http://ningin.com/mediastream/item:show/2008/11/21/megaman-movie-official-trailer/

I’m not quite sure what to think. I suppose for a low/no-budget fan movie it looks good. The soundtrack, judging by the trailer, sounds great.

It’s a stunt/trick video showing some of the insane movement tactics in UT2004. The other day while checking my email I got a friendly message from the YouTube Police telling me that this video had been removed for violating copyright.

Now, as it turns out, YouTube hasn’t totally removed the video, they’ve simply muted the audio. Fine, at least they’re not totally annihilating volumes of original work just because they include something that may be copyrighted*.

*Although, the distinction must be made that these works themselves have copyright, what they don’t have is deep pockets and teams of lawyers to aggressively antagonize hundreds of millions of people.

So, anyway I went back and took a look at this so called copyright violation. Apparently the audio on this video was pulled because it contains a whole 40 seconds of the song “I Believe I Can Fly” by Space Jam. What a crock. Bitterly ironic that it gets pulled for containing only the main chorus of a song by a band who only ever made one popular song…

Update: Related Reddit thread.

So, now I’ve got to decide whether I’m actually going to bother with Battlestar Galactica again. Sure, it was a great show — During the first season. But past the halfway mark of season 2 it really lost its way. The end of seasons 2 and 3 were particularly absurd.

Ronald Moore has said that the writers’ strike gave them time to reconsider their story arcs for the new season. That’s heartening news, since the failings of the show were in the inexplicable actions of characters, absurd twists and retroactive storytelling that undermined its good qualities. Even so, I think I’m going to take a pass on the season premiere tonight until some more information has leaked out. If the word on the street, as it were, is overwhelmingly positive, I may just give it another chance.

After reading and hearing a bit about this movie, I finally decided it was time to check it out this weekend.

The film has been talked up as one of the better Science Fiction movies in recent memory, so I came to it with rather high expectations. Perhaps that was a mistake, because when I think of films like 2001, Solaris, Stalker, and so on, it’s almost setting myself up to be disappointed.

The first two-thirds of this movie were good. Unfortunately, you can tell that a lot of it is quite derivative. But the film is knowingly an homage to a variety of other movies and sources, so that isn’t a fatal flaw. We have a commanding officer, Kaneda, most likely a reference to the Kaneda character in the Akira manga. We’ve got a seemingly esoteric psychologist named Searle, possibly named after the philosopher, visuals that are highly reminiscent of 2001, and the list goes on.

The fault I found with this film is in not going anywhere. Here we have an epic plot, the death of our Sun, tied in with human struggles and some thought provoking ideas. But it doesn’t go anywhere thematically. It’s inconsistent, and even though everything we see might make narrative sense, there’s no closure, nor even a thought-provoking open-endedness. Instead what we’re left with is a jumble of pieces that could have made something amazing, but instead merely make something passable.

Spoilers.

I largely enjoyed the first two thirds of this movie. I did think that, by the time Searle died, that we’d seen too many deaths. There was a sort of morbid fascination with the details of characters dying that I didn’t enjoy, and the music choices seemed a bit off to me.

It was obvious to me that something would cross over from Icarus 1 to Icarus 2. After all, it’d completely defy expectations to visit the other ship if that wasn’t going to happen. And, when first introduced to Pinbecker, he seemed like a fascinating character. But instead of developing him, he instead becomes a generic monster stalking the hallways of the Icarus 2. At this point, the film became less Science Fiction and more generic horror with science fiction trappings, like Event Horizon. Disappointing.

By this point the director’s overt morbidity and choice of harsh music for the soundtrack made a bit more sense. There’s even a fight sequence in an environment that can only be described as Cube-like. I can’t help but feeling like there are at least two movies here, one that focuses in on the astronauts in their mission to save the human race by reigniting the Sun, and another that focuses in on the psychological/philosophical/supernatural elements of a character like Pinbecker. As it stood, we get about two thirds of the former, and maybe a tenth of the latter before it degenerates into a confused mess of blurry camera movements with people dying and explosions everywhere. The ending tries to strike some note of an epiphany before killing off all of the characters, but because it’s such a mess it just adds to the confusion.

10. The Mothman Prophecies – Slow build up, but a very creepy film. Has stuck with me more than a legion of gorier, cheesier films.
9. Hellraiser – The endless sequels haven’t done this series much good, but the original retains the paranoid escape mentality and the strange vision of what lies beyond good and evil.
8. Jeepers Creepers – The sequel ruined the original, but alone it’s done with restraint and effectiveness that hits close to home.
7. Phantasm 4: Oblivion – I saw this movie a long time ago and without seeing the prequels, yet it sticks with me to this day.
6. Cube – See here.
5. Final Destination – Beats out Cube for hitting closer to home on my fear scale. Flashbacks to this movie when getting on a plane are inevitable.
4. Ringu 2 – I debated whether I enjoyed the original more than the sequel here, but I’m going with the sequel for the way it expands beyond the first film.
3. Alien – Claustrophobic paranoia while being stalked by the universe’s most deadly being, and your life is being treated like an expendable asset by a faceless corporation? Yes.
2. Poltergeist – Beats out Alien on the close to home factor. A movie that turned trees outside of windows, static on TV, and innumerable other household sights into fearful things.
1. The Thing – These things are always fungible, but The Thing hits all the right spots for me. A tight focus and a driving paranoia. The ending is what really nails it for me.

*For the moment, may be subject to revision without notice.

I just got done watching Halloween: H20: Twenty Years Later. The movie was alright, but what really struck me was how irritating it was watching it from a television station. Fortunately, I don’t even bother watching any television shows “live” anymore, and so therefore can skip the commercials. But even with the ability to skip through the commercials really quickly, I’m feeling particularly irritated with watching these things off of television at all.

Typical scenario: Mike Myers is seen walking down a corridor with a knife in his hand. The Halloween suspense theme is playing. Then, in the bottom of the screen, a row of symbols flashes by and coalesces into the television network’s symbol.

Great, any sense of tension was just blown. This happened constantly as I was watching the movie. If it wasn’t the network label appearing in the corner, it was an ad for another show on the network. There must have been at least three other shows being advertised during this horror movie, one of them a comedy and another a romantic comedy, total mood killers for the ambiance of a horror film. Do I care about these shows? No. And even if I did, I wouldn’t want that cluttering up and distracting me from something I’m already watching.

It seems like the network people want to discourage anyone from watching anything on their networks at all. If it really bugs me, it wouldn’t be hard at all to simply move entirely to watching everything on DVD. The only real benefit to TV at all is the serendipitous finding of something you might want to watch, but couldn’t remember you wanted to watch. Amazingly enough, I can browse throw a station’s offerings via the local TV guide or the streamed-in content guide, I don’t need to have ads plastered on top of my shows to know when something else is playing.

Yeah, I guess that deafening silence means I should just forget the crazy idea of television stations caring about my viewing experience at all.

As October’s been passing along I’ve been trying to catch up a bit on some of my backlog of horror movies. Cube and its two sequels were movies that I’d heard of before via friends, but never seen. Last weekend they popped into my mind for whatever reason, and I ended up picking up the trilogy to watch.

For the time being I’m going to limit my discussion to the first film. I’ll get to the sequels later. The concept of the movie is pretty simple: People are stuck in a cube, which is comprised of smaller cubes. In fact, the concept seems so sketchy that I was worried if the movie was going to be able to carry itself. Thankfully, it did so really well. The movie paces its revelations well enough that, even though you think there’s nothing further to unfold, there is. It works out well and keeps what could be a kind of tedious exercise, a group of people crawling through identical cubic rooms, interesting until the very end.

Although Cube is a horror movie, it’s not a slasher flick or the torture porn that passes for horror these days. Cube actually reminds me of what I thought of when I first heard the concept for Saw — “A serial killer who puts people in situations where they kill themselves,” ingenious, I thought. Sadly, Saw didn’t live up to my high hopes, but Cube is in the vein I was hoping for, a cerebral sort of horror.

Here’s where the spoilers begin. I’ll probably also be making comparisons to the sequels, so fair warning.

The original Cube movie is a tight, intense, character-focused movie. We don’t cut away from the Cube, we don’t see flashbacks, we don’t even get to see the outside. All we have is what is presented to us. When you look at the original Cube compared to its two sequels, this is actually the primary difference between the original and its successors, and it’s what makes Cube far, far better than them.

Both Cube 2 and Cube 0 have expanded the “Cube” universe to include things outside of the Cube. In the first movie we have characters who have dialogue which tells of their lives before they were placed in the cube. In the second movie we have dialogue that is accompanied by on-screen footage. We also have opening and ending scenes that take place outside of the cube. In Cube 0 a good half or more of the film takes place outside of the cube.

Further, the mystery of the first movie is: “Why is there a Cube?”, “Who built it?”, “Why would anyone build it?”, “What purpose does it have?” We even explicitly get a character, Holloway, who proposes the Cube was built by the military, a theory that the film itself seems to discredit. The sequels discard the stimulating open-endedness of these questions and basically state outright that the Cube is created by the military/government. Its purpose is never really divulged, but it doesn’t need to be — the implication is simply that “the military” is so full of cold and inhumane people that building a Cube device and filling it with live subjects is just another day’s work.

All in all, I’m glad I got around to watching the series, but the sequels were a bit too disappointing for me to watch them again. The original, though, stands alone quite well and is definitely among my favorites in cerebral and psychological horror films.

Some spoilers behind the cut.

Battlestar Galactica had/has a lot of problems, perhaps the most prominent of which was the third season’s weak attempt at making the show “relevant” by having the humans [for no particularly explicable reason] have their settlement occupied by the Cylons. Overall there is a lot more to it, meaning weak writing, lack of continuity, out-of-left-field revelations, and so on, but a lot of problems can be seen as stemming from the hoops the shows writers went through in order to set up situations for political commentary. Even though Battlestar Galactica definitely was the best sci-fi show in recent memory during its first season, the show lost its direction and floundered and is only a shadow of what it could’ve been.

So after watching this particular episode of Doctor Who, I am pretty confident in saying that it’s definitely one of the best sci-fi shows on right now. I’m not sure if it beats out Heroes, but it’s got much more sci-fi chops, for sure, and its mixture of camp, humor, and seriousness works out surprisingly well. Further, the storytelling is usually pretty solid — There’s a definite episodic structure, but it also develops relationships and meta-plots over the course of each season (or many seasons). There have been a couple of incidents in season 3, that I’ve noticed directly relate to events in season 1. Usually this would be reversed, but it is a show about time-travel, after all.

I never followed the original series when it was showing, but I’ve been informed that the new series actually mentains continuity with the old series. This makes it even more appealing, as we’re talking about a character with substantial history. In fact, one of the key points for the new series is how The Doctor is the last of the Time Lords. There are allusions and discussions all the time to how The Doctor was responsible for ending the war between the Dalek empire and that of the Time Lords, by means unknown. All that we know is that both of these great civilizations were destroyed and only The Doctor escaped.

I looked back to Battlestar Galactica and it’s contrived plots intended as political commentary, and then began to think about The Doctor’s history. We have this history drawn from [as far as I know] the 80′s run of the show of The Doctor being the sole survivor of the fall of two empires, and it’s hard not to see that as at least an unintentional zeitgeist-inspired reference to the cold war. And from there, we can look at The Doctor as this sort of post-Cold War hero.

With the continuation of series in its new incarnation, we can actually see some other interesting parallels. In the first season of the new series, the recurring villains are the Daleks. If we’re to continue the analogy from the previous incarnation of the series, the Daleks might be an allusion to Communism. However, I don’t think this is a particularly valid analogy at the level the Daleks function in the new series. Daleks are no longer a massive civilization engaging in a universe-ravaging Time War, but are instead stragglers, groups or individuals that managed to survive against all odds. And, although the Dalek imperative has always been to “Exterminate,” without the promise of a Dalek civilization flourishing in the vacuum of their exterminated rivals this imperative takes on a more nihilistic tone. Even though there may only be one Dalek left, he will fanatically seek out and exterminate what he sees as impure, the non-Dalek. Further, the Daleks we have seen thus far (the Emperor Dalek, the Cult of Skaro) have all had a religious dimension to their madness, something we’re led to believe is highly atypical of Daleks.

The new recurring villains introduced in season 2 are the Cybermen. As a representation of “Communism” in the new series, the Cybermen are much more fitting. Their methods, at least as shown in the new series, revolve around attempting to convert all non-Cybermen into Cybermen through a gruesome process involving brain transplantation into an artificial shell that supresses emotion and individuality. Those who resist are “deleted.” I don’t know whether the Cybermen were destroyed during the original series, but I can assume this is the case since they were introduced in the new series as from an alternate dimension. If we’re to continue the analogy, then, one may not see Cybermen as “Communism” but rather an offshoot “alternate dimension” version…

If we take these together, The Doctor actually appears to be quite the “WW4″ hero, opposing, amidst various sporadic threats, two of the more persistent, virulent and insidious ones of our time, that of fascist religious fanaticism such as Islamism, or imperialistic homogenizing meta-beliefs of Political Correctness.

So I finally decided to sit down and watch the last episode of Andromeda. As I mentioned in my last post on the series, I was putting it off because I felt like the possibilities I envisioned would be more fitting than what actually occurred. After about a week of mulling on those possibilities, I decided I was finally ready to see what happened.

I suppose I’ll mention right off the bat that I’m glad I took a week of hiatus from the show. That week really allowed me to think over what I felt like the mood of the show was, and what it could have been, and what it aspired to. The final episode wasn’t anywhere near the sort of catharsis it should have been, but taking that week away from the series let me get a distance on it not to be disappointed. In many ways I feel like it doesn’t matter what was actually shown. I’d imagined something better in my mind.

To the concrete:

• Earth was destroyed in approximately 3 seconds, and after that Andromeda immediately jumped away. A planet was destroyed and it was only a footnote in the show. There was a decent conversation between Dylan and Harper, but unfortunately Harper’s character has had five seasons to change into something more mature and didn’t. Too late now.
• Lots of spatial compression. Apparently, the Route of Ages is right next to every location in the universe. I guess this was necessary for the purpose of getting everything resolved in one episode, but that also means it was narrative compression. If they needed more time to resolve the show they really should have cut down on the Seefra episodes rather than pushing everything into the finale.
• Pretty predictable twist in that the Lambent Kith Nebula was compromised by the Abyss. Having the second Trance show up after going through the Route of Ages was pretty out-of-left-field, though, and unnecessary. That didn’t really add anything to the show, which is a problem with a lot of things, actually.
• Unsatisfying resolution. Our characters pretty much just watch as Trance single-handedly destroys the Abyss. (Hey, whatever happened to the “balance” in the universe?)
• Generally speaking, a satisfying resolution should have given each character a personal stake in the conflict and a reason to celebrate their victory. This wasn’t the case. The ending was most definitely Dylan-centric. Too bad.
• I would have really liked to have seen Keith Hamilton Cobb show up again for the final episode as Tyr Anasazi and redeem his character. He was most definitely one of the best characters on the show, and it lost a lot when he left. Even when he came back for a cameo, he acted very much out of character. Having him show up as the representative of the Abyss would have humanized the enemy and added personal stakes [for Beka, at least, if not others] and given him a chance to redeem his character. Rev Bem also should have had at least some role to play in the finale.