Comic Review: Old City Blues 2

    Giannis Milonogiannis takes us back to New Athens, 2049. More cases of cyber-crime hit the city, and the Special Police have to figure it out and take it down. The second volume of this old-school style cyberpunk comic series is more of the same. But that same is some very enjoyable stuff.

    The writing is quick and confident. The art leans far more into the realm of manga/anime than I like, but not so far that I couldn’t make my way through. A lot of Cyberpunk anime draws pretty blatantly from William Gibson specifically among genre titans, and this does the same. I was frequently reminded of Count Zero and some stories from Burning Chrome.  Evil megacorporation; scientist pushing things too far, cyber-psychosis, the slums, cyborgs, and some explosions. But it’s all handled well, and worth reading for genre fans.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Book Review: Old City Blues

    I’m a longtime Cyberpunk nerd.  William Gibson, Blade Runner, the works.  Giannis Milonogiannis dives into the classic tropes of the genre, filtering it through the Cyberpunk anime of the 80s and 90s, without picking up too many of the latter’s bad habits.

    The story is pretty typical of this sort of thing.  Cops VS corporations, corruption and cyborgs, and of course, A.I. and transcendence. But it’s all a lot of fun to read, and with a good use of rough artwork to create a mood. And the setting, a post flood, reconstructed Athens, Greece is certainly different.

    The stories are efficiently told, without seeming too rushed.  It took me back to some of the things I enjoyed in Cyberpunk years ago. If you’re into it, too, check out Old City Blues.

-Matthew J. Constantine

Comic Review: Concrete Park

    I hadn’t heard about this comic before I saw it on the shelf and it piqued my interest.  An inexpensive hardcover about a bunch of street gangers and disenfranchised shipped off to a colony world?  I’m in.  The book is written by a husband and wife team, Tony Puryear and Erika Alexander (both are Hollywood veterans, Puryear a writer, Alexander an actress, which normally makes me wary of 'stunt casting' creative teams).  And I gather the original run appeared in the resurrected Dark Horse Presents.  This gives the book a somewhat choppy feel, covering some bases multiple times to keep anyone who hadn’t caught the previous installment up to date.

    Getting past some of the wonky issues caused by its original presentation, I do like the comic.  I enjoy the setting, which blends the gritty, ugly, crime filled streets of 80s L.A. with the harsh, near prison-like conditions of a colony world.  It’s very cyberpunk, which of course, I dig.  And there’s a lot of world building, including a lot of slang (with a helpful glossary in the back).

    The characters have potential to be interesting, but sadly, the volume is quite short.  And that leads me to my main complaint.  The combination of the Dark Horse Presents short story format and the very briefness of the volume make it all feel extremely introductory.  I wanted more time with the characters and the setting.  I wanted more time to find out what the overall story is going to be.  I gather there is a second arc coming out on its own (not in Dark Horse Presents).  So hopefully, that will have more story/character content.  And of course, I should mention the art.  I have to admit, I’m not in love with it.  It has an intensity that I like, but it feels very, very digital, and I guess I don’t respond to that as much.  But the art certainly isn’t awful, and it doesn’t take away from the story.  So, here’s hoping things will improve and grow with the comic.  I’m plenty curious enough to see what’s next.

Concrete Park Vol. 1: You Send Me
Authors: Tony Puryear & Erika Alexander
Artist: Tony Puryear
Publisher: Dark Horse Books
ISBN: 978-1-61655-530-6

-Matthew J. Constantine

What I’m Listening To (3/2/14)

    Though I still find myself listening to M.I.A. while riding the bus, I’ve been listening to a bunch of other stuff while at home.  Due in part to starting up a Call of Cthulhu game, and because I like it, I’ve been cycling through a lot of 20s music, from some Jelly Roll Morton to Eddie Cantor to Josephine Baker.  I knew I had a good deal of music from the time, but I was surprised how easy it was to assemble a 4 hour playlist, especially considering many of the songs are rather short.  Along with the 20s music (some of it 30s), I raided my soundtrack collection, pulling tunes from Cloud Atlas, The Cell, and even Once Upon a Time in the West.  And I’ve been on YouTube listening to some weird electronica in the vein of the sadly unavailable Beyond the Black Rainbow soundtrack.  Black Mountain and Sinoia Caves both share musicians in some complicated Canadian way I don’t understand.  But there are traces of the Black Rainbow sound in there.  More investigation is needed.

    So, here are some of the things I’m listening to this week.

Artist: Die Antwoord
Album: $O$
    Somehow, I stumbled across this group in my net crawling, and found something about them challenging and appealing.  Their Zef style is so off-putting, yet taps into that 80s Cyberpunk spirit I love so much.  "The Street finds its own uses for things."  And the dirty, in your face, middle finger waving music kept me listening.  Are they good?  I don’t think so.  But darn it if some of their tunes aren’t aggressively catchy.  In Your Face, Enter the Ninja, Rich Bitch, and Doos Dronk are all infectious.  And the others keep you going from track to track.  Ninja is actually a pretty good rapper, and Yo-Landi’s weirdass singing works well with the whole package.  This isn’t going to be for everyone.  Even for fans of rap (I’m generally not among them), this stuff is pretty crazy.  This is music I could imagine being performed in a Bartertown bar, with Master-Blaster rocking out in the corner.

Artist: St. Vincent
Album: St. Vincent
    I first found St. Vincent a few years back as a blind buy, and I really enjoyed the album I picked up (Actor).  It reminded me a bit of Laurie Anderson, but there was certainly a unique quality.  Over the last couple years, I’ve picked up more albums (Marry Me, Strange Mercy, and the David Byrne collaboration Love the Giant).  As I listened to more and more of her music, I began to put her in with Devo and well, David Byrne and Talking Heads.  Her music is more experimental and challenging than a simple singer/songwriter.  This is Nerd Rock.  So last week, she put out a new album, the self titled St. Vincent.  Listening to it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the recent Devo album Something for Everybody.  She even deals with the kinds of emotional dissonance of the digital age Devo touches on.  I’ve listened to the album a couple times through so far, and I’m certainly liking it.  As with the best Nerd Rock, I doubt I ‘get’ half of it.  The music feels smarter than me, if you catch my drift.  It’s not like hearing Celine Dion, where you can guess all the lyrics of the song from the first few lines, or Fergie, where you feel yourself getting dumber while you listen.  I’m going to need more time with it to feel my way through each track.  But my overall feeling is that this is a another winner from a very interesting contemporary musician.

Artist: H.P. Lovecraft
Album: H.P. Lovecraft I
    I always had a taste for the psychedelic music of the 60s and 70s, and the wild imagery they conjure when you let yourself drift off with headphones on.  I’m two steps from Straight Edge and I’ve never dabbled in recreational drugs, but this music still hits a chord with me.  And in the case of the semi-obscure band H.P. Lovecraft, there’s also the added bonus of their tenuous connection to the works of…well, H.P. Lovecraft.  They draw on Lovecraft’s work in much the same way, and with a similar frequency, as Led Zeppelin with J.R.R. Tolkien.  I love the dreamy organ playing, the duel vocals, and the messy guitars.  Wayfaring Stranger and The White Ship are my two favorite tracks.  The White Ship is their epic masterpiece.  It’s a dreamy trip through astral space.  Really listening to it is like meditation, and by the time it ends, I feel more mentally clear than when I started.

    So, that’s some of what’s on my rotation right now.  St. Vincent’s new album has got me in the mood for something a bit different than the harsh, messy rap-beat stuff I’ve been consuming a lot since the beginning of the year.  Maybe, with Spring allegedly on its way, I’ll slide over into the more nostalgic, mellow music I have a tendency to play around this time of year.  I think pulling up H.P. Lovecraft might have been the beginning of that.  Until next time…

-Matt

Prodigal Son: Roots

                                                                  Part Twenty Three

    Cue long, exaggerated sigh, followed by a nostalgic musing while I stare off into the distance.  Yes.  It is done.  Or, to use a phrase I think should never be used in another film in the history of ever, “It has begun.”  After all the talk, all the wishful thinking, all the day dreaming, and yes, all the many false starts, the first night of actual roleplaying has been accomplished.  The first full session I’ve run in more than six years (other than that one on one thing with Brad a couple years ago when I was first trying to get serious about this).  I think that’s the longest continuous gap in gaming I’ve had since I started with the hobby as a young lad (pretty sure Reagan was still in office).  It feels good to slay that dragon.  Starting a game is always difficult.  Starting a game with people new to the hobby is a challenge (a very worthy one).  But starting a game after six years was very, very hard to do.  I’m using mental muscles that have atrophied, digging into parts of my brain that haven’t seen the light of day for far too long.  But, it all worked out pretty well.  All the stress and apprehension melted away fairly quickly, and I began to feel the old rhythms.

    Call of Cthulhu always has always felt a bit like coming home.  It uses the Basic Roleplaying system, the game mechanic I got started on.  And it didn’t take me long to fall for it’s 1920s/1930s setting.  After all, Indiana Jones was my hero.  Over the years, it’s meant a lot of different things to me.  I’ve played in several very different games, and I’ve run a bunch myself.  It’s always challenging, but usually rewarding.  This time around, I’m trying something a little more ambitious than normal.  In the past, I’ve almost always done one of three things.  Early on, my games were always set in very cinematic versions of exotic countries.  Then I graduated to The Thing style of relatable, but hopelessly remote locations, with characters from different walks of life thrust together through circumstance (survivors of a plane crash, for example).  Later, in an attempt to get things more grounded and relatable, my games were set in and around Bangor, Maine, my home town and a place I had a good deal of practical knowledge of.  Not this time.  This time the game is set in Arkham, the city is wide open, and I’m juggling more than one story.  In the past, I’ve tended to take just one idea, one creature, one item, and build a story around it.  When that story was over, perhaps I’d do a follow-up, likely connected to the first in some way.  This time, I wanted to do something new.  So, I’ve got a whole bunch of storylines, some fully developed, some only briefly sketched out, all waiting to be uncovered by the group.  And I’m going to let them explore those stories in whatever way they see fit.  Sure, I’ll be dropping hints and hooks, but already they’ve gone off in unexpected directions, and it’s great.  Of course, not ever story will pan out.  Not every clue will lead to something important.  And these story threads aren’t all linked.  They’re not all about the same thing, and they’re not all building to something, like I’d normally do.  Though they may be laced together by the characters (that’s already started to happen), I’m letting the chips fall where they may.

    Going way back, I always knew that Call of Cthulhu shouldn’t be Dungeons & Dragons.  I don’t just mean the system and all its nonsense.  I mean, it shouldn’t be about walking around fighting monsters all the time.  It shouldn’t be opening doors and finding random creatures and artifacts.  It shouldn’t be a video game.  I think that might be part of why I always focused stories on only one core idea or creature.  If the story was about Ghouls, then dang it, Ghouls would be what you got.  Maybe, just maybe, they’d have something extra special and nasty working with them, but 99% of what the game would be about Ghouls and Ghouls only.  This time around I wanted to do things differently, so I conceived two major and unrelated stories, and multiple lesser stories.  I still don’t want this to degrade into some 20s themed dungeon crawl, with rooms full of Deep Ones or legions of Nightgaunts flapping around.  But it’s going to be more monster/thing heavy than I’d normally do.  In fact, in the very first session, a monster was spotted (briefly), an artifact was found, and a bunch of other crazy stuff happened.  Normally, I’d take a lot longer to reveal that much.  And of course, like in all Call of Cthulhu games I run, I need to make sure that the possibility of the complete ending of the world is always an option.  I feel like any given session of the game should be able to result in an apocalypse of some form, be it a plague, open war with the Deep Ones, causing Yog-Sothoth to open the Gates, a visit from Ghroth, whatever.

    So, now that I’ve got my head around the game, now that the first session has happened, I feel more focused, and more like I know what I’m doing again.  Now, I need to target each player and his/her character with some particular excitement and horror, as well as provide opportunities for each to be a valued member of a team.

    I don’t imagine this game will go on for more than 3 or 4 sessions, especially as I’m trying to keep things moving quickly, and will probably be throwing a lot more, and more deadly things at the characters than normal.  So, I’m still thinking about what other games might be good for the group.  I would certainly like to do something more long form, something open ended, where character development can get more play, where stories can take their time to build, and where actions have far reaching consequences.  One especially nice thing about games like Call of Cthulhu is that, assuming characters reach a good ending point still sane and alive, there’s always the option of picking things up again later, even if there are new players in the group.  If folks enjoy this roleplaying thing and want to do more, we’ll talk about options again then.  I hope I can keep this ball rolling.  It’s tough, with everyone having kids and jobs and social lives.  But I think we can do it.

I still love Cyberpunk 2020.

-Matt

What I’m Listening To (1/21/14)

    I thought I’d try a new feature here on In the Mouth of Dorkness, focusing on one of the parts of my nerdiness that I don’t talk about all that much, my love of music.  I am not an audiophile.  I don’t have an opinion on vinyl.  I don’t have any kind of education in music theory, and I didn’t spend my high school years living in an indi music store, talking to all the people in local bands.  Heck, I’m not a fan of the Beetles, Bob Dylan, or Michael Jackson.  I’m just a dork who listens to music and is always glad to find something new.

    For a long time, I would joke that everyone I listen to was dead.  That isn’t the case anymore, thankfully.  Over the last ten years or so, I’ve found several active, productive bands and artists that I can now look forward to hearing new music from.  You’ll notice I don’t stick to one genre, nor do I tend to explore any genre too deeply.  I may love Ministry, for example, but not go for a lot of other respected Industrial bands.  I may find myself listening to Lightnin’ Hopkins, but not go in for Albert King.  And I go through moods, phases where I’ll be very into a certain type of music, to the exclusion of all others.  And then out of nowhere, I’ll be on to something different.

    I don’t know how often I’ll post one of these.  My moods often last for a few weeks at least, so I might go quite a while without new music to talk about.  Hopefully no less than once a month, I’ll write up some of the albums and songs I’m most in tune with …Oh, puns…at a given time.  Of course, I welcome your thoughts and suggestions.  Most of the music I discover comes from two sources, movie soundtracks and friends.  On the rare occasion I listen to the radio, it’s NPR, so I don’t hear new music there, and am generally unaware of whatever thing is ‘hot’ right now.

Without further blather…Oh, wait, with further blather…here’s what I’m currently listening to:

Artist: M.I.A.
Album: Kala
    I’ve been dimly aware of M.I.A. for quite some time, but never given her much attention.  I knew she had that song with the guns going off that was featured in Pineapple Express (Paper Planes) and I knew she was from Sri Lanka (well, born in England) because of some dialog in the movie Hanna.  But other than that, nothing.  After catching a couple of her tunes on YouTube for some reason or another, I got hooked and picked up Kala.  Right off, I was into it.  As a young teen, I was listening to a lot of early rap, N.W.A. and Public Enemy mostly.  And that’s what M.I.A. reminded me of straight away.  There was a raw, garage sound to the music, but also a vitality you tend to miss in big studio albums.  Add to that samples of music and instruments from around the world and it’s a crazy mix of sounds that’s infinitely danceable, but also layered enough to concentrate on.  As a long time Cyberpunk junky, I couldn’t help but think of this as being the sound of the Sprawl.  I wanted to take out my copy of Count Zero and jack in.  The weakest two tracks on the album, XR2 and Come Around are still perfectly listenable.  Ten of the twelve tracks were instant classics in my mind.  If I were pressed to name my favorite tracks, I guess I’d have to go with Bird Flu and $20.

Artist: Kate Nash
Album:  Girl Talk
    I find something very charming about Kate Nash’s lowbrow London accent and awkward relationship stresses.  When her new album came out, I picked it up, but I wasn’t quite in that mood, so it sat by my desk for a while.  When I finally popped it up on my playlist, I was kind of surprised by it, but pleasantly so.  While she’s still singing a lot about the struggles with love, betrayal, and confusion, and she still has that Rose from Doctor Who accent, the music has a much more polished and produced sound to it.  But where some performers loose their heart when the glitz is added, Nash seems to have kept her harsh edge.  There’s a retro vibe to it, tapping into 80s punky flare and even a bit of rockabilly.  I really like Part Heart and Sister, and You’re So Cool I’m so Freaky is cute.  Plus, the song Labyrinth is based on…the movie Labyrinth.  So, that’s cool.  Rap for Rejection is probably the weakest track.  It just doesn’t quite work.  Overall, the album is pretty good if you’re in the mood for her sort of music.  This is good post break-up music.  Or maybe, it’s really bad post break-up music.

This tune needs more propellers!

Artist:  George Antheil
Album:  Antheil: Ballet Mécanique, Serenade For String Orchestra
    While recently reading the book Heddy’s Folly, I was introduced to the rather odd character of George Antheil, who seems to have been trying to make Industrial music within the cultural and technological constraints of early 20th Century orchestral work.  Well I just had to listen to this guy’s stuff.  Interestingly, like the author Robert W. Chambers, he was quite popular at one time, but has now fallen off of most people’s radar.  I was able to find a CD and give it a listen.  It’s pretty intense.  Ballet Mécanique is darned intense.  His desire to make mechanical music, music as written and performed by machines was pretty out there.  I feel like there’s some similarity to Gershwin, though you’d never mistake one for the other.  Perhaps just elements of the times in which they were working.  If you haven’t listened to Antheil’s music, it’s something to check out for sure.

Artist:  Magnet
Album:  The Wicker Man (soundtrack)
    I recently started work on a script for a horror movie.  The idea started as a kind of modern day pagan tale, but has evolved away from that.  However, part of the vibe I imagined when I started has remained, that of the 70s pagan/psychic/Satanist type horror films, like The Wicker Man, The Exorcist, or The Fury.  In keeping with that, I’ve been kicking around the soundtrack of The Wicker Man, which is so much of its time.  I love it.  I can imagine the slightly oranged film footage, the tweed jackets, and the subtle hint of sinister post-hippie madness.  The whole album, from the saucy, beer soaked tune The Landlord’s Daughter, to the dreamy Willow’s Song is quite good and evocative.

    That’s all for now.  I’m sure I’ll be having some kind of tectonic shift in listening soon as it often changes in a big way with the seasons.

It might as well be spring...

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (8/4/13-8/10/13)

    I was on vacation this week, and I didn’t get much of anything accomplished.  Didn’t even get much reading done.  All things considered, I didn’t watch many movies, either.  Still, got into DC once, and hung with friends a bunch, so not too bad.  Still, I kind of need another week to get to all the projects and tasks I took this week off to do.  Alas.

Europa Report:  As I said when I saw Oblivion earlier this year, there should be movies like this coming out all the time.  If that were the case, this would be a solid, average semi-realistic science fiction film.  However, due to the rareness of films like this, it’s one of the better to come along in a while.  The story is fairly simple.  A bunch of astronauts are on a long journey to Europa, the moon of Jupiter, to investigate the potential for life.  As happens in these movies, things don’t go especially well.  However, unlike movies like Sunshine, the cast of characters doesn’t seem like a collection of maladjusted sociopaths and mental incompetents thrown into a slap-dash bargain basement ship.  These folk are mostly competent, sane, and even under extreme pressure don’t break down.  They may crack a bit, but they don’t break.  Also, the ship technology doesn’t break down constantly or at every key moment (like in Sunshine).  Though the movie is about the dangers we may face in Humanity’s ventures into space, it is also about the glory and wonder of facing those dangers.

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla: “Relax.  We’re with the government.”  The newer Godzilla movies are missing something, an essential charm.  They feel too rooted in modern Japanese science fiction, which is by and large total garbage, and less in the traditional Godzilla spirit.  This is no exception.  While the story of the disgraced soldier on a path to becoming a Mechagodzilla pilot is interesting, overall, the film is not.  And the monster fight effects are not good.  Everything looks cheaper, more made for TV.

2 Guns:  First, the good.  1) I’m glad this movie did well, so that Boom! Studios gets a cash influx, and maybe a bit of prestige.  Hopefully, that will turn into more of their comics getting adaptations, and in general, an improvement of titles they produce.  I  like Boom!  They tend to do the sorts of things I like to read (less superhero, more weird/science fiction stuff).  2) The Paula Patton nude scene is totally integral to the plot, and absolutely not gratuitous…Oh, wait, I mean had no reason for being there and was absolutely gratuitous.  Excellent.  After that, it’s all down hill.  Right from the start the dialog was awful.  The action scenes were boring.  And the whole plot was drab.  It felt like a second string 80s movie.  Like something Lou Diamond Philips would headline and Walter Hill would produce, but not direct.  Very bland.  Very typical.  No surprises.  No point.

King Kong Escapes:  Doctor Who (seriously, look it up) and a sinister governmental agent have finally figured out the best way to mine ultra-powerful radioactive elements from beneath the arctic ice.  Obviously, with a giant ape.  But where to find one?  Well, remember King Kong?  Yeah.  Right.  Well, we can’t get him.  So, uh, build a giant robot ape!  Duh.  But giant robot apes don’t do well with radiation.  And it turns out King Kong is around, and fighting dinosaurs on his island.  And boy is he horny.  Yup.  King Kong Escapes.  A whole bucket full of ‘what the hell’s wrong with Japan?’  But it’s also a lot of weird, silly fun.

The Host:  Holy balls, this movie is amazingly terrible.  It’s like the sad fantasies of a lonely high school girl.  Every line of dialog, every character decision, every plot turn feels like it was written on the back of a Trapper Keeper while listening to Debbie Gibson cassettes.  Many of these actors are better than this material, as is the director.  Frankly, the whole thing made me sad.  Not because the script was sad, but because it felt like watching a smart, beautiful woman descend into drugs and prostitution.  That’s what this movie felt like to me.  Sad and depressing.

It's so symbolic!

Yongary, Monster from the Deep:  “I’m going to see that monster.” Slow paced, low production value, and little of interest.  It’s not even up to the level of Gamera films.  Don’t bother.

Logan’s Run:  What can I say about this that I haven’t already?  One of my all time favorites.  It’s got all the stuff I love.  Dystopia, trippy music, Jenny Agutter in the buff, ruins of civilization, all that kind of thing.  A fun and twisting adventure of a style rarely done these days.  It scratches below the surface of a pretty paradise, digs into the underbelly, than rises up into the sun.  Awesome.

Elysium:  Overpopulation and climate change have turned large parts of the world into desolate urban sprawls.  The wealthy elite have fled, with their technology and know-how to a space station, where they’ve done a fine job of closing their eyes to life on Earth.  The look and feel of the movie is great.  The story is pretty basic sci-fi that’s been told scores and scores of times before.  A young man must rise from his humble place to free all the people from the oppressive regime.  Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Neo, Maria, the list goes on.  There aren’t very many twists.  It plays out in the expected ways.  But it’s well enough done to be enjoyable.  There is an over reliance on the dreaded ‘shaky-cam’ which is the bane of modern action film.  While not as poorly used as say Man of Steel or The Wolverine, it is still a black mark on the film’s record.  When will this nightmare of directors/producers/studios thinking that extreme close-ups and shaking cameras makes for good ‘tension’ end?  It just makes me sea-sick and angry.  But the thing I take away from this movie is that we’ve finally been given a really good vision of William Gibson’s cyberpunk world of Burning Chrome and Count Zero.  This movie is to Gibson and cyberpunk what In the Mouth of Madness was to Lovecraft and cosmic horror.  It isn’t based on any one work, but steeped in the genre, reaching for its essential center.  Is this going on my list of ‘best science fiction films’?  No.  But it’s a good one and worth checking out.  A good companion to The Running Man and Soylent Green.

Gantz II: Perfect Answer:  There are some extremely cool ideas at the heart of Gantz, but it fails in all the ways Japanese films tend to fail.  A sphere of ill-defined origin, with ill-defined motives, uses ill-defined powers to manipulate undefined characters on some ill-defined missions to terminate ill-defined aliens.  The Gantz anime had some good ideas too, but was stretched out over far too many episodes and never came together in any kind of satisfying way.  This two part adaptation condenses the series pretty well, and gives a better resolution.  Also, though not better defined, the characters are far less annoying and useless in this live-action version.  That said, Gantz II (and Gantz) is still a deeply flawed film with far too many problems and nothing especially amazing to make me recommend viewing.

    Wow.  Yeah, that’s pretty much my week.  Well, I did watch one other thing.  I powered through the first four seasons of Peep Show (It’s UK, so that’s not as impressive as it sounds. The seasons are only like 6 episodes long.).  The show is a touch painful, as David Mitchell’s character reminds me a lot of myself (actually, David Mitchell reminds me a lot of myself), and not always in a good way.  Funny.  But painful funny.

-Matt

Movie Review: Natural City

This originally appeared quite some time ago on cineAWESOME!, a site you should be reading.


    Neon lights and holograms light the rainy streets of a depressing future city, while cop R’s life spirals out of control in writer/director Byung-chun Min’s reworking of Blade Runner, Natural City (2003).  Even with a chicken alarm clock to wake up with, R isn’t satisfied until he gets his drunk hands on despondent, nearly expired cyborg Ria. There’s also a young prostitute/fortune teller/gardener living in the slums who inexplicably loves R.  Oh, and there’s a cop who likes R for some reason, and keeps trying to save him.  And some killer cyborgs (who never miss a spinning class).  And a creepy little albino-Yoda guy who knows his brain-chips.  These characters very, very slowly start coming together, and I guess a plot begins to develop.  Sadly, R seems to be our hero, but is such a colossally unlikable A-bag that not only do I have a hard time caring if he lives or dies, I actually want to see him fail miserably.  Actually, I want his cop buddy to put two in the back of the head and toss the body in the river.  I don’t need my protagonists to be nice, heroic, or completely likable.  But, some modicum of moral fiber, coolness, or something good needs to be present for me to relate.

    The plot is a little difficult to put together, at least on first viewing.  I’ve seen this movie at least three times now, and feel I’ve got a solid handle on it.  There are a few twists and turns and identity revelations that you can miss if you’re not paying attention.  But, when all is said and done, and the chips are down, it’s still pretty much a rehash of Blade Runner.  That brings me to the visuals, which again owe a lot to Blade Runner, especially when characters are out and about in the city, getting rained on.  Interiors remind me a lot of the Alien franchise.  And then there are the semi-post-apocalyptic ghettos.  It’s all put together to good effect.  The world is one I’d like to see more take place in.  It’s lived-in enough to feel real, while being exotic enough to be interesting.  And while the CG is often unimpressive, it’s not off-putting,  and it certainly doesn’t get in the way.  Oddly, for a movie that is kind of slow paced, the occasional action scenes used to spice it up have the opposite effect.  Some of the gags are cool, with limbs exploding and the like.  But the scenes tend to grind the movie to a halt just when it needs to speed up. 

    The actors all seem fine and the world interesting.  But the script just isn’t strong.  Too slow a pace, and an homage so close to the original as to feel plagiaristic.  With almost universally unlikable characters, try as I might, I could never bring myself to invest emotionally in the outcome.  So, when the bloody climax begins, the slow motion kicks on, and the lady singer let me know I’m watching Drama, I found myself checking my watch.  The best thing about this movie is that it makes me want to go back and watch Blade Runner again.  It’s been too long.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (5/5/13-5/11/13)

    Day after day, week after week, rain and threat of rain.  It’s starting to get to me.  I’ve only done maybe five or six bike trips so far this year, which is unacceptable by this point.  Otherwise, just stress broken up with movies and books.  Woot.

    I got in a few more episodes of Fraggle Rock.  I’m in season 3 now, and the quality has not dropped.  I continue to be impressed by the show’s solid foundation in basic morality without being too preachy or condescending.  Truly one of the greatest youth oriented shows I’ve experienced.

Star Trek: First Contact:  “This far.  No farther!”  Picard faces his Khan, the Borg, in this darned exciting and action packed film.  This should have been the first movie for the Next Gen crew, instead of the wishy-washy, gutless and stupid Generations.  After the Hugh episode of Next Gen pretty much eviscerated the Borg, making them little more than a bumbling bunch of communist thugs, First Contact made them scary and menacing again.  And oddly, by putting a ‘human face’ on them, helped to make them less human.  The so called Borg Queen is, I think, a manifestation of the species’ intellect as opposed to its leader.  As she says, you see disparity where there is none.  She is the Borg.  And she drips with sexual menace and Vaseline, becoming an all consuming fertility goddess, a bottomless hunger that consumes all.  The Borg are obviously the dark side of the potentials of cybernetics.  But they are not evil, simply alien.  Along the way, we also see the story of the fist warp vessel launched by a backyard astronaut-entrepreneur.  The movie looks great, it moves fast, has some really good moments, and a solid story.  I know everyone is about Star Trek II, but First Contact remains my favorite of the franchise’s films.

House on the Edge of the Park:  Well, that was unpleasant.  A film that makes beautiful women taking their clothes off difficult for me to watch.  I guess that’s something.  David Hess is hard to look at.  Don’t.

    As I’ve said before, I grew up in the late 70s and 80s, in the shadow of the Cold War, but also during a fairly tectonic shift in technology and its democratization.  The personal computer, the early days of what would become the internet, the explosion of prosthesis, transplants, and implants.  It was pretty wild.  Every year felt more and more like I was living in a new age, a science fictional world.  Part of that shift was captured in a somewhat short lived, but key movement in science fiction literature that I felt attuned to then, and still hold a special place in my heart for now.  Cyberpunk.  It was a movement born of and reflective of its time, a specifically 80s thing, though ripples of its influences continue to wash through books and movies and culture.  All that is just to bring up that I randomly picked the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades off the shelf this week and read the story Snake-Eyes by Tom Maddox.  Darned fine and cool tale.  Reading about the protagonist and his desire to experience the strange reminded me of myself.  I think my friends think I’m kidding when I say I want to get 360 degree vision, or the ability to shift my perception through various spectra, or just that I want mechanical legs.  But I’m not.  Not at all.  And here is a character after my own heart, as he struggles with what it means to have these implants within him, unleashing his primitive impulses.  I also like that the story isn’t about ‘tech bad/bio good’ or ‘instinct bad/logic good.’  It’s about the dangers of technology and the benefits, and its about balancing the deepest and most base lusts with the rational control of civilized Man.  I’m all about that.  Good stuff.

The Last Dragon:  “Shonuff!”  Oh, man.  What the heck is up with this movie?  It’s funny (sometimes intentionally) and weird as all get-out.  Bruce Leroy.  Vanity.  Young William H. Macy.  It’s some kind of alternative 1985, fueled by coke, neon, and awful post-funk Motown.  The acting is truly inspired.  And something about Bruce Leroy running around in that rice farmer’s hat seems racist.  I’m not sure how, but it feels racist.  Vanity really was cute, though.  Talentless, but cute.  So, when the Shogun of Harlem is giving you some guff, you just call Bruce Leroy with his Power of the Glow.  This movie is what the Double Dragon film should have been like.

Shonuff!!!

Cat-women of the Moon:  “You‘re too smart for me, baby.  I like ‘em stupid.”  I’m not sure if I’d seen this before, or if it’s so typical of the genre that it just felt that way.  Chicks in unitards hide out in the ruins of an ancient civilization.  The usual battle of the sexes crap.  A bunch of near-immortal sex kittens need to learn what wholesome and slightly dim American men can do for them.  It’s fine, but pretty by the numbers.  But hey, it’s short.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid:  “I got my shotgun full of 16 thin dimes.  Enough to spread you out like a crazy woman’s quilt.”  Everybody who was alive when this film was made shows up to look ugly as heck and do evil things to each other Peckinpah style.  I’m not a Dylan fan, but his music on this movie isn’t bad, and his extremely affected acting performance is fun.  Otherwise, it’s just nasty, nasty, nasty.  Oh, and depressing.  But it’s also a pretty good flick.  Not going on my list of best Westerns, but it’s a good one.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia:  “I been here before and you don’t know the way.”  Wow.  Ever think you’re just in too good a mood, and want to bring it down a notch?  This is the movie for you.  A relentlessly grim and angry film, it rages at you with whiskey stinking breath and grime covered hands.  You are the white whale, Peckinpah is Ahab, and he’s shooting his heart upon you with his chest cannon.  It isn’t the Western I was expecting, though it often feels like one.  It’s modern, but dingy and aged, beaten by the sun and spit on by life.  I keep thinking of Mister Eddy in Lost Highway with his throat all slashed, gurgling, ‘you and me buddy, we can sure out-ugly them som’bitches.’

Prey:  A dumb young woman and her obsessive lady friend are living the life in a secluded English estate, when a bird hating alien shows up looking for lunch.  One long, awkward dinner party later, who can tell hunter from prey.  This movie has a lot of screeching.  The dumb woman screeches a lot.  A LOT.  Her lady love also screeches…but not as much.  Even the alien screeches a bit.  Maybe they should have called the film Screech.  It’s not a good movie.  But it has a dubious charm.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad:  “We may be thieves and murderers…but we are not fools.”  One of literature’s great adventure heroes, Sinbad, gets a definitive presentation with this Ray Harryhausen creature packed fantasy film.  Like the tales of the Arabian Nights, it is a hodgepodge of traditional stories from various cultures and whole cloth.  Kerwin Mathews is an adequate Sinbad (though I prefer John Phillip Law), and Kathryn Grant is adorable as his chosen bride.  I notice watching this film, the evil wizard was hardly out of line in his requests for aid.  Granted, his reaction is perhaps a touch extreme, but I really do think he was used rather poorly by Sinbad and his sultan.

    Friday night and Saturday morning, I read new book The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan.  It’s a solid exploration of the need in American politics for the moderate, centrist elements to stand up and be counted.  The first rational call for a serious and useful third party I’ve seen in my lifetime.

    I also read the prequel graphic novel Star Trek: Countdown to Darkness that leads into next week’s Star Trek: Into Darkness theatrical release.  Can’t say I’m surprised to report it’s not very good.  The art is blah, the script is more blah, and the story isn’t interesting.  The portrayal of Robert April is straight-up silly.  It also does nothing to alive my fears for where they’re taking this new movie.  Conspiracy this, war that; fistfight, fistfight, fistfight!

Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island:  Fleeing a Confederate prison, some Civil War soldiers end up in a balloon, trapped in a powerful seemingly endless gale that takes them away from any known land.  Crash landing on a …mysterious island, they find some danged peculiar things going on.  The film works as a kind of sequel to Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and a nice stylistic companion to Journey to the Center of the Earth (though, that makes its lack of James Mason conspicuous).  Ray Harryhausen once again creates some very cool creatures to menace our heroes.  I love these adventure films.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad:  “My friend, you can not pick up two melons with one hand, and I cannot work miracles.”  John Phillip Law is definitely the best Sinbad of the Harryhausen era, and my Caroline Munro fetish can not be denied.  Plus, fourth Doctor, Tom Baker as the evil wizard is enjoyably hammy in that stage actor sort of way.  Even the supporting characters are more interesting than usual.  Lavish production and exotic locations give it a grand fantasy feel.  The story is pretty wild and the action solid.  Fantasy movies of this much imagination are not unheard of today, but they are rare.  I’d like to see more.

One Million Years B.C.:  “Errr!”  Hammer Studios takes on history in this caveman epic featuring the awe-inspiring body of Raquel Welch and the stop-motion wizardry of Ray Harryhausen.  Truth be told, this isn’t a particularly good movie.  Its grasp of history is…well, absent.  The acting, even without sensible dialog, is not good.  It’s pretty much made watchable by Welch (who is infinitely watchable) and the cool creatures.  Martine Beswick isn’t too hard on the eyes either, I guess.  The music is interesting.  Where do you find a village of beautiful blonde spear-fishing cavegirls, anyway?  Sweden?  Was this filmed on location?  I do kind of get Tumak.  All Welch’s emotions are weird and she’s kind of clingy.  I wonder if the scriptwriter began with ‘two fur bikini-clad women in sweaty cat-fight’ and worked backward from there.  That seems about right.

Where is this film's Oscar?

    And lastly, I started watching the PBS series Secret Files of the Inquisition, a look into the Vatican’s records.  The narration and dramatization are well done, though the pacing and editing is a bit weird.  It frequently feels like it’s going to commercial, but as it’s from PBS, I assume there wasn’t one.  And there’s a lot of unnecessary foreshadowing, often of events about to be described.

-Matt

History was AWESOME!