Blógünder Schlock

I’ve known for weeks now that there is a petition demanding that Uwe Boll stop making movies (like Bloodrayne, of which you may recall my review.) I’ve also known that Boll himself has said that he will indeed stop if enough signatures are collected.

Most of you probably know this already too, but apparently until I post the news, you’ll keep emailing me, so I’m caving in.

And now my thoughts on the matter: My dad used to warn me about sucker bets. “I bet you I can make that cat play the piano,” was the example he often used, followed up with the statement: “Never take this bet unless you really WANT to see the cat play the piano.” He never explained how it would be done, or how the weasel-words would cheat the sucker out of his wager. He just laid it out as a truth.

Uwe Boll has proven to be a masterful manipulator of publicity AND a masterful filmmaker. In the case of publicity, he’s turned negative news into name recognition, and in the case of films, he’s taken fine (Oscar-winning, even) talent and churned out deplorable tax-shelters. I don’t LIKE what he does, but I have to give the man credit: he’s got me convinced that the cat can play the piano.

What will happen if there are a million signatures on that petition? I suspect that Boll will either weasel a way into demonstrating that there are NOT one million or more signatories (and I’m sure there are enough of us signing several times to make the case for him) or he will find a way to take this list of “one million people hate me” to the bank for some marketing endeavor or another. Or, worst case, the petition will top out at around half a million, and it’s like we ALL went boxing against Boll and got our noses bloodied.

Maybe he was speaking rashly. Maybe your signature really will end his torturtous treatment of our favorite video games. But where Boll is concerned, I’m always ready to expect the worst.

I’ve been tempted to rent “In The Name of the King,” just to see how bad the film is, but I realized that if I do, Boll wins AGAIN. I’m not even allowing myself the privilege of enjoying the bad reviews, because that’s just another kind of cat playing the piano.

I saw The Golden Compass on Friday because I really needed to wind down a bit.

In a nutshell, don’t bother. Save your money for something else.

I’ve not paid much attention to the fact that the author of the source books has an atheist agenda (link), because I’m a sucker for eye candy, and love a good story well told. I wanted to see the movie because it looked like fun.

There was some fun, but the film went nowhere. The characters were clunky, the mythos ridiculous, and the ice-bears were not given nearly enough screen time.

I confess to enjoying the mini-arc in which the girl needs to hire the bear, uses the Golden Compass to see what the bear needs, and they both end up getting what they want. Overall, though, the movie was disjointed and disappointing.

Understand, this was a movie I wanted to like. Based on the trailers, it looked like a cool, steampunk/fantasy with a nicely mythic child protagonist. That’s right up my alley. The fact that I came away from it bored and disappointed speaks worlds more about the film than anything else I can say.

If you live in the Toronto area, my buddy Jim is having a book-launch party this Thursday night for The Makeshift Miracle, a brilliant gem of a story he first put online something like four years ago. He re-drew and recolored a bunch of it for print, and it really shines. Please stop by and support him in this — tell him Howard sent you, and I’m sure you’ll get a warm welcome.

Not that you wouldn’t get one anyway. Jim is great people. Not in the Toronto area? You can order Jim’s book online or through your local comics retailer.

In other miraculous news one of my all-time favorite comics - PvP - is getting animated. The 1-minute sample from the first episode looks and sounds great. The voices are spot-on, and the dialog is tight. Scott Kurtz and Blank Label Comics legend Kris Straub pushed the studio to put a top-notch team on this project, and they did.

The only down-side is that it’s kind of pricey. If you’re used to “free TV” (what we used to get via assemblages of wires on our roofs, kids) then the $30 price-tag for a dozen 5-minute episodes is going to seem steep.

Pre-order before the end of the year and it’s only $19.95 — still not free, but I’ll be plunking down the PayPal coin.

Nobody is getting rich off of this. As far as I’m able to tell it is a labor of love with some steep production costs they’d like to make back.

I’ll try and make this review short, because tomorrow is my anniversary and I haven’t gone shopping yet…

This is not a great movie, and might not even be a great comedy. Somehow, though, I went in the right frame of mind, and with the right person (my brother Randy, who now lives in Utah so we can have this kind of fun more often), and I laughed throughout the film. Also, I laughed harder than I ever have in my life.

You may be thinking that you hear that particular exaggeration a lot, and that’s fine. I’m not exaggerating. During the knife scene (Ricky Bobby thinks he’s paralyzed and stabs himself in the leg — a bit of this scene is in the trailers) I laughed so hard I almost blacked out. All I could hear was my own laughter and a rushing sound, my vision narrowed to a pin-point, and I felt for all the world like I was about to die happy.

No, there were no chest pains. It was not frightening. It was quite simply the most amazing laughter I have ever experienced. I will allow for the possibility that someone spritzed me in the face with a narcotic of some sort while I was laughing, but I’m pretty sure it was just honest-to-goodness uncontrollable laughter. Oh, and not enough air. I’ve been sporting a bit of a chest cold.

I know, that’s not much of a movie review. Those of you who see the film may end up expecting a lot more of that scene (or of the film itself) than it ends up delivering. Know, however, that I came home really, really happy.

The guy running around the theater with the narcotic nebulizer totally made my day.

Drink up, me hearties, yo-ho!

I walked into the theater with “Yo Ho, Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life For Me)” running through my head. I walked out of the theater with a stern realization that a pirate’s life is NOT for me. Pirates get chased by governments, eaten by cannibals, drowned, blown up, press-ganged, imprisoned, and dragged to the murky depths by sea monsters.

No, what I want is the life of being able to WATCH pirates. Over and over and over again.

This is a strong film, and it’s not just eye-candy. Yes, it’s beautiful, and of course ILM and their friends had a hand in making us believe in Davy Jones and his crew, but the acting is also great. Looking back, I didn’t for a minute suspect anyone of “being an actor.” They were all pirates, swashbucklers, cannibals, fugitives, witches, monsters, sailors, wenches, or whatever else. I mean, EVERYBODY had me fooled. I didn’t look at Jack Sparrow and see Johnny Depp, and Kiera Knightly and Orlando Bloom both disappeared into Elizabeth wants-to-be-Turner and her fiance Will Turner.

That’s really the test, isn’t it? Wrap us up so tightly in the story and the characters and the world that we can’t find our way out until the credits run, and THEN you’ve succeeded as a filmmaker.

More than just that, though, it’s a film I want to see again. In theaters. And then own on DVD. And then I want to see the sequel (because there are, oh, a few unresolved plot points when the credits roll.)

Speaking of the credits, sit through them.

So there’s your spoiler-free review. If you liked the first film, you’ll love this one. If you never saw the first film, watch it on DVD first, because there are some key bits in it that you’ll want to have seen at least once before seeing Dead Man’s Chest.

(Note: I cannot promise that the comments will remain spoiler-free. You have been warned.)

Sandra and I will be seeing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest Friday morning at 9:30am. So maybe it’s not a breakfast date with Jack Sparrow, but I’m still looking forward to it.

I’ll let you know what I think, and I promise not to spoil it. Watch this space.

–Howard

Yesterday I consumed a couple of pieces of entertainment which were produced and/or published in 1985.

For the record, that’s the year I graduated High School (Riverview High, Sarasota, Florida) and the year I started college (Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah). It was, as they say, a banner year for me.

We’ll start with Weird Science, a fringe brat-pack film featuring a very young Kelly LeBrock trying to look like an “older woman” (she was 25 at the time), and pulling it off thanks to the fact that the leading “men,” Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith were respectively 17 and 16 years old.

What can I say? I’ve only seen this movie twice now… once in 1985, and once 21 years later. I don’t remember it being nearly this corny, and I certainly don’t remember 80’s fashion that way. Pretty much all the main characters looked like they were wearing clown suits… except for Vernon Wells, who looked great in his biker bondage outfit. I was excited about recognizing having seen him in other things, until we realized the “other things” were Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.

The best thing to come out of Weird Science was the title track by Oingo Boingo. I love that song… and the music video is a lot more watchable than the movie.

My other consumable from 1985 has reached a rather wider audience. As far as twenty-one years can prove, it has proven to be timeless. I fully expect it to graduate from “timeless entertainment” to “part of human mythology” sometime in the next 300 years.

I’m speaking, of course, of Calvin and Hobbes. My copy of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes arrived yesterday, and I read the first 50 or so pages, whose comics first appeared in fall and winter of 1985. This book is a masterwork… a true treasury — especially for someone working full-time as a cartoonist.

In reading the introduction by Bill Watterson, I learned that he appears to accept a few things as universal, self-evident truths of cartooning, but which are neither universal nor self-evident. I’ll go into more detail on these musings in another column sometime, but mostly they center around “audience feedback” and “work environment.” Bill was and is reclusive. I’m merely introverted, and I’ve learned to work around that. In fact, I’ve learned that I HAVE to work around that. But, as I said, now is not the time for that extended ramble.

Time… Twenty-one years is a long time. For Weird Science it’s too long. For Calvin and Hobbes it’s barely time to rotate the bottle.

I just got back from Cars.

It was wonderful. Sure, the story arc and character arcs are predictable (especially if you’ve seen lots of similar Disney/Pixar films), but it is still a wonderful film.

The animation and voice characterization is uniformly brilliant, and the art direction and concept design is either the product of epiphanic genius or a jillion hours of really, really hard work. But you don’t have to be chowing down on the eye-candy to enjoy yourself.

Having seen it only once, I cannot be 100% sure that it will bear dozens of repeated viewings, but I know I’ll be buying the DVD, and I know my kids will watch it multiple times… with me and Sandra.

See this film, and stay for the credits… all the way to the very end.

I was expecting Pixar to blow this one. I don’t know if I thought it was too high-concept or too mundane, but I certainly didn’t expect it to speak to me. I’m not a NASCAR fan, and I’ve never followed car racing. A two-hour “cars-as-a-metaphor” film simply couldn’t work… could it?

It worked.

I’ll make this quick:

1) Don’t see this film without first seeing the prequels.
2) It is a very entertaining, dramatic, and satisfying film.
3) Those who are complaining about it do so largely because of “canon” issues. I’d say more, but I don’t want to spoil it.

That said, the meta-story behind these three films has gotten stale for me. The X-men film franchise has focused almost entirely on themes of acceptance, definition of “other,” and thinly veiled political references. That they’ve worked character development, drama, and solid action into the mix shows brilliance, but come on… we did three movies about superheroes in which the “bad guy” was “fear of people who are different.” It’s high time to pick a new theme.

X3 is worth seeing, and all three X-men films stand together well. Hopefully they’ll take the franchise someplace else, next… like letting it lie fallow for a few years, or maybe focusing on just one or two of the heroes in a story that is a little bit less grand in scope.

In 8th grade I read Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder.” I loved it.

Last night I rented the big-screen adaptation and watched it with Sandra. It was nice to make fun of, but the punch of the original story was gone.

Also, the effects were very 1993. “Hey, we can make all these backgrounds and monsters and stuff on the computer!” Any scene with CG in it not only shouted “CG in this scene!” but also invited the viewer to play “how far back does the blue-screen begin” instead of watching the actors.

The “science” was your usual mish-mash of tech-fantasy garnished with unsupported plot devices.

In the original story the time-travellers return from the Jurassic to find that everybody is speaking a different language. One of the travellers finds a crushed butterfly on his boot. As I recall, the safari leader then kills him in anger, and the report of his weapon is described as “a sound of thunder.” End of story.

In the film version we have “time waves” in which the effects of the squashed butterfly (which we don’t find out about until the last 20 minutes of movie) propagate visually, moving across the landscape like tidal waves. They begin seeing plant growth throughout the city. Then come the bugs. Then the (admittedly very inventively constructed) velociraptor-baboons.

The heroine tells the hero that the changes are propagating beginning with the things that evolved first (plants, bugs) up to higher-order critters, and that the last things to evolve will be the last things to change. Humans, of course.

I’ve seen evolution misquoted and abused. There was that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where everybody got “devolved,” for instance. Oh, and there was this kid in a chat room years ago who insisted that black people evolved from a different species of monkey than white people did. By comparison, I supppose A Sound of Thunder merely insulted evolution, threw some poo at it monkey-style, and then moved on to depicting the now-supposedly-justified absurdity.

*sigh*

Final plot hole… it turns out that the reason it’s supposedly okay for them to shoot at an Allosaurus who has fallen into a tar pit is that the whole area is about to be obliterated by a volcanic eruption. They only have about five minutes from Allosaurus-in-tar to wall-of-burning-ash.

The volcano destroys everything… including, one might suspect, the butterfly.