and suddenly the silliness of the whole situation gets to us and ... the Giggle Loop strikes. We both try to surpress our sudden amusement by looking somewhere else. I focus on the wooden floor paneling, she digs her nails into her hands to keep from laughing. And everytime we think we have it under control, a casual glance at the other is enough to bring back the urge to giggle - only stronger than before. The prayers don't help much, because the described things become more and more abstruse. I made it through, but barely. Another two minutes of this and it would have been too late. Even so I drew some strange glances from other attendees on the way out, because my amusement was quite visible on my face.

With that and the anti-catholic rant below, I've collected my share of Hell-Points for the month, thank you.

Rant addendum

2005-08-10T12:33:00.000+02:00

Bernd says:

Regarding the "in a society without god, everyone is his own god" problem, that's trivial:

It's the old religious argument (apart from, you know, god is just true) against atheism, that man without god would become arrogant, and would not accept higher authority beyond his own will, thus becoming evil against other men who have a different will:

It's been used against many free-thinking groups, and found different answers; if you consider that the biggest atheist movements of the 20th century have been the nazis and the communists, it's even hard to dismiss it out of hand.

I'll give Bernd the communists (gladly, in fact) but the nazis were not atheists for the most part. Various catholic and protestant groups (most notably, the "Deutschen Christen") openly supported them, and there never was a ban on religion in nazi-Germany (only on religion that didn't agree with them). The pope only condemned the nazis when the catholic church didn't get what had been promised to them.

Although it has only been a tangent of my rant, Bernd has some interesting thoughts on abortion, too. Makes me want to re-evaluate my stance on the issue which always has been something along the lines of "do as you wish as long as you leave me alone". Doesn't quite hold up, if one looks at it from a (bio)logical perspective.

Fuckheads like this

2005-08-10T10:26:00.000+02:00

are the reason I hate the Catholic Church with a passion normally reserved for worthier targets (Warning: Rant follows).

German Cardinal Joachim Meisner in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel (interview in German, obviously).

Choice quotes:

Fuckhead says:

"Zunächst kommt nur die Wirklichkeit an das Kind ran, die die Eltern ranlassen. Wenn sie die Wirklichkeit Gottes nicht eröffnen, werden die Kinder zu geistigen Krüppeln."

Translates to:

"At first the only reality reaching the child is the one the parents let filter through. If they don't show (the children) the reality of God, they become spiritual cripples."

Reads as: "We are losing our influence over the younger generation! Quick, find someone to blame other than the church itself, WHICH OF COURSE CAN DO NO FUCKING WRONG!"

Fuckhead says:

"Aber weil Eltern und Lehrer die Jugend nicht mehr an die Quellen des Lebens führen, kommt es zu Ersatzhandlungen wie etwa zum Griff nach Kondomen und der Pille."

Translates to:

"But because parents and teachers don't show adolescents the sources of life, they commit substitution acts like taking the pill or using condoms"

Reads as: The usual catholic indoctrination. But I like the term "Ersatzhandlung" which makes using condoms or the pill sound like a psychological problem.

Fuckhead says:

"Ich frage mich manchmal: Leben wir denn in einem Irrenhaus? In der EU-Verfassung etwa hat man auf den Gottesbezug verzichtet. Und wenn Gott in einer Gesellschaft nicht mehr Gott ist, dann fühlt sich jeder einzelne Mensch als Gott."

Translates to:

"I ask myself sometimes: Do we live in an asylum? The EU-constitution does not have a reference to god. And if god isn't god any longer in a society, every single person feels as god."

Reads as: "Separation of church and state? What's next? Democracy? That's not what Your God wants!". I don't get the whole "everyone is god" bit, really. Sounds a tiny bit paranoid.

Then he cowardly squirms out of the question about the comparison of an abortion-pill with Zyklon B, the gas used to kill countless Jews in WWII, he made in a sermon in January. Fuckhead.

Go read, your God commands you!

2005-08-10T09:43:00.000+02:00

Sinfest.

Taking Care Of Business

2005-07-29T09:15:00.000+02:00

Elvis survived. Of course we all knew that. What we didn't know is, that he ended up in a resthome in Mudcreek, Texas. Incidentially JFK also lives there. They coloured him black after the (more or less failed) assassination attempt in Dallas and ultimately hid him in the rest home. When an old egyptian mummy in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat (nicknamed Bubba Ho-Tep by Elvis) starts haunting the resthome and sucking the souls from geriatric geezers, The King and The President have to kick some serious ass.

Sounds strange? It is. It's also quite slow, Elvis and JFK move with the speed of 70 year olds and the mummy isn't much faster. What makes this great is the interaction between the two main characters, played by Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. Campbell absolutely nails The King, Davis plays JFK with a good dose of irony. Everytime those two are on screen together, you can see how much fun they had doing this. Elvis' monologues about fame and old age are great, too.

The movie was shot on a shoe string budget of $ 1.25 million. This shows in the special effects which consist of a few scarab models and a latex mummy costume. But that doesn't really matter, the movie is more about the interaction between JFK and Elvis, the whole mummy thing is just a framing device for that. If you get the chance, watch this. Hollywood got nothing on movies like Bubba Ho-Tep, this is where the real love is.

The DVD collection is a beautiful thing to behold, in addition to a commentary track by director Don Coscarelli and Bruce Campbell we get a commentary track done by The King, commenting the movie as he sees it the first time. Damn funny stuff. Many extra features on the second DVD, too.

[Movie] Madagascar

2005-07-20T10:45:00.000+02:00

Oh! Look! Talking animals! Cuuuuute!

That pretty much sums up Madagascar, Dreamworks' latest computer animated feature. The funniest thing of this one are the supporting characters - the paramilitary penguins, the posh, poo-throwing monkeys and the dumb-as-doorbells lemurs. The main characters are unfunny most of the time, only the hypochondriac giraffe manages to get some laughs at times. The underlying message is, of course, "friendship conquers all". Didn't see that coming from a few miles. But hey, it's a kid's movie, so it isn't supposed to be too complicated, is it? On the other hand, if it can have dead human bodies and a major plot point revolving around the killing of small cute animals, why shouldn't it have a story that takes more than two fucking minutes to figure out? Only watch if you intend to give your brain 80 minutes of rest, you won't really need it for this.

[Movie] Rashômon

2005-07-20T09:42:00.000+02:00

Akira Kurosawa is the godfather of Japanese movies. He's also been a tremendous influence for Hollywood, his Hidden Fortress was a major inspiration for George Lucas' Star Wars and his Seven Samurai have been copied time and time again, most notably in The Magnificient Seven. Rashômon has not been copied as such by Hollywood, but at the time of its making (1950) the non-linear storytelling - the story is told mostly in flashback - and the ambiguity of the characters' morale was untypical at the time. Especially the "I remember that differently" storytelling device has since found its way into cinemas mainstream, or even TV (having recently watched the third season of the BBC's Coupling, in the episode Remember This two of the protagonist experience a Rashômon effect when trying to remember the party they first met at).

Rashômon is set in 11^th century Japan, a time of crisis, war, famine and frequent death. The movie opens with a woodcutter, a priest and a derelict man meeting in streaming rain in a half ruined temple. The priest and the woodcutter are quite outraged, the man wants to know why. They tell him. The woodcutter gives an account of how he found the body of a murdered samurai in a glade. He reported the murder and shortly thereafter a known bandit is arrested. The woodcutter tells the tale of the bandit's questioning, which results in another flashback (so the story is really told in double-flashback) of the bandit's account of events. Later the wife of the samurai is found and also questioned, as is the spirit of the murdered man through a medium. The three accounts differ greatly, every one of the questioned tries to embellish his actions while trying to make the other parties look bad.

Back at the temple, the derelict man notes that the woodcutter's account of how he first found the body doesn't match up and confronts him. So the fourth account of events, from the woodcutter, is told. Here the events take another different road, this time embellished in the woodcutter's favour. Afterwards the derelict man finds a baby left in another part of the ruined temple by its parents. He just takes the baby's blanket and wants to leave. The woodcutter and the priest are outraged, but the man just points out that the woodcutter most likely took a precious dagger from the scene of the crime, which he conveniently left out of his account of events. The woodcutter is dumbstruck, but his conscience rears and he decides to take the baby in and raise it as his own. When he walks away with the child, the rain stops and the sun comes out from behind the clouds.

Rashômon is a exploration of human tendency to embellish events in their favour. The accounts of the witnesses differ greatly, every one of them designed to give the maximum of honor to the narrator. Kurosawa ends the movie on an optimistic note, when he lets the woodcutter overcome his selfishness and adopt the abandoned baby. The acting is good, only Toshiro Mifunes antics as the bandit are a bit over the top. The movie has some very good visuals, the shots in the temple with the streaming rain in the background or the scenes in the courtyard where the accounts of the witnesses are heard, while the already questioned people are lined up in the back along the wall, are exceptionally done.

The Criterion DVD is a treat, the booklet contains an intro by a film critic, excerpts from Kurosawas autobiography and the two short stories the movie is based on. The DVD itself contains an introduction by Robert Altman, a commentary track by a film historian and some excerpts from a documentation about the film's cinematographer. There is also an English dub, but it's not very good allegedly, I've watched the film in Japanese with English subtitles. Watch this if you are interested in where many of the inspirations of modern cinematography and storytelling came from, but also if you just want to see a good movie and are not put off by subtitles or b/w.

[Movie] The French Connection

2005-07-16T17:00:00.000+02:00

And, starting off the New Hollywood reviews with The French Connection, a movie by William Friedkin starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. Spoilers follow, but with a 33 years old movie, this shouldn't really matter.

Basically The French Connection is a straightforward crime movie telling the story of two cops in New York's narcotics department who stumble upon a $ 32 million heroin deal between a French syndicate and New York dealers. The story is based on a real life case, which was solved by the two most famous cops the narcotics department had back then. Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso were the basis for Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Hackman) and Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Scheider).

Friedkin shot the movie entirely on location, not a single set piece was used. He went for something he called a "faux documentary style" inspired by French films from the mid 60ies. Many shots were made using hand cameras or driving the cameraman around in a wheelchair instead of mounting the camera on tracks. The lighting is largely natural, so the overall feeling of the film is rather dark, gritty and realistic.

Doyle is basically the bad cop with Russo as his (more or less) good counterpart. The plot is rather straightforward, the cops stake out the bad guys and finally center them in an abandoned warehouse. What makes this one special is the execution. The scenes feel real, the famous scene where Doyle chases a train through New York was partly done without the other drivers on the road knowing about the movie being shot. Some of the cuts are a bit jumbled, without the commentary the scene where Doyle and Russo are taken off the case doesn't really make sense. The ending is rather strange, at first it looks as if Friedkin wanted to keep it ambigous if Doyle shot the Frenchman or the other way round, but the inserts afterwards clear up, that both of them survived. Friedkin mentions on the commentary track that the shot was meant to be Doyle frustratedly shooting in the air. But why keep it ambigous when the titles afterwards tell you exactly what happened to the characters?

Friedkin's commentary here is great. It gives insight into the creation of the film and the technical processes used in filming. Even if you normally don't watch commentary tracks, this one really is worth it.

Just A Reminder

2005-07-12T23:17:00.000+02:00

Organized Religion sucks. I can prove it. With charts.

New Hollywood Got Me 30 Years Late

2005-07-12T11:09:00.000+02:00

I'm in the middle of reading Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. While Biskind isn't known for his scientific accuracy, his account of the rise and fall of New Hollywood at the end of the 1960ies and during the 1970ies is brimming with interesting facts and gossip about the lifes and work of people like Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich or Paul Schrader.

Biskind sees New Hollywood as the seminal era in filmmaking, with the studio system that preceded it as just as bad as the blockbuster era that started with Jaws and Star Wars and ended the creative madness that abounded in the 1970ies. Beginning with Easy Rider and spanning movies like The Godfather, The French Connection, M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver or What's Up, Doc? Biskind tells the story of an age where directors emancipated themselves from the studios and tried to follow their own creative vision rather than stay on the safe side and make as much money as possible. Ironically, New Hollywood layed the foundations for the blockbuster era, where movies started to get more and more expensive and had to appeal to a very broad audience, often at the cost of story and creativity.

Biskind's view of New Hollywood is a bit skewed, his appreciation for the good films produced there seems to make him forget that the 70ies produced as much crap as any other decade in hollywood. Nevertheless his enthusiasm for the masterworks of the era is infectious and I've decided to (re)watch some of the movies (as they are available to me) he raves about.

The first few I'll be watching include:

The French Connection (William Friedkin)
Chinatown (Roman Polanski)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
M*A*S*H (Robert Altman)

I'd really like to get my hands on some of the more obscure movies Biskind mentions, especially Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie should be interesting to watch in its madness just from a "what the fuck?" perspective. But I doubt I'll ever be able to lay hands on this one, since a DVD version seems to be out of the question.

[Movie] Permanent Vacation

2005-07-10T16:30:00.000+02:00

The local arthouse cinema is showing a Jim Jarmusch retrospective (link in German). I caught Permanent Vacation, Jarmusch's first movie, yesterday. On the technical side this clearly is a first effort from someone straight out of film school (in fact it was his master's thesis, I believe). The whole film is shot in 16mm and the sound is sometimes nearly unintelligible. The pacing is glacial, sometimes it takes minutes for the protagonist to just wake up and get going. This should become something of a signature device of Jarmusch's, his pacing picked up a bit in later movies but he still is famous for some of the slowest films in history.

Permanent Vacation tells the story of a few days in the life of Alyosious "Allie" Parker, a young man in Manhattan's lower east side, who loves to listen to Jazz and doesn't sleep much. Allie's life has no real point or direction, he just wanders around from place to place, meeting strange people in the process. He repeatedly tells his girlfriend that he doesn't want to do what normal people do, that he doesn't want to stay, get a job and stuff like that.

Allie's wanderings take him to the ruins of the house he was born in (which was destroyed in "the war, by the Chinese" - a plot point that went completely over my head, I really can't remember any war the US and China were involved in that resulted in property damage in New York and I can't figure out if this was supposed to be allegorical for something), then he pays a visit to his mother who is institutionalized in an asylum. Further meetings include the "doppler effect" guy who tells the absolute worst joke in film history, a sax player and a mad Latin-American girl.

In the end, Allie steals a car, sells it for $ 800, leaves his girlfriend for good and gets on a boat to Paris, where he intends to continue his drifting. On the way out he meets his French counterpart who just arrived from Paris and hopes that New York is to be his "Babylon". When Allie finally leaves on a ship, he refers to himself as a "tourist on a permanent vacation".

The movie revolves around the alienation Allie feels in regards to his surroundings and his unwillingness to do something about it. There are some memorable scenes (the "doppler effect" guy, the latina, the wandering through the derelict buildings of the lower east side), but overall this is a really early effort and it shows. The background sound really starts to go on one's nerves, especially the strange music playing when no Jazz is on.

Permanent Vacation is clearly a conciously artsy movie, which explains the lack of plot and the abundance of weirdness somewhat. It has some merits as an early glimpse of Jarmusch's work which already has some of the interesting bits of his later movies, but taken on it's own it is quite flawed. Only watch this if you're rather patient with your movies. Nothing for instant gratification lovers.

[Anime] Last Exile

2005-07-03T19:29:00.000+02:00

I am by no means an anime expert. I've seen the classics - Nausicaä and everything else Ghibli, Akira, Ghost in the Shell and some more, mostly feature length movies - but especially serialised anime never really appealed to me. So I surprised myself a bit when I picked up the first Last Exile DVD (containing Episodes 1-5) on a whim, just because the description on the back cover was intriguing and the art style looked interesting.

Last Exile is set in a steampunky world, where Victorian era steam engines power WWI inspired flying machines and two warring factions battle each other adhering to a strict code of honour, overlooked by a seemingly all-powerful "guild". The protagonists are two 15 year old youths, Klaus and Lavie, who fly their steam-powered vanship on courier missions, trying to survive in their harsh world. Their first mission is the delivery of a message to an Admiral of one of the factions. This episode sets up the world and its laws and introduces the main players. In further episodes the two youths run across a hunted courier and take over his mission, delivering a young girl to a mysterious ship namend Silvana, which doesn't seem to be allied with any of the other parties and pursues its own agenda.

The world building going on in the series is interesting, the blending of WWI aesthetics and Victorian technology works quite well, even if the guild's technology seems to be a bit too advanced to fit in seamlessly. The story is rather straightforward in the first episodes, but managed to keep me interested. The characters are introduced ok and overall likable, although Lavie tends to get annoying (which could well be because of the shrill voice she got in the German dub I watched).

What didn't work for me was the blending of traditional animation for the character scenes and CGI stuff for the battles and flight scenes. The transition is jarring and takes from the enjoyment of the thing as a whole. Traditional animation all the way would have been a better choice in my book. The quality of the DVD is flawless, although it is quite short on extras. I can't comment on the quality of the dub, since my Japanese has gotten a little rusty in the last years. Overall quite interesting, but no masterwork. Maybe I'll get the following volumes someday.

Watching Tripods Fall

2005-07-01T11:25:00.000+02:00

The following contains spoilers on Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds. The two people reading this blog should be aware of this and only read on if they don't mind being told stuff that could impact their enjoyment of the movie.

I really didn't expect War of the Worlds to be anything but a special effects laden Hollywood summer blockbuster. And while it fits this bill, it is also something more. There are scenes in there which are really frightening, the whole movie reeks of paranoia and fear. The whole thing has an air of realism, the crowd scenes are very intense. The panic of the people seems real and there is no hero figure rising up to vanquish the enemy.

A very nice touch was the whole "don't look" thing with Rachel (the daugther, played superbly by Dakota Fanning). Everytime destruction and death are shown, the girl's eyes are shielded from it by her father. The audience on the other hand, does get the full view of the carnage, until the big battle against the tripods. While Ferrier's son "has to see" it, suddenly the audience is cast into the role of the girl and doesn't get a view of the battle raging behind the hill. Nice comment on the "disaster watching" mentality fostered by CNN and other news stations. Also the scene with the News team at the plane crash site seems to be a comment on the strange set of priorities "news" reporters have nowadays.

"Were you in that plane?"
"No."
"Pity. Would have made a great story."

Another highlight of the film is the cellar scene with a great Tim Robbins playing Ogilvy, an ex-amubulance-driver gone over the edge. While the suspense scene with the alien eye dragged on a bit too long, the interaction of Cruise and Robbins was perfect. Here, too, the death of Ogilvy isn't shown on screen, the audience is as shielded from it as Rachel.

My only real point of criticism is the ending, which is just too sugary-sweet for the rest of the film that preceded it. The scene where Ferrier's son runs to his death just to see what's happening was very poignant and hit quite hard. Having him show up at the end invalidates that. People died left and right in the millions, but the family of the protagonist goes unharmed. But I don't like happy endings, so maybe that's just me.

The Kong Is King

2005-06-28T09:04:00.000+02:00

The trailer for Peter Jackson's King Kong remake went online a short while ago. It's been years since I have seen the original, but some scenes here do remind me of it. Looks rather nice, I like that they left the story in the 1930ies and didn't try to update it. Also, Kong looks very good, WETA seem to know what they are doing. And you can't have enough Jack Black in a movie, I say.

Just to show you what I'm talking about

2005-06-27T14:15:00.000+02:00

Behold the greatness that is Jock:

More to see here, here and here. The man's a genius.

Pop Culture Musings

2005-06-26T21:08:00.000+02:00

Some random stuff I watched or read in the last few days. Just to get the hang of this blogging thing.

[Movie] Batman Begins
Now this wasn't horrible, but by no means the best superhero movie ever. The plot was rather thin, especially the microwave-device in the train part, which could have been lifted straight out of the 60ies TV series. Nolan didn't show Batman full frontal very often for a reason: the costume pretty much sucked. Bale gave an excellent Bruce Wayne though. Rather nice supporting cast, especially Caine and Hauer stood out. Gotham sucked, Burton's gothic vision was so much more compelling and grand than the bland city we got here. Overall a passable movie, but also a missed opportunity for true greatness.

[TV Series] Coupling, Season 2
The British one, of course. A comedy series about six Londoners and their sex lives, mostly. Season 2 contains some of the best episodes of the whole series, with "Her best friend's bottom" as an absolute highlight. Captain Subtext. Genius! And Jeff's antics are pure comedy gold, he steals every scene he's in. "I've got the key to the gates of paradise but I have too many legs!"

[Book] The Scar (China Miéville)
I first encountered Miéville's writing when I bought Perdido Street Station after reading a favourable review somewhere or other. I loved PSS to bits, it's one of the best fantasy books I've read in a long time (maybe I'll talk about it at length some other time), so buying its successor was a no-brainer.

The Scar continues very loosely where PSS left off, focusing on the character of Bellis Coldwine, who played a very minor role in PSS. The book focuses on areas of Bas-Lag far away from the city of New Crobuzon where PSS was set and takes a bit of time to get really moving. But when Miéville hits his stride, everything comes together nicely.

His mad ideas are still there, from the giant Avanc to the really scary anophelii he gives new insight into the workings of Bas-Lag which he seems to have plotted out in meticulous detail. Much of the charm of the book comes from the hints it makes to places like High Cromlech, The Gengris or concepts like possibility mining. The book ends in typical Miéville fashion, but on a more optimistic note than PSS did.

Miéville tends to take tired fantasy clichés and twist them into something which would work in the real world. His protagonists are no heroes, his heroes are not noble but calculating and cold and his villains aren't motivated by evil but necessity and economical gain. Especially the absence of classic hero-figures can be a little jarring at first, Bellis is just so damn inactive and gets played by everyone, it just doesn't mesh with what we've come to expect from fantasy-heroes. But that makes it even more compelling for me. Great book. Go buy.

[Comic] The Losers - Trifecta (Andy Diggle, Jock)
The first two Losers collections, Ante Up and Double Down introduced the Losers, a CIA special forces team, and their mission to hunt down the man called Max who fucked them over years ago in Afghanistan. Trifecta finally shows us how the Losers were betrayed by Max and ended up thought dead.

Diggle writes the comic equivalent of an action movie, but with brains. And Jocks designs are simply beautiful. The covers of the single issues are among the best on the market right now and the interiors are not far behind. Unfortunately Ale Garza steps in as a fill-in artist on two of the issues in the collection. Mind you, he's not bad, but he's no Jock. The collections ends with a mean cliffhanger, which leaves me cursing myself for not reading the singles. Very good stuff indeed, so no surprise that it's selling shit-all apparently.

Bad Blogger! No Cookie!

2005-06-25T12:25:00.000+02:00

Having been accused of creating one of the worst. blogs. ever., got me thinking (as far as thinking is possible at temperatures of about 33 °C and without air condition). I just don't seem to be cut out to be a blogger, I can't muster the enthusiasm to write endles diatribes about what the fuck happened in my boring life the other day. A simple case of too little ego, probably. And any interesting stuff I read, watched or came across on the net has always already been written about in a more competent and coherent way that I could ever hope to accomplish. So why bother in the first place?

On the other hand, why not? Finally having a little more spare time on my hands, I could try to update this thing a bit more frequently. Maybe. When I'm no longer melting.

so i've succumbed and gotten myself a blog

2004-12-30T10:59:00.000+01:00

i'm not sure where i want to go with this. just set it up, without having any real direction in mind. it's probably going to become a collection of things that interest me, without much merit for the outside viewer. if it, in fact, becomes anything beyond this first post.

nevertheless, enjoy.