The Uncanny Mesa

Twitter Sonnet #124

There's no right time to tell a clock to change.
The worst news is delivered via flies.
Sunlight off marble tames Minotaur's rage.
Cashew juices flow off fluorescent thighs.
Claws gently caress your front fanny pack.
Rotary dials died in plastic jaws.
Antennae dwell too long on what they lack.
Hand bestiality begins with paws.
Vito's orange mouth swallowed a grandchild.
No subtitle's safe in a wind tunnel.
Kanji vanishes into the wild.
Stored with strawberries in spider funnel.
The Blackberry killed the telephone star.
Sword swallower good lawyers eat the bar.

In Second Life last week, I got Tou this rather nice outfit;



It's The White Queen by Bare Rose and is one of a number of Alice in Wonderland related outfits Bare Rose has been releasing in the past several weeks. Only the Mad Hatter one really looks like one of the movie versions of the characters, but they all seem to live up to Bare Rose's usual standard of amazingly well made clothes, none of which ever seem to cost more than 180 and come automatically with three variants. The actual Alice outfits weren't my cup of tea (a little too bright), but I did get a sort of dominatrix meets muppet "Jubjub bird" outfit that's certainly a wonder to behold. I forgot to take a screenshot.

Speaking of muppets having sex, somehow that's all I could think of when I heard "Octomom" Nadya Suleman was being offered a role in a porno by a company who says they'll pay for her house in exchange. Am I the only one who thinks she looks like an Angelina Jolie muppet?

I've been meaning for a while to do a post about the costume designs in Venia's Travels. I guess I'll do half the post now.


This is the outfit Venia wore during most of the Vyurel segment. On the left is my original sketch, and you can see I dropped sleeves and a belt, pretty much at the last minute. This outfit, and most of the look of the faerie clothes, is mainly inspired by the 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad, mostly June Duprez's clothes.





I even modelled the Vyurelan ambassador to Niveriku after Duprez herself;



The idea wasn't to model anything after any specific outfit from the movie, but to take several elements to capture something of the overall style. A lot of the Paely clothes are meant to evoke a sense of 1930s Hollywood medieval, as you can see from Venia's father, whose clothes are meant to be a slightly more pathetic version of Basil Rathbone's outfit in The Adventures of Robin Hood;



The idea's not so much to make any kind of post-modernist, meta joke. Rather, I feel the fusion of knowledge of medieval dress mixed with 1930s aesthetic sensibilities creates something different from either perspective. But I went slightly earlier for Wircelia's look in chapter 34 when I put her in almost exactly one of Mata Hari's outfits;




I don't know why exactly, but I'd wanted to dress Wircelia like Mata Hari for a while, and I guess it seemed appropriate for the chapter.



Kakeshya's wearing something more in the Niverikiin style, which is mainly based on images of Byzantine dress I find in Google image searches;



But you probably noticed Kakeshya's outfit in chapters 41 and 42 is significantly different in style from the other Niverikiin outfits;



This outfit is based on the clothes of a number of Bedouin women I found pictures of online. The idea is that Kakeshya's clothes here are of the cat people of northern Niveriku--remember, she's only half gorgon, and her father was a cat person, a species inspired by the Val Lewton film, and which I decided was the only species immune to the gorgon's power, thus making it possible for there to be such a thing as a half gorgon. I didn't want the gorgon's power to be something that could be switched on and off.

While the clothing in Niveriku's mostly based on Byzantine and Roman clothes, the armour worn by Knights and Paladins of course is plate mail from a much later period;




That's about all I have time for to-night. I'll go over more in a later post.

Do Vampires Need Health Care?

Last night's tweets;

Claws gently caress your front fanny pack.
Rotary dials died in plastic jaws.
Antennae dwell too long on what they lack.
Hand bestiality begins with paws.

After spending all day hanging out with Trisa, who's in town visiting for a few days, I came back to discover Obama's Health Care Bill passed. I wish my keyboard could produce a random, ambiguous, unpronounceable symbol, because that's the only way I can think to articulate my feelings about it. On the one hand, it's bill whose only strength is rooted in a Nixonian ideology centred on empowering insurance agencies, and the bill also features the seeds of a pro-life device to prevent women from being able to pay for abortions. On the other hand, as Robert Reich points out, it's the most Democrats have accomplished in decades, and the political capital from such a victory may lead to better things in the future. I guess the only thing I can say for sure is that we are a sad, sad country.

But, in better news, the sample for the Rifftrax of New Moon has been put on YouTube.



"It doesn't make sense for you to love me" - Bella

"The Twilight series summed up in nine words." - Mike Nelson

An Agreeable Film

Despite the fact that I could've gone my whole life without seeing Paul Sorvino raise the roof, I didn't think Repo! The Genetic Opera was so bad. It shares some producers with the Saw films and is directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, who directed Saws II through IV. I've only seen the first Saw, with Rifftrax accompaniment, and while I enjoyed Repo a lot more than that film, I admit that's certainly not saying much. Though I suppose the only thing Repo shares with the Saw movies, content-wise, is somewhat whimsical, conspicuously artificial violence. Repo benefits from not taking itself as seriously as Saw, working mostly like an old fashioned haunted house at a Halloween fair, minus the scares. At the same time, its full throttle post-modernism can become somewhat tedious, though bits of genuine creativity save it from being the obnoxious borefest of a Baz Luhrmann film.

My least favourite part of the film was this guy;



The whole movie I kept thinking, "What's he doing here?" He looks like a fan who won a contest to appear in the movie. His face, uninterestingly settled between soft and chiselled is, for a man, unsuited for long hair, and his performance, while enthusiastic, lacks any particular texture or complexity. It occurred to me at one point, "This guy's either one of the composers or the director." Sure enough, I discovered later that he's Terrance Zdunich, one of the film's composers and also the artist responsible for another of my least favourite aspects of the film, its intermittent bits of exposition dumped on the audience in the form of comic book art. I would actually like to see a cut of the film without that stuff, most of which is repeated in dialogue anyway, and the absence of the rest of which wouldn't particularly harm the music video quality of the rest of the film. Truly, it's a movie that would've benefited from a little surrealism and less of a literal narrative.

That being said, the guy's music's not too bad. It's all pretty peppy and moves things along at a fun pace.



My favourite part of the movie was Sarah Brightman, who in addition to having a wonderful voice, has a face that looks particularly good with a lot of eye makeup. Having some knowledge of actual opera, she must have been a little amused by these kids thinking they were making something particularly shocking or transgressive.



Almost all the beauty of the film comes in the form of aesthetics, as is demonstrated by my favourite scene, where Brightman uses her false eyes to display a hologram of the main character's, Shiloh's, deceased mother, a la R2D2. This fascinating scene is here to serve a rather mundane plot about a young girl kept locked up by her father, played by Anthony Stewart Head, whose back-story, revolving around his mistaken guilt over killing his wife, prompting him to become a government sponsored assassin, actually had the potential to be a far more interesting tale of identity. Sadly, it's totally abandoned for Shiloh's humdrum, stilted progression from child to adult, though maybe I'd find it more interesting if I were a 17 year old. The banal story surrounded by grandiose trappings might actually be just the thing for your typical teenager, whose normal troubles with self esteem need to be flattered with the ascription of cosmic proportions. Shiloh even gets a whole opera audience to express awe at her liberation at the end.

Not my least favourite part of the film is Paris Hilton, who apparently won a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actress for this, which I think goes to show the Raspberries are as much controlled by politics and phoney social interests as the Oscars. Hilton may not be perfect, but she hits all the notes when she sings and she looks good. I know for a fact there were far worse performances in supporting roles that year.

Paul Sorvino's not bad, roof raising aside, adopting a more bombastic menace than his famous, taciturn performance in Goodfellas.

The visuals of the film aren't terribly original--the shots of the city, with its circular arrangement around a central tower, looked remarkably like Final Fantasy VII's Midgar;




With floating screens announcing things in voices echoing throughout the city in a manner causing me to expect to hear, "Live the good life, in the off world colonies!" A lot of the lighting reminded me of early coloured lighting in 3D video games, distractingly over the top, making things look cheap and television sized, but a lot of the bits of gothic architecture, wrought iron fences, and high contrast hair and makeup, are exactly the familiar items a lot of people want to see, which I found nice to see as well. The movie has a certain target milieu which it hits well enough.

Last night's tweets;

There's no right time to tell a clock to change.
The worst news is delivered via flies.
Sunlight off marble tames Minotaur's rage.
Cashew juices flow off fluorescent thighs.

Pumpkin Grape

Twitter Sonnet #123

Feet are too short to kick a funky skull.
Purple soul heats a fine lady ninja.
Tiny skateboarders orbit a snack bowl.
Hope Keanu Reeves is back on ganja.
Blue leaves are wrong for an old colonel's scalp.
Wellington's white roots touched subordinates.
Moon men are too fast and clumsy to help.
Count ten miles as same coordinates.
Wine watches tomatoes across traffic.
A green sky explodes with shredded cabbage.
Dildos shooting whiskey are specific.
Southwest presents its first class sex package.
Phantom Sith lords thwart all fruit inspectors.
But grapes here set off metal detectors.

I'm not normally a wine person, but lately I've been craving Cabernet Sauvignon, and I had some last night. Mostly, wine doesn't work for me, but when it does, it really does. The whole night gets transformed. I usually think back to a night where I drank wine and watched Sleeping Beauty. Maybe it's the "Skumps" song, but something about the whole visual style of the film compliments wine. I don't think I'll ever understand the appeal of white wine, though.

I see AICN is reporting that Marvel's offered the role of Captain America to Chris Evans, who played The Human Torch in the lousy Fantastic Four movies. I've never read Captain America, but I have to say I'm a little confused by AICN writer Beaks' enthusiasm over the news. Apparently Evans is appearing in an upcoming Edgar Wright movie, so maybe there's something more to him than I discerned from the Rifftrax accompanied viewing of Rise of the Silver Surfer. The guy just seems like a common asshole. Not even an interesting asshole, just kind of a standard young asshole. Maybe this Beaks guy is being sarcastic, though I see Devin Faraci at CHUD is excited about him, too.

Speaking of Rifftrax, I was excited to see to-day the release of the Rifftrax of New Moon. I hope I have time to watch it within the next couple days.

Previously Owned

Last night's tweets;

Blue leaves are wrong for an old colonel's scalp.
Wellington's white roots touched subordinates.
Moon men are too fast and clumsy to help.
Count ten miles as same coordinates.

I went out to lunch to-day--I was in the mood for pizza, but on impulse I drove into the Trader Joe's parking lot and walked across the street to get a sandwich. Next to the sandwich place was a lonely GameStop. I went inside after eating and the only person inside was a young employee with a big, Zach Galifianakis beard who talked to himself while I browsed. There were an awful lot of pre-owned games--three overflowing gondolas of games, and two walls. I'd say 60% of the store's contents were pre-owned games. I bought a pre-owned copy of Final Fantasy X--there were two copies there as well as one copy of Final Fantasy XII. I guess most people don't consider Final Fantasy games as having great replay value. I think the only Final Fantasy game I've completely played through, from beginning to end, more than once is the first game, but that might be because that one's been around long enough to get fresh again. I do find myself wanting to play through VI again a lot, which I still think has the best story. Though I haven't beaten V and I've only played most of IV. I've played a little of II and III, but I'm not sure they're worth bothering with.

It's interesting how old habits can instantly reassert themselves sometimes. I stopped at Barnes and Noble to-night and as I was walking past the bargain books I spotted a big Toulouse-Lautrec book and stopped to look through it. And I instantly remembered, years before Google image search, going to book stores often just to sit and pore over the ridiculously expensive big art books. I guess they're not the sort of thing I can see buying unless I had a coffee table--otherwise, I don't see the point of having the pictures on anything but the computer. But the book had topless photos of Toulouse-Lautrec's prostitute models I don't seem to see online--or maybe I just haven't figured out the right way to search. I do love all the paintings that guy did of the prostitutes he lived with.

Revenge is Best Served with Red Eye Shadow

Last night's tweets;

Feet are too short to kick a funky skull.
Purple soul heats a fine lady ninja.
Tiny skateboarders orbit a snack bowl.
Hope Keanu Reeves is back on ganja.

I watched Sympathy for Lady Vengeance last night, the final film in Chan-wook Park's Vengeance Trilogy. It wasn't bad, though I didn't like it nearly as much as Oldboy. I think Oldboy benefited from being based on a manga, and the fusion of the comic pulp with the extreme tragedy was a perfect mixture. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance doesn't have the boring leads Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance suffered from, but while Geum-ja's personality is oddly adorable and she and the characters around her were painted with a rare insight into human nature, I wasn't quite as drawn to her oversized sense of guilt as I was sort of entertained and charmed by Dae-su's.

The beautiful woman with red eye shadow and the title call to mind the classic revenge film Lady Snowblood, which is another thing that might lead one to expect pulp, but Sympathy for Lady Vengeance turns out to be an essay advocating capital punishment, with a large portion of the film's latter segment focusing on the meeting of a group of parents and relations of children who were murdered by the man who framed Geum-ja for one of his crimes. And it seemed clear to me that Park really couldn't make the sort of noir I described yesterday, about a person who's done genuinely bad things he/she feels guilty about. I suspect he's one of the few people who watched Double Indemnity and wanted to see Walter Neff in the gas chamber. He's a good filmmaker, but I suspect I wouldn't want him in charge of a country.

I read on AICN yesterday that Funimation has licensed Dance in the Vampire Bund, which I guess is why people are afraid to sub it now. Funimation is known to throw fits, one of which even got the useful anime torrent search engine, Tokyo Toshokan, taken down for a while (lately I've been using Jishaku Toshokan as well). And, according to the AICN article, Funimation is planning to censor episodes of Dance in the Vampire Bund it's broadcasting on its website, which only has up to episode 8 right now, making it a week behind Japanese broadcast schedule. So thanks, Fuckermation, for making us wait for watered down episodes which you might restore for DVD release at an even later date.

I hope they don't get in the way of Arakawa Under the Bridge, Shaft's upcoming seinen series I'm looking forward to.



Yes, that is a trailer to the anime series I just mentioned.

Lately I've been rewatching Ranma 1/2 with breakfast. Ranma 1/2, particularly its first season, remains a wonderful anomaly, though it's often been imitated. Nothing else has quite so successfully combined sex, genuinely good action sequences, keenly humorous artwork, and Rumiko Takahashi's talent for writing entertaining play among a large group of well defined characters.

Ants for the Lonely

Twitter Sonnet #122

Hope breaks no bones falling with thoughtless snow.
When you get back to the top there's buzzards.
Accepting all disks lets computers grow.
Cats inspect cords to avoid shock hazards.
The bark's umbrella has lost its pink leaves.
A new colour must the xylophone learn.
For mechanical maulings the heart grieves.
Tiger wounds are mended by Howard Stern.
Mean store gondolas tower behind you.
Blue shirts are always seeking openings.
Fighting shelves is an unwise thing to do.
Hot caffeine bids you rest under awnings.
Old streets are buried under a mountain.
A canine idea's big as Great Britain.

I watched Oldboy last night, the second in Chan-wook Park's Vengeance Trilogy, and holy shit, it's at least 8 million times better than Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. It's almost as though Park was working to improve upon exactly the primary shortcoming I saw in the first film--instead of the dull, uninteresting characters of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Dae-su, Oldboy's protagonist, is played by Min-sik Choi first as a boisterous drunk and then, after he's been imprisoned for 15 years in a fake hotel room, as a fascinating, inward man who exudes personality like radiation. It doesn't hurt that his hair makes him look like Robert Smith for much of the film.



The movie even has interesting, noir-ish voice over narration. The plot's still filled with holes, but it completely doesn't matter because the characters work like motherfuckers this time. The imagery's great again, and mostly it serves the story, and things were being told so well I enjoyed tangents like a barely relevant flashback one character has to seeing a giant ant on a subway.



Although there's plenty of noir-ish things about the movie, including a soundtrack with each track named after a different movie, many of which are films noir, I think the argument could be made that Oldboy's technically not noir. It is certainly a tragedy, and a link on the Wikipedia article to Greek tragedy is incredibly appropriate, but this movie is a keen illustration of the concept Park mentioned in the quote I posted yesterday, of characters who are good people obsessed with their "inevitably" committed wrongdoings. I'm thinking perhaps the quote was badly translated, because there are very few of the series of bizarre misfortunes and crimes portrayed in the Vengeance films I've seen so far that one could call "inevitable". I'm think perhaps Park meant to say that the unpleasant existences in which these characters find themselves are frequently beyond their control--it's all mechanics of fate. Oldboy even heavily relies on hypnosis controlling its characters. Fatalism is certainly an aspect of film noir, but more important is existentialism and the idea of people doomed to free will. The soundtrack references Out of the Past, but while one could look to Jeff's past to see things he can genuinely feel guilt and shame about, Dae-su's wrongdoings in Oldboy are all definitely the fault of the film's villains. It's reasonable for him to feel terrible about what happened, but ultimately not responsible for what happened. His wrongdoings aren't generated by his own flaws, but by flaws imposed on him by others.

This isn't a bad or a good thing about the movie, mind you. It merely makes it a different kind of movie, one more about how weird and terrible life is for the protagonists, a story which is engaging and cathartic because of how well crafted the characters are.



It's also an action film, and there's a famous scene where Dae-su fights fifty or so men in a long unbroken shot that I found absolutely wonderful. It's not slick, balletic martial arts, but a sloppy brawl where Dae-su comes out the winner through shear tenacity. This scene alone is a great story, but it happens to be part of a larger, also great story.

Nebulous Thoughts of Vengeance

Some video of Saffy the Cat from yesterday;



The music's by Nobuo Uematsu from the Final Fantasy VI soundtrack. I forgot to mention I got a chance to see Final Fantasy XIII at Tim's house on Saturday (which doesn't feature a Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack). From what I saw, it looks like a typical Final Fantasy game--some cringe worthy, poorly translated and performed English dialogue but with an exciting and interesting battle system. The character designs look good, but that's almost a given in any RPG from Japan or Korea, just as it's almost a given that American computer RPGs have ugly character designs.



Last night I watched Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a Korean film noir from 2002, the first in director Chan-wook Park's Vengeance Trilogy, which Trisa recommended to me when I spoke to her on the phone a couple days ago. Trisa told me her favourite was the third film, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and I'd heard a lot of good things about the second film, Oldboy, so I'm still going to watch both of those even though I found Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance rather disappointing.



The film's beautifully shot, filled with fascinating, carefully orchestrated static compositions. "Static" is a good way to describe the film, as it is filled with scenes that feel almost totally inert. The trilogy has a reputation for gratuitous violence, but as I've almost always found to be the case, this movie's reputation for shocking imagery is vastly exaggerated. Mostly, the film is a series of beautiful pictures of barely emotional characters dealing with a series of strange misfortunes occasionally resulting from mistakes made by the characters and really only on four brief occasions leading to actual acts of vengeance.

In order to accept the plot of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, one must simultaneously believe that South Korea is exceptionally good at keeping guns out of the country and that South Korean police are totally and notoriously incompetent. This is the only way one can believe that the criminal and terrorist organisations portrayed in the film do all their killing with knives--and no-one seems to expect anyone else to have a gun. And it's the only way to accept a group of police missing a recently deceased human body in a cairn at a crime scene and failing to follow through with simple lines of detective work, such as finding out the new address of a couple suspects they have names and contacts for.

But this could be like complaining about everyone using swords in the Kill Bill movies--it's a stylistic choice to facilitate the director's intentions. the New York Times review has an interesting quote from the director;

The constantly recurring theme is the guilty conscience. Because they are always conscious of and obsessed with their wrongdoings, which are committed because they are inherently unavoidable in life, my characters are fundamentally good people. The fact that people have to resort to another type of violence in order to subjugate their initial guilty consciences is the most basic quality of tragedy characteristic in my movies thus far.

But the supposedly "inherently unavoidable" wrongdoings actually appear to be distinctly avoidable, often prompted by extremely unlikely misfortunes. One character commits suicide apparently because she's afraid of being a burden before she even gets all the facts in the matter, another character drowns in shallow water, supposedly because she can't swim, though we see her clearly swimming well enough to reach shore. Another character, near the end, argues passionately the need to take vengeance for something he knows was an accident. All of this might be okay if there were some inherent charm to the characters--I was reminded of Detour, a movie where the protagonist seems to find people dying around him all the time for bizarre reasons. That movie, like so many films noir, is propelled by its engaging lead, and the strange poetry of noir voice over narration. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, though, is, again, populated by a few guys who are all but catatonic. There's a pretty, political fanatic girl I rather liked, but her part is much too small.



There are a few moments of interesting humour, such as a brief scene of four guys jerking off as they press their ears to a wall to hear a woman having an orgasm next door. This and a few other scenes seem there to paint a portrait of casual human strangeness, but there's just too little life infused in these characters for the story to really take off. It's beautifully photographed, but the skilful shots feel almost totally disconnected from what's actually happening in them. I'm hoping imagery and plot work hand in hand in the next two films.

Last night's tweets;

The bark's umbrella has lost its pink leaves.
A new colour must the xylophone learn.
For mechanical maulings the heart grieves.
Tiger wounds are mended by Howard Stern.

The Lizard Future

I was walking to my parents' house when I came very close to stepping on this beautiful lizard;




I got some video, too.



The music's by Trent Reznor from the Quake soundtrack. It's one of those rare instances where I knew exactly the music I wanted to use when I was recording the video.




I was bringing my bottle of Jameson to my sister who, for St. Patrick's Day, was making cupcakes that called for Guinness in the batter, Jameson in the chocolate filling, and Baileys in the frosting. While she was cooking, I drank some Baileys in some Italian roast coffee and played Soul Calibur III. Before I knew it, I had had a whole bunch of coffee and Baileys without having eaten and had gotten very wound up in the game. I've been coming down for hours now, but it was worth it.

When I got back here, I looked at Twitter and followed William Gibson's link to this video of the ending theme to a Japanese live action drama supposedly based on the true story of an otaku who intervened when a drunk started harassing women on a subway. The story's called Densha Otoko and is also a movie, manga, and novel, which leads me to believe otaku aren't often known to do shit Japan. I was intrigued to see Gainax listed in the end credits and discovered the opening theme is a homage to Gainax's famous 1983 Daicon IV music video for "Twilight" by Electric Light Orchestra as well as to the opening theme of Galaxy Express 999;



My favourite part is all the tiny, sperm-like carrots apparently fertilising the giant head of cabbage.

Last night's tweets;

Hope breaks no bones falling with thoughtless snow.
When you get back to the top there's buzzards.
Accepting all disks lets computers grow.
Cats inspect cords to avoid shock hazards.

"Here, You See, It Takes All the Running You Can Do to Stay in the Same Place."

Twitter Sonnet #121

Dough Thor frowns at no cards on a treadmill.
Beneath his beard is a spongy shark gut.
It's a dusty plastic egg bin to fill.
Aging improves vintage prizes somewhat.
The tacos to-day forgot Mexico.
George Washington is drowning in coffee.
Hope lives on in Gunbuster's Noriko.
Heavier than Prince's discography.
It's wrong to cut off Christopher Lee's tongue.
A serious sniper has killed Wilhelm.
Wild songs should be kept short when they're sung.
Movie drunks just sometimes notice the film.
Popular's a drink that makes folks smaller.
But somehow everyone's become larger.

As you can probably tell from the poem, I did see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland last night. I thought I was going to hate it, but I didn't. As I watched, I thought to myself what a misanthrope I can be sometimes. What Tim Burton's made is not an adaptation of the books, but a movie for the mass audiences that is a tribute to how well the Alice books have survived in the public consciousness. This is why nearly all the characters in the movie are those with which people who've never read the books are familiar and why it continues common misconceptions about the stories, such as the combination of the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen characters, a confusion which had already begun in Lewis Carroll's lifetime, and which, according to Wikipedia, Carroll addressed by saying;

I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion - a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm - she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses!

But to take issue with Burton's film for not honouring the characters is to miss the point. This is a movie for the people of to-day and their conceptions of Alice in Wonderland, a popular film, not an attempt to faithfully adapt the books. The very essence of the books is different--I realised because the books have a much more 19th century point of view. I came to this realisation when, as I watched the movie, I wondered to myself why it felt so much smaller than the books. One of the reasons is the film's plot is concentrated from beginning to end on a specific goal; Alice winning the war. The books, on the other hand, almost constantly lampoon the human tendency to impose order on the world, in ways as small as the ridiculous etiquette at a tea party, to as large as the very concept of war, where we see the Red and White Queens in Through the Looking Glass engaged in a conflict defined by seemingly arbitrary rules and as likely to join forces socialising with Alice as they are to fight one another. The White Knight is portrayed as a pathetic, quixotic character who earns our sympathy for his commitment to his delusion, not for the actual effect his resolve has on the world. In short, the books communicate to us what Carroll saw as the child's perspective on the silliness of adult preoccupations.

At first, I thought what I was seeing was simply Burton's philosophy clashing with Carroll's. But then I remembered how helpless, inevitably incompetent, and blinded by ego the high ranking military men, even Napoleon, are portrayed by Tolstoy as being in War and Peace. I couldn't remember any great book of the 19th century I've read that truly celebrated war. The attitude, in both the Alice books and War and Peace, is that ultimately war is an absurdity that only solves things according to the points of view of the people regarding them from a biased perspective.

Such a concept would make little sense to a modern audience, particularly in light of recent popular movies. War, it is now thought, is not absurd so long as one side is in the right, and it's implicitly accepted that one side can be thoroughly right.

Now, one might say this commentary on the nature of war is irrelevant when one considers that the war depicted in the movie is a metaphor for Alice's internal conflict, that in fighting the Jabberwock (for some reason, referred to in the film as the "Jabberwocky", which was actually the name of the poem about the monster) she is defeating her own internal demons. But I would say this is just as dependent on a modern perspective on the human mind as the absence of the portrayal of such a conflict in the books is due to a 19th century perspective. When I was trying to decide how to describe the difference I was discerning in the two works, I asked myself, "Is the film more masculine and the books more feminine? Is the film more American and the books more English?" The former dynamic may be only valid in outdated conceptions of masculine/feminine, though the film almost seems to nod to this concept as the Hatter refers to Alice as "he" several times, and Alice's assertive nature in the film is clearly portrayed as considered unfeminine or at least unladylike by the real world people around her. The latter contrast, American/English, may be more appropriate, as the world has changed from being led by European ideas to being led by American ideas, which are more about proving oneself, concerned with the idea that everyone must make a mark on the world in some to establish the reality of oneself.

The other reason the movie felt smaller to me was something Burton did quite intentionally, according to a quote from him in the film's Wikipedia entry;

In prior versions, Burton said "It was always a girl wandering around from one crazy character to another, and I never really felt any real emotional connection." His goal with the new movie is to give the story "some framework of emotional grounding" and "to try and make Alice feel more like a story as opposed to a series of events."

I could see this agenda as I watched the movie, and I was reminded of how the makers of the Lord of the Rings movies consciously attempted to make the movies centred on Frodo's story as much as possible, and it seems this philosophy of focus on a particular character's struggle is deemed essential to engage modern audiences in a fantasy film. Which may very well be true, but I'm curious as to why Burton ascribed the episodic nature of the Alice stories only to prior film adaptations when in fact the books are very much thusly segmented, almost always on a chapter by chapter basis, for Alice's series of adventures. The books feature Alice meeting characters and spending some time conversing with them with no particular overarching objective. The second book does have the ongoing chess plot, wherein Alice the pawn is working towards becoming a Queen, but it ends up functioning more as a long setup for a joke, again on the adult world. The film, meanwhile, introduces Tweedledee, Tweedledum, the Dormouse, the Dodo, and the White Rabbit all at once, and all of them are bent on the same task. All of this is designed with the explicit intention of making things move along more efficiently, getting the audience from the beginning of the movie to the end. So consequently what seems like a digest version of the story to me seems to general audiences like a respectful management of their time.

But, as I said, I didn't hate the film, there were several things I liked. I'd read that this movie shared an art designer with Avatar, and something of Avatar's flora can be seen in this Wonderland, but the look of Alice in Wonderland benefits greatly from a larger colour palette than Avatar. So instead of the muddy, greyed out look of Avatar, we have shapes sharply defined by reds contrasting with whites and greens and blacks. I particularly loved Anne Hathaway's look and I thought her performance brought a lot to what would otherwise have been a very minor role. Some reviews I've read have lamented that Crispin Glover wasn't given a more interesting role, but I actually thought the Knave of Hearts suited him very well--rather than taking a wonderfully weird actor and giving him someone over the top and wacky, we get someone more subdued, taking advantage of Glover's natural weirdness to deftly suggest depth in a very natural way.

I liked Depp as the Mad Hatter a lot more than I thought I was going to. The scene introducing him and the March Hare seemed to echo the great scene from the 1951 film, particularly in the March Hare, while Depp's more subtle madness was quite different from Ed Wynn, and I was reminded of Peter Cook and Michael Gough as the Hatter and Hare in the Jonathan Miller film and their madness apparently borne of a sort of infantile insecurity. Depp's switching of accents seemed suggestive of someone theatrical with a low self esteem, and I would very much have liked to have seen the actual dialogue from the book performed by these actors.

Mia Wasikowska looked the part far more perfectly than she did in the promotional material somehow, but found her performance a bit disappointingly limp. I would have much preferred someone like Anne Hathaway in the role.

So, anyway, final verdict--it's a mildly good film to me, probably a better one to most everyone else. When I got to my car, I needed some Morrissey STAT.

Sweet Old Hellscapes

Last night's tweets;

The tacos to-day forgot Mexico.
George Washington is drowning in coffee.
Hope lives on in Gunbuster's Noriko.
Heavier than Prince's discography.

To-day I think I'm really going to see the new Alice in Wonderland. I'm all screwed up with determination. I was planning on going to the Wild Animal Park again to-day, but I stayed up too late last night. I had a glass of Glenlivet and went on Second Life, where Natalie watched me lose a chess game. I didn't mind losing, it was at least an interesting game and I was pleased by my scotch.

There's not much else to say about yesterday. I didn't have time to watch anything, but I drove around a bit and read a lot. Mostly just enjoying not having to work like mad to get my comic ready on time--remember, new Venia's Travels to-day.

With breakfast to-day, I watched the newest Baka to Test to Shokanju. It continues to be good, but while I started out liking it better than Dance in the Vampire Bund, Dance in the Vampire Bund has pulled into the lead in my view, which was why I was disappointed to see the newest episode hasn't been subtitled yet. I am glad to see they finally finished the end credits animation, which seems to be an extension of the Mike Mignola homage Shinbo did for the final Zoku Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei ending theme;





Which further confirms for me that Zoku Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei was essentially Shibo's playground to develop many of the different styles he would go on to use in subsequent series. But, fuck, it would be great if there were an actual whole series using this Mignola style. Like, for instance, a Hellboy series. I wish someone would show these to the powers that be in the Hellboy universe and say make the Hellboy animated films look like this!.

Venia and Subliminal Parliaments

The new Venia's Travels is online. Watch Wircelia getting mild amusement out of making life difficult for everyone. I actually finished it at around five o'clock to-day, but knew better than to upload it early. It's sure been a long time since I finished a chapter early. Time for some scotch!

The Delicate Frontier

Last night's tweets;

Dough Thor frowns at no cards on a treadmill.
Beneath his beard is a spongy shark gut.
It's a dusty plastic egg bin to fill.
Aging improves vintage prizes somewhat.

Despite my body's apparent aversion to chocolate and coffee lately, I couldn't resist trying Starbucks' new Dark Cherry Mocha this evening. It's okay, though I kind of feel like I'm drinking someone's birthday cake. I got it without whipped cream, and it comes with sprinkles which, of course, sank right to the bottom and I haven't seen them since. I never understood sprinkles on beverages, but I guess it's a sign of the times.

I read an article on Huffington Post a couple days ago about how Howard Stern "unleashed a vicious attack on Gabourey Sidibe" of the movie Precious. The article, right from that opening statement, pretty thoroughly mischaracterises Stern's comments, which had been more along the lines of telling the young woman that she wasn't likely to get cast in another role, and, of course, he made some fat jokes. I distinguish this from a vicious attack because it's Stern's business to make fun of everyone, himself included, often for superficial details, and the fact that he actually seemed to like the movie and that his less jocular comments seemed aimed at Oprah Winfrey's foolishness in assuring Sidibe she had a career ahead of her, and pointing out that a lot of people resist accepting that it's unhealthy to be obese (not, as he pointed out, merely overweight).

But, of course, the people complaining are obviously total hypocrites anyway because ten minutes after Stern had made these comments he was making fun of a midget in a wheelchair because he didn't know eight times nine. You don't see articles about the people made fun of on The Howard Stern Show on a daily basis, Sidibe's different because by making fun of her, Stern's swimming against the popular current, which says we can only feel bad for the young woman or express feelings of unquestioning support for her because she was portrayed in a movie to have been in an abusive situation. This is one of the things I find so great about the Stern show--everyone's basically ridiculous in one way or another, and the reason productions like the Academy awards are so stiff and nauseating is because they're put together by people who put a lot of restrictions on what ridiculous things we're allowed to notice and find funny. People trying to create a reality where they're justified in taking themselves as seriously as they do.

Part of the problem is that artists, particularly actors, have to leave themselves emotionally vulnerable in order to access their emotions easily for their roles, which is brave and, I believe, essential for a quality culture, but it leads to a lot of hypersensitivity. Add to this fact that these folks are often surrounded by people who bullshit them to buttress their egos, and you end with people in delusional frameworks of support.

I finished up working on my comic early again yesterday and didn't know what to do with myself. I ended up playing a little Super Return of the Jedi, a Super Nintendo game I remember being somewhat addicted to. It's pretty silly, as you can tell from the fact that the little eyeball droid from the door to Jabba's Palace in the movie is twice the size of Chewbacca in the game and fires slow blue projectiles as the boss of the second level. But all the Super Star Wars series of games were actually pretty fun--they had a basic, side-scroller gameplay with slides (rolls for Han Solo), double jumps, a variety of blasters, and relatively nice dynamics for Luke's lightsabre. I love the double jumps, which make no sense--basically, you jump once and in mid-air you can press the jump button again and the character jumps again, as though there's an invisible platform, only this time doing a summersault. Again, absolutely senseless for a Star Wars game, at least for the non-Jedi characters. But in the first game I remember encountering it, Metroid 2, it made sense as it was an ability acquired from some alien technology found in ancient ruins on SR388. Metroid 2, for the Gameboy, has somehow managed to remain the best game in the series, in my opinion. Even better than Super Metroid, though I don't know why exactly. Maybe it's because there is no space jump in Super Metroid, which is what that jumping device is called. There's also a device you can get that turns Samus (your character) into a buzzsaw sort of thing whenever she does the summersault, which is something else the Super Star Wars games kind of lifted. Man, I'm in the mood to play some Nintendo . . .

The Wise Stupidity

Twitter Sonnet #120

Never fight a seal in a laundry room.
Dreams of wet clothes find ways into stucco.
Starch in the air conducts electric doom.
Harpo's taken the furnace from Chico.
Ralph Macchio's no match for Genghis Khan.
A bird in the hand's worth lycanthropy.
An adult goose should never fuck a fawn.
Youth's a musical colonoscopy.
And late worms are Tuesday's rubber pancakes.
The road to Troy is paved with octagons.
The pious man pole vaults for angels' sakes.
The path of truth is replete with ions.
A full court is better than half a ball.
Gratuity's the greatest gift of all.

Yes, two sonnets in a row. Michael Kupperman was doing a hashtag meme called "stupidwisesayings" and I thought to myself, "I say stupid things like they're wise all the time!" I was going to quit after one extra quatrain, but James Urbaniak tweeted one at me and I couldn't stop with Dr. Venture watching. But I actually had time to tweet last night because I finished the day's work on my comic just after 10pm--this is what happens when I stay on schedule, huh? Being absolutely terrified of letting things get backed up has helped, as has the fact that this has been a relatively easy chapter.

So I was able to watch all two hours and thirty five minutes of Inglourious Basterds, which I'd not seen since I saw it in the movie theatre. The first scene is really beautiful and, boy, is it Sergio Leone-ish. I imagine Leone, if he were still alive, coming across the movie and thinking, "Who is this guy trying to be me?" Though Leone was known to borrow a stylistic mannerism or two, so he'd probably understand. He'd probably criticise Tarantino for not lingering on close-ups longer.



I also fantasised about going back in time and showing the film to U.S. troops during World War 2. How different could it be from watching some of the cartoons at the time?



I realised they'd probably find the violence in Inglourious Basterds a bit much.

Speaking of Russia and Napoleon, one of the things I'm enjoying most about War and Peace is Tolstoy's keen ability to describe the sort of permanent naiveté of humanity, particularly in large groups. I just read a funny bit about two salons in Petersburg during Napoleon's invasion--one salon liked the idea of Napoleon invading, the other was against it, and a character named Prince Vasily frequented both salons. Occasionally he forgets where he is and expresses the wrong opinion, but everyone overlooks it. Which is so great--I think Tolstoy's very slyly pointing out here that groups who subscribe to a communal set of bullshit beliefs at some level know the beliefs are bullshit or superficial.

A scene at the start of Napoleon's invasion that takes place in a palace meeting of Russian nobles and merchants seemed like something that could be found in any Internet forum to-day;

"Excuse me, Your Excellency," [Pierre] began. (Pierre was well acquainted with the senator, but considered it necessary on this occasion to address him formally.) "Though I do not agree with the gentleman . . . " (he hesitated; he would have liked to say "mon tres honorable preopinant") "with the gentleman . . . whom I have not the honour of knowing, I imagine that the nobility have been summoned here not simply to express their sympathy and enthusiasm, but also to consider the means by which we can assist our fatherland. I imagine," he went on, warming to the subject, "that the Emperor himself would hardly be pleased to find in us merely owners of serfs whom we are willing to turn over to him, and cannon fodder, which we are willing to make of ourselves, instead of obtaining from us any co-co-counsel."

Many of those listening withdrew from the circle when they observed the senator's disdainful smile and the boldness of Pierre's remarks; only Count Ilya Andreich was pleased with Pierre's speech, just as he had been pleased with the naval officer's speech, the senator's speech, and, in general, with whatever speech he had last heard.

"I think that before discussing these questions," Pierre continued, "we ought to ask the Emperor, most respectfully to ask His Majesty, to apprise us of the number of our troops, and the position in which our army and our forces now find themselves, and then--"

But scarcely had Pierre uttered these words when he was attacked from three sides. The most violent onslaught came from an old acquaintance, a boston player who had always been well disposed toward him, Stepan Stepanovich Apraksin. Stepan Stepanovich was in uniform, and whether it was due to the uniform or other causes, Pierre saw before him a quite different man. With a sudden expression of senile fury on his face, he shouted at Pierre;

"In the first place, I tell you we have no right to question the Emperor, and secondly, even if the Russian nobility had such a right, the Emperor would be unable to answer us. Troops move according to the movements of the enemy--their numbers increase, decrease--"

Another voice, that of a nobleman of medium height and some forty years of age, whom Pierre had seen in former days at the gypsies' and knew as a wretched card player--a man also transformed by his uniform--came up to Pierre and interrupted Apraksin.

"Yes, and this is not the time for deliberation," said the nobleman, "what is wanted is action: the war is in Russia! The enemy is advancing to destroy Russia, to desecrate the graves of our fathers, to carry off our wives and children!" He smote his breast. "We will rise up, we will go, every man of us, and follow our father the Tsar!" he cried, rolling his bloodshot eyes.

Several approving voices were heard in he crowd.

"We are Russians and we will not grudge our blood for the defence of the fatherland! We must give up idle dreams if we are sons of the fatherland! We will show Europe how Russia rises to the defence of Russia!" he shouted.

Pierre tried to reply, but could not get in a word. He was conscious that the sound of his words, apart from any meaning they conveyed, was less audible than the sound of his adversary's excited voice.

In the rear of the little group, Ilya Andreich was nodding approval; several of his listeners turned sharply toward the orator at the conclusion of the phrase and cried:

"That's right, quite right! Just so! . . . "

Pierre wanted to say that he was by no means averse to sacrificing his money, his serfs, and himself, only one must know the state of affairs in order to be able to improve on it, but he could not speak.

So many voices were heard talking and shouting at once that Ilya Andreich had not time to signify his agreement with all of them, and the group grew larger, dispersed, re-formed, and moved off with a hum of talk to the big table in the largest hall.

Not only was Pierre prevented from speaking, but he was rudely interrupted, pushed aside, and backs were turned to him as if he were a common foe. This was not because they did not like the substance of his speech, which, in fact, they had forgotten after all the subsequent speeches, but to animate it the crowd needed a tangible object to love and one to hate. Pierre became the latter.

Pursuit Sports

Twitter Sonnet #119

Man makes onions occur in burritos.
Some police won't hear of a car phone call.
Goodness, don't you touch licensed tomatoes.
But fair, outdoor warnings redeem us all.
Coffee's a reward for a hard day's night.
Rabbits hunted by cameras are confused.
Smiling, televised art's an endless fight.
Old video gets loud French horns defused.
New controllers revive old Playstations.
Some women trade beauty for Sauron's eye.
All things worth fighting for want libations.
Jerusalem wants scotch, bourbon and rye.
Some TVs are too big for your cable.
Love shared with vegetables is more stable.

Here's the video I wanted to post yesterday;



The music is by Bernard Herrmann from the North by Northwest soundtrack. I was chasing this rabbit;



Normally, the rabbits only show up on the lawn at night but I guess the overcast sky fooled them yesterday.

I finished work on my comic unexpectedly early last night so I tried to hook up the Playstation 2 Tim gave me last week--it was really nice of him, I just wondered aloud, "I wonder how much it would cost to get a Playstation 2 off eBay?" and he said, "Well, you can have mine." I guess he doesn't have much use for it since his Playstation 3 is backwards compatible.

He gave me some monster cable with which to hook the thing up, but unfortunately I couldn't find the right vaginas for it on the television. I think they must be on the back, and the 42 inch widescreen's too heavy and delicate for me to move when I was just a couple hours away from falling asleep. I'm so glad I'm sleeping through the night again.

I guess I don't really need more video games to play. But it would be nice to be able to finally play Final Fantasy XII, just months before Final Fantasy XIII comes out. I contemplated playing World of Warcraft last night, but I just couldn't work up enthusiasm, especially since I've taken to only drinking once a week and didn't want to use up booze night on WoW when I wasn't even done with the new Venia's Travels.

It's not that I'm trying to drink more responsibly. It's just that, ever since I got sick in November, I don't quite enjoy alcohol as much as I used to. Same with coffee, unfortunately. I also get uncomfortable sitting cross-legged for long, bending my stomach much seems to make me light headed. I keep hoping this is all in my head, and that it'll go away at some point.

Preserved Raindrops

Last night's tweets;

Coffee's a reward for a hard day's night.
Rabbits hunted by cameras are confused.
Smiling, televised art's an endless fight.
Old video gets loud French horns defused.

I suppose I should be pleased Avatar didn't win Best Picture or Best Director, but I think I honestly put so little stock into the so-called opinion of the Academy that I pretty much don't care either way. I did kind of like Christoph Waltz's speech when he won Best Supporting Actor for his part in Inglourious Basterds. I liked that John Hughes was remembered, but I never liked seeing any of the rows of stiff actors on stage. I mostly felt embarrassed for them, particularly Alley Sheedy for some reason. I was a little frightened by Molly Ringwald's wide, staring eyes. I noticed Kathy Ireland had the same thing going, and I wondered if this was symptomatic of being a woman previously adored for her beauty only to now be all but forgotten, a sort of involuntary, fervent plea for love. And I thought Ben Stiller was really funny.

I'm fascinated to learn through AICN that Keanu Reeves is interested in making a third Bill and Ted movie. It remains the only role in which Reeves was ever appropriately cast, in a long career of anachronistic appearances as action heroes, romantic leads, and Victorian gentlemen.

It was raining yet again yesterday. I took some pictures;







I got some video, too, but YouTube's performing maintenance right now. Annoying.

I watched the third and final episode of the Re: Cutie Honey OVA, in which things started to feel very Evangelion. The serious subject matter the show seemed intent on exploring didn't quite gel with the satirical, playfully sexual quality of the show, but on the other hand, the ideas it explored kind of made sense in the context of a porno. Amidst all the gratuitous female flesh on display, we get a story about a villain without a heart trying to "become one with" Cutie Honey until, fascinatingly, Cutie Honey offers to do just this at which point the villain, Jill-sama, is horrified at the prospect of losing her own identity and chooses death instead. The idea of submerging an identity into the safety of a larger society is contrasted with Honey's heartfelt friendships. There's something there about the loneliness and anonymity of watching porn compared to the reality of other people. Which reminded me a bit of the Angels in Evangelion offering fantasy Misatos, Reis, and Asukas to Shinji as well as, of course, the Human Instrumentality project. The fact that Evangelion explored these ideas so much more effectively is one of the reasons I wasn't as wowed by Re:Cutie Honey, but Re:Cutie Honey does present an interesting and different angle.

Movie War

I've just gotten back from my parents' house where I watched the first part of the Oscars. I have no desire to see any more. I wanted to leave from the hokey opening number--I suppose I may be the only one completely sick of Neil Patrick Harris now. But I can't be the only one who gets douche chills seeing a slow pan over actors lined up while dopey music plays.

Maybe I'd be more interested if I'd seen more of the movies nominated. I really do want to see The Hurt Locker.

Tim and I tried seeing Alice in Wonderland last night, only to find oceans of people accumulated around the two movie theatres we tried. I really didn't expect this kind of turnout somehow, but maybe I should've--it's getting the artsy people, the Johnny Depp people, probably the Twilight people looking for a void to fill, and everyone else waiting for mother media to regurgitate the next prescription into their throats.

In between movie theatres, driving in a rainstorm, a cop pulled me over under a freeway overpass. As I was digging around for my registration and proof of insurance, I tried to speak very politely to the guy but accidentally phrased my question, "Would you mind telling me what I did?" which I think can't fail to sound pushy even with the ultra-supplicant tone I'd affected. Fortunately, the guy was cool enough to just answer my question and forgo looking at my registration, as he could see it was going to take some digging.

He'd pulled me over because my license plate light was out. Yes, in the middle of a rainstorm at night, a cop pulled me over to tell me something on my car that many cars don't even have was not functioning. It's one of those things that make me think there was more to his initial motive.

Everything I've been hearing about the new Alice in Wonderland has ranged from lukewarm to lousy. Judging from the fact that it appears to be succeeding on the movie going audience, I've started pondering a series of cgi action films based on children's books. Maybe a Green Eggs and Ham movie where Sam-I-Am learns to believe in himself again after a desperate battle against hordes of green pigs and chickens. Maybe a movie where Goldilocks learns to have confidence in her own decisions after some initial resistance and later moral support from her new bear companions, just in time to face the Mongolian Empire.

But, hey, I haven't seen Alice in Wonderland, so what do I know.

Last night's tweets;

Man makes onions occur in burritos.
Some police won't hear of a car phone call.
Goodness, don't you touch licensed tomatoes.
But fair, outdoor warnings redeem us all.

Storms and Cooking

Twitter Sonnet #118

Wall eyed bat totems guard bags of sugar.
Productive islands employ everyone.
Montezuma's wife's an angry cougar.
Toucan Sam knows how the jungle was won.
The new beast's fake fruit ribs arch overhead.
Gnats and flies make eating indoors pointless.
Fresh strawberries in old oatmeal we're fed.
Introduce Dracula to a countess.
Stilted are scenes of love on the X-box.
The Na'Vi are easily tipped over.
Nicer, tall sprites have white, cumbersome locks.
Bunny girl armies route a Smurf lover.
Eyes and starchy nutrients cannot save
Innocent yams led to the microwave.

I was really happy to hear Obama might be cutting loose Rahm Emanuel. I never liked that guy--he always seemed sleazy and ready to compromise. I see Michael Moore is kind lobbying for the job. This could only be an improvement. Enough with the timidity. Well, assuming it is timidity and not just lots of people being on the take.

I only just to-day read Roger Ebert's review of Shutter Island and I was intrigued to learn Scorsese had had the cast view Out of the Past and Vertigo. Again, I can't get away from Vertigo. I wouldn't be surprised if Alice in Wonderland ended up being related somehow.

But of course, I could see Vertigo as I was watched Shutter Island, certainly in the movie's themes, but also in its look. I loved the warm colours of the psychiatrists' conference rooms and study that reminded me of Gavin Elster's office.

I also forgot to mention how much I loved the 1950s pulp quality of the movie. According to the Wikipedia article on the original novel, author Dennis Lehane, "sought to write a novel that would be a homage to Gothic settings, B movies, and pulp. He described the novel as a hybrid of the works of the Brontë sisters and the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. His intent was to write the main characters in a position where they would lack 20th century resources such as radio communications." Things like loss of radio communication and the idea of someone living in caves to avoid capture on the island fed into this. My favourite bit was when DiCaprio has a line about going to a place where no-one might notice a body and there's a cut to him and his partner in the graveyard--a sudden storm forces them to take cover in a mausoleum, at which point DiCaprio divulges a bunch of exposition. Great stuff.

I beat Oblivion again at Tim's house last night--on the hardest level of difficulty. I really liked that I was able to kill the last boss, voiced by Terrence Stamp, with two arrows from across the room without him or his lackeys even seeing me. I interrupted some long winded speech he was giving.

Can We Talk?

I heard Joan Rivers on The Howard Stern Show earlier this week. She happily discussed and told jokes about a guy who died recently while she was in the middle of having dinner with him--she's still very quick and just as fearless as Stern. If someone really wanted to shake up these late night wars, they'd give her a show. If this world were right in any way, she'd bury Leno.

But who's to say if the world's right? I saw Shutter Island last night. It's not bad. It seems to be Scorsese channelling Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock--my friend Marty had told me about it being very Hitchcock, but the severe, slow orchestra soundtrack with fast moving aerial shots at the beginning immediately put me in the mind of Kubrick. And sure enough, Shutter Island's rather fascinating soundtrack features some of Kubrick's favourite Polish composers, Krzysztof Penderecki and Gyorgy Ligeti. Gyorgy Ligeti can make anything seem really serious, as those who viewed my recent video of a raccoon might know.

There is certainly plenty of Hitchcock, too. Most pleasantly for me in the rich colour palette--in this damned modern era of lazy cinematographers washing out colour as much as possible to achieve gloom or "rawness", Scorsese still knows there's nothing more striking than colour used right. There were great blue and brown suits, fedoras, and even some Lynchian red drapes with marble statues. Perhaps the most obviously Hitchcockian moment sees DiCapro climbing down an almost sheer wall over jagged, surf pounded rocks where he thinks he's seen the fallen body of his friend. Then there's a moment that reminded me of Cocteau as DiCaprio finds it was a peculiarly man-shaped rock, a discovery accompanied by a choral sting reminiscent to me of when Cocteau would have something quick and weird happen.

There were a lot of just beautifully composed shots, too--those featuring Michelle Williams being particularly luscious. There's a shot of bodies floating in a lake near the end filled with lily pads I found particularly gorgeous and there's a nice visual motif of things fluttering in the air throughout the film--ashes, papers, even tree limbs during a storm sequence.

I deeply appreciate the focus of the film's story, self-perception and the value of people who are considered monsters by society. The film's last lines, "You know, this place makes me wonder . . . Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?" nicely highlights this, though I rather wish the film had been more of a rumination on it. I think less procedural detective stuff and maybe more of a focus on DiCaprio's relationship with Michelle Williams would have been good. I really would have liked some scenes of them getting to know each other.

The casting's great in the movie, and I love Scorsese for putting Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow in good roles.

Afterwards, I had dinner at Denny's and kind of wish I hadn't because to-day I feel like I swallowed several infants and a rock. Oy.

Last night's tweets;

The new beast's fake fruit ribs arch overhead.
Gnats and flies make eating indoors pointless.
Fresh strawberries in old oatmeal we're fed.
Introduce Dracula to a countess.

Peace with Innocence

Last night's tweets;

Wall eyed bat totems guard bags of sugar.
Productive islands employ everyone.
Montezuma's wife's an angry cougar.
Toucan Sam knows how the jungle was won.

I'll definitely be seeing the new Alice in Wonderland movie this weekend, even though Roger Ebert's three star review of the film is pretty close to exactly what I expect from the movie. I'm too much of an Alice nut to miss it.

I found Ebert's impression of Lewis Carroll's original works rather interesting; "Alice's adventures played like a series of encounters with characters whose purpose was to tease, puzzle and torment her. Few children would want to go to wonderland, and none would want to stay," he says, noting that the stories are far better suited to adults; "There's even a little sadism embedded in Carroll's fantasy. It reminds me of uncles who tickle their nieces until they scream."

It's true there is something fundamentally treacherous about Wonderland, though my impression of the characters there to torment Alice was that they were often caricatures of the sorts of adults a real child would have to deal with in Carroll's England--with exaggerated, nonsensical tempers to emphasise what Carroll figured children must find to be truly patronising and exasperating in adults. The caterpillar, the flowers, the Queens, all come off as dedicated to ridiculous, unspoken philosophies they expect Alice to abide by.

By the same token, Alice herself is often portrayed as fallible, as when she tries to recall lessons, when she worries about the possibility of being a slow classmate named Mabel because she doesn't feel like herself, and her general naive willingness to engage with everyone she meets, however foolish they may obviously be. These things, of course, all contribute to her charm. There's a sort of latent sadism, perhaps, at perceiving oneself to have an advantage over an attractive person by creating her as being intellectually inferior, though one might say the charm is just as much about Alice's freedom to act innocently without the encumbrance of adult considerations and the neuroses that would prevent adults from the sorts of explorations Alice indulges in.

I was thinking actually along similar lines about a character in War and Peace, Natasha, who I have found to be extremely attractive ever since I read this bit;

In the damp, chill air, and the confined semidarkness of the carriage, for the first time she vividly pictured what was in store for her there at the ball, in those brightly lighted halls--the music, the flowers, the dancing, the Tsar, all the dazzling young people of Petersburg. The prospect was so splendid, and so incongruous with the chill darkness of the cramped carriage, that she could hardly believe it would come true. She only realised what was before her when, after walking over the red baize at the entrance, she had entered the hall, taken off her fur cloak, and, with Sonya at her side, preceded her mother up the lighted staircase between the flowers. Only then did she remember how she should behave at a ball, and tried to assume the stately air she considered indispensable for a girl on such an occasion. But fortunately for her, she was so dazzled that she saw nothing clearly, her pulse beat a hundred to the minute, and the blood throbbed at her heart. It was impossible for her to affect the pose that would have made her ridiculous, and she went on, almost swooning with excitement and trying with all her might to conceal it. And this was the very attitude that became her best.

I really don't have a right to feel superior--I've certainly gotten all flustered over things other people might not understand or consider trivial. But here, and several times afterwards, Natasha's charm is easily conveyed in situations where an enthusiasm overtakes her that she can't control. Tolstoy's mentioning of her pulse, her heart beat, and on other occasions her arms and her figure, drive me absolutely wild. And it's all wrapped up in this idea of someone beautiful having intense, pleasurable feelings not entirely with their consent. Which sounds a bit predatory and slightly dangerous, yet at the same time seems to be honouring the purity of human experience. It got me to thinking about the precariousness of society, with some parties wishing to sacrifice such excitement for safety's sake, and on the other hand it's worth considering that there are predators out there.

Later in the book, Natasha rather quickly and easily falls for a rake, but as much as this made me fear for her and aggravated me a bit, the scenes where her innocence is absolutely beautiful still seem much more significant.

Careless Operations

Twitter Sonnet #117

Jacks are hazardous to awkward robots.
Espresso's bad for rusty metal joints.
In the future, nuns wear plastic habits.
To a shinier world Peg-leg Pete points.
Q-tips are oil drills of the mind's sea.
Famished, free ducks might tip you a feather.
I think perhaps gorillas don't like me.
Noisy geese aren't really my fans, either.
Crying birds flee ghost computer toasters.
The greatest shocks drop jaws to wishing wells.
Time's over for analogue wall posters.
Bright pixels weave infinite mundane spells.
Needed hours shrink in old fried egg yolk.
Fifty years effort might earn you a Coke.

All the typos in my copy of War and Peace are really starting to annoy me. They'd been getting more and more frequent before I came across this barely intelligible paragraph;

But the Tsar and Balashev passed without noticing Arakcheyev Holding his sword to his side and lancing wramfolly about him. Arakcheyev followed some tweaty paces behind.

Okay. "Tweaty" was funny. But I had to reread the paragraph to figure out "lancing" was meant to be "glancing" as at first it looks like Arakcheyev drew his sword and started randomly thrusting at the air around him. And "wramfolly"? I take it this was meant to be "wrathfully", but what the fuck? Would this be erring in the manner of a wram?

Just looking quickly through the past thirty or so pages, I spotted these bits;

Till then he had reproached her in his heart and tried to dospise her, but now he felt so sorry for her that there was no longer room for reproach.

. . .

Pierre too, when she had gone. almost ran to me anteroom, restraining tears of emotion and joy that choked him.

It's getting seriously distracting. This is all from the War and Peace on my Kindle, the Signet Classics edition, which I also have in paperback. So I compared the Kindle copy with my paperback copy and found the paperback had none of these typos. Judging from the fact that a lot of the wrong letters and punctuation marks bear some resemblance to the correct letters and marks, I'm guessing the Kindle edition comes from a scan of the pages that a computer automatically formatted into the electronic edition. Oh, brave new world with such lazy people in it.

Yesterday, I watched the first episode of Re: Cutie Honey, a three episode OVA series based on a manga series and anime series from the early 70s. It's directed by Hideaki Anno, who had directed a live action Cutie Honey film shortly beforehand and which I've only heard bad things about. This OVA, though, is just thoroughly delightful, manic, stylised fanservice. It reminded me a bit of a borderline pornographic Powerpuff Girls, though much, much funnier.

Re: Cutie Honey features a lot of the very angular, fishbowl zaniness Gainax first started producing in His and Her Circumstances and developed further in series like FLCL, Top wo Nerae 2, and Gurren Lagann. I liked Re: Cutie Honey a lot better than Gurren Lagann, which is a series that annoys me for reasons I can't even quite explain.



In addition to good sexual fantasy, there are a lot of quick visual gags in Re: Cutie Honey I loved, many of which are poking fun at dramatic anime conventions. My favourite being the cops, who appear to be mindless, always happy children who quickly show up at any crime scene just to goof off until the no-nonsense inspector shows up.



I also liked a bit where the henchmen of the main villain, Panther Claw, take over the bodies of people in a nearby hospital a la Agent Smith from The Matrix. The guy on the operating table giving the doctors a devious spurt of blood from his open stomach was the best;

Quacking Data

I drove up to the San Diego Wild Animal Park yesterday, which is sort of part of the San Diego Zoo. It's way out in the middle of nowhere in order to facilitate its main attraction, which is a large, sort of simulated plain on which animals can roam while guests tour in little buses. Kind of a simulated safari with real animals.

But I got there just past 4 o'clock, an hour before the place closed, so the tour bit had already closed. I ended up just seeing a lot of birds and gorillas. Which I guess makes up for the gorillas that hid from me at the zoo--I swear the ones I saw yesterday didn't like me. The biggest one immediately started growling when I walked up.

Here's the best of the video clips I got;





The music is Joan Crawford performing "I Never Knew Heaven Could Speak".

Mostly I took still photos;











It's hard to tell, but that white stork was huge. Only slighter shorter than me.



I walk very fast, which enabled me to see a lot of the park in under an hour, but it really was a ridiculously brief visit.

I drove back through the hills that are for some reason filled with ostrich farms--there were several roadside stores with crudely painted signs advertising ostrich jerky and ostrich eggs. I guess since I'm the sort of vegetarian who eats chicken eggs, I could therefore eat ostrich eggs. I fantasised about getting one, but I would have no clue how to prepare it. I thought about what I'd do if I got one that hatched--would I feed the baby ostrich sardines? Cow's milk? Formula? What would I name it? Oswald and Oscar seemed too obvious, but it would need to be something beginning with the letter "O". I settled on On. I'd say, "Hey, here's my ostrich, On. Say hello to the nice folks, On." It goes without saying On would always be on.

I drove to the nearby North County Fair mall, which is one of my favourite malls, as it's remote, indoor, and huge. The more a mall feels like a microcosm, the more it represents what I like about malls. I sat in the Nordstrom cafe and wrote the rest of the next Venia's Travels script.

With breakfast to-day, I read the two other Sirenia Digest stories. "Persephone Redux" was a nicely grim portrait of a post-apocalyptic world, with an interesting focus on the relationship of religion to a true apocalypse. It's apparently a fragment, a beginning of a larger work, and it feels like a world just getting set up. Both it and the last story in the new Digest, "The Eighth Veil", reminded me of the Fallout games, "Persephone Redux" for the post-apocalyptic landscape, and "The Eight Veil" because it featured a lethal substance called Jet, which is what a popular drug is called in the Fallout universe. "The Eighth Veil" is also an interesting anthropological exercise, focusing on a bunch of low level gangsters who speak in a sort of alternate universe slang dialect that's very fun to read. A large audience of them seem to get sadistic pleasure out of watching a pretty girl getting killed by Jet, basically disintegrating, which I found oddly sweet--it's a curiously tame form of entertainment for bloodthirsty degenerates. Instead of people or animals ripping each other violently apart, it's pretty much just someone passing away. That this culture sees something like this as exciting is as much a curious anthropological element as their dialect.

Last night's tweets;

Q-tips are oil drills of the mind's sea.
Famished, free ducks might tip you a feather.
I think perhaps gorillas don't like me.
Noisy geese aren't really my fans, either.

Organic Parts in the Mechanisms

Last night's tweets;

Jacks are hazardous to awkward robots.
Espresso's bad for rusty metal joints.
In the future, nuns wear plastic habits.
To a shinier world Peg-leg Pete points.

I'd forgotten how useful the Jacks are in American McGee's Alice--once you have them, there's little reason to use anything else except the Vorpal Blade.

I played the "Crazed Clockwork" level, which is a level that most strongly reminds me that American McGee came from the id Software team that made the Doom games and Quake--apart from being the first developers to effectively create 3D games that made a player truly feel threatened by what was happening, the team was also distinguished by their efforts to convey situations and aesthetics that were completely fucked up. Lots of games have gore and demons, but there's something about the mutilated bodies and screaming skies in the id games that other companies couldn't quite accomplish.

Coming across the conscious March Hare, his body held apart by metal clamps that also keep him to a sort of washboard that electrocutes him and dunks him in water, and the Dormouse similarly dismembered on an operating table but only babbling about how he doesn't get any tea, succeeded in creating that fucked up id Software feeling better than earlier portions of the game. Alice's at first casual reaction is good, too, reminding us that we're in her head and she's becoming psychotic. It's one of the few moments in the game where the bad dialogue doesn't get in the way of the story.



I read a rather irritating review of Maria Holic on AICN to-day. In addition to having bad grammar and spelling, the review appears to have been written by a guy who doesn't understand a few fundamental and obvious things about the show, most notably its take on its young lesbian protagonist, Kanako. "Kanakao is not a rounded character who happens to be a lesbian. She's a lesbian, and that's the joke." Eh, no. She's awkward and horny, that's the joke. She's like Ataru from Urusei Yatsura only female. The only character who puts down Kanako for being a lesbian is Maria, a male character who's always dressed as a girl, the obvious hypocrisy of which is also a joke. This is all achingly obvious. The reviewer barely spends any of his lengthy review even discussing the title character. I was also irritated that he took the time to mention that Akiyuki Shinbo's tendency to shift frequently between different styles was nothing new in anime, as though this might somehow be a mark against the series. I suppose if a movie presented Nazis as villains for the first time, the novelty would be enough to overcome any other shortcomings?

I was kind of excited to see one of Akiyuki Shinbo's post-Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei series getting a western release (though I'm dreading the inevitably lousy English dub). I was surprised to learn Maria Holic would be first, as it was never particularly popular. I hope this makes it more likely for Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei to be released here, since waiting for official western releases of it might not even take longer than waiting for fansub groups who seem to be increasingly reluctant to work on it. I still haven't seen a fansub of the OVA from last October.

I also read the first story in the new Sirenia Digest to-day, "Apsinthian." A nice little vignette with sexy, mysterious sea life textures. A good thing to read.