Smarter Than Harry Knowles

I’ve been on somewhat of a movie viewing streak lately, having seen The Village, Anchorman and I, Robot in consecutive weeks. I will also be seeing The Manchurian Candidate tonight, and event that will pretty much round out the summer movie circuit for me with one notable exception: Hero.

I’ll come back to Hero in a moment, but first I feel the need to bitch and moan for a bit. The Village was a very good movie (although not quite as good as some reviewers made it out to be) that felt reminiscent of classic horror writers like H.P Lovecraft while maintaining Shyamalan’s own artistic style. As any horror fan knows, though, to truly appreciate (and be entertained by) these works you have to give yourself fully to the universe in which it takes place. You can’t really analyze or critique until afterwards, when many of your quibbles will have been resolved by the clever plot twists that are the hallmark of all good horror stories. Unfortunately, an American movie theater on opening night is possibly the worst place to achieve this state of mind. Inevitably, every asshole in your area will be there armed with all the annoyances one can find in a group setting: they will ruffle bags, answer phones, talk loudly, laugh at inappropriate times (usually because they don’t understand what’s going on) and just be a general bane on humanity. My advice to any of you who have not yet seen The Village: wait, either until it comes out on DVD or until everyone else has already seen it. So long as you can avoid spoilers you’ll be doing yourself a favor.

That was longer than I expected, so I think I’ll just talk a bit about The Village and save the Hero commentary for tomorrow. Shyamalan’s newest effort still isn’t as good as The Sixth Sense, but then to expect that is pure folly; Shyamalan has the somewhat dubious honor of having made his best movie the first time out. Let me clear one thing up right away, though: The Village is not what the previews would lead you to expect, if you’ve actually seen them (which I hadn’t). The pacing is slow and deliberate with the ingenious twists we’ve come to expect, but it adds to that a wonderful use of color. Although far from the first person to use red in this manner, it nonetheless feels perfect in a horror setting and it’s not the only color he uses anyway. The acting is spot on and the dialogue, while it feels awkward at first, works well for reasons I can’t really expand upon without potential spoilers. Do yourself a favor and see this movie; you won’t be disappointed.

The Schedule

I know I said I would talk about Hero, but then anyone who’s been reading this site for a while should know that no promises I make here are ever kept. Besides, I realized halfway through writing the Hero post that there really wasn’t a way for me to talk about it without totally spoiling the plot. Instead, I will just wait until the movie is out, see it again, and then make the post (if I still feel the same way) in the forums where those who wish to participate can and those who don’t can safely ignore.

On a positive note, my summer work commitment will be ending this very Friday, and you probably can’t imagine how titillating that is. Following the end of my internment will be what has been referred to as the “guys’ weekend” at Dustin’s place up north, which should include dozens of other people and prove a fitting end of work celebration. After that I can look forward to two weeks of no work, although during that time I have to finish work on my final project for my C++ class. Given the number of times I wrote entire programs on the day (night, really) they were due last year I think I’ll have plenty of time to finish FFX-2 and Beyond Good and Evil as well as The Age of Spiritual Machines. After that there’s a week of packing and driving a load (I have a Saturn so this is quite an adventure) of stuff up to the apartment in Houghton that will serve as a precursor to the big summer finale, PAX in Seattle. Attending this event will actually result in my missing the first day of classes, but this seems like a small price to pay for the prospect of a weekend of geeky goodness with Pat and Bryan.

Thus, busy I will continue to be, although this is the kind of busy I can actually enjoy. Once I get settled into my new apartment (read: get my net connection up) I’ll finally get around to finished the version three update that I started several months ago. No, really, this time I mean it.

Three Hundred Percent Awful

I can’t take credit for that title since it was Pat who actually shouted it out towards the end of Aliens vs. Predator tonight. If any of you are currently considering paying theater prices to see this movie: don’t.

There really isn’t a single damn redeeming thing about it aside from, possibly, the last fight with the queen alien. Even then, I only liked it because the queen alien was well rendered but it wasn’t anything you haven’t seen if you ever saw Jurassic Park. I didn’t even go into it with abnormal expectations…all I wanted was a popcorn movie with lots of awesome predator and alien fighting, but with pretty much every character in the movie (predators and humans) dead within the first half hour there really wasn’t much left to do in the remaining forty-five minutes.

I’ll give you some advice, Paul Anderson – don’t quit your day job. And while you’re at it, go play some AvP at a LAN party sometime…it’s way more fun than your crappy movie.

Maybe If They Competed Naked Again

Is it just me or do the Olympics feel somehow less interesting than they once did? I seem to remember being a kid and watching pretty much every televised event as long as my parents allowed me to stay up, but this year I was only barely cognizant that they’d begun at all. Between NBC’s mediocre coverage (would someone please kill those commentators?) and my usual apathy the Olympics just don’t have the pulling power they once did.

Speaking of unmet expectations, apparently my buddy Paul thinks that all the best scenes were cut from AvP to make the PG-13 rating they imposed less than three weeks before the deadline (it was originally going to be R). Fine, I’ll give you that, Paul, but somehow I don’t think getting to see a little blood was going to make your movie any better.

Oh Yeah…

I’m getting ready to re-launch this site with the new design and content (target is the middle of September) and I need a few new faces. I’m specifically looking for anyone interested in writing for the gaming section of the site. I’m not looking for people to just post little news tidbits or even write reviews (in the standard sense) but for people interested in doing short articles like you might find on Game Girl Advance. If you think this sounds like you, feel free to e-mail me and let me know.

Suicide Club

This post is going to be, by and large, barely coherent rambling on my part. I was going to ask you to forgive me but I decided that simply warning you first was probably the better solution.

Anyway.

I guess I’ll just start with the basics: while browsing shelves at Blockbuster a few days ago I picked up, on a whim, a Japanese horror film called Suicide Club (Suicide Circle), or 自殺サークル in Japanese. It listed an International Film Festival award among its credentials, a club to which such greats as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero can claim membership. Figuring that, at least, watching it would give me a chance to see how much Japanese I remember I took it home.

Let me preface this next part by making it clear what “horror” actually means. When most people think of horror movies they’re actually thinking of “slasher” movies – things like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the Thirteenth, House of the Dead, etc. True horror, both western and eastern, relies much more on psychological fear and a general feeling of creepiness than it does blood and guts. Eastern and western horror differ slightly in both their use of suspense (more in western, slightly less in eastern) and the use of supernatural forces (eastern horror tends towards spirits and ghosts, whereas western tends more towards more “realistic” causes). Both are wonderful, and some movies and games (such as The Ring or Silent Hill) manage to combine both to form something greater than the sum of its parts.

Okay, at some point I need to talk about the movie itself. From a cinematography perspective Suicide Club does something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before: change its style dramatically to suit the situation. In any other movie this would result in a terrible sense of discontinuity, but Suicide Club is definitely not any other movie. Many scenes are shot in something approaching sepia tones, but they never feel jarring – the soft-focus camera effects that have been the staple of the horror genre for years are also used without feeling clichéd.

And the sound design! One of the central tenants of Suicide Club is a manufactured, pre-adolescent music group called Dessert (or Dessart or Dessret or Desert, depending on the director’s whim) whose lyrics perfectly embody the saccharine, dangerously catchy melodies that make J-Pop either angel or devil, depending on your tastes. The grotesque opening sequence involving the simultaneous suicide of fifty-four schoolgirls in a Shinjuku JR station is set to a bouncy tune that doesn’t belong within a thousand feet of such a scene, a juxtaposition that too few directors use properly.

Suicide Club is incredibly difficult to dissect; it includes a dozen conflicting impressions and threads that don’t seem to be easily reconcilable. Indeed, the film feels contradictory in its central message: is it asking you to kill yourself, or is it asking you not to? Is it asking at all? The plot includes both overt and discrete commentary on Japanese society and, by extension, many westernized societies in general. The Japanese heard tendencies and media saturation are drawn to sickening conclusions that, while they certainly stretch the limitations of the word, remain eerily plausible.

The film includes themes from many diverse sources ranging from classic anime like Akira to social commentary from Fast Food Nation. The concept of marketing from cradle to grave is thrown into stark contrast in Suicide Club and is, I think, really the central thrust of the message.

I’m sorry if very little of that makes sense – Suicide Club is a movie you really have to see to even begin to understand what I’m trying to say. I absolutely have to purchase it because there’s simply no way I got even half of what the movie has to offer in my first viewing. This is a movie that’s going to deprive me of sleep for weeks as I ponder in mysteries.

Northern Exposure

Despite the fact that moving always sucks my spirits are buoyed by the wonderful broadband internet connection I am currently posting from. Yes, I’ve finally returned to Houghton, land of trees and snow and not much else. Classes won’t start until Wednesday, or should I say, classes won’t start for me until then because I’ll be in Seattle for the Penny Arcade Expo.

As an aside, something in the office building next door must be throwing out some nasty electromagnetic interference…my monitor is quite wavy right now.

Anyway, once PAX is over and I’ve kicked the collective asses of my first week of classes I’ll probably get around to finishing the site updates I’ve been promising for so long. The redesign has been somewhat painful, and I’m considering creating a “developer’s diary” in the forums so that other web enthusiasts can benefit from my wisdom. Or at least learn from my mistakes, which is really the same thing.

PAX Report: Day One

I am not, as most people would attest, the most organized person in the world. In spite of this I ended up doing most of the prep work for out little jaunt to Seattle this weekend that managed to affirm that I can at least effective utilize the internet when planning trips.

Anyway.

Flying to Seattle itself was pretty uneventful, which really is a rather surprising thing to hear myself say. I wasn’t much of a traveler before I left for Japan, but having been there for half a year and done traveling within that time frame was a lot like swinging with a weighted bat; comparatively speaking, crossing the country is nothing.

The only concern I had involved our transit from the airport to our hotel, which was not actually in Seattle but in Bellevue. As it turns out – and as I was already peripherally aware – Seattle bills itself as a progressive, environmentally conscious city and has a pretty nice bus system as a result. Two dollars was enough to get us to the Bellevue transit center, less than two blocks from the convention center which was itself a block from our hotel. Needless to say, things couldn’t have gone more swimmingly if I’d arranged them myself, which with the exception of the hotel I certainly didn’t.

Since we’d be spending the next two days at the convention itself we decided to hit up downtown Seattle, ostensibly to find food and do a little exploring. On the bus trip there Bryan ended up sitting next to one of the more remarkable people I’ve met in my life. Her name I can’t recall accurately enough to risk typing, but she was of Indian descent and had moved to Seattle relatively recently. I turns out she had grown up in Michigan (not more than ten miles from us, no less) which meant we already had plenty to discuss, but to top it off she’d also spent a year in Japan as a student! Friendly to a fault and concerned that we would get lost she decided to play tour guide and led us around, pointing out various spots of interest and good locations for bars, parks and hangouts. She eventually led us to a bar and grill staffed almost exclusively by homosexuals, I might have thought she’d done to try and shake a bunch of Midwestern stiffs had we not already proven that our collective effort to find humor in everything made us impervious to such a banal attempt.

Speaking of gay people, which I wasn’t really doing but bear with me for a moment, the best way to get yourself a free upgrade from a single room with one big bed to a single room with two is to make offhanded remarks about loving your friend a lot tonight. Just in case you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

We ended up parting ways after the restaurant but the encounter made it clear to me, now more so than ever, that the best part about traveling is meeting people like that.