Archive for the 'Visual' Category

Missing Shows

Published
by
Cineris
on February 15, 2007
in Personal and Visual
. 0 Comments

What the heck has been going on with the Sci-Fi channel lately?

I don’t know if they’ve changed their lineup/scheduling or what but it’s got me pretty irritated with them. All I want to be able to do is queue up Heroes and Battlestar Galactica on a Friday night and have them available to watch late Friday night or Saturday. I’ve been fortunate enough lately with my mixed up schedule to not miss any episodes: Ever since Heroes’ half-season cliffhanger I started watching it on Mondays on NBC, simply because after a few weeks of not seeing the show I wanted to get back into it without waiting the whole week to watch it. I also remember looking for Battlestar on Fridays and not seeing it, but then having it show up on my Tivo rather mysteriously.

So today I sat down to queue up Heroes and Battlestar. Not there. What the heck? Now I’m a bit irritated since I purposefully didn’t watch Heroes on Monday with the intention of getting back into my regular TV watching schedule, which means I’ll have to get caught up on the show some other way. I could probably check Sci Fi’s page to see when they moved the shows to — but doesn’t it kind of make sense to announce that sort of thing before people end up in the lurch and miss episodes of the shows they are making a commitment to watch?

I guess they’re still better than G4 Spike TV Wannabe.

Serial Experiments Lain

Published
by
Cineris
on January 18, 2007
in Anime, Culture and Visual
. 0 Comments

Possibly spoiler-ish musings below.

So last night I finished watching Serial Experiments Lain. My reactions are alternately,

“Wow.”

and

“What?”

I’m still not sure I understand what happened. If anything happened. The show reminds me a lot of Ghost in the Shell, not merely for the fact that both deal with science fiction ideas of identity/being and the internet, but also in that both seem to tell stories with a similar sort of incoherency. Ghost in the Shell is more of a Matrix-like blend of philosophy and action, whereas Lain reminds me more (to be kind of generous) of, say, the Sixth Sense, but a lot of the narrative techniques seem pretty similar.

Or maybe they’re only similar in that they are frequently incomprehensible to me. Any given Ghost in the Shell plot is going to try, if it can, to have a twist. Maybe everything you see is fake, an elaborate illusion conjured up by the Major. Maybe the person the Major is after isn’t the real culprit or, even better, doesn’t exist at all. Maybe a character we think we know is actually someone else, an action we see turned out to have happened an entirely different way, or some other trickery. Lain pulls from the same stock, but instead of eventually culminating in some [usually somewhat anti-climactic] reveal, it keeps pulling and pulling and pulling.

It must have the most complex plot I’ve ever seen in a story. But, that said, since it’s so huge, so incomprehensible, I don’t get the feeling of fulfillment when everything falls into place — Because not everything has fallen into place. In fact I only have the sketchiest idea of “what happened” and am mentally just not even bothering to try to string the other ninety percent of the anime into my conception of it. Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to watching it again, but I don’t know. I’m not one to really watch things repeatedly and I am kind of daunted by the idea of watching the series again with a mind to “Get” it. That’s not to say I found it difficult to watch the first time through, but a second time watching it would be purposeful and thus open itself up to becoming difficult.

I’m kind of happy with where it’s residing mentally right now. Basically, floating around free-form inside my head, not as some coherent whole but as bits and pieces — Fragments and associations that pop into existence and then disappear. It’s like the mental process of eating a meal, moving from experience to experience, enjoying the richness of each without appealing to a systematizing process of ordering and establishing hierarchies.

Maybe I’ll write about this more again later.

Omissions: A Link RoundUp

Published
by
Cineris
on January 13, 2007
in Art, Culture, Miscellaneous and Visual
. 0 Comments

There’s a number of things I’ve been meaning to link to here over the past week or so, but haven’t gotten around to doing. Here are a couple:

Michael Blowhard, as always, is churning out amazing links and essays with ease:

Here he links to an essay by Richard Curtis about the publishing industry and print-on-demand technology. I find it particularly interesting because I know someone who has successfully used Lulu.com, one of the premier self-publishing outfits who use print-on-demand technology, and am thinking about pickup up a copy of his book. (Not to mention the future applications in self-publishing for my own writing!)

Michael’s got a posting called Private Pleasure, Public Vulgarity about a broad swath of cultural issues. The comments are a great read as well.

Perhaps related, perhaps unrelated to the above-mentioned posting are some of Michael’s thoughts on the New York Times Book Review section and its attitude toward “popular” writing. Part 2 is here, part 3 is here.

As always Michael seems to tread a fine line between populism (e.g. wanting the NYTBR to at least acknowledge the existence of popular literature) and elitism (e.g. condemning the pornification of much of popular culture) — It’s a line I find myself pretty darn sympathetic to, though naturally Michael does it with far more style and brain-stirring breezy musing than I can manage. In the past Michael has mentioned of of the abstract “themes” of his blog is the idea that the “Our Elites have turned against us” (paraphrasing) — And in that sense I can see a sort of unity between these seemingly at-odds positions. Namely in these disparate realms of society, the elite book-publishing crowd has created a hermetically sealed little world where nothing exists except for books, whereas elites of various stripes have completely made a mess of our popular culture, destroying social mores and turning everything that should be private into an inescapable commercial push.

*

Some other links from 2Blowhards:
David Chute writes about Children of Men. Children of Men has been getting some good reviews from some trusted sources, so I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to go see it sometime this weekend or next week. I’m still bitter that the last movie I wanted to see, The Fountain, was out of theaters by the time I managed to put aside some time to see it. Anyway, concerning David’s writing on Children of Men: The political angle of the movie is undoubtedly predictable and banal. I haven’t even seen the movie yet and I could already see it coming. It’s almost inevitable given the state of our current art elite, political correctness, the demands of the story and general cultural attitudes. I’m still planning on seeing it, though.


The Invisible Hand writes about brutalist architecture. Good riddance to Boston’s City Hall. One reference I think is particularly apt here is to that of the Emperor’s new clothes — So much of modern art seems to be a play of experts with rigid minds prevailing over common sense or basic instinctual understanding of beauty — I’m just glad to do my part in tearing down that edifice.

*Note: Asterisk indicates that my internet connection failed at this point while I was writing this post. I was going to comment on some more stuff but was limited to only the tabs I had opened at that point in time. I’ll probably follow up in a day or so with some more things. It figures, that my internet connectivity goes out the first time in a week that I really sit down to write anything at all.

The Battlestar Galactica Drinking Game

Published
by
Cineris
on December 2, 2006
in Culture, Miscellaneous and Visual
. 1 Comment

Watched the new Battlestar Galactica that came on last night. I really liked the episode, but it continues along what I consider a fairly bad trend of relying upon flashbacks to tell a story. The second season really suffered for it, mostly because it was springing things on us that were implausible given the way we had seen events play out in previous episodes. The year and a half gap between season two and season three gives some significant time to explore drama that occurred during that period, but I still think it’s rather sloppy to so consistently rely upon flashbacks.

While watching this week’s episode, even though I enjoyed it, I thought things were just taken to the point of absurdity. Hence I devised this little game to participate in while watching the show.

The Battlestar Galactica Drinking Game

-Every time a character other than Colonel Tigh has a drink on-screen, take a drink. Count multiple people drinking together as one person unless part of different scenes / groups.
-Every time Battlestar Galactica cuts to a flashback, take a drink.
-If the flashback is of someone drinking, take two drinks.
-If the flashback is of something that did not occur on-screen in prior episodes, take two drinks.
-Every time Battlestar Galactica cuts to a flashback of people drinking in a scene that did not occur on-screen in prior episodes, take three drinks.
-If Battlestar Galactica cuts to a flashback of anyone other than Colonel Tigh drinking in a scene that did not occur on-screen in prior episodes, finish your drink.

Wildcard Event:
-If an episode of Battlestar Galactica attempts to justify or explain how the characters have access to so much liquor while flying through space with limited supplies, double the amount you drink for each of the above occurrences.

If you’re still sober at the end of an episode then congratulations, you’re a Cylon! No human metabolism can handle that much drinking in an hour.

The Mists of Avalon

Published
by
Cineris
on November 27, 2006
in Culture and Visual
. 0 Comments

As a bit of a prelude, let me mention that the Sci-Fi channel is apparently run by imbeciles. Instead of showing Heroes, Dr. Who, and Battlestar Galactica last friday, they decided to run a bunch of Sci-Fi original pictures that are so unoriginal they wouldn’t even be entertaining fodder for Mystery Science Theater.

Since my TiVo wasn’t busy for that three hour block I decided to look around to see what else was showing around that time and ran across The Mists of Avalon. I’d heard of the series of books from a few years back, and also heard that it was made into a TNT miniseries. Typically these adapted miniseries are crummy, but, well, it’s hard to resist King Arthur. Not to mention that my osmosis of information about the books told me that this was a heavily female-dominated narrative and the promise of plenty of attractive women swooshing around in beautiful dresses makes an enticing prospect. So I queued it up and watched it over this weekend.

Overall, I had a good time watching The Mists of Avalon. Don’t confuse that with saying that the movie/miniseries was good — It wasn’t. Still, I found it entertaining enough to watch, humorous where it was bad, and with just barely enough eye-candy to keep me interested. The only real draws here are Juliana Margulies as Morgaine, Samantha Mathis as Gweneviere (Gwenwyfar), and Joan Allen who plays Morgeuse (Morgoose? Morgouse? Morguse?). Juliana isn’t someone I consider particularly attractive generally speaking, but she has her moments, particularly in the second half of the movie/series. Gwenevere is very pretty, though not really striking, but she does have better costumes than Juliana. Morgeuse is also quite attractive, but she’s getting big bonus points for being a redhead in the film.

The whole thing starts off with narration about how “Everything you know about the Legend of King Arthur is wrong” and then drags on and on and on. That line alone was enough to elicit a chuckle from me. That’s a tough challenge to live up to for a made-for-TV movie, undoubtedly one it would fail to meet. The first real scenes we see are of our main character, Morgane Le Fey, her mother, Igraine, and her aunt Morgeuse. Morgane is a young child, looking about five or six. The actress playing Igraine is stately but not really attractive — My fantasy that this movie was going to be a parade of beautiful women in beautiful clothing is already on the rocks. Igrayne definitely shows her age, and the set itself is very humble for the wife of a nobleman. It’s clear this movie is coming more from the realism/historicism school than the romantic school of Arthurian retellings. What’s unusual is that even with the movie’s attempt to emphasize realism/historicism, it simultaneously attempts to incorporate magic as a real part of the narrative. A tough mix to pull off, and it comes off as pretty hokey.

My major problem with this film comes as a result of this. Putting magic side by side with an attempt at historicism is, before anything else, going to be a strained relationship. Things are made much worse though in that the magic in the film is justified as being part of some nebulous “Mother Goddess” worship. This is a purely modern invention and blows any credibility I place in the film. The funny part of the whole thing is that even though the idea behind the contrived “Goddess” worship is to create some sort of unified religio-political movement that basks in a bunch of platitudes about love and nurturing and motherhood, as depicted in the movie the “Goddess” religion ends up looking pretty darn ruthless and inhumane.

Despite its attempts to be a “feminist” narrative and to subvert the traditional Arthurian legend, what really ends up happening is that responsibility merely is shifted — In the traditional Arthurian legends, Morgaine is a character deeply involved in the downfall of Camelot. In The Mists of Avalon that responsibility is shrugged off onto Morgeuse, who assumes the “witch/enchantress” role that Morgaine typically fits into. Aside from this one role-shift, there don’t seem to be many significant differences between The Mists of Avalon and other Arthurian legends. You’ve still got Lancelot and Gweneviere having their affair, Mordred seeking to usurp Arthur. The major differences are all fairly cosmetic as far as affecting the flow of the story goes, merely seeking to add soap-opera levels of angst and drama to what already existed. For something that claimed that everything I knew about Arthur was wrong, this is a disappointment.

In any case, there were some definite moments. At its best it reminded me of the A Game of Thrones D&D game that I was involved in a few months ago. Though fleeting, the few times when imagination and reality were in sync… That is worth it.

Design Decline

Published
by
Cineris
on November 26, 2006
in Games, Unreal Tournament and Visual
. 4 Comments

UT2007UTR1

Above we have a promotional picture from Unreal Tournament 2007 (or possibly Unreal Tournament 2008 if the release schedule slips…). The characters above are Malcom and an as-yet unknown character belonging to a team called the “Twin Souls.” Both seem to be carrying what looks like a large yellow brick, or perhaps a UT2007 version of UT2004’s worst, and second-most overpowered, weapon the Mine Layer.

Now, I don’t recall where I heard this, but the yellow brick these characters are carrying is neither a yellow brick nor a new minelayer: It’s the Flak Cannon. Aside from the Shock Rifle, the Flak Cannon has to be one of the Unreal Tournament series’ most iconic weapons. How can this boxy monstrosity compare to the classic lines of something like this?:

UT2007UTR2

More below the cut… Continue reading ‘Design Decline’

Heroes, Preliminary Thoughts

Published
by
Cineris
on November 22, 2006
in Culture, Personal and Visual
. 0 Comments

A lot of people recently have been talking up Heroes, one of the few shows on television I actually watch regularly. I like the show, but it’s rather confusing to me to encounter people claiming Heroes as one of the best shows on television — Is it really?

In a lot of ways, Heroes mimics comic books. Each episode is given a “Chapter” number and title, as if each episode of the show is actually an issue of a comic. Though this is good in that I really crave the sort of long-form storytelling that serialized comics, and Heroes, provides, I’ve always had trouble emotionally connecting with the majority of superhero comic books. This holds true for Heroes as well — Even though I enjoy the series, I never feel an emotional attachment to the characters in the way that I might for a good book or movie or even a better television series. Every time I feel like I’m ready to get into the series something happens and breaks my involvement.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’ve identified a few major issues. One is simply that each of the stories shares space with all of the others — This means the stories aren’t getting the sort of focused attention they might otherwise. This also lends itself to distancing via cuts between stories. As soon as any individual subplot reaches a point of emotional conflict, chances are the flow of the narrative will be interrupted by a change in focus on another set of characters.

Another thing that has begun to be problematic over the past couple of weeks is the insistence of turning every character in the show into someone with superhuman powers. The conceit of almost all live-action superhero projects is that they attempt to take a more “realistic” or perhaps “humane” approach to looking at comic book superheroes — To show them as humans rather than as super-human archetypes. In a situation like this I think it’s important to maintain a fairly strong connection with reality, but each episode seems to slip further and further away from that.

Suresh, the young professor who also reads the rather inane ramblings about “Genetics” and “Evolution” that precede each episode was one of the few characters who seemed to have no super powers — Yet the latest episode certainly casts doubt on that presumption. A young woman he meets also seems to be one of the few people without super-powers, yet we learn that she is involved with some sort of semi-sinister organization and clearly has some special ability.

This is not to say I don’t like the show. I definitely do. But at the same time I feel like Heroes is verging on being a really great series, but somehow always manages to fall a little bit short.

Battlestar Galactica’s Loose Change

Published
by
Cineris
on November 18, 2006
in Culture and Visual
. 0 Comments

Or, a look at good and bad storytelling techniques.

I just finished watching this week’s episode of Battlestar Galactica and I felt compelled to make a bit of a comment on it. If you haven’t seen the episode yet I advise not reading any further as it’s basically impossible to talk about this subject without bringing up things of a spoiler-ish nature.

More below the cut… Continue reading ‘Battlestar Galactica’s Loose Change’

Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King

Published
by
Cineris
on November 4, 2006
in Culture and Visual
. 0 Comments

Recently I managed to get around to watching this movie. In case you don’t know, it originally aired on the Sci-Fi channel in late March. It was four hours long, so I ended up putting it off a bit. The fact that it was titled Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King really did nothing to inspire me, nor did the fact that it aired on the Sci-Fi channel. As I’m sure anyone can tell, generic “Fantasy” tends to end up making bad movies. I think I need not even provide any example of Sci-Fi original movies to support the claim that they’re horrendous.

So I managed to put off watching the thing for a good half a year or so, but I did finally watch it. Imagine my surprise when it turned out this wasn’t “Dark Kingdom” at all, but rather the story of Siegfried, the knight who slew Fafnir the dragon. I find it beyond absurd that someone would thing to change the name of this movie from Ring of the Nibelungs to something as generic and uninspiring as “Dark Kingdom.” No doubt Sci-Fi played a part in this brilliant move. Now, it’s not a totally faithful adaptation to the version of the Siegfried story that I know, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

All in all, I thought it was an enjoyable movie. There were a lot of agonizing moments where I was astounded by the stupidity of the characters, but that is largely the legacy of the folk stories … Though I’m sure the movie could’ve done a better job at conveying the motivations of the characters in some of their actions, it’s hard for me to fault them for what is largely an issue of cultural drift. I was pretty pleased by the performances, though the female leads did have some moments of dramatic excess. The effects were excellent for this picture, and the best of them were Alicia Witt and Kristanna Loken.

Loken1

Loken2

Above is Kristanna Loken. Probably the weakest actor of the bunch, a fair number of her lines come off problematically. Still, she’s physically the perfect fit for her role, and fairly convincing. Besides, who can resist a blonde Valkyrie in wolf-furs or battle armor?

Witt1

Witt2

Above is Alicia Witt. She’s definitely the more refined of the two in the film, though her pictures here don’t really do justice to that. You just have to be partial to her hair, which is both red and very luxuriant. She is definitely princess-like, as befits her role, and some of her dresses had me pining for the days when women might have actually worn such beautiful clothing.