Wednesday, December 23, 2015
The new camera works, here's proof.
Some quick shots from a trip around downtown today. As I improve with this thing, I'll whittle it down to just good shots. As for now, the last camera I had with this many buttons used film. Film, for those of you who don't know, is an archaic form of imprinting photos that required a dark room, a place that required hours of delicate work and also where undergrads used to fuck.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Unpleasant Comedies: A couple of reviews
A Film With Me In It (2008)
I'll just confess I watched this for Dylan Moran, an Irish comedian who is definitely in my top three. I also watched it on a stay-in date, which you'll find hilarious in a minute, after I've told you a bit about this movie.
It's a commonly cited difference between American and UK humor, that is America all jokes eventually point to having the biggest dick in the room, where the British come from a very modest, often defeatist place. Well, now take the Irish, who for the last few centuries haven't largely been allowed to own their own shit, and you can guess what kind of grim comedy comes out of there.
A Film With Me In It involves two broke schlubs trying to make a movie, and then basically everybody dies. One by one, in horrible fashion, in accidents that appear very, very hard to explain away as anything other than foul play. Crippled brothers are crushed, girlfriends are impaled, and faithful old dogs are... also crushed. It gets so bad that when the cops come round, they wind up abducted by our protagonists.
This is what's contained with the boundaries of the trailer, mind you.
A Film With Me In It is bleak, shot in darkness and squalid settings, and has more in common with thrillers than comedies, though people with an ability to yank joy from a gauntlet of stomach-churningly tense situations should get enough of a laugh to warrant a look. And there is a lot of genuine dark humor from the well-written dialogue and typically Irish understatement of an insane situation. It's not for most people, though.
Super (2010)
Some movies are doomed to obscurity and mediocre reviews due to the mass audience -despite having a love affair with some mutant definition of irony- having little appetite for irony focused on themselves. Super is ostensibly a superhero movie from Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. Most people have seen his PG Porn webseries, and that's a good start at plumbing his crazier depths, but Super is a bandage that's been torn away from a man's psyche way too fast. The trailer might make you expect a quirky, loveable indie comedy. It doesn't prepare you for a parade of miserable people, heads being caved in with a pipe wrench, and two genuinely psychotic protagonists.
Rainn Wilson from The Office stars as what appears to be an "average guy" whose wife (Liv Tyler) relapses into her old drug habit and leaves him for a major pusher (Kevin freaking Bacon). After moping around and binge watching an old religious superhero tv program, he has a despair-induced hallucination that the almighty personally touches his brain and decides to become a costumed crime fighter. After a few bungled attempts, he enlists the aid of a bored comic shop employee (Ellen Page) and figures out that he needs a weapon.
What follows is a cartoonish montage of our protagonist beating people with a wrench and dropping concrete blocks on heads to a series of pastel freeze frames reminiscent of the old Batman tv show, and then it gets really savage. Page's character figures his secret out immediately and appoints herself as his sidekick, and she's even more unhinged than he is, crushing a thug's legs with a car and then spewing an unbelievable stream of invective while laughing at him.
And when they finally go after the drug lord who stole Wilson's life, then it just turns into a highly theatrical explosion of bullets and flying body parts. The trailer makes an attempt to convey this, but really fails to capture the more bleak part of the movie's tone. And that's probably the whole point, the denial of what the audience wants in favor of what they should think about. That's probably also what keeps this movie from being more well-known.
The characters are bizarrely likeable despite being absolutely wretched, with Gunn's usual skill at writing giving the slightest welcome nuances to heroes and criminals alike, and he's set the groundwork properly for this bizarre mix of humor and horror-level violence to work, but make no mistake; this is a grim, grim piece of work that turns the usual superhero flick theatrics on its back to point and convey a rather distasteful but vivid message. The strength of the movie is certainly in the performances and subversion of expectations, but the overall arc will alienate most viewers who may feel... legitimately... that the joke is on them.
I'll just confess I watched this for Dylan Moran, an Irish comedian who is definitely in my top three. I also watched it on a stay-in date, which you'll find hilarious in a minute, after I've told you a bit about this movie.
It's a commonly cited difference between American and UK humor, that is America all jokes eventually point to having the biggest dick in the room, where the British come from a very modest, often defeatist place. Well, now take the Irish, who for the last few centuries haven't largely been allowed to own their own shit, and you can guess what kind of grim comedy comes out of there.
A Film With Me In It involves two broke schlubs trying to make a movie, and then basically everybody dies. One by one, in horrible fashion, in accidents that appear very, very hard to explain away as anything other than foul play. Crippled brothers are crushed, girlfriends are impaled, and faithful old dogs are... also crushed. It gets so bad that when the cops come round, they wind up abducted by our protagonists.
This is what's contained with the boundaries of the trailer, mind you.
A Film With Me In It is bleak, shot in darkness and squalid settings, and has more in common with thrillers than comedies, though people with an ability to yank joy from a gauntlet of stomach-churningly tense situations should get enough of a laugh to warrant a look. And there is a lot of genuine dark humor from the well-written dialogue and typically Irish understatement of an insane situation. It's not for most people, though.
Super (2010)
Some movies are doomed to obscurity and mediocre reviews due to the mass audience -despite having a love affair with some mutant definition of irony- having little appetite for irony focused on themselves. Super is ostensibly a superhero movie from Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. Most people have seen his PG Porn webseries, and that's a good start at plumbing his crazier depths, but Super is a bandage that's been torn away from a man's psyche way too fast. The trailer might make you expect a quirky, loveable indie comedy. It doesn't prepare you for a parade of miserable people, heads being caved in with a pipe wrench, and two genuinely psychotic protagonists.
Rainn Wilson from The Office stars as what appears to be an "average guy" whose wife (Liv Tyler) relapses into her old drug habit and leaves him for a major pusher (Kevin freaking Bacon). After moping around and binge watching an old religious superhero tv program, he has a despair-induced hallucination that the almighty personally touches his brain and decides to become a costumed crime fighter. After a few bungled attempts, he enlists the aid of a bored comic shop employee (Ellen Page) and figures out that he needs a weapon.
What follows is a cartoonish montage of our protagonist beating people with a wrench and dropping concrete blocks on heads to a series of pastel freeze frames reminiscent of the old Batman tv show, and then it gets really savage. Page's character figures his secret out immediately and appoints herself as his sidekick, and she's even more unhinged than he is, crushing a thug's legs with a car and then spewing an unbelievable stream of invective while laughing at him.
And when they finally go after the drug lord who stole Wilson's life, then it just turns into a highly theatrical explosion of bullets and flying body parts. The trailer makes an attempt to convey this, but really fails to capture the more bleak part of the movie's tone. And that's probably the whole point, the denial of what the audience wants in favor of what they should think about. That's probably also what keeps this movie from being more well-known.
The characters are bizarrely likeable despite being absolutely wretched, with Gunn's usual skill at writing giving the slightest welcome nuances to heroes and criminals alike, and he's set the groundwork properly for this bizarre mix of humor and horror-level violence to work, but make no mistake; this is a grim, grim piece of work that turns the usual superhero flick theatrics on its back to point and convey a rather distasteful but vivid message. The strength of the movie is certainly in the performances and subversion of expectations, but the overall arc will alienate most viewers who may feel... legitimately... that the joke is on them.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
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