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January 31, 2008

Back with some new...

Honestly, I just wanted to be sure everyone watched the video below. It's the first editing I've done since film school, and while my free software isn't especially precise, I think the sense of narrative flow is there.

Anyhow, new articles for you today...

...there's a presidential primary coming up, and nowhere in any media outlets have I seen any discussion of the Green Party's presidential candidates.

I understand why: in 2004, Peter Camejo won most of the primaries but the Party gave the nomination to David Cobb anyway, and Camejo bolted to run with Ralph Nader independently. Still, as I am a registered Green, I'd like to know which primary candidate I should support.

So I looked into who's actually running. . .

Read all about it here

and then on a lighter note...

It's easy to get confused when searching for the Irvine office of Dr. William Kessler-if you're looking for anything resembling a conventional doctor's office, that is. One might not expect to find it in the back of a gigantic fighting gym labeled NO LIMITS. To see the doctor, you must first walk by a wall of mixed-martial-arts gear and merchandise for sale, around the boxing ring where athletes you might have seen on TV are furiously training, past a full-scale caged octagon, and through an array of punching bags hanging from the ceiling like obstacles in an American Gladiators challenge.

Read more about the Fight Doc.

Posted by LYT at 6:29 PM | Comments (2)

January 28, 2008

Here's what I did this weekend

Posted by LYT at 7:57 PM | Comments (6)

January 25, 2008

"THIS...ISN'T...SPAAAARTAAAA!"

My somewhat predictable review of MEET THE SPARTANS is now online.

Posted by LYT at 7:29 PM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2008

OC Weekly today

I have a little feature up on a locally made direct-to-DVD flick.

Recently released on DVD by Vanguard Cinema—sales figures haven't been released yet, but producer Sara Parrell says she's been promised a report at the end of the month—Stupid Teenagers was a project several years in the making, beginning when Parrell, Smith and Meredith found themselves working at an unnamed "theme park in Anaheim." (Smith still works there, so he can't bring himself to actually say the name in public.)

"The first thing we did—just for fun, with a bunch of other employees—we took a Hi-8 video camera and made a movie set at a party," Smith says, "basically as an excuse to have a party every week and videotape things . . . "

". . . With actors that weren't paid!" Meredith adds.

"I dunno if you'd call them actors," Smith says. "They were our friends. We'd go, 'Hey, you're a slut, you play the slut. . . .' From that, we realized we needed to pay actors."

And then our cover story this week is on OC's biggest political donors. Every writer on staff chipped in on this one, myself included. To be honest, it looks a lot better in print with a Monopoly Board layout. But if you're nowhere near OC, the text ain't bad by itself.

Posted by LYT at 6:56 PM | Comments (0)

My Grandfather's Column

Homophobia

I find there is a serious misunderstanding of the way liberal thinkers use the term homophobia. This is that the word means some sort of sin or evil inclination on the part of the homophobe. In fact the proper meaning of a phobia is an irrational (and probably morbid) fear of something. The claustrophobe is terrified of enclosed spaces, whereas the agoraphobe is scared stiff of the wide open air and the homophobe is seriously frightened by homosexuality. Phobias are notoriously difficult to eradicate; so that some psychotherapists regard some of them as incurable.

The usual way by which sufferers cope with their affliction is simply to avoid what they fear. The arachnophobe can usually find somebody else to get the dreaded spider out of the bath. If he can't he most probably kills it. The agoraphobe just has to stay indoors; and so on. As for the homophobe he can usually avoid the company of overtly gay people and find sufficient reasons for his abhorrence of homosexuality. Most regrettably our Christian Bible has two passages, one on Leviticus and one in St Paul's letter to the Romans, which give explicit support to homophobia, regarding it not as irrational but as God's own law.

Jesus is not recorded as having said anything on the subject, though he was clearly largely surrounded by men in the days of his earthly ministry. Importantly St John tells us that perfect love casts out fear, for fear has torment. The best way to overcome fear, whether awake or in one's dreams, is to turn and face the feared thing and if possible love it.

-Peter Graham

Posted by LYT at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2008

Facing Fear

The other night, I watched a movie called When the Wind Blows. It was a movie I'd been afraid to see for 25 years. That may sound surprising on the surface, especially if you were to come across it on TV -- it's a cartoon about two old people and the way in which they finally die. But there's a history with me and this particular tale.

The movie is based on a book, written and drawn by Raymond Briggs who, at the time the book came out, was best known as a children's author, and indeed, the book looked exactly like his children's books. It was even a semi-sequel to one called Gentleman Jim that I had read prior, and while it was full of adult satire that went way over my head, nothing in it was particularly inappropriate for kids -- it's about a janitor who fantasizes first about being a cowboy and later about being a highwayman, a dream he rather naively tries to realize with woefully pathetic results that ultimately get him thrown in jail.

I had recalled getting When the Wind Blows at age 6, but a cursory Internet search suggests that it didn't actually come out until I was eight, which would also make that the year my parents split and the year I developed allergies. The end of innocence in almost every way.

I do specifically remember the day I got the book, though. My dad had been away on a trip somewhere, and my teacher at that time had said something to the effect of, "Oh, that's good for you, because when parents go away on trips they always bring you back something. Ask him what he brought you." Needless to say, my parents properly chastised my manners when I did.

There had also been some talk about World War III -- nothing I as a kid could conceptualize, except that I guess the Rock Hudson TV movie had been on, some other kids had seen it, and said "It's such a big war, it ends with the world blowing up!" I assumed at that point it would be taken into space, and be Star Wars all over again (I wonder if Ronald Reagan thought the same thing).

So I'd been talking about that, and then my dad finally relented and said indeed he had gotten me something, and it was about what I'd been talking about - World War III. When I realized it was a sequel to Gentleman Jim, I was happy, but didn't understand the war angle.

To this day I have no idea what my parents were thinking. The plot of the book, such as it is, is that this elderly couple here that war is coming, and assume it'll be like World War II, for which they have fond memories. They build a bomb shelter, and survive the initial explosion, only to die slowly thereafter from radiation. The point of the book is obviously twofold, less obviously threefold:

Firstly, it satirizes the "head in the sand" attitude of the older generation's simple patriotism;
Secondly, it savages the actual survival leaflets the British government was putting out, by showing just how ineffective they'd be. (Years later, touring a Cold War bunker that became a museum, the tour made clear that the government didn't actually expect people to survive in great numbers, but wanted to take their mind off of panicking.)

Thirdly, which didn't become clear until many years later when Briggs did a more autobiographical book, there were clearly some family issues at play -- the couple are blatantly based on his own parents, which makes their ultimate fate seem quite twisted on his part.

The first time I read the book, it didn't really sink in. I was in the same position as the lead characters in not understanding the situation, and the satirical elements of the story presuppose that the reader does know about fall-out and such. Only on repeat readings did the dark nature of the story become clear, at which point I begged my father to take the book away, and fondly wished that I had never read it, or could unlearn what I now knew to be possible.

My parents didn't exactly help allay my fears. Rather than, say, describing how the hotline established via the Cuban missile crisis now made such things unlikely, they simply said that if it happened, we'd all be dead very quickly. Comforting. I dreaded reading or even listening to the news for many years, worrying that every mention of war meant nuclear, and wanting to be taken be surprise if it ever came, rather than receiving an early warning and knowing it would come.

Learning you're going to die is one of childhood's harsh lessons. Learning it at the same time as you learn that everyone else in the world could die as well in a global conflict is overwhelming. And until I just checked, I didn't realize that shortly thereafter came the parental split.

Anyway, we have probably all had dreams of armageddon, but I also would frequently have dreams about being forced to read that book again. When something scares you at that young an age, it goes beyond reason, inserting itself into nightmares unswayed by rational argument.

I avoided all realistic movies about nuclear weapons. When my job required it at one point -- the anime Barefoot Gen, about Hiroshima -- I made sure to get really drunk first. A few years ago, I stumbled across The Day After on the Sci-Fi channel. Though not as horribly dated as one might think, it nonetheless was, well...just a movie. And one starring Steve Guttenberg, no less.

Then I watched the UK movie Threads on Google video. That had not dated one iota -- the Brits no how to make things gritty and realistic, kitchen-sink style, rather than Hollywood-ized. It's still as harsh and horrific as it ever was, and would never make it to TV here. Its images haunted me for a while, but then passed.

My intent was that one day I would finally confront the animated movie version of When the Wind Blows when I could get fully loaded and have the loving arms of someone to lie in afterwards, holding me in the night if the bad dreams returned. The loving arms are not something I can wait for, alas. I learned that the movie could be seen on Youtube, in fragments. Nearly out of whiskey, I could only get to the 7-11, and bought some flavored girly-beers that turned out to be sickly disgusting -- but I needed the buzz.

This is probably the longest movie review preamble ever.

So now we come to it. And may I say it is a compelling movie. It's also short. I'm not sure it's as effective as the book though. The book, like Persepolis, draws power from its simplicity -- a good 40% of the story is just two people lying in a tiny shelter and talking. The book really fucks with your head about 2/3 of the way through, when the color scheme starts getting blurry to simulate failing vision, an effect used for about 30 seconds in the film and then discarded.

Director Jimmy T. Murakami tries to open the story up as much as possible, with flashbacks, fantasy sequences, overhead landscape shots, which is more cinematic, for sure, but again, the claustrophobia is part of what made the original deliberately unbearable. The use of live-action footage is questionable -- we begin with black-and-white newsreel of trucks with a police escort, and then a guitar riff kicks in, followed by David Bowie singing a tune that wouldn't be out of place on today's radio. But it IS out of place in the movie -- these characters would never listen to something like that.

Later, there's old World War II footage, but it doesn't work so well next to the animated flashbacks the characters have. And a fantasy sequence where Hilda (Peggy Ashcroft) imagines herself as a fairy -- what's that about?

Nonetheless, the movie does keep the focus on James (John Mills) and Hilda, refraining from showing anyone else except some bus passengers at the beginning. And of course the explosion gets epic treatment, though it was simply represented by two white pages in print.

The dialogue is laden with malapropisms -- "IBMs" for missiles, "commuters" for computers...these are isolated people. Only occasionally do they seem impossibly naive, as when Hilda imagines she can write a letter to the president of Russia and it'll change his mind. James then worries that they've missed today's post.

The performances take you through it -- Mills' voice is reassuring to the last, even when it's clearly shown to be false hope. James' constant references to doing "the Correct Thing" as per the "Powers That Be," even to the point of wondering if it's okay to pray before going to sleep one last time, hammer home the idea that the government is simply full of it and abusing the faith the people have put in it. Some of what is said, however, is a bit too "ironically" on the nose, as when Hilda says the war will be "over in a flash" (cut to the image of a missile on the launchpad), or remarks that if you can't see radiation or feel it, it can't hurt you. Murakami often feels the need to underscore such moments with ominous music; at one point, he takes a bird's eye view and shows us a devastated nearby village, which is one thing, but then treats us to a music-box-style rendition of rock-a-bye-baby, which is overplaying a tad.

Thankfully, he doesn't overdo the grossness of the bomb after-effects -- this was before vomiting scenes were oh so common in cinema. I remember being severely grossed out by the moment in Heathers when Winona barfs, but nowadays it seems every other movie has a puke scene. I don't know why, as nobody I know has every praised such a moment. Anyway, handled discreetly here.

There's even a rather strange attempt to salvage a semi-happy ending without betraying the material, exactly -- as the image of our dying protagonists fades into a tiny glowing ball that then seems to ascend into the heavens at the end. It's an odd way to go out. Understandable that Murakami doesn't want to drive his audience into utter despair, but the thing is that Briggs does.

The images from the movie are haunting, and have stuck with me the past few days, but I feel like maybe I've dragged them out of my subconscious, where they no longer belong. Time will tell. 25 years on, we're still here.

Nowadays, my nightmare is more that I'll never find those arms to hold me.

Meanwhile, if you want to see the film for yourself, just search for the title on Youtube.

Posted by LYT at 8:31 PM | Comments (3)

Open Thread

I don't feel like I have much useful to say about Heath Ledger's death, besides "what a damn shame," but if anyone else feels like it, do so in comments below.

Posted by LYT at 12:41 PM | Comments (2)

First review of RED from Sundance

Brad at Bloody Disgusting likes it, though his review would imply that it's all due to the substitute director, which I doubt.

Posted by LYT at 2:49 AM | Comments (6)

January 22, 2008

Drunken Karaoke - "A Little Respect"

Posted by LYT at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2008

Cloverfield monster action figure is coming...

...in September. And it costs a hundred bucks.

On the plus-side, it has 70 points of articulation (a toy nerd term that means "joints") and "life-like" detail.

No pictures yet. But if you want it to truly recapture the movie experience when you buy it, make sure to only look at the toy after you've downed enough whiskey shots to get dizzy.

Posted by LYT at 6:59 PM | Comments (1)

Trekkin' and boozin'

Two new super-long posts over at the OC blog.

Posted by LYT at 6:53 PM | Comments (0)

Derek and the Poorman discuss genital warts.

Posted by LYT at 1:10 AM | Comments (3)

January 19, 2008

Poorman chugs a beer in 5 seconds

Posted by LYT at 11:29 PM | Comments (2)

January 18, 2008

The Kaijus are responsible for all the flamewars in the world

So yeah, I reviewed CLOVERFIELD.

UPDATE:

I also reviewed MAD MONEY

Posted by LYT at 2:16 AM | Comments (4)

January 16, 2008

Daniel Plainview calls a phone sex line

Unofficial Sequel to Paul Thomas Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD, which starred Daniel Day-Lewis. None of this will likely make any sense if you haven't seen the real one first...

Posted by LYT at 7:28 PM | Comments (1)

January 15, 2008

Drunken Karaoke - "Chains of Love"

Posted by LYT at 2:26 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2008

Up For Pre-Order, Y'all!

Click the pics to go get 'em!

Posted by LYT at 7:54 PM | Comments (0)

Uhhh...No

From a publicity email I just received:

"Maybe this Valentine's Day, instead of sending a box of chocolates, you
should consider a bag of carrots."

Yup. And maybe I should just go ahead and buy this too.

I'm sure I'd be the hit of the night.

Posted by LYT at 5:50 PM | Comments (0)

More Drunken Karaoke

This time I butcher the Bangles:

Posted by LYT at 12:26 AM | Comments (4)

January 13, 2008

Drunken Karaoke

Part one of a new open-ended Youtube series. Yes, I take requests. And frankly, if you're fond of a particular song, you probably don't want to see me perform it.

Here, I attack my personal favorite song.

Posted by LYT at 2:30 AM | Comments (4)

January 11, 2008

Stupor Boll

If you want to know about the latest Uwe Boll opus, check out my review.

Posted by LYT at 1:59 PM | Comments (1)

January 10, 2008

THE LOST DVDetails

Sexy cover, right?

For details on technical specs, extras, etc., head on over to Fangoria for a related interview with Chris Sivertson.

Posted by LYT at 4:40 PM | Comments (1)

January 7, 2008

LAFCA awards this weekend

We'll be giving trophies to Sidney Lumet, Daniel Day-Lewis, and a bunch of Romanians.

Anyone want to be my date? I need to know by end of day tomorrow.

NO DUDES.

No strings attached. Holding hands, or anything else, is strictly optional.

Posted by LYT at 7:00 PM | Comments (2)

My Grandfather's Column

Reverence for the Planet

Some time in the 1970s, Bishop Hugh Montefiore produced a book called The Question Mark - the End of Homo Sapiens? Now, over 30 years later (and perhaps too late) the world is waking up to the message of that book, in which climate change and the exhaustion of the world’s natural resources were foreseen as the precursors of the extinction of the human race. At long last the arguments in that book have been accepted by the vast majority of the world’s thinkers and leaders.

The selfishness of the rich who were prepared to ignore the problem because they thought it wouldn’t affect them is just beginning to fade but nothing like fast enough. There have been stupid Christians who said man had been ordered by God to subdue the earth rather than to treasure it. There are also vast numbers of people who imagine that there is simply nothing they can do about it.

I remember in World War 2 that amazing experience of knowing that everyone was doing their bit to save the country from defeat. I don’t know why it’s so different today when the stakes are even higher. There were just a few people then who wanted simply to give in, thinking that Hitler and co were just invincible so that there was nothing any of us could do about it. Unfortunately the pessimists and head-in-the-sand people to-day are far more numerous.

I have a dream and in it every household has a garden of modest size and there are no organised collections of rubbish from outside our homes. Every waste product we produce has to be dealt with by ourselves, We could burn, we could compost or we could bury it. Our personal landfill site would of course have to become a pretty dominant feature of the garden. Surely we would do our utmost to keep the use of it to a minimum.

Luckily we do have some well organised re-cycling available; so the situation is not as dire as my dream one. I’m still shocked however at the number and size of the black plastic sacks put out each week to be despatched mostly to some landfill site.

I want people to love their gardens and the greater garden which is our planet. We may still not be able to save it from destruction but it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

-Peter Graham

Posted by LYT at 2:21 PM | Comments (2)

January 6, 2008

Thompsons Represent!

Posted by LYT at 10:50 PM | Comments (2)

January 5, 2008

Catching Up...

In case many of you still don't keep tabs on my official job-type blog at OC Weekly -- or skip it because it's too OC oriented, or whatever -- here are some recent posts you might like to read anyway.

Review of ONE MISSED CALL

Village Voice/LA Weekly film poll with some added thoughts.

Interview with Tobin Bell and Tim Palen

Interview with Eli Roth

Interview with Lucky McKee and Nathan Baesel

Posted by LYT at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)

January 4, 2008

Tawk to Da Hand

I just watched the pilot episode of the new Sarah Connor Chronicles Terminator TV show. It plays like dated fan-fiction.

The kid they have playing John Connor is well cast -- he really does look like a missing link between Edward Furlong and Nick Stahl. The only thing is that unless the series somehow pushes a reboot button at the end (which is always possible when dealing with time travel), the show exists in a new continuity where TERMINATOR 3 never happened. Where this puts the upcoming TERMINATOR 4 movie, I do not know. I know fans like to bitch incessantly about T3, but I liked the way it brought things around and reflected its own decade. To wit:

TERMINATOR -- released in the '80s, during all-time high fear of nuclear annihilation. Ends with a tiny note of optimism in the face of looming, imminent disaster. Implies we cannot avoid evil fate, but can and must meet it with grace and strength.

TERMINATOR 2 -- released in the '90s, as the Berlin wall comes down. Cold War over. Movie suggests we don't have to face that evil fate after all -- we can make our own destiny. True optimism a possibility.

TERMINATOR 3 -- released in the aughts, after 9-11 and war on terror end our period of peace and prosperity. Theme of the movie is that nope, you thought you were safe but fuck you, your mom got cancer and the world's still gonna be destroyed. Don't even try to stop it, just hunker down and fight back when the dust settles.

I like that symmetry. It's too early to tell what the theme of the TV show is, but it has already introduced THREE Terminators:

-Arnold-type Terminator, minus accent or charisma, who doesn't give a crap if he's ID'ed or not, just keeps coming.

-Bald black FBI guy, able to casually eat cheeseburgers and blend in as a totally normal person without any weird moments of robotic behavior. Allegiance unclear.

-hot chick, has moments of mechanical behavior, but being age-appropriate for John, I'm betting we learn down the line that she's capable of nascent emotion.

Initially we're told this is set in 1999, but later in the episode they use a time machine to go forward to 2007, which is when SkyNet REALLY begins in this new continuity. It's all Dick Cheney's fault, I bet.

Hey, maybe John keeps being played by different actors because timeline revisions keep retroactively changing the circumstances of his birth? Just sayin', if we accept all the revisions, then logically Reese will have to be an older dude when they finally send him back to become the daddy in part one.

It is what it is. Lena Headey's a decent replacement for Linda Hamilton, and Summer Glau has that otherworldly quality that works. But seriously, guys, if we're gonna have the bad-guy classic Terminators, hire foreign bodybuilders with bad accents. That's half the appeal. Please?

And those of you who bitched about how much you hated Jonathan Mostow's directing, don't even try to claim this show is better directed, because it isn't. I'm amused by how sci-fi nerds always want everything to be "dark," and then when someone actually goes to dark places -- like David Fincher killing off Newt and Hicks casually in Alien3, or Mostow giving Sarah cancer and nuking the world -- they all get so upset that their favorite characters got iced.

Hey, maybe they can do a "Ripley Chronicles" TV show with Newt and Hicks as characters, pretending ALIEN movies 3 and 4 never happened. If this show does well, I won't be surprised.

I hope T4 the movie stays in movie continuity, and doesn't retcon the way the HIGHLANDER series did after the TV show came out. Highlander continuity was already so fucked that it didn't matter. I want to keep my Terminator movies straight.

Posted by LYT at 10:52 PM | Comments (7)

January 3, 2008

Read Me

I have the cover story in today's OC Weekly

Photographer Ed Dellis never stops smiling, and if you lived his life, you wouldn't either. From the exhaust—swept pits of the Indianapolis 500 to the boudoirs of Little Saigon, he's been everywhere a red-blooded heterosexual male has ever wanted to be—and put smiles on plenty of faces just by making his living.

That grin doesn't even disappear when he says, "I'll show you where I got killed."

Dellis is driving past white, generic-looking, one-story buildings in the shadow of the 22 freeway, with its attendant dirt mounds on either side, separated from the buildings by chainlink fencing. They had just started widening the 22 here three years ago when it happened—New Year's Eve, at precisely 4:32 p.m. (he knows this because his watch froze).

"I was shooting with a Vietnamese model for a motorcycle organization, and I remember the client asked for a picture of the model on the dirt bike in the dirt when we had gotten done with our studio work," Dellis recalls. "So I decided to fire up this motorcycle. I looked for a hole in the fence to get over onto the dirt. I remember turning around and getting in second gear, and next thing I know, I'm waking up in a very strange room with tubes and wires coming out of me, and things weren't adding up."

Read it all. And watch video, too.

Also, there's more news on The Poorman:

But the day after our feature came out, Trenton received an e-mail from Ellis reading, in part, "We cannot air the Ron Jeremy ads anymore. . . . They are now costing us mainstream business. . . . We will be blacking them out/or overriding them with something else starting tonight. . . . Can you sell something more mainstream than porno tape ads? If not, we will have to part ways. . . . We cannot balance our family-friendly positioning and these ads."

Posted by LYT at 6:28 PM | Comments (2)

January 2, 2008

Damn...wanna feel old?

It's been more than TEN YEARS since the first Austin Powers movie

Posted by LYT at 2:39 AM | Comments (4)