Read this excellent essay by CS Leigh. I agree with the characterization of Harmony Korine as the new face of "post-cinematic cinema," even if I do blame him for indirectly leading to the rise of the interminable Mumblecore genre. It's Dogme 95 meets Web 2.0 slacker navel-gazing, and it inherits the most annoying aspects of both. Kids, it doesn't count as creativity inducing artificial limitations when they are imposed by budget and talent rather than arbitrarily.
It's a brave new world folks; one that has sacrificed mystery and danger upon the alter of almighty convenience. On the other hand, it is also a paradise for the lazy fan of obscure genre films.
It's Friday the 13th again already, and the mini horror deluge begins anew. The Last House on the Left remake is attempting to fill the slasher void with predictably middling reviews and 'torture porn' rants. I'd like to rise up to its defense, but it will almost certainly be terrible--not to mention painfully derivative by even the low standards of 21st century horror remakes. For a gander at the film's dubious pedigree, check my flowchart of its predecessors.
Today's other big release is the controversial (to say the least) action-horror videogame, Resident Evil 5. I really wish they would revert to the Japanese title, Biohazard, as their hasn't been anything particularly 'residential' about the series since the first title. It's a big release, certain to make sick piles of cash monies, but their are two very loud factions of detractors: people upset by the series' legacy controls, and people upset by the perceived racist imagery.
Early RE games were played on static, prerendered backdrops that acted like dramatic camera angles, giving the series a cinematic feel, enhancing its claustrophobic nature, and generally frustrating casual gamers to no end. The sublime fourth entry shook things up by cross breeding with a third person shooter to make the mutant hybrid known as 'stop-n-pop.' (Similar to the backwoods restroom technique: stoop-n-poop.) This retreat-position-aim-repeat gameplay, combined with its emphasis on self contained action setpieces, proved so popular that it has been the blueprint for a large cross-section of this generation's most entertaining games. Without RE4 there would certainly be no Gears of War or Dead Space.
Of course, now their are legions of gamers who are more familiar with permutations of Resident Evil 4 gameplay than the game itself, and when confronted with a game similar to GoW or Dead Space, only minus the ability to maneuver, they will freak out. Personally, the mere idea of RE4 style anything in HD releases a mass of endorphins into my cortex, and as strange as it might be moving back a generation control-wise, it only took two playthroughs of the demo to get back into the swing of things. Besides, in Dead Space (not so much in Gears, which leans further into the third person shooter realm) I never found myself relying on moving while shooting that much, anyway. The RE quickturn would have been preferable in many situations, too.
The other aspect of RE5 that is causing spastic freakouts and moral panics (in case you have been on Mars for the last few months) is the allegation of racism. Hackles are raised on both sides of the issues, and so many flame wars have begun on the topic that the entire internet is in danger of burning to the ground. I'm still waiting for my collector's edition of the game to arrive from Amazon, (fingers crossed for tomorrow) so I can't make any sort of final judgment, but here is what I've gathered so far:
-There is a 0% chance that this game will be intentionally racist. When the racism kerfuffle first reared its head, I commented to interested friends that it would be almost certain that the player would have an African sidekick of some sort or at least do some explicit rescuing of uninfected Africans. Sure enough, a few trailers later the makers introduced a black co-op partner, Sheva. Her light skinned appearance will certainly be made an issue of, but along with the fact that the villagers are obviously affected by one or more of the many viruses and parasites from the RE mythos, this should let some of the air out of the perception that the game is about killing Africans for the sake of killing Africans.
-On the other hand, if you are one of the many fanboys who get agitated at the very mention of racism, you are probably being willfully ignorant. The early trailers, showing white, musclebound Chris Redfield walking around a sinister African village, getting attacked by the townspeople, then beating the living shit out of said townspeople, are more than troubling without the proper context. This is the kind of imagery that David Duke wanks-off to, kiddies, and if the Resident Evil series wasn't so tightly bound to their B-movie narratives, it would not be a stretch for the remaining racists in our society to fire up the game in order to play make-believe racewar. (This is assuming that your average racist has enough imagination for such a task, but they did manage to pump out The Turner Diaries.)
The problem here is not the game itself or the decision to set it in Africa, but in Capcom's ill-thought out marketing campaign that released highly questionable imagery without the proper context. Fans of the series could easily guess at what the designers were going for (responding with uncomfortable facepalms or reflexive defensiveness) but anyone not familiar with the tropes of the series could easily be horrified. Judging from the mini media circuses that sprang up on the web with every early trailer, people obviously were.
Now that the game is out (USPS don't fail me now) everyone can play it for themselves, realize that the game is more interested with demonizing Wesker than the people of Africa, and chill the heck out.
Once again, sorry for the lack of substantial updates around here. I promise that the following will be coming soon: Body Melt, I Come in Peace, Class of 1999, an exploration of the films of BBC teleplay writer Nigel Kneale, and much, much more. In fact, I have a massive stockpile of films in desperate need of review, but no damn time to give them my usual "massive information dump" treatment.
It's a bit of a ghost town in here this week. Sorry. I'm in the final stages of buying a house, but things will be back to normal and firing with both barrels in a couple weeks.
Anywho, I finally made it out to Watchmen at the IMAX Monday, and it was pretty much what I expected. Visually spectacular, great casting, "Pruit Igoe," live action Rorschach; it was about as good as it could theoretically be, but still never gave a compelling case for its own existence outside of being an extension of the comic. I only know one person so far who has seen it without having read the source material, and he... didn't get it at all.
One area in which the movie is undeniably groundbreaking is in its use (or overuse depending on who you ask) of the rapidly emerging field of computer generated wangs. Let's take a look at the pioneers of this art:
1. Irréversible
It's a pretty safe bet that this movie will somehow make it onto every list I come up with. For the uninitiated, it is a chronologically backward faux-single take festival of human misery. (Check the above linked list for more details.) It also boasts the first ever digitally added penis. Obscuring genitalia has been old hat for the film & video world for a long time, and digital technology has facilitated that, but never before (that I know of) had a filmmaker needed to use the magic of CGI to insert a penis into a shot in which it was lacking.
The digi-dong occurs at the tail end of the film's infamous 10 minute, single take rape scene. Since actually raping Monica Bellucci would be an even more henous crime than forcing audiences to squirm through the disturbingly acurate simulation, the attacker's wang remained safely behind underwear. When he pulls out upon finishing, the director was forced to add a shadow covered dinky to maintain the scene's searing hyperreality. Because when you're attempting to psychologically damage people, you simply can't have them notice little things like that.
2. Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and Damned
Never a game to shy away from controversy, Rockstar Games needed to come up with a new trick to upset its legions of moralistic foes. Blowing up police helicopters, running down hookers, swearing, and drug use simply are not enough to upset people these days. So they decided to offend outside the box with full frontal male nudity of the virtual kind.
The player character, a surly biker working odd jobs around the Liberty City underworld, gets a new provider of missions midway through: a corrupt politician who spends their first meeting buck ass naked. Knowing that rumors of the digi-wang would begin flying immediately, they decided to (um) tease the player for the majority of the cutscene by keeping said wang tastefully off camera. Just when you start to think that the internets have lied to you, they cut to a less tasteful medium close-up; pubes and all.
Think about it for a second. Someone had to make those scrotum textures. Someone had to design it in Maya. This isn't a shadowy silhouette penis; it is presented anatomically correct, in full detail. On a related note: why must I keep falling for the cruel trick that is Grand Theft Auto multiplayer? Deathmatch is never fun, the team games are always empty, and everyone just does the races, which are fun for a minute before you realize that no one stands a chance in hell of getting within half a lap of the guy in first because of the brutal melee going on between third and fourth. It's the exact opposite of Mario Kart; not a rubber band, but a slingshot.
3. Watchmen
Yup. That is a big blue dingaling. ....and there it is again.Can someone get the Smurf-god a towel, please?
So, what say you? Anyone know of any other examples? How about female genitalia? Digi-boobs are practically the norm by now, which definitely says something about our culture, but as an appreciator of the incredible advances in videogame jiggle-physics I'm not going to complain.
Back in my art school days I was absolutely fascinated by the strange artifacts caused by imperfections in digital video. While old fashioned celluloid has the advantage of existing as 24 discreet frames a second, the digital world has to be much more frugal. 30 full resolution stills take up far more space than one second of video, so in order to fit all the delicious content into your DVD and YouTube sandwiches, the programmers have to get creative.
Rather than diving into the technical end of things, lets just say that the various video compression algorithms out there have lots of very complicated ways of extrapolating your favorite hardcore porns and Sesame Street episodes from as little video information as possible.
In this way, digital video is more like human memory than an actual recording. The skeleton of the video is there, but the rest is being filled in by the codec as you play back. When something goes wrong, the error can cascade throughout the rest of the image like Sunny-Delight dumped into a river.
Back in 2006, I discovered this amazing use of intentional video corruption by a German multimedia artist.
Facinated, I eventually tracked the guy down and, via a series of poorly translated e-mails, talked him into revealing his secrets. Unfortunately, while the effect was easily duplicatable, Quicktime was unwilling to export the final product, rendering it ephemeral. The solution ended up being a complicated and unwieldy series of scripts dedicated to taking screen captures of the corruption in progress.
So for the last couple of years, the project has basically been shelved. Cue 2009, and it looks like everyone has beaten me to the punch. (That'll show me.)
One caveat of this effect is that much of the detail is lost when changing resolutions or recompressing for the web, so rather than embedding the next videos, I'll let you check out their HD versions on YouTube.
Here is a music video for "Evident Utensil" by Chairlift. This is the basic effect that I had been going for, only in an art film context rather than a music video. Check the YT uploader's page for instructions on how to do this yourself. His process is infinitely simpler and shorter than mine, but with somewhat less control. (Not that you have much to begin with. My experience with the effect was mostly "This shot/movement/transition might look cool. Let's see what happens.") Also, he calls it Datamoshing, which sounds really stupid.
Like a trend vampire waiting to pounce, here is Kanye West with a more subdued take. On the funny side, there are now legions of confused YouTube comments wondering why the video is "messed up."
Ultimately I am extremely torn by this turn of events. On one hand, the new corruption technique could save me a lot of time if I wanted to start the project back up. Also, I could watch the Evident Utensil video over and over and over, despite the aggravating male vocal that periodically rears its goofy head. On the other hand, why bother making an art film now that the effect has made it into rap videos -- isn't that a universal sign of something being played out?
After freebasing crappy genre films for long enough, it becomes pretty easy to predict what a new flick will provide. In fact, the vast majority of B-pictures are downright predictable to a fault. (Drinking Game Alert: rent the most obscure '80s slasher you can find, make predictions with your friends about the order of character deaths, then drink when you are proven correct. Drink more when you aren't.)
After tracking down a copy of the obscure, early '90s, post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk picture, Hardware, (also known as M.A.R.K. 13) I made a lot of assumptions about it during the first act. All I knew about it was that it is about a killer robot, and it was never given an official DVD release. That's a pre-qualification for Video Updates right there, so I never bothered to do any research. Turns out, nearly everything I assumed about the movie was completely bass-akwards. I don't know if that is the fault of the filmmakers' "world building" or my own close-mindedness, but it certainly lead to a motherload of the slack-jawed WTF moments that Video Updates is all about.
The film opens with a post apocalyptic desert and an intense blast of the color orange, who should probably get an associate producer credit. There is plenty of black, and some occasional browns and reds; once, near the end I spotted some blue, but for the most part all you'll see is orange. The sandy backdrop is disrupted by a nomad with a sweet gas mask and cowboy hat combo. He stumbles upon the scattered remains of some sort of robot and begins scavenging, unaware of the occasional twitch in the machine's hand.
Assumption #1: This will be a post-societal desert movie like The Road Warrior or Tank Girl.
Assumption wrong. A few scenes later and we're in a Blade Runner-esque, futuristic L.A. shithole, and far from roving bands of isolated survivors, there is a massive overpopulation problem. The desert is just a neighboring "forbidden zone," where our hero, played by a young Dylan McDermott, has been searching for old junk to give to his artist girlfriend. (Stacy Travis) Wait; not only has society not collapsed, it has a thriving art community? What kind of dystopia is this?
It's strange seeing McDermott in this sort of role. Actually it is strange seeing Dylan McDermott at all. Period. We don't normally run in the same moving picture circles, so I basically only know him from half remembered snippets of TV ads for The Practice. The guy is the most bland, generic "leading man" type I've ever seen; so much so that I'm fairly certain he was constructed (or grown) in a top secret lab of some sort.
Thought Experiment: write down words that physically describe McDermott, Jason Patric, and Keanu Reeves. (Example: beady, soulless eyes.) Now try to find something that couldn't apply to any of the three. Nothing? I thought so.
Okay, so he's no Bruce Campbell; let's not judge him too harshly. (Starting...... now) After buying the previously mentioned robo-wreakage from the wasteland scavenger, he gets a taxi-boat ride through (presumably) radioactive sewage care of an essential Lemmy cameo as the driver.
Rolling in with his wingman, Shades, (John Lynch, recently seen in Isolation) who is thus named because of his penchant for wearing... um... shades all the time, McDermott makes his way through the throngs of stairwell squatters to the blast doors of his lady's place. They arrive; there's tension in their relationship; he gives her the roboskull; blah blah blah.
Assumption #2: The robot will somehow reactivate and go kill crazy.
Assumption (eventually) correct! After, painting a gonzo American flag on it and welding it into a mural of cool looking metal shit, the machine promptly reactivates, steals electricity from nearby appliances, and starts reconstructing itself with various nearby artworks. Armed with various blugeons, buzzsaws, and a curiously dick-shaped drill, it is totally ready for the oncoming kill-craziness. Also, its glowing eyes and droopy, spiky lower-jaw give it more than a passing resemblance to your basic necromorph.
Assumption #3: (also #0) This will be a fairly straightforward killer robot movie.
Assumption so very naive and wrong. Why waste the budget on lots of sets and location shooting when you can confine the killbot to a large apartment for most of the movie? Okay, so it's an Alfred Hitchcock Presents style postapocalyptic dystopian killer robot movie, I can dig it. What I can't dig is the characters referring to the robot as a goddamn cyborg.
Attention early '90s sci-fi filmmakers: 'cyborg' is a portmanteau of 'cybernetic' and 'organism,' meaning a robot with people parts or a people with robot parts. It is not a synonym for robot. Every time you use the terms interchangeably, a nerd who might have gone on to cure cancer suffers a fatal aneurysm.
While his special someone plays cat and mouse with a disgruntled toaster, our hero discovers his dangerous junk from the wasteland dealer has been assassinated by the killbot's hand. Fortunately, the dude was recording his findings about the machine when it offed him, so everyone gets a convenient exposition dump. It turns out that the machine is a prototype model of the totalitarian state's upcoming population control program: killing people with badass robots. Programmed for maximum mean motherfuckery when subjects try to resist, the MARK 13 biblical-proportions killing unit is generally more humane in its work than other deathbots. It's ultimate weapon is an internal stockpile of potent neurotoxin that provides its victims with an intense feeling of euphoria and generally makes them trip balls for a bit before passing into the next world.
Back in the apartment, the damsel in distress has more to worry about than killer robots. It seems the massive perv spying on her from an adjacent building has picked this evening to make his big move. (Why he does this after clearly spying the killbot with his high-powered optics, or why he immediately forgets about it once he arrives will remain mysteries for the ages.) To make matters worse, the unit's huge blast door goes on the fritz, and only Creepy McPervyson knows how to get it open. Take a wild guess what happens to him.
Luckily, this particular killer robot has some obvious weaknesses. One that is unnecessarily telegraphed early on is water. (Dur. I saw Westworld, I know what happens when you splash water on your mechanical Roman concubine.) The other is that its vision is infrared, Predator style. As it closes in on our heroine, she uses this fact to her advantage by hiding in the fridge--with the door open. Neither her nor the filmmakers seem to be aware of how this would make her more visible rather than less, so it ends up working.
Much like The Rats will make your children too dumb to survive an outbreak of killer rats, Hardware should be avoided on the grounds of robotic uprising survival misinformation. We can't have our descendants responding to the activation of Skynet by suffocating themselves in refrigerators.
So while the guys are trying to force open her blast doors (hehe), the damsel decides to take matters into her own hands and, after a frantic struggle, cranks the gas on and blows up her entire kitchen.
Assumption #4: Having exploded its robot, the movie is over.
Assumption wrong. I know they mentioned Mark 13's aversion to moisture earlier, but there is something very climactic about destroying half your apartment in order to blow up the evil robot trying to saw you a new one. Not climactic enough, apparently; a quick check of the run time reveals that we're just starting act 3. What on earth could Hardware have in store for us in the next half hour?
Total batshit insanity, apparently. Dylan and the building's security guys go nuts with auto-shotguns, somebody gets chopped in half by the blast door, Mark 13 gets his chainsaw-wang wet, everybody falls out a window and pretends they're in Blade Runner, and our poor hero gets injected with happy-fun-time euthanasia serum, resulting in at least fifteen solid minutes of him tripping balls, and giving the filmmakers an excuse to completely stop making sense. For instance, the not tech-savvy whatsoever heroine suddenly gains the ability to hack into the robot's CPU remotely (dystopian WiFi perhaps?) from her giant door opening telephone console. Also, everyone constantly forgets about the robot when it isn't on screen. Poor thing probably just wants some attention.
The death trip warrants special attention for both its randomness and intensity. The flickering lights, woozy camera, and wide angle lenses are reminicent of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, only with more fractals.
Eventually they manage to take Mark 13 out once and for all by shooting it point blank in the face with a Desert Eagle while giving it a relaxing hot shower. Ah H20, the kryptonite of the destructo-bot world. Someone should have told Dave Bowman that all he had to do was spill his drink on HAL.
Hardware is a goofy little chunk of cinema, but like many films unavailable on DVD, it raises the question: "Why is this floating in the either of obscurity while so much blindingly awful drek manages to make the digital transition?" Especially considering this was an early Weinstein Bros. production with enough clout for Lemmy and Iggy Pop to make cameos. (Oh wait.) After doing a little research, I discovered that there is a pretty obvious reason that Hardware languishes in release limbo: Richard Stanley, the "writer" & director, ripped the whole thing off from a 2000 AD comic, which you can read in its entirety here. Needless to say, the comic's creators sued the pants off of someone (probably lots of someones), got themselves full writing credits, and probably created a massive legal clusterfuck around the film's ownership and distribution rights. It's likely that no one wants to (or will ever want to) do the necessary courtroom throwing down required to get this strange little slice of 1990 into your region 1 DVD player.
And what a slice it is. I will never tire of watching cyberpunk films that predate the rise of the internet. In the future, it seems everyone will communicate with giant consoles cobbled together from miscellaneous conduits and snowy, buzzing cathode ray tubes. Noirish blinds will be all the rage, and we will all make love in the shower to the soothing sounds of Public Image Ltd. without first removing our robo-hands. Oh yeah, and killer robots sporting American flag paintjobs will cull the population with neurotoxins that smell like apple pie and get you totally high... in addition to killing you.
